Joanne Paul's contribution begins this article. Scroll below to see contributions on this subject from four more writers
Thomas More’s Utopia remains one of the most famous books ever written. Within decades of its publication in Latin in December 1516, Utopia had gone through several editions and was published in almost every European vernacular.
It is also one of history’s most enigmatic books. No one seems to be able to work out quite what More—an elusive man himself—was up to in writing it. These two aspects of the book—its popularity and its mystery—may be linked; after all, everyone likes a good puzzle.
And everyone likes a good debate. Utopia, the tale of a commonwealth united by common property, remains divisive. Is it a prescriptive programme for social reform? A dystopic portrait of totalitarian control? Or perhaps nothing more than the fanciful expression of an unstable mind? At stake is both our view of More himself and the very value of “utopian” thinking, a genre of writing and theorising which takes its name from More’s 500-year-old text—celebrated this year with a new edition and a series of exhibitions.
For centuries, Utopia has raised the question of how to reconcile the ideal and the real; what few have noticed, however, is that it also answers it. Utopia is a mirror in which readers observe how social convention shapes their society, and how they can work within those customs to effect positive change. In 2016 these questions remain as pertinent as ever, as politicians—whether Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn—still struggle to find the balance between idealised principles and realisable political ambitions in a corrupt and often contemptible political world.
But the ultimate lesson of Utopia is that the “realities” that have to be navigated in embarking on a political career—namely pride and corruption—in fact stem from “fantasies” of social construction: property ownership and inequality. These are customs, which take away from the natural realities of equality and community. Thus, to engage in “real-world politics” is in fact to participate in nothing more than a “stage play.” Once that is understood, one can stay true to eternal ideals of common interest while appearing to take part in a game of self-interest.
The controversy surrounding Utopia is built into the book itself. “Utopia” comes from “topos,” the Greek for “place,” but the puzzle is in the prefix. It may be “ou” for “no” or “not,” thus making Utopia a “no-place.” However, it could also be “eu” for “good,” making Utopia the “good place.” Before even opening the first page, we are faced with a utopia that is simultaneously ideal and entirely unreal.
It is thus no surprise that Utopia was controversial immediately upon publication. Most readers put it in the same category as Plato’s Republic: another impossible fantasy, a jeu d’esprit. As the century wore on, others saw it as something more dangerous. More’s family, hoping to get him canonised by the Catholic Church, left Utopia out of their biographies, because of its associations with the humanist reform at the foundation of Protestantism. More’s jesting was taken, by others, as a sign of his foolishness and the impossibility of Utopia was likened to the Catholic belief in purgatory.
At the same time, Utopia was also inspiring a new genre. Writers like Francis Bacon and James Harrington wrote utopian works arguing for specific social and political reforms and in the so-called “New World” Utopia was used to think about the foundation of new settlements and cities.
By the 20th century, it was becoming increasingly difficult to extricate Utopia from the various traditions that it had generated. Efforts to give it a liberal reading were in tension with those that read it as fundamentally totalitarian, drawing parallels with the communist regimes that, in some eyes, operated with habits of thought that traced back to More. Meanwhile, the saintly scholarly More, as immortalised in Robert Bolt’s 1960 A Man for All Seasons, was coming under fire from historians, who countered Bolt’s protagonist with a picture of a More who was zealous, unhinged and ultimately insane, a possible schizophrenic who delighted in torturing Protestants in his own home. Just as Bolt’s More was drawn from sympathetic historical accounts, this negative account inspired the fictional portrayal of More in Hilary Mantel’s widely-admired Wolf Hall. In such readings, Utopia either becomes anomalous, completely at odds with More’s later works and actions, or the fantastic ramblings of a troubled mind.
But it needn’t be either. More was largely consistent in his ideas; one of the most fundamental of which is that the world we live in is a “stage play” or “fantasy” which we mistakenly take to be reality. By creating a fantastic world built on the real and eternal principles of eternity and community, Utopia, as a “mirror,” draws attention to the artificial nature of inequality and self-interest in our own world.
It is difficult to disentangle a reading of Utopia from an understanding of More’s personal history, largely because More appears in his own text. Utopia was begun in the summer of 1515, while More was on a diplomatic mission to Flanders. When talks stalled, More visited some of his scholarly contacts in the area, namely Pieter Gillis, a scholar and public administrator in Antwerp.
By 1515, More was starting to make a name for himself both as skilled public servant and as erudite humanist scholar, but his Europe-wide notoriety and a place in the court of Henry VIII were still around the corner. And of course his role as persecutor of “heretical” Protestants was years away. No one could have predicted in 1515 how far More would rise, to the highest position under the king—that of Lord Chancellor in 1529—and fall, convicted of treason and beheaded on Tower Hill in 1535. But 20 years before that, in summer 1515, More was simply an up-and-coming lawyer with a solid education and a few courtly and scholarly connections.
Utopia opens not in a fantasy island, but with More’s own diplomatic mission and his trip to see Gillis, who also appears in the book. Fact is thus blurred into fiction from the start.
Where the slide into fiction is most apparent is the appearance of a third character, Raphael Hythloday, a traveller and scholar who tells of the land of Utopia where everything is held in common and everyone is equal. In Book II he details Utopian customs: homes are assigned randomly and kept only a short time before being reassigned; gold and gems are used for slaves’ chains, chamber pots and children’s toys, so that they become objects of disdain and condemnation. Most importantly, no one can be said to own anything. Private property and a sense of ownership are what make us feel superior to our fellows, cutting through the social bonds which ought to unite us; this isn’t a problem in Utopia.
The character of More remains unconvinced. There is much, he says in conclusion, in the Utopian commonwealth he might “hope” rather than “expect” to see realised in Europe and the book ends there, without telling its readers what to make of Hythloday’s tale and what ought to be done in response to it. Do we overturn every social convention in the hope of eradicating pride? Do we shut ourselves away from the corrupting influences of property and inequality? Ought we to live an active life of politics, despite the corruption inherent in a non-utopian world?
These questions are the subject of Book I of Utopia, in which More and Hythloday debate whether a wise man has a duty to serve the commonwealth. Hythloday suggests that, given the corrupt world they live in, to do so would be at best pointless, at worst deadly. More maintains that an “indirect approach” which “adapts itself to the drama at hand” will be more successful. The debate ends without resolution, but More’s voluminous other writings make the message clearer.
From his earliest poems written while a student at Oxford to his religious reflections composed while imprisoned in the Tower, More consistently argues that our short lives are nothing but pageants in which we play parts—kings, slaves, priests, nobles. When we die we shed our costumes and return to what we were: equals. Nothing we own in this world actually belongs to us, it is “borrowed ware” which is later returned. European social conventions do not reflect the reality of this essential and eternal equality; utopian ones do.
More thus reminds us of this fundamental equality. His lesson need not impel us to reject private property, but does usefully require us to recall its artificiality and essential triviality. By seeing the world we operate in as a stage play, we can participate without attachment, avoiding corruptive influences and remaining committed to communal interest over our own self-interest. As More’s friend John Colet put it: “Use well temporal things. Desire eternal things.”
Rescuing Utopia from debates emerging from its legacy and the controversy that dogs More’s biography, we are able to recover lessons of the text which reinvigorate our understanding of it and of utopian thinking as a whole. Utopia still works as a mirror of our contemporary world, in which the falsities of social convention are revealed, not as a means to overthrow them, but as a reminder of their potential malleability for higher ends. In short, rather than separating real and ideal, Utopia provides guidance on how to navigate the tempestuous sea between them.
Utopian thinking deserves its place, not among impossible demands or totalitarian agenda, but alongside today’s political satires and critiques, which point out the absurdity of social convention, in the hopes that someone will work within that ridiculous stage play for more admirable ends.
Danny Dorling - Only dreamers see the future
It is no coincidence that Thomas More set Utopia on an island. He was a teenager when the Americas were discovered, a time when the world learned that more was possible than we knew. He could not have known that this discovery would change everything, with 1492 sparking a series of events that would propel humanity to become a very different species, one which today could no longer survive as most people survived then. More was imaginative, but no human is capable of imagining change on the scale that has occurred. The search for utopias is the constant attempt to stretch our imaginations over what is possible.
For all eternity humans have watched their children often die before them. Such suffering was thought unavoidable up to a century ago when over a tenth of the children of the richest people in the world, the English servant-keeping classes, died in childhood. Today child mortality rates in China are falling so fast that within a year or two they could be as low as in the United States. Already less than 1 per cent of babies born in China die before their first birthday. On the island of Iceland only two in every thousand infants die and the rate is still falling. Worldwide rates are falling fastest such that we know that they cannot fall any faster than they are now, because they cannot fall below zero. Never have we known such progress, but only a very few people saw this as possible just a few decades ago.
The utopians have consistently been proved right in the long run. Our species is transforming into something new. We now understand that it was not the gods that suddenly decided that almost all children should live to see adulthood. Our agonising about dystopia is the main way we achieve progress. We rightly complain about all the greed, selfishness and stupidity in the world. Occasionally we need to recognise what this complaining achieves. And then we move on to look out for the next island of possibility. What world into which almost all our children will now survive is possible, especially now that we have so few children because we can be so sure that they will live?
Lionel Shriver—The horror of engineered bliss
Maybe perfection is the enemy of the good.
In the narrative arts, the utopia is one more dystopia. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World portrays everyone as happy, thanks to being doped up with “soma.” Citizens are bred to be contented with their social rank. But the state-engineered bliss is horrifying.
Visions of societies that have resolved all their problems are strangely unappealing—even repulsive. Why on earth? The whole notion of a utopia is implicitly mechanistic, inorganic, and so inhuman. When uniformly happy, tranquil and compliant, peoples come across as lobotomised. Some switched-on outsider reliably arrives to shake things up. Is to be human, then, necessarily to be miserable?
Perfected, societies appear pointless: there’s nothing further to accomplish, and people are mere inputs in a smoothly running programme. Utopias often imply an absolute control from on high, and so suggest oppression. Our species is anarchic, rebellious. We dislike being bossed around, even for our own good, and (what the European Union has never understood) we like to be free to make our own mistakes.
An ideal world is anti-story and so anathema to fiction and real life alike. Aside from regression, nothing can happen. There’s no requirement for agency when naught remains to achieve, which means a utopia is a world without heroes. So a society running tickety-boo strikes us as lifeless and depersonalised. With the end of plot and the end of character, existence is either static, or numbingly circular.
Utopias in the arts have often institutionalised a deadly moral compromise, too. (For example, in his short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut imagined the end of today’s much-demonised “inequality”: the intelligent are made stupid, the athletic hobbled, the beautiful disfigured. Oh, great.) These utopias are rigged, secretly flawed, not really utopias at all, and thus planted with the seeds of their own destruction.
Western democracy is forever trying to refine itself. Yet if utopias are nightmares, are we striving towards a goal that we don’t actually want to reach? How much do any of us really want to live in Singapore? In case you’re worried, relax. Last time I checked the newspaper, utopias springing up here, there, and everywhere doesn’t seem to be the big problem.
Lionel Shriver's most recent novel is "The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047"
Andrew Brown—Paradise shouldn't need border controls
Aldous Huxley wrote two versions of utopia: Brave New World early in his career, and an almost forgotten novel, Island, right at the end. The difference is that Island is not meant ironically. Huxley really believed that love, sex, reason and humility could make the world a kind of paradise, especially when glued together with hallucinogenic drugs.
Considered as a style of fiction, what distinguishes utopias is that they work best when they are least psychologically credible. This is also what distinguishes them from the greater part of science fiction. The incredibility that makes utopias valuable is of a particular sort. It’s not technological—by now there is nothing that seems technologically impossible to the contemporary imagination—but psychological: the idea of a state of permanent happiness and balance, where all dangers are properly controlled seems, literally, too good to be true. That is usually taken as a weakness. But that reaction is exactly what makes utopias valuable. Chasing down the intuition that something is too good to be true can show us something about both goodness and truth which we can’t see as clearly from any other perspective.
The moral tension in conventional stories, even when they are science fiction, arises when people fail to live up to their ideals, or succeed in living up to the wrong ideals. But the premise of a utopia is that they should succeed in living up to the right ideals—those we share ourselves—and the question hanging over it is always “What could possibly go wrong?”
The answer, in a really pure utopia, is that the outside world will intrude. If the society is revealed to be inadequate by its own inner contradictions, then its perfection is too realistic. We have no difficulty in believing in the misery of Bernard the Savage in Brave New World because our experience is that humans can and will screw up the best organised schemes. Similarly, in the contemporary writer Jo Walton’s re-imagining of Plato’s Republic, it is the participants’ lust for power that breaks up the just city.
But Island is true to the genre in that misfortune comes from without. A journalist, that figure of archetypal corruption, appears with a proposal to exploit the island’s oil reserves and in the end it is invaded and conquered by a neighbouring, less pacifist island. That never happens to More’s island, of course, because in those days islands could be entirely inaccessible. But it does provoke one fresh disturbing reflection: a true utopia needs border controls—but can a paradise with border controls be truly good?
Andrew Brown is the author of "Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared"
Ursula K Le Guin—Breaking the chains of the status quo
In the sense that it offers a glimpse of some imagined alternative to “the way we live now,” much of my fiction can be called utopian, but I continue to resist the word. Many of my invented societies strike me as an improvement in one way or another on our own, but I find utopia far too grand and rigid a name for them. Utopia, and dystopia, are intellectual places. I write from passion and playfulness. My stories are neither dire warnings nor blueprints for what we ought to do. Most of them, I think, are comedies of human manners, reminders of the infinite variety of ways in which we always come back to pretty much the same place, and celebrations of that infinite variety by the invention of still more alternatives and possibilities. Even in the novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, in which I worked out more methodically than usual certain variations on the uses of power, which I preferred to those that obtain in our world—even these are as much efforts to subvert as to display the ideal of an attainable social plan which would end injustice and equality once and for all.
Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader’s present, actual world. Young people in general welcome this kind of story because in their vigour and eagerness for experience they welcome alternatives, possibilities, change. Having come to fear even the imagination of true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know, or think they know.
The imaginative fiction I admire presents alternatives to the status quo which not only question the ubiquity and necessity of extant institutions, but enlarge the field of social possibility and moral understanding. This may be done in as naively hopeful a tone as the first three Star Trek TV series, or through such complex, sophisticated and ambiguous constructions of thought and technique as the novels of Philip K Dick or Carol Emshwiller; but the movement is recognisably the same—the impulse to make change imaginable.
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
Ursula K Le Guin is the author of 22 novels, four collections of essays, seven books of poetry, 12 children’s books and over 100 short stories. This extract is taken from Verso’s new edition of More’s “Utopia,” with four essays by Ursula K Le Guin and an introduction by China Miéville
Thomas More’s Utopia remains one of the most famous books ever written. Within decades of its publication in Latin in December 1516, Utopia had gone through several editions and was published in almost every European vernacular.
It is also one of history’s most enigmatic books. No one seems to be able to work out quite what More—an elusive man himself—was up to in writing it. These two aspects of the book—its popularity and its mystery—may be linked; after all, everyone likes a good puzzle.
And everyone likes a good debate. Utopia, the tale of a commonwealth united by common property, remains divisive. Is it a prescriptive programme for social reform? A dystopic portrait of totalitarian control? Or perhaps nothing more than the fanciful expression of an unstable mind? At stake is both our view of More himself and the very value of “utopian” thinking, a genre of writing and theorising which takes its name from More’s 500-year-old text—celebrated this year with a new edition and a series of exhibitions.
For centuries, Utopia has raised the question of how to reconcile the ideal and the real; what few have noticed, however, is that it also answers it. Utopia is a mirror in which readers observe how social convention shapes their society, and how they can work within those customs to effect positive change. In 2016 these questions remain as pertinent as ever, as politicians—whether Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn—still struggle to find the balance between idealised principles and realisable political ambitions in a corrupt and often contemptible political world.
But the ultimate lesson of Utopia is that the “realities” that have to be navigated in embarking on a political career—namely pride and corruption—in fact stem from “fantasies” of social construction: property ownership and inequality. These are customs, which take away from the natural realities of equality and community. Thus, to engage in “real-world politics” is in fact to participate in nothing more than a “stage play.” Once that is understood, one can stay true to eternal ideals of common interest while appearing to take part in a game of self-interest.
The controversy surrounding Utopia is built into the book itself. “Utopia” comes from “topos,” the Greek for “place,” but the puzzle is in the prefix. It may be “ou” for “no” or “not,” thus making Utopia a “no-place.” However, it could also be “eu” for “good,” making Utopia the “good place.” Before even opening the first page, we are faced with a utopia that is simultaneously ideal and entirely unreal.
It is thus no surprise that Utopia was controversial immediately upon publication. Most readers put it in the same category as Plato’s Republic: another impossible fantasy, a jeu d’esprit. As the century wore on, others saw it as something more dangerous. More’s family, hoping to get him canonised by the Catholic Church, left Utopia out of their biographies, because of its associations with the humanist reform at the foundation of Protestantism. More’s jesting was taken, by others, as a sign of his foolishness and the impossibility of Utopia was likened to the Catholic belief in purgatory.
At the same time, Utopia was also inspiring a new genre. Writers like Francis Bacon and James Harrington wrote utopian works arguing for specific social and political reforms and in the so-called “New World” Utopia was used to think about the foundation of new settlements and cities.
" Utopia was controversial immediately. Readers placed it with Plato's Republic: an impossible fantasy"The real development in utopian thinking came in the 19th century, when Utopia was seen as a foundational text for the socialist and communist movements. Étienne Cabet, one of the first to use the term “communisme” was “so struck” by the ideas in Utopia that he had to close the book and “meditate” on its ideas. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the writers of The Communist Manifesto, both knew More’s text well, and their shared copy is heavily annotated.
By the 20th century, it was becoming increasingly difficult to extricate Utopia from the various traditions that it had generated. Efforts to give it a liberal reading were in tension with those that read it as fundamentally totalitarian, drawing parallels with the communist regimes that, in some eyes, operated with habits of thought that traced back to More. Meanwhile, the saintly scholarly More, as immortalised in Robert Bolt’s 1960 A Man for All Seasons, was coming under fire from historians, who countered Bolt’s protagonist with a picture of a More who was zealous, unhinged and ultimately insane, a possible schizophrenic who delighted in torturing Protestants in his own home. Just as Bolt’s More was drawn from sympathetic historical accounts, this negative account inspired the fictional portrayal of More in Hilary Mantel’s widely-admired Wolf Hall. In such readings, Utopia either becomes anomalous, completely at odds with More’s later works and actions, or the fantastic ramblings of a troubled mind.
But it needn’t be either. More was largely consistent in his ideas; one of the most fundamental of which is that the world we live in is a “stage play” or “fantasy” which we mistakenly take to be reality. By creating a fantastic world built on the real and eternal principles of eternity and community, Utopia, as a “mirror,” draws attention to the artificial nature of inequality and self-interest in our own world.
It is difficult to disentangle a reading of Utopia from an understanding of More’s personal history, largely because More appears in his own text. Utopia was begun in the summer of 1515, while More was on a diplomatic mission to Flanders. When talks stalled, More visited some of his scholarly contacts in the area, namely Pieter Gillis, a scholar and public administrator in Antwerp.
By 1515, More was starting to make a name for himself both as skilled public servant and as erudite humanist scholar, but his Europe-wide notoriety and a place in the court of Henry VIII were still around the corner. And of course his role as persecutor of “heretical” Protestants was years away. No one could have predicted in 1515 how far More would rise, to the highest position under the king—that of Lord Chancellor in 1529—and fall, convicted of treason and beheaded on Tower Hill in 1535. But 20 years before that, in summer 1515, More was simply an up-and-coming lawyer with a solid education and a few courtly and scholarly connections.
Utopia opens not in a fantasy island, but with More’s own diplomatic mission and his trip to see Gillis, who also appears in the book. Fact is thus blurred into fiction from the start.
Where the slide into fiction is most apparent is the appearance of a third character, Raphael Hythloday, a traveller and scholar who tells of the land of Utopia where everything is held in common and everyone is equal. In Book II he details Utopian customs: homes are assigned randomly and kept only a short time before being reassigned; gold and gems are used for slaves’ chains, chamber pots and children’s toys, so that they become objects of disdain and condemnation. Most importantly, no one can be said to own anything. Private property and a sense of ownership are what make us feel superior to our fellows, cutting through the social bonds which ought to unite us; this isn’t a problem in Utopia.
The character of More remains unconvinced. There is much, he says in conclusion, in the Utopian commonwealth he might “hope” rather than “expect” to see realised in Europe and the book ends there, without telling its readers what to make of Hythloday’s tale and what ought to be done in response to it. Do we overturn every social convention in the hope of eradicating pride? Do we shut ourselves away from the corrupting influences of property and inequality? Ought we to live an active life of politics, despite the corruption inherent in a non-utopian world?
These questions are the subject of Book I of Utopia, in which More and Hythloday debate whether a wise man has a duty to serve the commonwealth. Hythloday suggests that, given the corrupt world they live in, to do so would be at best pointless, at worst deadly. More maintains that an “indirect approach” which “adapts itself to the drama at hand” will be more successful. The debate ends without resolution, but More’s voluminous other writings make the message clearer.
From his earliest poems written while a student at Oxford to his religious reflections composed while imprisoned in the Tower, More consistently argues that our short lives are nothing but pageants in which we play parts—kings, slaves, priests, nobles. When we die we shed our costumes and return to what we were: equals. Nothing we own in this world actually belongs to us, it is “borrowed ware” which is later returned. European social conventions do not reflect the reality of this essential and eternal equality; utopian ones do.
More thus reminds us of this fundamental equality. His lesson need not impel us to reject private property, but does usefully require us to recall its artificiality and essential triviality. By seeing the world we operate in as a stage play, we can participate without attachment, avoiding corruptive influences and remaining committed to communal interest over our own self-interest. As More’s friend John Colet put it: “Use well temporal things. Desire eternal things.”
Rescuing Utopia from debates emerging from its legacy and the controversy that dogs More’s biography, we are able to recover lessons of the text which reinvigorate our understanding of it and of utopian thinking as a whole. Utopia still works as a mirror of our contemporary world, in which the falsities of social convention are revealed, not as a means to overthrow them, but as a reminder of their potential malleability for higher ends. In short, rather than separating real and ideal, Utopia provides guidance on how to navigate the tempestuous sea between them.
Utopian thinking deserves its place, not among impossible demands or totalitarian agenda, but alongside today’s political satires and critiques, which point out the absurdity of social convention, in the hopes that someone will work within that ridiculous stage play for more admirable ends.
Danny Dorling - Only dreamers see the future
It is no coincidence that Thomas More set Utopia on an island. He was a teenager when the Americas were discovered, a time when the world learned that more was possible than we knew. He could not have known that this discovery would change everything, with 1492 sparking a series of events that would propel humanity to become a very different species, one which today could no longer survive as most people survived then. More was imaginative, but no human is capable of imagining change on the scale that has occurred. The search for utopias is the constant attempt to stretch our imaginations over what is possible.
For all eternity humans have watched their children often die before them. Such suffering was thought unavoidable up to a century ago when over a tenth of the children of the richest people in the world, the English servant-keeping classes, died in childhood. Today child mortality rates in China are falling so fast that within a year or two they could be as low as in the United States. Already less than 1 per cent of babies born in China die before their first birthday. On the island of Iceland only two in every thousand infants die and the rate is still falling. Worldwide rates are falling fastest such that we know that they cannot fall any faster than they are now, because they cannot fall below zero. Never have we known such progress, but only a very few people saw this as possible just a few decades ago.
The utopians have consistently been proved right in the long run. Our species is transforming into something new. We now understand that it was not the gods that suddenly decided that almost all children should live to see adulthood. Our agonising about dystopia is the main way we achieve progress. We rightly complain about all the greed, selfishness and stupidity in the world. Occasionally we need to recognise what this complaining achieves. And then we move on to look out for the next island of possibility. What world into which almost all our children will now survive is possible, especially now that we have so few children because we can be so sure that they will live?
Lionel Shriver—The horror of engineered bliss
Maybe perfection is the enemy of the good.
In the narrative arts, the utopia is one more dystopia. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World portrays everyone as happy, thanks to being doped up with “soma.” Citizens are bred to be contented with their social rank. But the state-engineered bliss is horrifying.
If utopias are nightmare, are we striving towards a goal that we don't actually want to reach?On a planet that’s put an end to war by systematically sacrificing a contingent of both sides with bloodless euthanasia, Star Trek’s Captain James T Kirk forces its leaders to forge a real messy peace or go back to massacring each other the old-fashioned way.
Visions of societies that have resolved all their problems are strangely unappealing—even repulsive. Why on earth? The whole notion of a utopia is implicitly mechanistic, inorganic, and so inhuman. When uniformly happy, tranquil and compliant, peoples come across as lobotomised. Some switched-on outsider reliably arrives to shake things up. Is to be human, then, necessarily to be miserable?
Perfected, societies appear pointless: there’s nothing further to accomplish, and people are mere inputs in a smoothly running programme. Utopias often imply an absolute control from on high, and so suggest oppression. Our species is anarchic, rebellious. We dislike being bossed around, even for our own good, and (what the European Union has never understood) we like to be free to make our own mistakes.
An ideal world is anti-story and so anathema to fiction and real life alike. Aside from regression, nothing can happen. There’s no requirement for agency when naught remains to achieve, which means a utopia is a world without heroes. So a society running tickety-boo strikes us as lifeless and depersonalised. With the end of plot and the end of character, existence is either static, or numbingly circular.
Utopias in the arts have often institutionalised a deadly moral compromise, too. (For example, in his short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut imagined the end of today’s much-demonised “inequality”: the intelligent are made stupid, the athletic hobbled, the beautiful disfigured. Oh, great.) These utopias are rigged, secretly flawed, not really utopias at all, and thus planted with the seeds of their own destruction.
Western democracy is forever trying to refine itself. Yet if utopias are nightmares, are we striving towards a goal that we don’t actually want to reach? How much do any of us really want to live in Singapore? In case you’re worried, relax. Last time I checked the newspaper, utopias springing up here, there, and everywhere doesn’t seem to be the big problem.
Lionel Shriver's most recent novel is "The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047"
Andrew Brown—Paradise shouldn't need border controls
Aldous Huxley wrote two versions of utopia: Brave New World early in his career, and an almost forgotten novel, Island, right at the end. The difference is that Island is not meant ironically. Huxley really believed that love, sex, reason and humility could make the world a kind of paradise, especially when glued together with hallucinogenic drugs.
Considered as a style of fiction, what distinguishes utopias is that they work best when they are least psychologically credible. This is also what distinguishes them from the greater part of science fiction. The incredibility that makes utopias valuable is of a particular sort. It’s not technological—by now there is nothing that seems technologically impossible to the contemporary imagination—but psychological: the idea of a state of permanent happiness and balance, where all dangers are properly controlled seems, literally, too good to be true. That is usually taken as a weakness. But that reaction is exactly what makes utopias valuable. Chasing down the intuition that something is too good to be true can show us something about both goodness and truth which we can’t see as clearly from any other perspective.
The moral tension in conventional stories, even when they are science fiction, arises when people fail to live up to their ideals, or succeed in living up to the wrong ideals. But the premise of a utopia is that they should succeed in living up to the right ideals—those we share ourselves—and the question hanging over it is always “What could possibly go wrong?”
The answer, in a really pure utopia, is that the outside world will intrude. If the society is revealed to be inadequate by its own inner contradictions, then its perfection is too realistic. We have no difficulty in believing in the misery of Bernard the Savage in Brave New World because our experience is that humans can and will screw up the best organised schemes. Similarly, in the contemporary writer Jo Walton’s re-imagining of Plato’s Republic, it is the participants’ lust for power that breaks up the just city.
But Island is true to the genre in that misfortune comes from without. A journalist, that figure of archetypal corruption, appears with a proposal to exploit the island’s oil reserves and in the end it is invaded and conquered by a neighbouring, less pacifist island. That never happens to More’s island, of course, because in those days islands could be entirely inaccessible. But it does provoke one fresh disturbing reflection: a true utopia needs border controls—but can a paradise with border controls be truly good?
Andrew Brown is the author of "Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared"
Ursula K Le Guin—Breaking the chains of the status quo
In the sense that it offers a glimpse of some imagined alternative to “the way we live now,” much of my fiction can be called utopian, but I continue to resist the word. Many of my invented societies strike me as an improvement in one way or another on our own, but I find utopia far too grand and rigid a name for them. Utopia, and dystopia, are intellectual places. I write from passion and playfulness. My stories are neither dire warnings nor blueprints for what we ought to do. Most of them, I think, are comedies of human manners, reminders of the infinite variety of ways in which we always come back to pretty much the same place, and celebrations of that infinite variety by the invention of still more alternatives and possibilities. Even in the novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, in which I worked out more methodically than usual certain variations on the uses of power, which I preferred to those that obtain in our world—even these are as much efforts to subvert as to display the ideal of an attainable social plan which would end injustice and equality once and for all.
"Having come to fear true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know"To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.
Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader’s present, actual world. Young people in general welcome this kind of story because in their vigour and eagerness for experience they welcome alternatives, possibilities, change. Having come to fear even the imagination of true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know, or think they know.
The imaginative fiction I admire presents alternatives to the status quo which not only question the ubiquity and necessity of extant institutions, but enlarge the field of social possibility and moral understanding. This may be done in as naively hopeful a tone as the first three Star Trek TV series, or through such complex, sophisticated and ambiguous constructions of thought and technique as the novels of Philip K Dick or Carol Emshwiller; but the movement is recognisably the same—the impulse to make change imaginable.
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
Ursula K Le Guin is the author of 22 novels, four collections of essays, seven books of poetry, 12 children’s books and over 100 short stories. This extract is taken from Verso’s new edition of More’s “Utopia,” with four essays by Ursula K Le Guin and an introduction by China Miéville
