Assignment

The hypocritical world of Utopias

When I started my journey three weeks ago into the world of Utopias my first immediate reaction was there is only one Utopia I deemed realistic and that is Heaven. Heaven is a place where you find eternal happiness, peace and solace with oneself. Heaven is a place where everyone gets along no matter what religion, race or sexual preference, and does not show hypocrisy to those around them for not sharing their same beliefs. It is a place where there is no rich or poor, no democracy, communist or socialist nations, no hierarchy of status among those who reside there, no consequences for wrong or right decisions of their time spent in life, no worries, no doubt, and no evil. Heaven is a place of just three desires: forgiveness, love and belonging. It is a Utopia that cannot be disproven as a dystopia, because every person and soul visits there upon death. As Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, states:

               “Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”

A simplistic definition of Utopia, is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system (Wikipedia). Chronologically, the first recorded utopian proposal is Plato’s Republic (Kumar).  Part conversation, part fictional depiction, and part policy proposal, it proposes a categorizations of citizens into a rigid class structure of “golden,” “silver,” “bronze” and “iron” socioeconomic classes. The wisdom of the golden “philosopher king” rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, though the details on how to do this is unclear (Wikipedia).  The word was coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in his frame narrative Utopia. In More’s novel he depicts a society that has few laws, no lawyers, and rarely send its citizens to war and encourages tolerance of all religions (except atheists). Some Utopian socialists chose to accept this hypocritical society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others maintain the position that More’s Utopia functions only on the level of satire; a work intended to reveal more about England of his time than about an idealistic society (Kumar).

    The classic utopia was simply a perfect society that often served as a philosophical illustration of the steps humanity needed to take to reach this perfect state. Often this meant abolishing conflict, war, private property, jealousy and greed. The message was that for humanity’s lot to improve, humanity has to improve as well. The early utopias concentrated primarily on the virtues of a simple lifestyle, often agrarian or mountain retreats concerned themselves with proper governance, spiritual growth and human limitation and harmony. From Plato’s Republic to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to Edward Bellamy Looking Backward, they followed a relatively similar path, envisioning human society as it should be.

The line between utopia and dystopia, between dream and nightmare, can be pretty thin.  Utopias are the dreams we look for. Dystopias are the nightmares we try to escape, but even the nightmares often appeal to the psyche due to, they seem more real and plausible than dreams. While dreams may be out of sight and demand more of us, we have learned since children that the world is filled with pitfalls that may easily become the stuff of nightmares. One man’s utopia can be another man’s dystopia because underneath the surface, utopias are the ultimate tyranny, one man’s or woman’s way of imaging society as it should be, with no other options or alternatives. Whereas Heaven can be and is imagined by man or woman their own way, and because no one who has gone there can speak of it in detail we are to assume it maintains our depiction of Utopia.

In Objective 2B: What problems rise from a utopian story that minimizes conflict and maximizes quality and harmony? What genre variations derive from these problems with plot? In Utopia, as presented by the character Raphael Nonsenso in More’s novel, is a place that considers itself home to the perfect society. One of the great ironies (hypocritical Fallacies) of Utopia is how disgusting they find another society’s love of gold to be, if Utopians place just as much value on another metal? Just because Utopians value iron instead of gold, this hardly makes them “right” and another society “wrong;” it simply demonstrates their own version of materialism. This makes the whole society hypocritical. Though Utopians seem to feel that iron is somehow more practical than gold, they disprove their own alleged disdain for gold by making practical use of it as chains, chamber pots, and other things. Utopian society, however, is quick to recognize the value of gold once it becomes necessary to do so, like in the face of war. Basically, they only appear to view gold as “a totally useless substance” (More 89), or as only good enough “for punishing slaves, humiliating criminals, or amusing small children” (88), all the while secretly holding gold in meticulously high esteem.

Utopian leaders purposely make gold seem undesirable in order to ensure that when it becomes convenient to have gold, the population of Utopia will be willing to hand it over for their government’s use without being compensated in anyway. Indeed, “if they suddenly had to part with all the gold and silver they possess – a fate which in any other country would be though equivalent to having one’s guts torn out – nobody in Utopia would give two hoots”(87). These feeling are the direct and desired results of leaders, a way for the leaders to minimize conflict and maximize quality and harmony among the Utopians. I play on society by More using satire as the genre helping the give the novel itself a plot. The utopian leaders “do [ing] everything they can to bring these metals into contempt” (87) a hypocritical way of forcing citizens of the society to believe something in order to bring them excess, and just reinstating a utopian never survives without some form of greed. Just proving utopian is a ruse, a joke, a hypocritical place where in the end human nature always wins and evil prevails.

As Kathleen Breaux claims in her essay, Utopia: Ever in Sight, Ever Out of Reach, “this gleaming emblem of perfection is the driving force of both utopian and dystopian literature, either to convey its achievement and functionality or to prove that it is ultimately unattainable. She conveys as we study this literary genre which has played so persistent a role in Western Civilization and education, we must relate the successes and failures found on the page to invoke a question with regard to ourselves.  This is very apparent in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland when she creates a utopian society where she eliminates a whole species or sex in the society, which is simply put as no men.

This female-only world allows the exploration of female independence and freedom from patriarchy. The societies may not necessarily be lesbian, or sexual in nature at all, like Herland. Basically the women of Herland lived as one, as “we were borne inside, struggling manfully, but held secure most womanfully, in spite of our best endeavors” (Gilman 25). Operating in this text are deep assumptions about the nature of meaning based on the binary structure of language which produces an abundant network of paired terms whose meanings are one another’s opposites – masculine/feminine, public/private, good/evil – and so on. What is masculine is not feminine, what is public cannot be private. That good cannot be evil seems to reduce the logic. Therefore, the language of utopian genesis becomes meaningless for that supposedly new world, for it is still the meanings and values of the old world, if only “half” of them, which define utopia (Johnson-Bogart 1).

 Just proving how hypocritical it is to say a utopian society can solely be based on just women. Sure, as a woman, I can relate to the idea of it being a complete utopia of not having to deal with the intimate issues of relationships, sexual relations, deep feelings, and most important feeling beneath a sex and solely only depending on the same sex as myself. I completely understand the appeal. It is just hypocritical. How could Gilman even justify it is beyond me, due to, the fact she was married twice and gave birth to a daughter. These are things that if you lived in a utopian society of just women would be unheard of realistically, and basically I find hypocritical on Gilman and other women’s intelligence.

Ayn Rand’s, Anthem, utopian genre is satire. Equality 7-2521, the hero of Anthem, is twenty-one years old when he escapes to freedom from a totalitarian state. The author of Anthem made the same escape, at the same age. Then like her hero, she proceeded to rename herself. Rand knew that they (Russia) were wrong in trying to control the fate of other people’s lives. In anthem, a council of state-appointed experts decides on the lifework of Equality 7-2521, who has a brilliant scientific mind. It sentences him to a career in street sweeping. Equality 7-2521 discovers electric light; the planners try to forbid its use. “Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candies (Rand 20). “This would wreck the Plans of the World Council,” said Unanimity 2-9913.

No one who appreciated the value of the electric light, or any other unforeseen discovery of the individual mind (and all discoveries are unforeseen), would willingly suppress the invention simply because a collective of self-styled authorities disapproved of it. The planners must therefore respond with force. That is what happens in every collectivist society, and that is what happens in Anthem.  This is a perfect example of a dystopia – not a utopia at all. The gap between utopia and dystopia is more often a matter of perspective. To the urban dweller, a simple rural life enforced may well be a dystopia, while to the rural dweller an urban lifestyle may be its own dystopia as well. For as long as humanity is imperfect, utopia is beyond us, but dystopia never is.

This brings me to this thought: Utopias are hypocritical. The definition of hypocritical according to Webster’s dictionary: a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc. that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs. This to me is the explanation of utopias as a whole. I do think it is human nature to strive for utopias, because everyone would love a world where everything is so simple. Without conflict there is now growth. There are no lessons to be learned or knowledge to be gained. This is why dystopias are more real. They remind us that the world is full of speed bumps, ups and downs, like a huge roller coaster ride; and it is not a blissful society where all is perfect.

It does not change my mind in the fact there is one utopia, Heaven. Heaven is completely different ontological experience than we have now. I do not think we can fully comprehend what it is like, not because we cannot know; but because we are fundamentally unable to fully grasp what it will be like.

We can only assume the afterlife is worth the life we live today, the choices we make, the love we share. The dreams we strive for, the aspirations that drive us, the will to live in the end when we reach those pearl gates we will all see our utopia. Only each one’s perception will be different from another. As Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, author of Minima Moralia, states:

               “None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.”

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward

Bogart, Kim Johnson. The Utopian Imangination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Reconstruction of Menaing in Herland. University of Washington. 2005.

Breaux, Kathleen. “Utopia: Ever in Sight, Ever out of Reach.” LITR 5439 Literary & Historical Utopias

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland

Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism. New York: Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991.

More, Thomas. Utopia

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1961. 

Wikipedia. Utopia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia