good place or no place?
UTOPIA
DAVID
SOLWAY
David
Solway is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror,
Antisemitism, and Identity. His editorials appear regularly
in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM and
Pajamas Media. He
speaks about his latest book, Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books), at frontpage.com.
Much
has been written about the perennial temptation of the Utopian
project embraced by intellectuals and political reformers across
the ages. The impulse to radically transform existent society
and replace it with a new, smoothly functioning, and presumably
idyllic alternative never seems to diminish, a sign of perpetual
dissatisfaction with the world as it is and, to a great and
unchangeable extent, must be. The subject is as timely as it
is timeless and slides along a continuum between the nostalgic
desire for what once was or might have been and the revolutionary
ambition to create a social paradise in the here and now.
As
to be expected, the literature is interminable, grouped for
the most part under the generic term ‘Utopian fiction’
and including a wide ambit of texts of considerable thematic
latitude, ranging from the Garden of Gems in the ninth
tablet of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Garden of Eden
in Genesis and the Golden Age in Hesiod’s
Works and Days (when men “dwelt in ease and peace”)
to, say, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, B.F.
Skinner’s Walden Two and Ernest Callenbach’s
Ecotopia. The models developed are practically countless
and, in the later exemplars, the rhapsody of destruction masking
as beneficent change pretty well uncontrollable.
The
myth of the earthly paradise or Golden Age has taken many forms,
for example, the belief in an El Dorado hidden deep in inaccessible
jungles, which animated explorers of old and was mercilessly
mocked in Voltaire’s Candide; or the construction
of an entirely new organization of social and political life,
the attempt to bring the Golden Age into time, whether by stealth
or by force. But perhaps the most celebrated source for the
concept of Utopia, among a plethora of classical and Renaissance
works too numerous to mention here, is Thomas More’s 1516
treatise of that name. More’s Utopia fixed the
word in the language and is often read as a serious exploration
of a possible, rationally conceived society, that is, of an
eu-topos, the Greek word for ‘good place.’
At the very least it reified the dream that has never ceased
to beckon. The problem with this benign interpretation is that
it dismisses the many satirical or ambifocal elements that call
the book’s ostensible thesis into question.
It’s
worth looking closely at More’s seminal book, which deconstructs
the beau idéal of the Utopian program, revealing all
sorts of deflationary traces that signal More’s original
intent. Scholarship has determined that Utopia owes
much to Lucian’s True History, which More had
earlier translated, in which the 2nd century satirist had rollicking
fun at the expense of the idea of another world categorically
better than the one we inhabit. Names and titles are an even
more direct giveaway. As Paul Turner points out in his introduction
to the Penguin edition of Utopia, the main character’s
surname, Hythlodaeus, is Greek for “dispenser of folly”
or “Nonsenso.” The title of “chief magistrate,”
Ademus, means “peopleless,” the river Anydras is
“no water” and, of course, Utopia in its first acceptation
is ou-topos or ‘no place.’
It
gets even better as we move along. None of the inhabitants of
Utopia, apart from Hythlodaeus, are given personal names, for
they are not real people. The Utopians find Lucian “delightfully
entertaining,” oblivious to the fact that he judged their
progenitors a pack of utter imbeciles. Utopia has passed sumptuary
laws forbidding extravagance in dress and accoutrement, yet
exports “scarlet and purple cloth” to advance trade.
The heads of family units are called “syphogrants”
(silly old men) and their superiors are known as “tranibors”
(plain gluttons). The capital of Utopia is Amaurotum, or “Dream-town.”
Travel is restricted; nevertheless, the Utopians consider that
“perfect happiness implies complete freedom of movement.”
They despise precious metals and regard ascetic acts as ludicrous,
yet More wore a golden chain and beneath it a hair shirt. Utopians
have few laws and despise lawyers, but More devoted his life
to the law and became England’s chief law officer. Divorce
is permitted in Utopia; More went to prison rather than consent
to King Henry’s divorce.
Hythlodaeus
asserts that private property and material accumulation are
the root of evil and must be abolished. He is rebutted by the
More character in the story who, clearly parsing his mentor
Aristotle’s Politics — we recall that he
donates “even more of Aristotle” than of Plato to
the Utopian library — argues that redistribution would
lead to laziness and reduced production. Hytholodaeus has no
riposte except to say that “in Utopia the facts speak
for themselves,” which is palpably no answer at all. Indeed,
More might be described as a proto-capitalist. In his more sober
tracts, he savagely attacked the ethos of communal sharing practiced
by the Anabaptists, and began writing Utopia when he
was on an embassy to Flanders to promote the wool trade and
thus increase the wealth of England’s mercantile classes.
The
list of discrepancies in the text, and the contradictions between
the historical More and his fictional stand-in, would fill several
pages. I’ve provided only the merest hint of the discontinuities
that strongly suggest, despite a few scattered indications for
the improvement of social life, that Utopia is not
to be taken seriously and that it is, ultimately, a bucolic
and whimsical exercise in a genre we might call ‘romantic
satire,’ puncturing the figment of a surrogate Creation.
Utopia is to be taken cum grano. It’s
also interesting to note that the book has generated a respectable
posterity. One thinks in particular of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest in which a foolish Gonzalo boasts that he “would
in such perfection govern [as] to excel the golden age,”
of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, in which the Utopian
world culminates in ennui and discontent, and Samuel Butler’s
hilarious Erewhon (an anagram for Nowhere), where everything
is done backwards.
What
is true of the Utopia and its successors is even truer
of the Utopian enterprise itself, in all its diverse manifestations.
It is like a country without an invoicing currency. It is riddled
with incongruities and plain impossibilities, flies in the face
of human nature and leads inevitably to terrible suffering.
The Big Brother syndrome is unavoidable — as More writes,
“everyone has his eyes on you.” (This is a remark
to be taken both literally and prophetically. As Anna Funder
shows in Stasiland, the declassified East German Stasi
files revealed, as in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s
USSR, a vast network of child and spousal informers spying and
reporting on their own kin.) Dystopian fictions like Orwell’s
1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Yvegeny
Zamyatin’s We and John Calvin Batchelor’s
undeservedly forgotten The Birth of the People’s Republic
of Antarctica (among others) flesh out the darker implications
we find in More’s libellus (or “little book,”
as he called it) and are mirrored in actual human societies
that have followed the Utopian leveling and redistributive script:
Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, the Jongleurs’ North
Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
It’s
only fair to mention that Mario Vargas Llosa’s magisterial
novel, The War of the End of the World, which tells
the tragic story of the 19th century Brazilian commune of Canudos,
is neither dystopian nor utopian. If we want to get a bit fancy,
we might call it a meso-utopian fiction, falling somewhere in
between the two genres. The historical Canudos, a society of
the dispossessed, seemed to work for a time, before it was destroyed
by the Brazilian government. Whether a colony without money,
private property or marriage, comprising the wretched of the
earth under the leadership of an “apocalyptic prophet,”
would have flourished indefinitely is a question Llosa does
not try to answer. Aside from a less turbulent microcosm of
social change like Calvin’s 16th century Reformation Geneva,
the fate of other such real-world communities would suggest
not.
We
need to keep in mind that entities like Geneva or Canudos were
really small, relatively homogeneous city-states, not nations
occupying a different scale of magnitude. The same is true of
another famous historical instance, the 17th century English
Diggers’ attempt to practice “the levelling of all
estates” in various places around the countryside. Christopher
Hill in his The World Turned Upside Down (a title appropriated
by Melanie Phillips), sympathetically tracks the fate of this
“utopian communistic society,” which may or may
not have survived before it was broken up by the Council of
State. Another such visionary adventure, Robert Owens’
New Harmony, disintegrated of its own accord. Owens’
effort to inaugurate a “New Moral World” as a prelude
to the millennium in which social classes and personal wealth
would melt away lasted less than three years.
But
on the whole, such municipal anomalies are comparatively malleable.
With the possible exception of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s
Turkey, now undergoing a fresh tremblor, it amounts to a near
certainty that the program envisaging the “fundamental
transformation” of any large and complex society must
invariably produce a ‘fundamental distortion’ of
human potentialities, impoverish its supposed beneficiaries
and install in power a privileged and despotic ruling class
which represents the violent antithesis of its hypothetically
sacred canons.
Here
it is important to recognize that the American experiment in
republican governance is by no means a Utopian project, as hostile
revisionists may be disposed to argue or as some Utopian speculators,
claiming precedent or superior knowledge, may allege in order
to bolster their ongoing efforts to remake the country. Were
they to have their way, as Mike McDaniel shows in a PJM article,
law would then become a function of an elastic values-based
mission, unfinished and open-ended, subject to constant re-interpretation
in the quest to construct the perfect society, at the expense
of a stable social and juridical order. This is, in essence,
the ‘living Constitution’ thesis so beloved of activist
judges, intellectual meliorists and ‘progressive’
politicians. It is part of the Utopian endeavor.
But
the motto Novus ordo seclorum (New Order of the Ages),
which derives from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and appears
on the exergue of the Great Seal of the United States, obviously
does not signify a Utopian upheaval. Rather, as explained by
the Seal’s designer Charles Thomson in 1782, the phrase
purports “the beginning of the new American Era,”
based on profoundly moral and common sense principles. The American
‘New Order’ is not a top-down political structure,
but one that establishes the authority of the people over its
legislators and representatives. Thus, the American system may
be justly described as resolutely anti-Utopian, as if the Founders
intuitively understood, unlike our current ‘experts’”
that chronic social bricolage is a kind of pathology and that
the Elysian passion is anathema to human welfare.
And
the Elysian passion is cheaply bought. An analogous idea is
expressed by Eva Hoffman in her memoir Lost in Translation
where, borrowing Alan Tate’s word, she speculates that
many American intellectuals and academics, primarily on the
left, suffer from a form of “angelism” — “a
desire to be more immaculate beings, avatars of pure ideas .
. . so they can ricochet from one vision of utopia to another.”
In particular, the academic branch of the compact may seem harmless
enough, like mall Santas with tenure, but the influence they
wield in the education of young minds, the conduct of public
discourse and the production of left-wing intellectual unanimity
is highly injurious. The fact is that the Utopian predisposition
unfailingly releases its own devastating contradictions, starting
in the penthouse and collapsing in the basement. It cannot help
but fail since it is an a priori, intellectual concept divorced
from real experience, springing like Athena from the forehead
of Zeus and so violating the natural process of gestation.
These
grimly earnest seekers after social beatitude must inevitably
meet, not with success but, in the words of Edgar Allen Poe,
with their own shadow, the ominous side of their putative errand
of light. As Poe tells it in a wise and prescient poem,
Eldorado, such “gallant knights” at the end
of their journey will only have encountered the “Shadow”
and found
In
the final analysis, the Utopian obsession is the kind of infantile
fantasy that drives the doctrinaire socialists (and multicultural
appeasers) of the day. They are the child-soldiers of the millennium
who brandish grown-up weapons and are determined to bring the
City of the Sun, the New Atlantis, Utopia, Arcadia, the Land
of Cockaigne, the “levelling of all estates,” the
Golden Age of Man, the New Moral World, Marx’s scientific
socialism or communism, neo-Marxism, neo-Socialism, social democracy,
the caring society, the welfare state, hope and change —
call it what you will — into being by every means at their
disposal. Indifferent to what More called “the grand absurdity
on which [such a] society was erected,” they opt for radical
metamorphosis instead of gradual amelioration. They are ready,
as the Russian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev warned in The
Destiny of Man, to sacrifice freedom for the illusion of
perfection. They will turn the world upside down for our supposed
benefit. It is, quite literally, a perennial ecstasis.
America
especially must remain alert under an administration pledged
to alter its constitutional foundations in the direction of
a socialist patriarchy. The dire consequences of such lurid
and quixotic prepossessions are everywhere visible, from an
impoverished and totalitarian island off the coast of Florida
to a collective European ally collapsing from within owing,
at least in part, to the unsustainable reverie of universal
peace and contentment. And it doesn’t stop there. The
Utopian virus seems to be spreading almost unchecked, sometimes
furtively, sometimes aggressively, with predictable results.
Investing
one’s thoughts, feelings, energies, convictions and strategies
in the effort to build a ‘no place’ will result
inescapably in establishing a ‘bad place,’ a kakotopia,
in which only the elite can prosper — or, at any rate,
those who can escape their shadow. The 2009 Romanian film, Tales
from the Golden Age, the most recent contribution to the
Utopian (or rather anti-Utopian) curriculum, documents with
rueful humor everyday life in the last years of the Ceausescu
regime, showing just how drab and oppressive the aureate displacement
of the ordinary can be for all but the new managerial aristocracy.
Such
is the travesty inherent in the Utopian compulsion, which always
seems to lead to a condition of reductive squalor and a morbid
state of public resignation. Or, in More’s memorable words,
Utopia represents the end “of all dignity, splendor and
majesty.”
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