The Austrian-born philosopher Karl Popper once remarked: ‘Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.’ Since the time of Plato at least, there has been no shortage of visionaries, mystics and cranks who have conjured up brave new worlds that have encouraged hope and exhibited folly in more or less equal measure. Most of these earthly paradises never had much prospect of existing outside the minds of their creators, but the few that have been realized in fact have tended to confirm Popper’s confidence in mankind’s capacity to turn dreams into nightmares.
Today, calling something ‘utopian’ generally carries the implication that the scheme in question is both idealistic and unattainable. This subtlety of meaning was intended by the man who originally coined the term ‘utopia’, the English scholar and statesman Sir Thomas More. At the beginning of his Utopia, written in Latin and published in 1516, More includes a short prefatory verse which explains that the ideal state he describes, which is called ‘Utopia’ (from the Greek meaning ‘no place’), might also warrant the name ‘Eutopia’ (meaning ‘good place’). More’s imaginary island is a humanist paradise, a proto-communist society in which everything is held in common and men and women live together harmoniously as equals; religious intolerance has been banished and education is provided by the state; and gold is valueless and used to make chamber pots.
Marginal voices By deliberating on the best form of government, More was drawing a clear though oblique contrast with the politics of his day, in his own country and in Christian Europe as a whole, which at that time were driven by greed and divided by self-interest. Following More’s example, many later writers used the utopian romance as a literary vehicle that allowed them to criticize the evils of contemporary society without overtly antagonizing dangerous men in high places.
In his post-Marxist Ideology and Utopia (1929) the Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim claims that utopian ideas appeal in particular to subordinate social groups and classes, who are attracted to the potential they offer for change, while dominant groups typically adhere to ideologies that tend to promote continuity and to preserve the status quo. In other words, those who suffer most from society’s existing defects stand to gain most from social reform; and turkeys do not vote for Christmas.
Accordingly, it is often fringe political figures, lacking a voice within established power structures, who have been most strident in pushing forward utopian schemes. Many utopians have traced society’s ills to inequalities in wealth, which are presumed to have spawned greed, envy and social unrest. And hence, like More, they see a remedy in removing such differences and implementing some kind of egalitarian, communist system in their place.
From hope to fear The 19th century saw a great enthusiasm for utopian ideas that was fuelled by the stunning progress of science. While the tone was generally optimistic and the usual panacea was socialism, there was nevertheless a wide spectrum of views expressed. At one extreme, the US novelist Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) has its hero wake up in the year 2000 to discover a world which is classless and egalitarian, yet heavily industrialized and bureaucratic. Horrified by Bellamy’s technocratic vision, the English socialist artist and author William Morris provided an antidote in his News from Nowhere (1890), which offers a pastoral idyll in which industrial grime has been scrubbed from a land where men and women are free and equal.
The signs of anxiety at the remorseless advance of science that begin to surface in Morris’s work intensified in the early decades of the 20th century. Where the Victorians were hopeful and dreamed up utopias that were egalitarian and inclusive, the Edwardians were fearful and devised utopias that were elitist and exclusive. For futurists such as novelist and science-fiction writer H.G. Wells, the aim now was not so much to make the world a better place for people to live in, but to make a people more worthy to live in the world. Fears that decent folk would be overwhelmed by the ‘people of the abyss’ – the ever-growing working poor – coincided with the emergence of new ‘sciences’ that seemed to promise ready solutions. Social Darwinism (a cruel distortion of Darwin’s ideas) suggested that society’s weak and vulnerable could and should be winnowed out by a natural process of selection; in other words, they could be left to fend for themselves while those more fortunate looked on. At the same time, eugenics promised a proactive way of improving and purifying the human stock by any means, including compulsory sterilization.
‘The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.’
Evelyn Waugh, 1942
‘The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they’re liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see.’ The horrible truth of British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s words was evident in the decades following the First World War. The ghastliness of twisted eugenics and social planning was witnessed in the Teutonic nightmare of Nazi Germany, a bucolic monstrosity of blond pigtails and jack boots; and the communist utopia of Marx and Engels was brought to horrifying life in the gulags of Stalin’s Russia and in the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s China. One positive legacy of these totalitarian perversions was the two great dystopian classics of the 20th century. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), social stability is gained at the cost of an anodyne existence induced by drugs and brainwashing within a eugenically manipulated caste system. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a totalitarian nightmare in which the abiding image is ‘a boot stamping on a human face – forever’.
the condensed idea
Heaven or hell on earth