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.
that's AI-generated art from Dall-E-2... it's one of the jankier (free) AI programs, but i ain't fancy, and something about the accidental lo-fi aesthetic is charming.
i think a lot of people are feeling stuck where you are (including myself) and that's why i view this whole thing as more of a spiritual crisis than a political one. we've been conditioned to think that the struggle is about fighting for a particular set of solutions to a problem, usually expressed as an ideal form of government (utopia) to steer us away from its dysfunctional opposite (dystopia). we're expected to man the ramparts at all times to keep things from slipping away from our preferred form of management. this produces the anxiety and despair that's become endemic in our culture.
the truth (at least for me) is that we don't know exactly what the problems are, or what the available solutions will be. i don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the level of global instability we're embarking on is unprecedented in human history, since the end of the last Ice Age. rather than playing an endless game of ideological King of the Hill, i'd prefer to explore how people created meaning that transcends material reality—in the face of that global instability, and all the apocalypses that have happened since then.
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.
exactly. i'm working on a delineation between (grassroots) "leadership" and (authoritarian) "governance," but i haven't fully fleshed it out yet and i'm not sure if those are the best terms to use yet. we will always have leadership, even (especially) in the darkest times. we might not always have governance.
Well I would argue that a democracy is both top-down and bottom-up. There is a top down structure that makes decisions for the bottom. But it is informed (and voted on) by the bottom!
I think part of what that shows is that "Democracy" can mean a wide range of different things (in either real life or an imagined utopia).
There's a version of classic liberalism in which you imagine that there are certain questions that get decided democratically (what do we tax and spend or distribute) but a number of other questions that are left to the individual and excluded from Democratic decision making (who will you marry, who gets to have children, etc . . . )
In that case the formal structures of democratic decision making (elections, laws) probably aren't what makes a society utopian or not -- (this is, on some level, the right-wing argument that culture trumps politics).
In our current world government is very powerful and shapes our lives in important ways, but isn't really capable of the careful management implied in R.G. Miga's comment about, "the idea that the world can be improved through management." On some level that has to either come from another source OR you have to imagine a significantly transformed government.
Well but democratic decision making is why we do not still work 60 hour workweeks for $1 an hour while breathing in soot. Our democratic decision making did things like establish a minimum wage, establish a 40-hour workweekm and establish worker conditions. Those things do mean we live a better life at baseline.
That *is* the the world being improved through management? No?
First, I think you are correct that something like the 40-hr work week as an important victory, and I wouldn't argue with including early advocates in a history of utopian efforts.
But, more importantly, I think the question that @r. g. miga is asking is to pay more attention to _who_ is acting, in a way that saying "democratic decision making" skips over -- that's a perfectly good summary for some purposes, but for this case is too broad a summary.
There are 47 years between president Grant implementing an 8-hr week for government workers and Congress mandating an 8-hr work week for railroad employees (and another 24 years before Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect). During that time there were ongoing labor struggles, and a couple of individual companies that agreed to an 8-hr workday.
Does it make sense to lump all of that under "Democracy?" (rhetorical question -- it may or may not depending on the context).
It occurs to me that, in all seriousness, it would be fascinating if you were to write a post on the history of Prohibition as a Utopian project. Off the top of my head it stands out as a major reform effort which was largely pushed by grass-roots organizations lobbying for a legal change (and which had such a clearly defined success and failure in the 18th and 21st amendments).
As in "there were grassroots movements that forced the hand of government?" Because yes that's true, and yes that is democracy.
Prohibition is actually a fascinating case. Because it did cut down on drinking related deaths, and even reduced crime and violence. You could argue it was a public good. But it turns out it was a public good we didn't want! (And what we want is part of the utopian vision too, not just what is best for us statistically!)
My point about using "Democracy" to refer to any process by which we make collective changes is that there are a wide range of different ways in which that can happen, and that it can be important to distinguish between them -- particularly in the context of the conversation about "top-down" vs "bottom-up."
I'd argue, for example, that Prohibition was pretty clearly bottom-up, whereas, establishing a national bank is pretty clearly top-down, and there's a whole range of things in-between.
Doesn't that distinction, while useful, break down a little bit in practice? It's hard to think of many examples of pure top-down utopias with an imagined law-giver after the 18th Century (or so).
I mean where would you put _Star Trek_ in that? (not a pure utopia and _certainly_ not a coherent utopian vision, but one of the most utopia-adjacent pieces of popular culture). On one hand, Star Fleet is a hierarchical quasi-military organization but, on the other hand, there's no sense that the utopian aspects depend upon following a specific set of rules -- and I don't think that's just a way to give the writers room to tell stories, I think the audience would be suspicious of a top-down vision.
Which is all to say that I think the comment in the original post, "utopian fiction is predicated on the idea that the world can be improved through management" is recognizably getting at something important, but I don't know that it stands on its own -- it needs some additional work (or just a sense that it applies to a fairly small set works).
good example. realistically, how would you get to a functional military hierarchy without a top-down organizational structure? what is the purpose of Starfleet's warships, if not to enforce the borders of its utopian society (for the people within those borders, at least)? i think a lot of utopian fiction like Star Trek hand-waves away the actual politics of its world, in favor of the fantasy of a morally righteous technocratic society. and that would be fine, if it were *just* fantasy. but when people hold up fictional utopias as realistic models of how society should be organized, i think it's important to carefully examine all the externalities of the model being presented.
Iain Banks' Culture novels present this problem really well. The Culture is a utopia; the Culture is a Utopia because it maximizes the freedom and agency of all of its inhabitants; the Culture is a Utopia because there's a secret hierarchy possessing ultimate sovereignty/governmentality that works to neutralize both external threats to the Culture's well-being via suborning or mobilizing its own citizens without their full consent as agents against external threats and by bracketing extreme forms of anti-freedom within the utopia into spaces where those 'freely chosen' forms of unfreedom can't harm anyone else.
Thank you for these reflections, the intro to Dougald Hine’s work, and the acronym W.E.I.R.D. societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic——although sadly, the D increasingly stands for Demagogic.)
Excellent response and central to my thinking as well. Even in imagined worlds like Star Trek TNG, there were still had not “solved” vision loss with their engineering officer. He had to accept what the technology offers and even so, he had a high position to have access to that. Not everyone wants that so we have to recalibrate how we think people benefit from so-called advancement. I often operate under the motto that “the future is disappointing”, in that all the splendor we imagined will not be realized and basic issues of access or conflict will exist in ways we never planned.
Agreed that there will need to be management of the society. I’ve created a traditional utopian model in my head and walked it back to accommodate some of the issues of resource distribution, tech acquisition, security, healthcare, etc. We cannot operate headless, but that head doesn’t need a crown either. I’m interested in how that idea would be applied practically.
Love that you’re thinking of those whose worlds have ended and are picking up the pieces. I cannot write from that space but would gladly listen and learn. I think it’s worth it for us to loosen the grip on our current lives and start taking cues from indigenous people, among others. We have to learn how to sustainable manage a planet and not destroy it (or people’s worlds).
believe me—in many ways, i'm not at all the ideal advocate for writing from the perspective of worlds that have ended. many of those narratives are very, very culturally specific, and i wouldn't dream of trying to authentically represent them. nevertheless, i think there is an authentically *human* way of finding our way through the end of a world—something that precedes and/or transcends its diverse cultural expressions throughout history. those are the footpaths i'm trying to uncover. it's a lifelong project, and i'm just getting started. hopefully i'm headed in the right direction!
Yes, there will always be vision loss! (And all other manner of ailments). There is no such thing, and never will be such a thing as a life without suffering. But Star Trek is still utopian! We can figure out how to make people's lives *better* at baseline, but yes we will still always have to figure out how our lives will be *good* from there!
Well argued. At the recommendation of @Sarah Lewis, I've been reading "the Davids" new book, "The Dawn of Everything" (authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow) and it's blowing my mind - in a good way. If you don't know David Graeber, check him out - his Wikipedia says he's an "American anthropologist and anarchist activist," who influenced the Occupy movement. (And is sometimes credited w/ "we are the 99%," though he insisted that was a collaboration.) They make the point that the Enlightenment story of human social + political "progress" -- ie, early versions fall to newer, better versions and so on, till we inevitably(?) arrived here -- is pure fiction. Looking at recent archeology and anthropology on Ice Age humans, social structures and governance were as varied as they are today, and why not?
One example they cite is seasonality - that certain groups / societies had different political structures depending on whether they needed to organize for a big hunt or if they were more low-key foraging and gathering.
It's gotten me thinking that the choice of top-down versus no-top-down management may be answered "both, depending on the time of year."
Thanks for doing this. It's generating some great conversations and feeding my subconscious, story-making self.
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.
that's AI-generated art from Dall-E-2... it's one of the jankier (free) AI programs, but i ain't fancy, and something about the accidental lo-fi aesthetic is charming.
i think a lot of people are feeling stuck where you are (including myself) and that's why i view this whole thing as more of a spiritual crisis than a political one. we've been conditioned to think that the struggle is about fighting for a particular set of solutions to a problem, usually expressed as an ideal form of government (utopia) to steer us away from its dysfunctional opposite (dystopia). we're expected to man the ramparts at all times to keep things from slipping away from our preferred form of management. this produces the anxiety and despair that's become endemic in our culture.
the truth (at least for me) is that we don't know exactly what the problems are, or what the available solutions will be. i don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the level of global instability we're embarking on is unprecedented in human history, since the end of the last Ice Age. rather than playing an endless game of ideological King of the Hill, i'd prefer to explore how people created meaning that transcends material reality—in the face of that global instability, and all the apocalypses that have happened since then.
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.
exactly. i'm working on a delineation between (grassroots) "leadership" and (authoritarian) "governance," but i haven't fully fleshed it out yet and i'm not sure if those are the best terms to use yet. we will always have leadership, even (especially) in the darkest times. we might not always have governance.
Well I would argue that a democracy is both top-down and bottom-up. There is a top down structure that makes decisions for the bottom. But it is informed (and voted on) by the bottom!
I think part of what that shows is that "Democracy" can mean a wide range of different things (in either real life or an imagined utopia).
There's a version of classic liberalism in which you imagine that there are certain questions that get decided democratically (what do we tax and spend or distribute) but a number of other questions that are left to the individual and excluded from Democratic decision making (who will you marry, who gets to have children, etc . . . )
In that case the formal structures of democratic decision making (elections, laws) probably aren't what makes a society utopian or not -- (this is, on some level, the right-wing argument that culture trumps politics).
In our current world government is very powerful and shapes our lives in important ways, but isn't really capable of the careful management implied in R.G. Miga's comment about, "the idea that the world can be improved through management." On some level that has to either come from another source OR you have to imagine a significantly transformed government.
Well but democratic decision making is why we do not still work 60 hour workweeks for $1 an hour while breathing in soot. Our democratic decision making did things like establish a minimum wage, establish a 40-hour workweekm and establish worker conditions. Those things do mean we live a better life at baseline.
That *is* the the world being improved through management? No?
Okay, this forces me to be more precise.
First, I think you are correct that something like the 40-hr work week as an important victory, and I wouldn't argue with including early advocates in a history of utopian efforts.
But, more importantly, I think the question that @r. g. miga is asking is to pay more attention to _who_ is acting, in a way that saying "democratic decision making" skips over -- that's a perfectly good summary for some purposes, but for this case is too broad a summary.
Looking at a history of the 40-hr work week (which is fascinating), for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workweek-2015-10
There are 47 years between president Grant implementing an 8-hr week for government workers and Congress mandating an 8-hr work week for railroad employees (and another 24 years before Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect). During that time there were ongoing labor struggles, and a couple of individual companies that agreed to an 8-hr workday.
Does it make sense to lump all of that under "Democracy?" (rhetorical question -- it may or may not depending on the context).
It occurs to me that, in all seriousness, it would be fascinating if you were to write a post on the history of Prohibition as a Utopian project. Off the top of my head it stands out as a major reform effort which was largely pushed by grass-roots organizations lobbying for a legal change (and which had such a clearly defined success and failure in the 18th and 21st amendments).
As in "there were grassroots movements that forced the hand of government?" Because yes that's true, and yes that is democracy.
Prohibition is actually a fascinating case. Because it did cut down on drinking related deaths, and even reduced crime and violence. You could argue it was a public good. But it turns out it was a public good we didn't want! (And what we want is part of the utopian vision too, not just what is best for us statistically!)
Right, I think a look back at prohibition would be interesting (and I'm sure one reason that it was on my mind was this recent post by Alice Evans: https://draliceevans.substack.com/p/can-we-end-alcohol-abuse )
My point about using "Democracy" to refer to any process by which we make collective changes is that there are a wide range of different ways in which that can happen, and that it can be important to distinguish between them -- particularly in the context of the conversation about "top-down" vs "bottom-up."
I'd argue, for example, that Prohibition was pretty clearly bottom-up, whereas, establishing a national bank is pretty clearly top-down, and there's a whole range of things in-between.
Doesn't that distinction, while useful, break down a little bit in practice? It's hard to think of many examples of pure top-down utopias with an imagined law-giver after the 18th Century (or so).
I mean where would you put _Star Trek_ in that? (not a pure utopia and _certainly_ not a coherent utopian vision, but one of the most utopia-adjacent pieces of popular culture). On one hand, Star Fleet is a hierarchical quasi-military organization but, on the other hand, there's no sense that the utopian aspects depend upon following a specific set of rules -- and I don't think that's just a way to give the writers room to tell stories, I think the audience would be suspicious of a top-down vision.
Which is all to say that I think the comment in the original post, "utopian fiction is predicated on the idea that the world can be improved through management" is recognizably getting at something important, but I don't know that it stands on its own -- it needs some additional work (or just a sense that it applies to a fairly small set works).
good example. realistically, how would you get to a functional military hierarchy without a top-down organizational structure? what is the purpose of Starfleet's warships, if not to enforce the borders of its utopian society (for the people within those borders, at least)? i think a lot of utopian fiction like Star Trek hand-waves away the actual politics of its world, in favor of the fantasy of a morally righteous technocratic society. and that would be fine, if it were *just* fantasy. but when people hold up fictional utopias as realistic models of how society should be organized, i think it's important to carefully examine all the externalities of the model being presented.
I agree -- I think you're asking an important question about, "what is the implied social structure that would support this vision of society?"
Iain Banks' Culture novels present this problem really well. The Culture is a utopia; the Culture is a Utopia because it maximizes the freedom and agency of all of its inhabitants; the Culture is a Utopia because there's a secret hierarchy possessing ultimate sovereignty/governmentality that works to neutralize both external threats to the Culture's well-being via suborning or mobilizing its own citizens without their full consent as agents against external threats and by bracketing extreme forms of anti-freedom within the utopia into spaces where those 'freely chosen' forms of unfreedom can't harm anyone else.
well said! i haven't read Banks in too long, i'll have to get something from the Culture series back on my nightstand soon.
Thank you for these reflections, the intro to Dougald Hine’s work, and the acronym W.E.I.R.D. societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic——although sadly, the D increasingly stands for Demagogic.)
you're very welcome. Dougald Hine has some powerful medicine. thanks for reading!
Excellent response and central to my thinking as well. Even in imagined worlds like Star Trek TNG, there were still had not “solved” vision loss with their engineering officer. He had to accept what the technology offers and even so, he had a high position to have access to that. Not everyone wants that so we have to recalibrate how we think people benefit from so-called advancement. I often operate under the motto that “the future is disappointing”, in that all the splendor we imagined will not be realized and basic issues of access or conflict will exist in ways we never planned.
Agreed that there will need to be management of the society. I’ve created a traditional utopian model in my head and walked it back to accommodate some of the issues of resource distribution, tech acquisition, security, healthcare, etc. We cannot operate headless, but that head doesn’t need a crown either. I’m interested in how that idea would be applied practically.
Love that you’re thinking of those whose worlds have ended and are picking up the pieces. I cannot write from that space but would gladly listen and learn. I think it’s worth it for us to loosen the grip on our current lives and start taking cues from indigenous people, among others. We have to learn how to sustainable manage a planet and not destroy it (or people’s worlds).
believe me—in many ways, i'm not at all the ideal advocate for writing from the perspective of worlds that have ended. many of those narratives are very, very culturally specific, and i wouldn't dream of trying to authentically represent them. nevertheless, i think there is an authentically *human* way of finding our way through the end of a world—something that precedes and/or transcends its diverse cultural expressions throughout history. those are the footpaths i'm trying to uncover. it's a lifelong project, and i'm just getting started. hopefully i'm headed in the right direction!
Yes, there will always be vision loss! (And all other manner of ailments). There is no such thing, and never will be such a thing as a life without suffering. But Star Trek is still utopian! We can figure out how to make people's lives *better* at baseline, but yes we will still always have to figure out how our lives will be *good* from there!
Well argued. At the recommendation of @Sarah Lewis, I've been reading "the Davids" new book, "The Dawn of Everything" (authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow) and it's blowing my mind - in a good way. If you don't know David Graeber, check him out - his Wikipedia says he's an "American anthropologist and anarchist activist," who influenced the Occupy movement. (And is sometimes credited w/ "we are the 99%," though he insisted that was a collaboration.) They make the point that the Enlightenment story of human social + political "progress" -- ie, early versions fall to newer, better versions and so on, till we inevitably(?) arrived here -- is pure fiction. Looking at recent archeology and anthropology on Ice Age humans, social structures and governance were as varied as they are today, and why not?
One example they cite is seasonality - that certain groups / societies had different political structures depending on whether they needed to organize for a big hunt or if they were more low-key foraging and gathering.
It's gotten me thinking that the choice of top-down versus no-top-down management may be answered "both, depending on the time of year."
Thanks for doing this. It's generating some great conversations and feeding my subconscious, story-making self.