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Utopia. Mark Stephen Jendrysik
Читать онлайн.Название Utopia
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509534944
Автор произведения Mark Stephen Jendrysik
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
In all its many forms, utopia critiques the existing order and, in doing so, “contributes to the open space of opposition” (Moylan 2014: 1). Utopia can be ambiguous, questioning its own very possibility. Utopian writers can demonstrate the dangerous potentials of utopia in dystopian works. Utopian ideas contribute to feminism and queer theory. Utopia may be found in small spaces outside of social norms, as in the heterotopia described by Michel Foucault.
Lyman Tower Sargent defines a utopia as:
A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space. In standard usage utopia is used both as defined here as an equivalent for eutopia or a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived. (2010: 6)
Ruth Levitas provides a definition that helps explain the place of utopia in political thought:
The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively. Its expressions explore and bring to debate the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. It is thus better understood as a method than a goal – a method elaborated … as the Imaginary Reconstruction of Society. (2013: xi)
Utopia provides a platform to criticize our times and to work toward something better. Any utopian work or theory provides an alternative to present social, economic and political organization. The “Imaginary Reconstruction of Society” must be followed by efforts to really reconstruct society. It is not enough to criticize; we must also provide answers to our seemingly insurmountable problems. But simply reading More’s second book of Utopia, where he gives the reader a report on the close to perfect society of the Utopians, without reading the first book, where he delineates the injustice and imperfection of England in his own times, misses the point. The mixed critique at the heart of utopia remains its critical feature, even when, in the present, dystopian speculations seem to have replaced utopia. Utopian dreams still insinuate themselves into our current dystopias. As Lucy Sargisson has noted, contemporary works mix “eutopian and dystopian possibilities for the human race” (2012: 12).
Types of Utopia
Krishan Kumar suggests that four primary elements constitute utopia. First, he says that utopia contains the “element of desire,” which he describes as an “escape from toil and suffering.” Second, utopia means “harmony.” In utopia, “everyone is at peace with himself and with other men.” Third, all utopias provide “hope.” Utopia is the “promise of a new dispensation” where “justice and freedom reign.” Finally, utopia is organized by self-conscious “design.” Kumar says that these four elements combine to give us “a map of quite different possibilities for speculating on the human condition” (1991: 18–19).
Kumar and Sargent, among others, link these elements to several enduring features of utopian dreaming. All societies seem to have Golden Age stories, tales of a time when people lived in harmony with one another, with the gods (or God) and with nature. But these stories inevitably delineate the beginning of the current age of oppression and violence. The Garden of Eden is the most obvious such example, but similar stories can be found in the myths of the Greeks, Romans, Hindus and Chinese. During the so-called Age of Discovery, European explorers sought an earthly paradise in the “new world.” Others in this period searched in Africa and Asia for the legendary kingdom of Prester John, a mighty Christian monarch who ruled a just state and would join with the kings of Europe to drive back the threat of Islam. Other traditions look to the lost immortal and enlightened realm of Shangri-La, the perfection of Atlantis, or the simple pastoral life of Arcadia. But not all utopians have such high aspirations. Some dreamed of a fleshly paradise or a “body utopia,” often called Cockaygne, where food fell from the trees and work was banned. In such utopias, often identified with the dreams of the poor in medieval Europe, harmless license, gluttony and sexual freedom abounded. Finally, utopian dreaming can be seen in the longing for the end, the advent of the millennium. In the Christian tradition this has come to mean a time when true justice will be established. The dream of an end to the mundane world and the revelation of new and liberating truths crosses cultural boundaries. This desire has produced groups who withdraw from the world, such as the Essenes of the first century CE and today’s religiously inspired intentional communities. It can be seen in the many forms of monasticism found around the world. But this dream has also produced nightmares in the form of groups such as the Fifth Monarchists of the sixteenth-century English Revolution, who believed the reign of Christ could be brought forward by violence. It has produced apocalyptic cults such as the followers of Jim Jones, who were driven to mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978.
Zygmunt Bauman points to nostalgia as a key feature of contemporary utopia. He says that “‘retrotopias’ are currently emerging: visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past” (2017: 5). Such retrotopian ideas can be seen in political discourses that praise the “good old days” or the “greatest generation” and call for the restoration of traditional values (whatever they might be). The rise of ISIS, European neo-fascists, the American alt-right, or even Donald Trump’s promise to “make America great again” all show the power and danger of retrotopian ideas.
The ideal (but not necessarily perfect) city stands out as one of the defining characteristics of traditional utopian dreaming, planning and action. Plato’s cities in Republic and The Laws and the actual experience of the ancient Greeks in civic design provide a template that inspires utopian thought to this day. Utopian ideal cities share a number of characteristics. First, the community will have a founder, an individual or group of committed people who receive the credit for the design of its institutions and its very existence. The greater distance in time from the founding to the present in a utopia, the stronger the power of the rules, norms and traditions left behind by the founder(s). The founder will have the kind of personal virtue that allows him or her to reconstruct a society on good principles. Perhaps this is why in utopian literature founders are often mythical or quasi-mythical figures. Second, an ideal city will be practically self-sufficient. This dream of a community that can provide all its needs and wants (which in utopia should be in balance, both for the whole society and for the individual) is rooted in the prejudices of ancient moralists who saw trade and commerce as corrupting. Third, the ideal city will resist change, since change is seen as decay. The Spartans were the object of admiration across ancient Greece, since their institutions seemed to have remained unchanged from time immemorial.
Claeys sees equality as central to utopia. Referencing More’s Utopia, he says utopia seeks “to balance strife by privileging the communal, usually by making property and social classes more equal. … Imagined or practiced humanely, it can teach us the enduring value of love, respect, the cultivation of the individual, even the eccentric and unique” (2011: 8). Making property common or giving all citizens in the community a moral claim on the products of earth and factory provides a common organizing feature of many utopian works. From More to Ursula K. Le Guin, utopian authors create methods of distribution and structures of work that allow all to contribute to the common good and take from the common store. But the equality at the heart of utopia is an equality not just of ownership but of duties as well. Utopia allows for no free riders.
But while equality is a key feature of many utopias, hierarchy and class structures provide another and contrasting feature. In early utopias such as Plato’s, “we hear little or nothing about … the great mass of people who attend to the economic and general life of the community” (Ferguson 1975: 64). Karl Popper says that Plato rests “the fate of the state with that of the ruling class; the exclusive interest of this class, and in its unity” (2013: 83). Many pre-modern utopians saw the need for a class of slaves or serfs to free the citizens from