Defining utopia, with Elle Griffin - Part 6

The conclusion (for now?) of the exchange with "my nemesis."

This is the last correspondence in the initial emails between myself and

Elle Griffin

on our different interpretations of “utopia.” It’s been a really enlightening exchange, and I think we might collaborate again in the future. For anyone who missed the previous installments—Part 1 is here; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5. And thanks to everyone who read and commented throughout this series: the community discussion around this topic has been tremendous.

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Dear Elle,

I hope I haven’t lost the thread of the conversation! Just to clarify:

• I’m not arguing that utopian fiction is inherently bad and nobody should be writing it. Hope and optimism are wonderful things, and absolutely vital in our current circumstances. In that sense, the stories that I’m working on are also utopian, since they are also about people overcoming adversity and building a better future.

• That said—I think it’s worthwhile to think carefully about the sources of our optimism, and to be wary of the false hopes that have let us down in the past. I’m interested in stories that complicate our assumptions about what we can rely on when times get tough. The twentieth century was full of big ideas about how to engineer an ideal society; as we face down the new millennium, I think it’s wise to reckon with the failures of those ideal societies (including our own).

• I believe that indigenous cultures have a lot to teach us about creating meaning in a post-collapse culture, since—as

  Dougald Hine
  observes—many of them are on their second or third apocalypse, whereas Westerners are only just starting to contemplate their first (as a result of climate change combined with cascading inequality and political dysfunction).

And just to clarify—I’m not taking issue with your specific use of the word “utopia.” Rather, I think the whole genre has some unexamined contradictions built into it.

When we talk about a “good place,” the immediate questions will always be: “good” for who? And what’s involved in creating a “place” to our specifications? How is this accomplished without making things better for some people and worse for others? Those questions are, unfortunately, baked in to the etymology of the word “utopia.”

Again, these are not criticisms of your work, but challenges that the genre as a whole might need to grapple with.

As far as what’s possible in the real world—I’ll put all my cards on the table. I’m writing as someone who doesn’t expect to get a seat in the lifeboat once we start to feel the full effects of climate change. Unless we get an unprecedented series of miracles in the next few (very few) years, I believe that we can expect several feet of sea level rise throughout the next century. As of 2014, about 40% of the United States’ population lives in coastal communities. Even if we avoid the worst-case scenarios of ecosystem collapse—in which the planet becomes almost entirely uninhabitable—we’re still looking at a refugee crisis on a scale of tens of millions of displaced people. Even this relatively optimistic outcome will mean the complete unraveling of American society: those who aren’t directly affected by rising sea levels will still need to contend with FEMA camps, failing infrastructure, supply chain disruption, epidemics, and quite possibly the breakdown of the federal system of governance.

This sounds apocalyptic, I realize. And I don’t want to sound hysterical. However, the simple fact is that none of the systems we’ve built (which are already showing their age) were designed to accommodate large populations of displaced citizens. Our logistical infrastructure just went through a major stress test with Covid. We all remember how that went—and that was just because people were stuck in one place. How would voting work, for example, if districts need to be redrawn due to sea level rise?

It’s not as if there will be no survivors in this scenario. We won’t all immediately find ourselves in some country-wide dystopian hellscape. Nevertheless, I don’t expect to be one of the lucky ones who finds themselves in a place where life goes on uninterrupted—where there are sufficient resources to blunt the worst effects of what will, in some places, very much be the end of the world.

When we talk about eradicating diseases and all the progress we’ve made as a global culture, I can’t help but put an asterisk on the end of it all that reads: “...so far.”

It’s not that all of this is wrong, exactly; just incomplete. And it is still possible that somebody will catch the Hail Mary pass—that in the next decade, all the countries of the world will unite to contain the worst effects of the climate change that is already headed our way, or discover a scalable net-gain energy source that will make fossil fuels obsolete overnight. I wouldn’t dream of discouraging anyone who still hopes for that future.

But for people like me, who are running the numbers on a rapidly-shrinking window for solutions and experiencing a great deal of anxiety because of it—I’d like to offer a way to diversify our emotional investments.

What is still worth hoping for when so much is going wrong?

Just to take the question to its logical extreme: what makes life worth living when death is no longer preventable?

Without focusing too narrowly on one specific disease or systemic failure, I think it’s safe to say that contemporary utopian thinking reflects our culture’s deeply-held belief that death is the worst thing that can happen to a person, and that all of our technological and scientific power should (in principle, if not always in practice) be thrown into preventing it. 

This is just one example of the cultural impacts of treating disease. We could spend a college semester discussing the assumptions that undergird allopathic medicine, and how those differ from the medicine practiced by traditional cultures. At the risk of oversimplifying, allopathic medicine understands death as a failure, rather than an inevitability—and it compels anyone under its care to accept this perspective.

This understanding has created a deeply dysfunctional culture around death in Western society (to the dismay of observers from non-Western cultures.) It’s not a huge problem, as long as the means of forestalling death through sophisticated technological interventions are available. The real consequences emerge when people have become thoroughly convinced that death is a terrifying darkness—and they no longer have access to the treatment that prevents it. The only way we know how to deal with death is to stop it; when we can’t stop it, we have no way to deal with it, as individuals or as a culture.

Most people in human history have had to cope with living and dying outside of the technological utopia that we imagine. There’s good reason to think that the consequences of climate change will leave many more people out in the cold, literally and figuratively. But that doesn’t need to be terrifying. Humans have tens of thousands of years’ worth of experience, living in an ungovernable world. We just need to remember how to do it.

It's not that I believe we'll unavoidably be living in a dystopia, but that the utopia/dystopia dichotomy is self-defeating. If those are the only two possible futures, then we find ourselves with a great deal of anxiety about maintaining the few utopian islands we can hold onto. Our vision gets very narrow if we only understand our wellbeing in terms of technology, infrastructure, and their necessary maintenance.

Besides—it's no fun to be deadlocked over endless prognostications about the relative optimism or pessimism of possible futures.

I started kicking around the whole idea of "phasmatopia" as a way to sidestep that deadlock—a third option that looks outside the realm of human governance, which I think is much closer to the way traditional/indigenous cultures see the world. It's also not far from what we experience in the places that modernity has already left behind. I grew up in the Rust Belt; the word "ghost town" has layers of meaning, when we talk about places haunted by the dreams of a better future that never materialized. Those of us who don't find a way into a utopian future will still be living in the ruins with those ghosts—and I think it's possible to do that in a hopeful way. It's part of what makes us human, how we made it this far as a species.

That’s what I hope to achieve with my storytelling. I’m not saying that my way is the only way; I hope, instead, it will be a worthy supplement to the more optimistic work that you’re engaged in.

What are your thoughts?

Sincerely,

R.G.