Reflections on Utopia
Utopia and why it needs to have bad things
Utopia is a term, essentially, invented by Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor in the 1530s. The word’s meaning is disputed but the dispute is important. Its derivation is Greek ‘u’ and ‘topos’. ‘Topos’ means ‘place’. It’s the ‘u’ bit - the upsilon – which is disputed. Upsilon in Greek can denote ‘nothing’ or ‘no’ or ‘not’. So ‘Utopia’ could mean ‘no place’.
There is, however, another way of defining ‘utopia’ and that is to equate the ‘u’ with the Greek prefix ‘eu’ or eta upsilon. ‘Eu’ before a word means ‘good’: think of ‘euthanasia’ which, literally, means ‘good death’ - ‘thanatos’ meaning death or ‘euphemism’ which, literally, means ‘good speaking’. Under this definition, utopia would come to mean ‘good place’ and, I think, Thomas More conceives of it in this way. I want to continue in the tradition of More and put forward my own recipe for Utopia by suggesting that it should consist of the following four ingredients:
Paradox
Suffering
Self-denial
Ignorance
At first glance, not, perhaps, the most appetising of menus but bear with me! I want to start with a conceptual feature of Utopia of which I increasingly feel we lack due appreciation. That is the understanding of the importance of paradox. It’s a hangover of Enlightenment thinking that we value the ability of reason to slice, laser-like, through superstition, muddled thinking, traditional folklore and, dare I say, religious belief with our inherent ability to reason to sunlit uplands of logic and clarity. Kant, in the 18th century and an atheist, laid the foundations for such thinking by arguing that the dignity of human beings lies solely in their unique capacity for reason. Reason ‘dignifies’ human life. It raises up every individual – serf, peasant, nobleman or monarch – to the same level. It’s a great leveller. A belief in the capacity for reason lays the foundation for universal human rights, for science with all the benefits that brings, for our education system and for the desire to respect people for who they are.
I support all this and believe in it too. But, to think just in this way is not only dangerously idealistic, it also misses out other aspects of human experience and understanding which have made and continue to make an important contribution to our vision of reality. Let’s take a few simple examples that have made it into national consciousness:
Edward Colston, a 17th century merchant, who made his money partly through the slave trade.
Mohandas Gandhi who had a disdain for the peoples of Africa.
Winston Churchill who had a clear understanding that the white race was superior even whilst acknowledging that the treatment by white people of indigenous peoples around the world was unacceptable.
Yet, paradoxically, Colston’s wealth was gifted to the people of Bristol to spend on education and the arts. Gandhi’s speaking out for the untouchables – or ‘the children of god’, as he called them - and his fight for independence through peaceful means not only helped to bring about the independence of India but raised consciousness of the plight of the poor in India. Churchill’s leadership during WW2 and in the years afterwards helped to create the world order we are now familiar with, an order which has helped to maintain peace in the West.
Paradox is not just muddled thinking. It’s not simply a problem which doesn’t have a resolution. It’s embedded even into the fabric of the universe. Reason expects binary solutions but, often, reality defeats such classifications. Humans, as we all know, are complex, quixotic, ineffable and, often, paradoxical in their character and deeds. In religion, paradox abounds: in Christianity, for example, God both dies on the cross and is eternal. No amount of post-Enlightenment thinking can reason that away and, indeed, St Paul talks about this very truth as ‘a scandal to the Jews and a stumbling block to the Greeks’.
So, not being able to grasp something through reason and not expecting to do so is the first thing I would argue for in a utopia. I am not advocating for lazy thinking or inconsistency. I am asking for a deeper understanding that truth and value is, sometimes, beyond rationalization.
Utopia needs suffering. I don’t mean a little bit of suffering. I don’t mean the kind of suffering that you can quantify into chunks. ‘You have broken your leg but, it’s OK, because it will automatically heal in 3 days’ time’. I am advocating that inexplicable suffering has to be part of utopia. Why? Because it gives way to a great human sea of compassion which, in turn, is also bottomless and inexplicable. A French priest and evolutionary biologist, Teilhard de Chardin, writes about suffering as dynamic and as an inevitable part of an evolutionary world like this:
“…the world is an immense groping, an immense search, an immense attack; it can only progress at the cost of many failures and pain…”
And the key word is ‘progress’. Without it, there is no dynamism and without dynamism, there is no response. Utopia needs to be a place of response. Suffering engenders compassion, nobility, kindness, self-sacrifice and courage. These are things I want the people who live in my utopia to exhibit.
De Chardin notes that a world which is ‘all joy’ is like a suffocating prison. He compares a hand-picked bunch of flowers with a tree growing naturally. We would be surprised to find a dead or dying bloom in the bunch of flowers. Why? Because the bunch of flowers is an artifice – it’s not natural. But we would expect to find that the tree showed all the marks of growing in a changing climate: vigorous growth alongside dead branches and ravages by storms. We would also expect the tree to die. Not accepting death is what defines the positive credos of the world which attempt to eliminate it yet, death itself is a necessary prerequisite to any understanding of utopia.
And de Chardin was not intellectually indifferent to the suffering in the world. De Chardin speaks of ‘the crazy indifference and heart-breaking dumbness of a natural environment in which individual endeavour seems wasted or lost’. But, for de Chardin, suffering has an end point – as he was a priest – an end point in God. For me, suffering does not have to have a point in the sense that all suffering can be explained but it can be the agent of the greater goods on which utopia would have to be built. Those initial characteristics I mentioned earlier – courage, compassion, self-sacrifice – are simply impossible without a cause for them to exist. Anything less than inexplicable suffering would simply fall into the category of something which can be reasoned away and if this is all it does, those noble qualities would, in my view, also disappear.
My third feature is self-denial. I think most of us can now identify with the need to restrain our consumption. Essentially, I am talking about a limiting of choice. The narrative is that choice is good and, in the West in particular, we have choice which is unlimited in almost every sphere of life: in consumables, in life chances, in politics and human rights, even in the pronouns we use! But choice can also be, literally, terrifying. Total freedom raises levels of anxiety and stops us from thinking clearly and safely. Limiting choice can have the opposite effect but it can also lead to a greater appreciation for the choice one has made. If I am faced with 100 different types of phone, I can make a choice – it might take a while – but I can make a choice. I will know I have chosen one phone from 100 but I will still, potentially, be aware that there are other either better or different phones that I haven’t picked. So, not only is my choice a difficult one in the first place, there is a strong chance I will not be wholly satisfied with the choice when I have made it. If, on the other hand, I have to choose my phone from just a range of three, not only is my choice going to be easier but I am far more likely to be happy with the choice once I have made it. Further, if there is only one phone I can have, the issue of whether I am happy with it or not simply does not arise. It becomes the phone I have and, as it performs the function of a phone, I am very happy to have it.
In part, this explains why peoples who live in cultures with few consumables seem to be at least as happy if not more so than those of us who so much ‘stuff’ in our lives. So, learning to live with less and making that work will be essential.
And, finally, my last ingredient for a Utopian recipe is, rather surprisingly, ignorance. But this is only referring to a type of ignorance. We currently live in the age of information – we are bombarded by it and, in particular, by information from media and social media. In general, we don’t now tend to find out things because we go to the library, pick up a book and read it. Most of us tend to use the internet as our primary source of information. Increasingly, we use AI. Rutger Bregman’s advice in his book, Humankind, is: don’t consume media. Full stop. We are so used to media in our lives that we have tended to assume it is as necessary as having two legs or a pair of lungs. And, in this case, I mean we assume that it is as benign as having a pair of lungs. The truth is far more complex. All media – even media which is free to use – is the tool of someone or something with an agenda. That agenda, at least in part, is to create news, to create traffic, to generate interest and, in nearly all cases, to make money. Let’s think about two newspaper headlines recently:
PM hails deal to cut methane emissions (The Times)
Will the last eco-hypocrite to leave COP26 turn off the lights? (The Star)
There is something humorous about the contrast between the two headlines and this is a particularly stark contrast but it highlights the point about agendas. These headlines choose for you what to see and what to think.
It is easy to spot in the printed press. Harder to do so when you are watching a news programme. Yet, the thing your eyes see on the BBC, ITV, CNN or Sky News is not the same as what you would see if you were actually there. You are seeing a second hand account of the news items: second hand because the camera is being pointed at what it wants you to see or at what the producer of that programme wants you to see. You are observing the news as presented by somebody else. This can only have the effect of influencing the way you think about an issue. So, it is worth coupling that with the types of story you are likely to read or watch – and, in general terms, it is not a story about the little old lady next door who popped round with some freshly baked brownies and asked you if you wanted some. That’s the thing that happens every day in countless myriad ways. No, news has to be something which is not everyday but is, well, ‘new’ or new according to one person’s definition of what counts as new.
Media, therefore, has the effect of distorting how we see things. Psychologists will talk about negativity bias or availability bias here – both making us inclined to believe the latest bad news is the thing we need to believe in. Now, I am not arguing here for a total disconnect with media – I teach Politics and I am always telling politics students to keep abreast of current affairs. But, anything like an obsession with news can overload the brain and block out the ability for it to decide what is significant from what is destined to be tomorrow’s fish and chip paper. The real secret? Almost no news is ground-breaking, shattering, devastating or once-in-a-lifetime, despite what you might be led to believe.
So, a healthy ignorance will be a requisite in my utopia. News is about the exceptional not the everyday. You will not see a headline reading:
Number of people living in extreme poverty down by 137,000 since yesterday
…even though that is true and has not only been true yesterday but has been true every day for the last 25 years! When will you see a news reporter standing in the middle of nowhere declaring:
“Today, I am standing in the middle of nowhere and there is still no sign of war”?
Sociologists in Holland conducted some research on the correlation between bad news stories and actual events and found, amazingly, a negative correlation. Between 1991 and 2005, for example, when the number of plane crashes dropped, the amount of news about plane crashes increased. In another study, a database of 4 million news items on immigration and crime was compiled during a period when immigration and crime were declining. Guess what? The number of news items increased even though there had been a decline in both!
Bregman describes media coverage as ‘an assault on the mundane’. Let’s be honest: life is mostly fairly predictable. Nice but boring. So, perhaps I need to modify my ‘ignorance’ characteristic. Be informed but be informed about being informed. Set media news in context and focus, mostly, on what is in front of you in real life in your own life. Those things not only matter more but will be, for the most part, positive, good and life-affirming.
So, there we have it. I present to you my vision of Utopia: a vision where depth and complexity matter, where compassion, nobility and self-sacrifice are celebrated, where we have less stuff but are happier with what we have and where we curb our instincts to latch onto bad news. The question is: is this just a dream? My answer is: of course not. It’s pretty close to our world but it’s close to our world with a few small and easily manageable adjustments. Bregman calls us to be realists. He notes that the word ‘realism’ is often connected with the word ‘pessimism’ or ‘cynicism’ but he means ‘realist’ in the actual sense of the word: look to see what you have got. Be real. Get real. It is surprisingly good. Human are surprisingly kind and generous nearly all the time. And with some adjustment to our consumption in particular, tomorrow will dawn, bright and refreshed with a new energy.