November 8, 2010
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I Lied
…when I said I would only post my first paper. Here is my third philosophy paper. I just enjoy writing them too much not to post them:).
Useful Utopia
“Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” –Leonard Cohen
From our discussions and readings, the more I think about utopia the less I know. Before I took this class I never thought of utopia on a large scale. I was big on self-perfection; figuring out better ways of doing things in my own life, but not on the same level as utopia (mainly because it seemed like too much work).
Now that I am reading and talking about utopia, I go back and forth on theories. Could it happen? I don’t know. I lean toward the idea of it being impossible, but I think the sliver of hope that says perhaps it may happen is exactly what makes utopia so intriguing and useful. Without forming conclusions as to whether or not a utopia is possible, this paper will look at the benefits of utopia today. Today, in a day where it obviously has not arrived.
“Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.” –E.M. Cioran, History and Utopia
Utopias are useful, not just to college students, in four distinct ways. First, dreaming up an ideal world takes work. It takes brain muscles to nail down specifics as to what we think works and does not work, or to agree/disagree with someone else’s version. Simply taking the time to dream is a benefit that cannot be underestimated. Second, utopias are useful for pointing out the problems of today to those who don’t see it. When you list how things should be you can clearly contrast them from how they are currently.
Third, utopia can bring about hope for change. Maybe not everything, and probably not all at once, but seeing it down on paper can stir something inside that says “Maybe I can change, or do something a bit differently.” Fourth and final, utopias are useful in discovering things about oneself. If you are writing your own utopia, it draws out the question of why you feel that would work/not work. Reading someone else’s utopia is like reading their diary, it reveals a lot about a person when you read their dreams.
Dreaming
“Dreams are answers to questions we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.” –X-Files
I thought the project for this class would be to create our own utopias. And then I walked into the classroom. It isn’t, or at least it doesn’t have to be. But I am hoping that I can work some kind of my own utopian creation into one of the papers due before the end of class. Why? Because I find it stimulating to try to figure out how I think I can do things better.
The process of discovering how to do things better was very highly esteemed in Herland. It was expected that each generation would improve upon the past, and pass that on: “Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?”
“Why no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.”
Dreaming of a utopia is the first step to making something happen; just like admitting you are an alcoholic is the first step to recovery. If you refuse, or cannot see there is a problem, then you will never change. If for no other reason, utopias are beneficial for making us discontent with what is presently reality, and start dreaming of other possibilities.
Herland was Gilman’s way of dreaming about life without the problem of men. Looking Backward was Bellamy’s way of dreaming about life where each person could be fully alive without poverty. News from Nowhere was Morris’s way of dreaming about life gone back to natural.
Marin, in Jameson’s article The Politics of Utopia, says that “(utopia’s) function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future…to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined.” Whether or not this is true, it still points out the benefits of dreaming a utopia (even from a negative stand point).
Reading someone else’s utopia awakens something inside that asks “Why isn’t it like this now?” This process, even if not continued to any further action, is still better than never having been “stirred up” at all.
Pointing Out Today’s Problems
“Abandon all hopes of utopia—there are people involved.” –Clayton Cramer
Interesting how people are both the problem and solution in utopias. They are what keep us from getting there, but also who create the utopia itself. And, at least in all of the utopias I have read, there are people included in utopia. Dreaming up utopia is not just pointing out what is right for this “nowhere”—it is also about making clear what is very wrong with today.
Thomas More wrote a complete first book to preface his Utopia, making specific commentaries on current evils and how much better it was done in his place. The voice of his book was able to say things that More, in repressive England, could not (a lot of good that did him—he still got killed).
Looking Backward was constantly comparing both worlds, but really came to a head when Bellamy had his main character dream about returning to 19th century England, and try to convince the people that life didn’t have to be that way. The character, after seeing the utopia, is so upset—he walks through the town, seeing the impoverished faces: “Like a wavering translucent spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and soul had lived.”
Bellamy had such a passion for his ideals that he wrote Looking Backward as a way to illustrate that it was much easier to change than we think, and oh, the foolishness and waste of our current system.
Many of the utopian writers use the newcomer’s shock (newcomer to the utopia) as a tool to reveal current problems for what they are, or discrepancies in what we say and actually do. An example in Looking Backward: “The solidarity of the race and brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases, are, to our thinking and feeling (in this utopia), ties as real and as vital as physical fraternity.”
News from Nowhere was obviously pushing Morris’s ideas of communism/socialism and a return to the natural. His character is constantly in awe of the beauty of utopia, made so clear by the ugliness of reality. He spends most of the book saying how much better this new place was.
Herland points out the problem of a male driven society, from chaining up dogs to thinking of fatherhood as “just” fathering a child. As the women learn from the men, Gilman uses their distain and shock to convey the glaring problems of her day, in education, religion, relationships, sex, ex. By stating that “of course things are done this way.” When stereotypes are removed, it makes you wonder how those types got there in the first place.
Hope for Change
“There is nothing like dreams to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.” –Victor Hugo
Besides the benefit of asking how things can be done better, utopias often birth a hope that something can change for the better. While this often ends up looking nothing like the original utopia, it still is often different from yesterday. This brings to mind one of my classmates in our discussion: she was so passionate about that “at least SOMETHING could/should change” that I was very certain that something would—at least for her. Utopia had stirred something up inside of her that was moving towards action.
From that discussion, I put together a theory about knowledge moving toward action:
Level 1. General knowing. You hear about it. (Utopia? Oh, that is a nice idea)
Level 2. Specific knowing. You learn about it. (Maybe through a PHIL 414 class)
Level 3. Simple experiential knowing. You see it for yourself. (For utopia, perhaps this is through a really active imagination)
Level 4. Deep experiential knowing. It touches you. (This would be what my classmate had)
Level 5. Ownership knowing. You feel it personally. (This would be utopia realized—which is still in question on plausibility—but maybe this could be small change toward utopia as well)
I don’t think any of the writers would have written their utopias if they didn’t feel there was some element of hope for change in actuality. Marcuse, in his article The End of Utopia wrote “Today we have the capacity to turn the world into hell…we also have the capacity to turn it into the opposite of hell.”
News from Nowhere also has this note of hope in the end, where the character is told “Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all around you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle.”
Discovering Oneself
“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache…. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”—George Orwell, Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun
On a personal level, a utopia reveals a lot about how a person thinks. This scares me a bit on writing my own utopia, because I wonder what I will find. For each of the writings, I am constantly pulled out of the “story” and into “Why did that person think that?”
I think the clearest example of revealing oneself through utopian thought was Mother Ann and the Shakers. Her experience with having four children die deeply affected what she thought, and then in turn, what all of the Shakers lived.
I have made sure to get a background on each of the authors we have read, and have not been disappointed to find connections with their life and what happened, with what they have written. Herland unashamedly looks at Gilman’s issues with a male-driven society, News from Nowhere at Morris’s socialist views and reaction to Bellamy, and Looking Backward reveals Bellamy’s passion for ending poverty and waste.
Conclusion
“Nothing, not even a Utopia, can necessarily make the pursuit of happiness a successful one that ends in capture. The best society can merely allow every individual to flourish in the pursuit.” –Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
I like utopias. I like thinking about them, dreaming them, reading them. And honestly, I don’t really care if they are impossible or not. I think they are beneficial just as they are.
