There is a strain of recent writing about 'utopia' that is not fiction but is trying to reclaim the idea of "realistic utopias"--Frederic Jameson, Rutger Bregman, Erik Olin Wright among others--and one thing that's interesting about all of them is that they try to avoid the "blueprint" model, where utopia is laid out as a comprehensive design, and instead describe it more in terms of features it ought to have. (Which might include, for example, "death from preventable medical conditions should be rare and never result from a lack of service availability or affordability".)
I'm reminded a bit also of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Three Californias" series of novels--the first book is a dystopian future California; the second book is a status-quo future California; the third book is a 'plausible' utopian California. The third book very much avoids the 'blueprint' model--there's no narrator laying out a comprehensive design. It's about one character's everyday routines and experiences, which also lets Robinson say "even in a better world, there's still going to be loneliness and emotional emptiness etc.; there will still be stories".
i think that's a big question for me: if there is no blueprint, then what makes it a utopia? what distinguishes utopian fiction from fantasy, or science fiction, or even just literary fiction in a future setting? i have a hard time letting go of the idea that anything billed as "utopian" is explicitly or implicitly part of the tradition that Thomas More established—and More was unequivocally positioning his work as didactic, expecting that readers would use his Utopia as an actual template.
as the essay asks—how optimistic must a narrative be in order to meet the minimum standard of "utopian"? and, contra that optimism, how *realistic* must a narrative be in order to keep it from being purely speculative, fantasy or science fiction?
Nice! I didn’t know the California trilogy took that pattern. I got stuck at the beginning of the first dystopian one and never continued. Maybe I’ll give the 3rd one a try.
And what if the disease is not deadly, but merely debilitating?
This post made me think of the old Soviet joke, “in the Communist utopia, the teacher said, everyone will have a helicopter!
But Comrade, the student replied, why will everyone need a helicopter?
Just think, the teacher said, you might live in Moscow, and there might be bread in Leningrad! “
A utopia will not merely be able to do one thing. Well, it must do everything well. in doing the first thing, well it must not make the second thing worse.
And as you point out, one man’s utopia might turn out to be another man’s dystopia.
nailed it. in doing one thing, it must not make something else worse—and that's where the very selective framing of utopian narratives get problematic, in my opinion.
Take the recent vaccine controversy, for example. For one group utopia seemed to be that everyone got vaccinated, for another group that nobody got vaccinated, and for the middle, probably that everybody had a choice whether they wanted to get vaccinated or not. Those views are literally contradictory, those utopias don’t work together.
Then wouldn't utopia be to have the best possible cure available to the most possible people, while still allowing people to opt out if they don't want it?
And given that different people want very different things, making something better for one person, almost by definition risks, making something worse for another. The Muslim man may desire 70 virgins, but the American feminist woman does not wish to provide them.
I think that if you took pretty much any religion, there are a lot of people who would absolutely positively dislike living in a society that was based upon the principles of that religion.
But my specific point about the 70 virgins was that for the Muslim man Having a harem with 70 virgins is his idea of heaven. For the modern American feminist woman being part of that Harem would probably closer to her idea of hell.
I chuckled at that joke! It also kind of reminds me of what Paul Kingsnorth has called the “technology trap,” in which one technological change necessitates the next, ad infinitum, often because of unforeseen externalities. In the joke scenario, the Communist society has food shortages (presumably caused by mis/over-management of distribution systems) and that’s why everyone needs a helicopter. Once I encountered the “technology trap” concept, I started seeing it everywhere. It’s an alternate interpretation of the dominant viewpoint of technology as driving innovation and the economy.
Your central point is valid: we get tunnel vision in imagining utopian society and don’t account for all the cultural and ideological and technological diversity of humanity.
Your point is culturally centred and quite important in building any imaginary world.
Valid concerns! With the specific issue you mentioned, it seems like there’s no reason to speculate. there’s already been a lot of “saving the world” in places like Africa, including disease prevention. I’m sure there are studies and critiques of how that has and hasn’t affected the cultures there. (And actually, I just found one, but only have access to the abstract: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43817537.)
Which leads me to believe that Utopianism is really only practical in fiction, if that makes sense. And in a wholly created world that has nothing to do with the fraught histories of our own. (But is it even utopian if it’s not directly about fixing our own world?)
Or else it needs to focus on a small group of people creating a utopian community within the existing world. Which again leads me back to Utopianism probably only being possible in small groups, say villages of 200-300 people, where you know all your neighbors and you need to rely on them for mutual aid. But such a restricted society might seem dystopian to most of us!
You mentioned a Utopianism that focuses on one single thing, and that made me think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. By the end of it, they’re undertaking huge geoengineering projects, which many would consider dystopian! (Not that he’s pursuing Utopia per se.)
exactly right. and if utopian fiction is just a snapshot in time—after the troubled histories of the past, and before the troubling consequences of the future—is it just fantasy? are utopian narratives just Proustian reveries about a fleeting, golden moment in time? should we look more critically at the idea that utopian thinking and utopian fiction can speak directly to the reality that we live in?
storytelling has always inspired, and challenged, and warned, and preserved. but utopian fiction seems to have carved out a special place in our culture, where it's understood to faithfully present a normative view of our actual society. like the essay says: because of that privileged position in our culture, i think it should stand up to more scrutiny than "normal" fiction.
I do think there's a place for fiction that imagines whole different ways of being, as inspiration rather than prescription. I don't know if that falls outside the definition of utopian or not.
right? super interesting. i'm losing track of what i've said where (it's been a busy week in the comments!) but i think there's some very interesting analysis about how the concept of "the present" (vs. the past and the future) is foundational to utopian thinking.
“Technology is never culturally neutral.” Yes! I feel that this is (one of) the problems with technological solutions being proposed not only for others but even within the culture/country of the tech’s origin. Technology changes culture, mediates human interactions, and puts us at a remove from the natural world. This may be an acceptable consequence or it may not, but it does seem that these externalities are often not uncovered or considered at all.
I’m not very familiar with Elle’s work but I see this disregard for externalities (and for ecological limits) often in the techno-optimist slant of Wired articles. I still read Wired despite this massive blind spot, because I find it useful to understand this viewpoint and its significant influence on our culture in the modern, Western world (and maybe even more so in America, specifically).
I also am seeing echoes in this discussion of real-world political issues/events/diseases but will refrain at this time from opening that can of worms. :-)
absolutely! there is a whole para-politics in how technology is distributed and implemented around the world—and not all of it is democratic. for example, while i haven't researched it extensively, i know that there were some serious concerns about the aftereffects of the Green Revolution, which was originally billed as a spectacular success for exactly this type of solutioneering. even without doing the research, i would be completely unsurprised to learn that upending an established food system had some unintended consequences for the people who were subjected to it.
I looked up this reference in response to a comment by Elle, but it's relevant here as well. I think you're correct that carrying the banner of Utopia should require more than just optimism that things can be better in some collection of ways. But I don't think it's fair to say that Utopia should aim to solve all problems or resolve all differences (not that you've said that precisely, but it should be possible to be utopian and pluralistic, and I hope this dialog offers some thoughts about how to balance those two ideas).
"What makes this multiplicity significant, Berlin believed, is that our values are also often incompatible and at times incommensurable – that is, not jointly measurable on a common scale. To take only the simplest examples, more justice means less mercy, more equality less liberty, more efficiency less spontaneity; and there is no objective procedural rule that enables us to balance one value against the other in such a conflict and decide where to draw the line. Each value is its own yardstick, and there is no independent measuring-rod that can be used to referee clashes between them.
One of the most important results of this state of affairs is that the systems of value that we find embedded in different cultural traditions are also plural, like the separate values that contribute towards them. This means that there can be many different value-structures, many different moralities, without it being possible to rank them in an order of approximation to some ideal blueprint for human life. And this is crucial for the understanding and management of differences between cultures, nations, traditions, ways of life. Aggressive, triumphalist nationalism and most mainstream forms of religion (especially but not only in fundamentalist form) have to be rejected, on this basis, as radically wrong-headed, built as they are on the anti-pluralist (or ‘monist’) assumption that there is only one right way, superior to all other candidates.
This doesn’t mean that we must go to the other extreme and say that any aspirant code of values is as respectworthy as any other: a position of that kind is sometimes called ‘relativism’, though this is a dangerously slippery and ambiguous word. Pluralists are natural advocates of the maximum of toleration and variety, certainly, but they also recognise that human nature sets certain definite limits to what is desirable, and makes certain key requirements that any decent, civilised culture will need to satisfy. Cruelty is out, for instance, as is the arbitrary use of force. So, probably, although this is more controversial, is the kind of neglect of basic human rights characteristic of some modern regimes, for all that they sometimes urge different cultural traditions as the rationale for their conduct."
There is a strain of recent writing about 'utopia' that is not fiction but is trying to reclaim the idea of "realistic utopias"--Frederic Jameson, Rutger Bregman, Erik Olin Wright among others--and one thing that's interesting about all of them is that they try to avoid the "blueprint" model, where utopia is laid out as a comprehensive design, and instead describe it more in terms of features it ought to have. (Which might include, for example, "death from preventable medical conditions should be rare and never result from a lack of service availability or affordability".)
I'm reminded a bit also of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Three Californias" series of novels--the first book is a dystopian future California; the second book is a status-quo future California; the third book is a 'plausible' utopian California. The third book very much avoids the 'blueprint' model--there's no narrator laying out a comprehensive design. It's about one character's everyday routines and experiences, which also lets Robinson say "even in a better world, there's still going to be loneliness and emotional emptiness etc.; there will still be stories".
i think that's a big question for me: if there is no blueprint, then what makes it a utopia? what distinguishes utopian fiction from fantasy, or science fiction, or even just literary fiction in a future setting? i have a hard time letting go of the idea that anything billed as "utopian" is explicitly or implicitly part of the tradition that Thomas More established—and More was unequivocally positioning his work as didactic, expecting that readers would use his Utopia as an actual template.
as the essay asks—how optimistic must a narrative be in order to meet the minimum standard of "utopian"? and, contra that optimism, how *realistic* must a narrative be in order to keep it from being purely speculative, fantasy or science fiction?
I love all of those writers—Rutger Bregman's vision being my favorite. Utopia for Realists is pretty much my working manifesto at this point!
And Kim Stanley Robinson is next up on my reading list (after The Dispossessed). I can't wait!
Nice! I didn’t know the California trilogy took that pattern. I got stuck at the beginning of the first dystopian one and never continued. Maybe I’ll give the 3rd one a try.
And what if the disease is not deadly, but merely debilitating?
This post made me think of the old Soviet joke, “in the Communist utopia, the teacher said, everyone will have a helicopter!
But Comrade, the student replied, why will everyone need a helicopter?
Just think, the teacher said, you might live in Moscow, and there might be bread in Leningrad! “
A utopia will not merely be able to do one thing. Well, it must do everything well. in doing the first thing, well it must not make the second thing worse.
And as you point out, one man’s utopia might turn out to be another man’s dystopia.
nailed it. in doing one thing, it must not make something else worse—and that's where the very selective framing of utopian narratives get problematic, in my opinion.
Take the recent vaccine controversy, for example. For one group utopia seemed to be that everyone got vaccinated, for another group that nobody got vaccinated, and for the middle, probably that everybody had a choice whether they wanted to get vaccinated or not. Those views are literally contradictory, those utopias don’t work together.
Then wouldn't utopia be to have the best possible cure available to the most possible people, while still allowing people to opt out if they don't want it?
That would be utopia for one group, dystopia for the others
And given that different people want very different things, making something better for one person, almost by definition risks, making something worse for another. The Muslim man may desire 70 virgins, but the American feminist woman does not wish to provide them.
no need to single out Muslim fundamentalists: Yahweh was a big fan of virgins too, once upon a time, as we see in the Book of Numbers.
I think that if you took pretty much any religion, there are a lot of people who would absolutely positively dislike living in a society that was based upon the principles of that religion.
But my specific point about the 70 virgins was that for the Muslim man Having a harem with 70 virgins is his idea of heaven. For the modern American feminist woman being part of that Harem would probably closer to her idea of hell.
I chuckled at that joke! It also kind of reminds me of what Paul Kingsnorth has called the “technology trap,” in which one technological change necessitates the next, ad infinitum, often because of unforeseen externalities. In the joke scenario, the Communist society has food shortages (presumably caused by mis/over-management of distribution systems) and that’s why everyone needs a helicopter. Once I encountered the “technology trap” concept, I started seeing it everywhere. It’s an alternate interpretation of the dominant viewpoint of technology as driving innovation and the economy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/13/shawnee-chasser-treehouse-miami-demolish/
Your central point is valid: we get tunnel vision in imagining utopian society and don’t account for all the cultural and ideological and technological diversity of humanity.
Your point is culturally centred and quite important in building any imaginary world.
Valid concerns! With the specific issue you mentioned, it seems like there’s no reason to speculate. there’s already been a lot of “saving the world” in places like Africa, including disease prevention. I’m sure there are studies and critiques of how that has and hasn’t affected the cultures there. (And actually, I just found one, but only have access to the abstract: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43817537.)
Which leads me to believe that Utopianism is really only practical in fiction, if that makes sense. And in a wholly created world that has nothing to do with the fraught histories of our own. (But is it even utopian if it’s not directly about fixing our own world?)
Or else it needs to focus on a small group of people creating a utopian community within the existing world. Which again leads me back to Utopianism probably only being possible in small groups, say villages of 200-300 people, where you know all your neighbors and you need to rely on them for mutual aid. But such a restricted society might seem dystopian to most of us!
You mentioned a Utopianism that focuses on one single thing, and that made me think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. By the end of it, they’re undertaking huge geoengineering projects, which many would consider dystopian! (Not that he’s pursuing Utopia per se.)
exactly right. and if utopian fiction is just a snapshot in time—after the troubled histories of the past, and before the troubling consequences of the future—is it just fantasy? are utopian narratives just Proustian reveries about a fleeting, golden moment in time? should we look more critically at the idea that utopian thinking and utopian fiction can speak directly to the reality that we live in?
storytelling has always inspired, and challenged, and warned, and preserved. but utopian fiction seems to have carved out a special place in our culture, where it's understood to faithfully present a normative view of our actual society. like the essay says: because of that privileged position in our culture, i think it should stand up to more scrutiny than "normal" fiction.
I do think there's a place for fiction that imagines whole different ways of being, as inspiration rather than prescription. I don't know if that falls outside the definition of utopian or not.
Wait I love this so much, I hadn’t thought of the problem of utopian fiction in those temporal terms before, but now I can’t stop
right? super interesting. i'm losing track of what i've said where (it's been a busy week in the comments!) but i think there's some very interesting analysis about how the concept of "the present" (vs. the past and the future) is foundational to utopian thinking.
“Technology is never culturally neutral.” Yes! I feel that this is (one of) the problems with technological solutions being proposed not only for others but even within the culture/country of the tech’s origin. Technology changes culture, mediates human interactions, and puts us at a remove from the natural world. This may be an acceptable consequence or it may not, but it does seem that these externalities are often not uncovered or considered at all.
I’m not very familiar with Elle’s work but I see this disregard for externalities (and for ecological limits) often in the techno-optimist slant of Wired articles. I still read Wired despite this massive blind spot, because I find it useful to understand this viewpoint and its significant influence on our culture in the modern, Western world (and maybe even more so in America, specifically).
I also am seeing echoes in this discussion of real-world political issues/events/diseases but will refrain at this time from opening that can of worms. :-)
absolutely! there is a whole para-politics in how technology is distributed and implemented around the world—and not all of it is democratic. for example, while i haven't researched it extensively, i know that there were some serious concerns about the aftereffects of the Green Revolution, which was originally billed as a spectacular success for exactly this type of solutioneering. even without doing the research, i would be completely unsurprised to learn that upending an established food system had some unintended consequences for the people who were subjected to it.
I think Vandana Shiva has written several books about the Green Revolution—she’s on my list of authors to check out. She and Dougald Hine were in a dialog earlier this year, discussing these topics: https://www.chelseagreen.com/2023/finding-humility-at-the-end-of-modernity/
I looked up this reference in response to a comment by Elle, but it's relevant here as well. I think you're correct that carrying the banner of Utopia should require more than just optimism that things can be better in some collection of ways. But I don't think it's fair to say that Utopia should aim to solve all problems or resolve all differences (not that you've said that precisely, but it should be possible to be utopian and pluralistic, and I hope this dialog offers some thoughts about how to balance those two ideas).
https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/writings_on_ib/hhonib/isaiah_berlin%27s_key_idea.html
"What makes this multiplicity significant, Berlin believed, is that our values are also often incompatible and at times incommensurable – that is, not jointly measurable on a common scale. To take only the simplest examples, more justice means less mercy, more equality less liberty, more efficiency less spontaneity; and there is no objective procedural rule that enables us to balance one value against the other in such a conflict and decide where to draw the line. Each value is its own yardstick, and there is no independent measuring-rod that can be used to referee clashes between them.
One of the most important results of this state of affairs is that the systems of value that we find embedded in different cultural traditions are also plural, like the separate values that contribute towards them. This means that there can be many different value-structures, many different moralities, without it being possible to rank them in an order of approximation to some ideal blueprint for human life. And this is crucial for the understanding and management of differences between cultures, nations, traditions, ways of life. Aggressive, triumphalist nationalism and most mainstream forms of religion (especially but not only in fundamentalist form) have to be rejected, on this basis, as radically wrong-headed, built as they are on the anti-pluralist (or ‘monist’) assumption that there is only one right way, superior to all other candidates.
This doesn’t mean that we must go to the other extreme and say that any aspirant code of values is as respectworthy as any other: a position of that kind is sometimes called ‘relativism’, though this is a dangerously slippery and ambiguous word. Pluralists are natural advocates of the maximum of toleration and variety, certainly, but they also recognise that human nature sets certain definite limits to what is desirable, and makes certain key requirements that any decent, civilised culture will need to satisfy. Cruelty is out, for instance, as is the arbitrary use of force. So, probably, although this is more controversial, is the kind of neglect of basic human rights characteristic of some modern regimes, for all that they sometimes urge different cultural traditions as the rationale for their conduct."