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by Mike Gray
On Pajamas Media, David Solway takes a close-up look at utopian literature, with special emphasis on Thomas More’s Utopia, which he believes starry-eyed social reformers of the past and present have persistently misunderstood:
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.
. . . . 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.
. . . . 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.
As for the United States being an expression of Utopian aspirations, Solway vigorously demurs:
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.
According to Solway, every attempt at recovering Eden is doomed to failure:
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.
Solway’s article — “Utopia: Good Place or No Place?” — is here. In it he references the following literature:
- The Epic of Gilgamesh -
- Hesiod’s Works and Days -
- Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward -
- B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two -
- Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia -
- Voltaire’s Candide -
- Thomas More’s Utopia -
- Lucian’s True History -
- Aristotle’s Politics -
- Shakespeare’s The Tempest -
- Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas -
- Samuel Butler’s Erewhon -
- Anna Funder’s Stasiland -
- George Orwell’s 1984 -
- Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World -
- Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We -
- John Calvin Batchelor’s The Birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica -
- Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World -
- Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down -
- Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue -
- Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation -
- Edgar Allan Poe’s Eldorado -
- Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis -
- Nicolai Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man
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