-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- >From http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/020500utopia-library.html Via http://www.philosophynews.com/index.html {{<Begin>}} February 5, 2000 Paradise Lost: Can Mankind Live Without Its Utopias? By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Utopia may be "no place" (as one of the word's original meanings suggests), but when imagined, it is always some place. Just not here. It is across an ocean (like Sir Thomas More's noplace that was the first to be called utopia), atop a mountain (like H. G. Wells's) or in interstellar space (like the science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin's). In ``Utopia,'' Sir Thomas More envisioned there would be no private property, much leisure and few lawyers. The utopias philosophers imagined are just as difficult to reach, requiring a mastery of esoteric dialogue (like Plato's) or dialectical theory (like Karl Marx's). Paradise is glimpsed only after strenuous intellectual or physical effort. And whoever has made the journey to alien shores brings back tales of lands where labor has been transformed into pleasure and knotty earthly problems are unwoven with ease. Our world, too, the story goes, could be like this, if only . . . And there the difficulties begin. The significance of utopias is not that they imagine versions of perfection, but that they imagine cures for imperfection. A utopia is not, like Peter Pan's Neverland, an impossible place; that would turn utopianism into mere fantasy. The promise of utopia is that while seeming to be Neverland and Noplace, it has a chance of becoming This Land and This Place. That is why something seemingly imaginary becomes compellingly urgent. Utopianism defines a political program; utopianism inspires progress. But paradoxically, it also results in the opposite. Visions of utopia have led to extraordinary horrors and nightmarish dystopias. Some have been indelibly imagined in such fictions as "Brave New World" or "1984." Others, less literary, have flourished in the hothouse of 20th-century expectations: suicide cults and terrorism, Fascism and Communism. What goes absolutely wrong is the attempt to make everything absolutely right. Dystopias are failed attempts at utopias. The last century has been extraordinarily rich in both attempts and failures. So it is no surprise that studies of utopia have recently taken on a peculiar urgency. Last year, Russell Jacoby's "End of Utopia" (Basic) mourned the death of the utopian spirit and the weaknesses of contemporary liberalism. Routledge recently published "The Utopia Reader," an extensive anthology edited by Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, with readings ranging from Hesiod to Huxley. Another anthology of utopian writings has just been published in England ("The Faber Book of Utopias"). Next fall, the New York Public Library, in collaboration with the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, plans an exhibition of 400 utopian manuscripts, maps, images and other materials from the two libraries' collections. The exhibition will open in France this summer and in New York in October. Here, it will be accompanied by three public lectures on utopianism, to be published by Oxford University Press (full disclosure: I am delivering one of them). A Society for Utopian Studies (http:// www.utoronto.ca/utopia), founded in 1975, also publishes a journal, Utopian Studies, in which such essays as "Primitivism in Feminist Utopias," "Lewis Carroll as Crypto-Utopian" and "California as Dystopia" have appeared. The Internet, which has itself been the object of many great utopian hopes, offers an array of sites with utopian aspirations, some of them collected at users.erols.com/jonwill/utopialist.htm. But considering that these are visions of paradise, it is astonishing how few one would feel comfortable living in. Only those who look for utopia in the distant, irretrievable past find an unambiguous glow. Ovid recalls a Golden Age in which rivers flowed with nectar and honey dripped from green trees, providing a pastoral ideal that survived for over a millennium. More's 16th- century "Utopia" has a more modern forthrightness about it: no private property, much leisure and few lawyers -- a fantasy that has proved remarkably enduring. But there are hints of satire in some of More's imaginings, and darker intimations that some utopian things one "may rather wish for than hope after." Edward Bellamy, a 19th-century Massachusetts journalist, wrote what has probably been the most popular utopian vision ever created, "Looking Backward: 2000-1887." A reform movement was based on its ideas, but this world, too, seems unpleasant. His hero awakens in the year 2000 from a 113-year sleep, finding a government that is an all-powerful corporation; citizens divide all profits equally while answering to the strict military discipline of an "industrial army." The year 2000 was also imagined by H. G. Wells in his 1901 book "Anticipations;" it is an enlightened era in which "whole masses of human population" are judged inferior and are subject to sterilization, export or poison. Utopias, for all their promise of freedom, turn out to be extraordinarily rigid places, full of rules and demarcations -- attempts to dissolve or constrain desire, greed, envy or other human frailties. In practice, that rigidity has turned into cruelty. The 20th century was unique not in the kinds of utopias imagined (which have been inspired by everything from pastoralism to feminism) but in the relentless attempts to bring them into existence and the technology to make them seem possible. The utopian "science" of Marxism and the utopian nationalisms of Fascism carried the model to extremes: grand visions of a new age combined with horrific exorcisms and totalitarian control. After such historical experiences, the idea of utopia no longer carries much moral weight. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued that utopianism leads not to freedom but to tyranny. He regularly invoked Kant in reproof: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." The philosopher Karl Popper, in "The Open Society and Its Enemies," (which he began in 1938, on the day the Nazis invaded Austria), wrote that those who envision making heaven on earth will only succeed in making hell. The Romanian writer E. M. Cioran added an aesthetic fear to the political one. Utopias, he wrote, are "tedious": "To conceive a true utopia, to sketch, with conviction, the structure of an ideal society, requires a certain dose of ingenuousness, even stupidity." Utopianism enjoyed a resurgence in the 1960's and 70's in some strains of the counterculture; there were hopes that a spiritual or sexual revolution would transform human nature and lead to a new form of politics. The hopes still resonate, but realities have never lived up to expectations. More recently, the physicist Steven Weinberg, in the January issue of the The Atlantic Monthly, dismisses five current ideas he thinks are misguidedly utopian: belief in the free market, in a governing elite, in the powers of religion, in ecological consciousness and in technological innovation. As a result of such suspicion, there has now arisen a bit of nostalgia for the utopian spirit, a wish that it could rise again, older, wiser and perhaps a bit less . . . well, utopian. Mr. Jacoby, for example, has no patience with sentimentality, yet he misses the energy that utopianism gave to the political left. Now, he suggests, "the belief is stone dead. Few envision the future as anything but a replica of today." Krishan Kumar, a historian of utopianism and a professor at the University of Kent in England, has suggested that utopianism, for all its flaws, is in need of some rehabilitation. What is missed by those who miss utopianism is not the prospect of utopia itself but the prospect of trying to reach it. What is missed is the conviction that there are methods that might be reliably used to improve the human condition. It may be that the most challenging political question in a knowingly wary world is how to envision progress without envisioning a utopia. In the influential 1974 book "Anarchy, State and Utopia," the philosopher Robert Nozick argues essentially that the best utopia we can expect is one in which utopian consciousness -- the consciousness that each problem can be solved in advance and imposed from above with a determined solution -- does not exist. Mr. Nozick proposes, instead, a minimally intrusive government that allows for elaborate freedoms. But in one sentence he ends up revealing just how far off even this minimal utopia lies: "One persistent strand in utopian thinking," Mr. Nozick writes, "is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that all will realize its dictates, and complete enough to cover all problems which actually arise." But what set of principles can possibly be so obvious, precise, clear and complete? The only widely accepted belief seems to be that someday such principles will be found. Ask questions and give answers about Movies, Music, Trivia and more. Join Abuzz, new from The New York Times. 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