If utopia is supposed to be the ideal and perfect place, where everyone lives in harmony, then why do so many of them turn out to suck? To get an answer, let's go to the source: Thomas More, whose 1516 travelogue Utopia gave us the word, a pun meaning "no place" and "perfect place." More's Utopia describes an island where everyone is happy and smiling and living in divinely inspired synchronization. Told with verve and a sly wit, Utopia is one of the foundational texts of contemporary science fiction as well as utopian thought.
But More wasn't just a writer of fantastic tales. He was also a politician and one-time Undersheriff of London. As such, More was not only an enthusiastic upholder of a radically unequal and oppressive social order, but also an advocate for burning 16th century heretics. Live by the sword, die by the sword: in 1535 Henry VIII beheaded More and anyone else who didn't support his accession to Supreme Head of the Church of England. The violence of More's historical period is never far from the surface of More's island Utopia, where a single act of adultery is punishable by slavery and serial adulterers are punished with death. If More's narrator had looked past the happy smiling faces of Utopia, what fear and violence might he have seen?
Yet utopia—a word that has come to represent a hope that the future could surpass the present—persists. "As long as necessity is socially dreamed," Guy Debord says in his 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle, "dreaming will remain a social necessity." Debord meant that in conditions of inequality and injustice, people will always imagine a better place. What constitutes "better" is, however, a matter of much dispute. We dream our fears as well as hopes, reflecting all the agonies and contradictions of the waking world; in dreams, demons rise from our darkest places. This is the dangerous element in utopian aspiration, the monster behind the smiling face. Utopias can embody the highest hopes of humankind and frameworks for continuous evolution, but they can also reflect our worst fears and sickest appetites—not to mention a mania for power and control that is latent in every person. "What a strange scene you describe and what strange prisoners," says Glaucon, Socrates' disciple, in Plato's Republic, the template for the stupid utopia. "They are just like us," answers the master.
Plato's Republic
Told in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, one of the earliest and most primitive utopias is all about limits, discipline, and hierarchy. The number of inhabitants of the Republic, pronounced Socrates, should be limited to 5,040 in order to maximize conformity and control. In this most "just" of cities, women and children are property, for how could they be otherwise? "For men born and educated like our citizens," Socrates says, "the only way of arriving at the right conclusion about the possession and use of women and children is to follow the path on which we originally started, when we said that the men were to be the guardians and watchdogs of the herd." Quite naturally, the State would be ruled over by men most like Socrates himself, philosopher-kings, "the best of our citizens." This guardian class would live communally and apart from the herd: "having wives and children in common, they must live in common houses and meet at common meals."
Exactly how stupid is Plato's Republic, and who am I to call one of history's greatest philosophers "stupid"? Is Plato's time simply too different from our own for us to pass judgment? I don't think so, for The Republic lives on in the rhetoric of contemporary political movements of both right and left—every elitist and technocratic fantasy of our time has grown from the seed of The Republic. Plato would not have understood the term "dehumanization" as we understand it—he'd never, of course, seen a factory floor or a gas chamber—but when his ideas have been enacted in places like the Soviet Union, Mussolini's Italy, or modern state-capitalist China, they have proven brutally dehumanizing, his apparat of "guardians" thoroughly corrupted by power.
Though protected from criticism by the moldy gauze of antiquity, Plato and his teacher/mouthpiece Socrates are not so different from us; they had their fears and prejudices just as we have ours. We still live in the fabled cave Socrates describes in The Republic, watching the shadows on the walls and thinking them reality. He thought that only the philosopher could throw off his shackles in the sensible world and leave the cave for the heaven of Ideas; the philosopher alone could wield this pure knowledge in ruling the Republic. In didn't occur to Plato/Socrates that the World of Forms beyond the cave might only be another shadow or even hallucination. Plato could not escape the trap into which any utopian can fall: he didn't believe enough in his own fallibility.
The City on the Hill
More than just a source of gold, in the Christian imagination the New World represented the triumph of the natural ideal over a decadent European culture. Naked and innocent "Indians," living in communitarian grace, appeared immediately in the writings of Conquistadors and would serve to bolster a utopian image in Europe of the New World. (This chimera persists, mutated, in New Age idealizations of indigenous culture.) When the natives wouldn't conform to that image, in due course it became necessary destroy their villages so that their souls might be saved. "They are not fit to command or lead," said one exemplary Catholic of those he deemed his racial inferiors, "but to be commanded and lead."
Up North, their Calvinist counterparts arrived and set about creating a Protestant utopia of everlasting hierarchy. "We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill," preached Massachusetts governor John Winthrop. "God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath soe disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in submission." The New World was to be More's Utopia, at last made real. In Salem sixty years later, witches would burn. A Native American apocalypse was not far behind, followed by Filipinos, El Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and anyone else who ran afoul of this utopian marriage of theocratic and imperial aspiration.
>>To read the rest of the article at STRANGE HORIZONS click here
