Defining utopia, with Elle Griffin - Part 2
A collaborative series with "my nemesis."
I’m delighted to share this exchange of ideas with
, SubStack’s resident expert on utopian fiction. Our exchange started when I jokingly addressed her as “my nemesis” because of our divergent views on utopian fiction. (See below.) She was generous enough to not only accept this in good humor, but to address my critiques at length. It’s been a wonderful correspondence. You can read the first part of our exchange on Elle’s space, The Elysian. My first response is below.Dear Elle,
Thank you for your response! Unless I'm mistaken, the whole raison d'etre for utopian fiction is predicated on the idea that the world can be improved through management. There are competing theories and approaches to how this management can be best accomplished, and you've done a wonderful job of surveying some of these, describing the historical -isms with their preferred management schemes. However—despite the ostensible diversity of thinking behind these approaches—they're all in agreement on the assumption that somebody needs to be managing things.
This management doesn't have to be as heavy-handed as a police state. Any kind of technocrat fixing or wide-scale manufacture of technology requires some form of administrative control. There's a whole world of implicit assumptions that are upstream from the "we'll just invent [x]" imagineering that characterizes utopianism.
Just to take one example from your work: In your essay "We won't need doctors in the future," the word "we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Who is "we"? If this really is the future of medicine, how will everyone who wants it have access to it? What are the resource inputs, and are they scalable? What happens when the tech breaks down? How will this disrupt the food systems of people in parts of the world who can't incorporate this tech into their communities—or choose not to?
With all those considerations taken into account, it seems like there are a great many people who will need doctors in the future, and the "we" suddenly starts to look like a very small minority. Nevertheless, because it is theoretically possible, it becomes part of the utopian vision.
Those questions are rhetorical—just an example of the issues that tend to get passed over as insufficiently optimistic when we take all of utopianism's priors for granted. And you can see how this discussion could get bogged down in the usual political/ideological arguments about the how and the why of better management schemes: how to provide equitable access, how to manage resources sustainably, how to create a political structure to ensure all these good things continue to be available.
Those are all important questions, but I've lost interest in those political arguments, because I no longer believe in the reality they describe.
In the circles I travel in, there's ample reason to doubt that the world can be saved, if there even is a world in need of saving; it's also not clear that the technocratic management schemes which have dominated the past few centuries of human development are the best way to save what needs saving.
brought forth my favorite take on this: for many (most?) of the indigenous cultures on Earth, the world has already ended at least once. Some of them are already on their second or third apocalypse. And now people in the W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies are waking up to the fact that their world might also end, which is prompting all this frantic utopian imagineering about sustainable futures.I'm not exclusively interested in criticizing utopian thinking. (Maybe just a little bit.) My bigger project is exploring the view from those worlds that have already ended, and figuring out how life continued for them. They tend to exist in a world in which top-down management simply isn't possible: there is no centralized government, no expansive technological innovation, no endless pool of labor and resources to draw from. The "better world" they've built among the ruins looks nothing like the utopias that we imagine. There is still hardship and suffering. But many of them go on living regardless, and end up producing the kind of vibrant cultures and robust societies that rich Westerners envy.
We can only really appreciate those ways of being when we step outside the worldviews that we take for granted. I think one of the cornerstones of our problematic worldview is the insistence that somebody always needs to be managing things, and that management must be sustained indefinitely, by any means necessary. And that's why I have no choice but to (respectfully) be your nemesis :)
Again, I have no interest in trashing you and your work, or getting bogged down in the same old political arguments. I'm much more interested in comparing the perspective of these two vantage points in a collaborative way. An inter-faith dialogue! Let me know if any of that sounds interesting or useful to you. In the meantime, have a happy summer!
Sincerely,
R.G. Miga
The next installment, with Elle’s response, will be published tomorrow on The Elysian.
This back and forth is perfect for me, since my own views tend to swing wildly between both utopian and dystopian poles (more heavily toward the latter, especially in recent years). Will our modern technological society somehow persist, or will some sort of collapse push us into a more agrarian or maybe even a hunter-gatherer way of life? Or something brand new and in-between? (And how many people will suffer and die along the path to that future?) I know some are sure which way it's going to go, but I'm not placing any bets one way or the other.
I'm intrigued by your protests about the management or administration of our society. Those protests about the administrators seem as old as the agricultural revolution and/or the first towns larger than a few hundred people. And one version of utopia is a return to some sort of pre-agricultural society -- but of course, that's impossible with eight billion (heading toward ten billion) people on the planet. (It's also the "solution" the AI in my sci-fi novel resorts to.) I'm thinking about James C. Scott's Against the Grain, which I've only read a bit of. And David Graeber's work, which I haven't even started, but read reviews of.
Where's the art at the top of your post from? It looks like fan art of Ellie in The Last of Us.
Utopia "from below" and utopia that results from some structural imperative, imposed from structure onto people (consenting or otherwise) are just fundamentally different kinds of imaginaries that trace their distinct genealogies back into the political/intellectual oppositions of Enlightenment thought (though I think you can also trace the difference into non-Western histories and cultures too, as you suggest). These aren't just differences in aesthetic preferences, they're fundamentally different statements about what a better world--or just a world surviving after a cataclysm--might be or could be imagined as being. To privilege thinking about a better world that rises up from everyday life and lived experience, or the arts of survival in a ruined world, almost inevitably requires thinking that formal structures that administer and govern systems simply can't make a better world in a utopian sense, and have often been already the means to An End in the sense that you describe it, delivered to actually-existing social worlds.