Utopia and its discontents

What comes to mind when we hear the word "Utopia"? Perhaps a particular set of texts, mostly from the worlds of philosophy or political theory. More likely, we think of a place--one that is Edenic and flawless, a paradise for its inhabitants, albeit one that is impossible to actually construct. But what I've always found strange about the idea of Utopia is the divergence between these idyllic associations that the noun-form of the word has accumulated, on the one hand, and on the other, the negative associations called up by its adjective, "Utopian." Popper and many of his followers in the tradition of classical liberalism leveled this term as a criticism against Marxism. Someone who engages in Utopian thinking chases fantasies of societal perfection while subjecting actual people to all manner of injustices. Indeed, one of the problems with Utopian pursuits is that they seem to offer a blank check to those held in their sway; since if one is pursuing what one genuinely believes to be an infinite good end, then any means needed to achieve that end will come to seem justifiable.

These critiques of Utopianism apply to a surprising number of dystopian worlds--not only the Marxist societies that were the subject of Popper's arguments, but the Sparta-like police-state described in Plato's Republic (a subject of different discussions by Popper!) as well as the fictional Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, encountering these dystopias, we may be struck by the fact that they are Utopian for at least some of their inhabitants (for instance, for those who directly benefit from the societal structures, i.e. those at the top of the ladder who are able to maintain power by controlling the thoughts and actions of others). And even some ostensibly Utopian fictions--for instance, Skinner's Walden Two--may easily come to seem distinctly dystopian when viewed from another angle--say, in the case of Walden Two, when viewed as something akin to what Oceania might feel like to its happier, Big-Brother-touting inhabitants. (Even if we dismiss this particular possibility for Walden Two, and claim that the society described in those pages actually is "perfect" in some sense, the fact would remain that it seems like an incredibly dull place to live, and thus would be Utopia only for a people with specific personalities....)

The fact that utopianism can so easily seem like the other side of the dystopian coin makes me wonder: is there a deeper attribute that all of these imagined societies share? I think the answer is yes--and that attribute is: these are societies entirely devoid of problems. In the case of the worlds that are supposed to look like utopias (Republic, Walden Two, and so forth), the problem-free environment is meant as a "feature"--one that will make life easy and pleasant for the inhabitants. For the worlds that are supposed to look like dystopias, the problem-free environment, tenaciously enforced through (in Orwell) torture, brainwashing, Newspeak, the rewriting of history, the erasure of truth, and so forth, is precisely what makes the fictional societies look so bleak. But, despite the different valence these and other authors give to their worlds, the underlying logic is the same. A superficial form of "contentment" is maintained by preventing people from seeing problems and trying to solve them. The enforced avoidance of problems may be well-intentioned, yet whatever the rulers' intentions, the picture that emerges is of a static society, in which growth, discovery, novelty, excitement, and further exploration and understanding are impossible. This underlying logic is why the very idea of Utopia as it is frequently understood is, in fact, so dark.

There is a twist. If dystopias (and dystopic "Utopias") aspire to be problem-free worlds, then it would follow that an actual Utopia--not a society simply called that, but a society that actually does allow for flourishing in its fullest sense--would be full of unsolved problems, which the inhabitants would pursue freely and as they pleased. This dovetails with Robert Nozick's view, described in the final part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, of Utopia as not a single kind of place, but a "meta" world in which vast numbers of different societies and associations, each tailored to the different interests of different kinds of people, would emerge. Nozick's Utopia, too, is full of problems, both for those individual societies (whose task, he says, is partly to facilitate the discovery of what good societies might look like--thus implying that this is not yet known, and thus can't be perfectly instantiated even in principle) and for the meta-Utopia, whose problem will involve, for instance, the peaceful interactions and integrations of its constituent societies. Of course, most importantly, the problems that arise in such a meta-Utopia and its constituent Utopias would also exist on the level of individual inhabitants, who, unlike the inhabitants of the Republic, Oceania, Walden Two, and so many other "Utopian" worlds, would be free to imagine different, perhaps better worlds, and thus would be faced constantly with the personal problem of how to reshape their circumstances in pursuit of those dreams.

Of course, one cannot help but be struck by how decidedly unglamorous this account of Utopia sounds. Indeed, a "society full of problems, in which people go about trying to solve their problems" sounds not only unglamorous, but downright mundane. No wonder fictionalized false-Utopias and Dystopias seem to outnumber fictionalized real-Utopias.

However, here too, there is a twist. Yes, there are a handful of actually-optimistic Utopian fictions (some Le Guin comes to mind); but, there is also a sense in which most fiction is Utopian in the positive meaning of the term--that is, most fiction is about everyday people with lots of problems trying to do stuff that will make their lives better. In this view, the genuine champions of the Utopian vision are novelists like Jane Austen and George Eliot, whose characters may "rest in unvisited tombs," but who nonetheless show us a model of striving in which problems are present, but problem-solving is not thwarted by some oppressive autocrat. Indeed, perhaps this explains my abiding love of rom-com movies, whose plots tend to track the same processes. Rom-coms often highlight the problems and dissatisfactions of individual people, yet they also do so in a way that is fundamentally comic, and in which the overcoming of those problems is allowed even as success is never guaranteed.

Perhaps this is also why my intuitions about works like Così fan tutte or Into the Woods diverge from the intuitions of other listeners with whom I've compared notes. Many over the years have been tempted to see in these narratives a fall from grace--a loss of perfection and a confrontation with the tarnished reality of human life. And yes, that is one view: no character in these two works survives unscathed. But in both cases, what we witness is a process in which problems denied in Act I are recognized in Act II--and, in both cases, the end of Act II brings a loosening of authority and control, and with it a sense that, perhaps, problem-solving in the future will be possible for the characters. In Così, Don Alfonso steps back and allows the lovers to pursue their problem-filled lives without interference. Perhaps, after the end of the opera, the lovers' relationships will grow into authenticity. And in Into the Woods, the narrator is, literally, vanquished, as are the Witch's meddling, supernatural powers. What we are left with at the end is, in some sense, a fallen world. In another sense, however, it is a world that, for the first time in the musical, will allow its inhabitants to "just pursue [their] lives." That their strivings will never come to an end--that Cinderella begins to say "I wish..." even as the music stops--is itself a point of hope for the nascent, optimistic Utopia we see taking shape.