The case for utopia
Why radical imagining is some of the most important work we can do
Utopia has a bad reputation in our culture. Most often, the connotations of utopian visions for society fall into one of two categories. The first is the idea that utopias are impossible, impractical, and therefore not useful, distracting from change we could actually achieve. The other is they are dangerous, representing a totalitarian blueprint for what the “perfect society” would look like, which usually results in the oppression of those who don’t conveniently fit into this vision.
There’s definitely some truth to the second understanding. During the 20th century, we saw many visions for collectivist utopias in the form of communism dissolved into tyranny, realizing horrors that scarcely resembled the “perfect society” their leaders had promised. We live in the aftermath of that history, and most of these experiments in social engineering are only remembered as cautionary tales.
If it's true that utopianism only distracts us with unachievable visions in the best case–or in the worst case, results in staggering sectarian violence–then it’s easy to conclude that the concept does more harm than good. It’s impossible to find a utopia that’s truly a utopia for everyone, when so many utopian visions are predicated on exclusion and when there is so much disagreement on what the “good life” entails. But if we abandon utopia, do we lose something important in the process?
The answer is that we do, and in some ways we already have. The important distinction here is how we understand the place of utopian visions within the process of systemic change. There’s an important difference between utopia as a political tool and utopia as a cultural practice. In the first, political leaders and elites invent their own top-down vision of the perfect society, separate from the people upon whom it will be imposed, and then use force and violence to make it a reality.
But writers and thinkers in the last thirty years have reimagined the social role of utopia, arguing that they are a crucial tool for us to collectively envision what kind of world we want to live in.
Utopian visions resist the idea that it’s impossible to fundamentally change our social structures. They go beyond critiquing the systems we have now and actually engage in the process of imagining what might be better – what it would look like, feel like, and be like.
Lisa Garforth, who wrote the book Green Utopias tracing how utopian visioning interacts with environmental movements, explains it in the following way: “When we are unhappy, unfulfilled or alienated, we imagine to fill the gap. Those dreams and desires, however fantastical, speak to and keep in circulation the possibility of other, better ways of being.” These visions are crucial in that they bring into question the necessity and normality of our current systems. According to Erik Olin Wright, the author of Envisioning Real Utopias, they inhabit the space between “what is hoped to be achieved and what can be.” In that way, they function as a kind of bridge between the present and all of our potential futures.
It’s hard to imagine a more important task at this time than to build these bridges, however fantastical they might seem. That doesn’t mean that we settle into one vision of the perfect world for everyone – that’s how we end up with the totalitarian version of utopia. There’s no singular vision that will ever resonate with everyone, and implementing one vision in reality isn’t even really the goal. The goal is to articulate what’s not working in our current world and imagine genuine alternatives, however small or large in scale.
Then recall the other critique of utopia – that it’s impractical and therefore distracts us from more realistic options. In that understanding, we would simply keep our blinders on and move forward on the most well-trodden path, without questioning if it’s actually the right one to be on. It might indeed be more practical to follow the main path, but it fundamentally limits our options to whatever we deem to be in our realm of direct possibility. It closes us off, pushing us forward on a path we deem inevitable, even if it’s leading us toward destruction.
So what is the purpose of utopia? It’s perhaps summed up the most simply in Eduardo Galeano’s poem, quoted below. The purpose of utopia is not actually to reach a destination – it’s to cause us to advance.
“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.”
-Eduardo Galeano
What Happens if We Lack Utopian Visions?
The other interesting question to consider is what happens when we lack utopian visions that move us forward. Our current world is a pretty good indication of that – what you end up with is what the late writer and activist Murray Bookchin calls “futurism.”
Rather than engaging in the process of coming up with bold dreams of a new kind of world, we instead have a limited imagination that is bound by incremental changes – tweaks to the current system – brought about by new technologies. The largely unquestioned assumption of our time is that the present should extend into the future on a never-ending upward trajectory of innovation. It’s a bit of a paradox because the conventional wisdom about innovation is that it’s what changes society, what drives it forward. But innovation changes it in a very particular way – in this vision, we start from where we are and move toward an “ever-improved” version of our current reality.
We get more and more sophisticated ways to consume; things get more convenient and addictive; and at best, harm to the environment is mitigated somewhat through technological improvements. The best we have to offer is the “disruption” of the present through startups and new tech. But what if the structures we have now are fundamentally incompatible with the kind of future we want? Will improving it be enough? Are we even moving in the right direction?
Murray Bookchin, in a speech from 1978 that remains relevant today, said “Most futurists start out with the idea, ‘You got a shopping mall, what do you do then?’ Well, the first question to be asked is, ‘Why the hell do you have a shopping mall?’ That is the real question that has to be asked.” It’s true; how many “shopping malls” do we have in our world that we are putting all of our energy into improving, rather than evaluating why they even exist in the first place?
There’s no doubt that we are living through a crisis of imagination that is hindering our ability to conceive of alternatives. Our dreams of the future are fragmented or nebulous. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson summed up our greatest challenge: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Utopian visioning is a powerful antidote to this crisis of imagination, not because of the specific visions they generate, but because of the crucial questions they raise: What is the place of human beings in this world? How do we want to live with each other, and with the earth? What could this world be like?
How we understand our possibilities for the future – how we answer the above questions – shapes how we act in the present, and can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy). If we believe that neoliberal capitalism is inevitable and largely unchangeable, then it’s not worthwhile to imagine any alternatives. Conversely, if we believe that systemic alternatives are possible, we will act in a way so as to bring them about.
The thing about systems is that they often appear unchangeable – until they change. Large-scale social transformation – from women’s rights to same-sex marriage to racial integration – does not magically come into existence. These things must be fought for, in hearts and minds as much as in the political arena. And to do that, we have to find something to fight for in the first place, usually by believing in a vision that is far from what we’d deem practical or possible in our world today.
Universal Basic Income and debt forgiveness are two ideas that have always been criticized as utopian. No government, it seemed, would ever agree to just give its citizens money with no strings attached or magically erase their debts. Now, UBI has been piloted in countries all over the world, often with promising results. Likewise, student debt cancellation is a serious policy being pursued in the United States. Neither of these ideas seemed remotely politically feasible at the time of their conception. What would have happened if their original writers had abandoned them because they were seen as too idealistic, rather than continually fighting for them until the right opportunity arose? Would history have unfolded in the same way?
Writer and racial justice activist Ta-Nehisi Coates remarks about his own work, “If I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out—preferably one that could garner a sixty-vote majority in the Senate. There was a kind of insanity to this—like telling doctors to only diagnose that which they could immediately and effortlessly cure.” In this way, although utopian thinking can be dangerous, so can the absence of it. It closes us off to potential futures that are perhaps far more just and equitable than our own.
Even Milton Friedman, the architect of the turn towards neoliberal policymaking, had his own variant of utopian thinking. He argued that we must “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. [...] When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” It is moments of crisis which offer the opportunity for previously inconceivable ideas to become common sense. Given this, we must consider which ideas we want to keep alive, even if they seem impossible now.
“There isn't ‘the future’ that we're doomed to enact. There are all kinds of possible futures. And which one we're going to get is going to depend on what we do now.” — Margaret Atwood
As people living in this time of great upheaval, this process of reimagining is our responsibility – whether we like it or not. Rather than inspiring dread, however, it actually poses a great opportunity. Where past generations have stayed conservatively close to the mainstream, inching towards incremental change, we have the opportunity to imagine a completely different world. Crises are the spaces where the impractical suddenly becomes the imperative, opening up whole new realms of possibility.
In the same speech, Murray Bookchin closed by instructing the audience to “‘Be practical, do the impossible,’ because if you don’t do the impossible, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself. So to do the impossible is the most rational and practical thing we can do.”
Traditional notions of pragmatism and practicality have their time and place, but frankly, we are well past that point. The stakes are too high. These are not normal times. We know at some level that the massive problems facing us cannot be solved through incremental technological tweaks; we need more of a systemic overhaul. At the same time, “changing the system” seems like a gargantuan and impossible task. It may indeed be impossible, and we must try anyway. If we don’t, the outcomes before us will almost certainly remain as bleak as they seem today. We owe it to ourselves to give it our best shot, however impractical the visions may seem.
At the end of his speech, Bookchin remarks that daydreams are dangerous; they are the seemingly fleeting bits of imagination that float up and change the course of history. The future is being written now. So we must ask ourselves: what will we dream up? And how can we learn to be bold enough to put it into action?
To dive deeper into the history of utopia, check out this article from BBC explaining the impact of Thomas More’s book Utopia. More is the person who coined the word back almost 500 years ago and has shaped the world in innumerable ways.
To understand how science fiction has served as an important arena for imagining different worlds, read this interview with prolific science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson
To understand more about the role of technology and disruption, check out this article by Jill Lepore for The New Yorker titled “What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong.”
This article was written by Thea Walmsley and edited by Gareth Gransaull.