‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’
- Oscar Wilde
‘It’s not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.’
- Bertrand Russell — Political Ideas
‘Creating a utopian paradise, a new Garden of Eden, is our only hope.’
- William H Koetke — The Final Empire
What better place to start our investigations than with all the things that we consider to be pleasurable in life? When it comes to utopia, it’s all about pleasure. Many utopias look at what we ultimately want and the details about how such societies or worlds are sustained are mere technicalities. But there are also much more pragmatic ideas for making a better world. We will be looking at both types of utopia. To use some terms that will become more apparent as this book progresses: Utopia is the vision. The outworking of utopia — making it pragmatic — is the mission. And within this mission there are numerous aims required to bring about the detailed functioning of the better world that is being proposed.
The word utopia, as I’ve suggested in the Introduction, can often be used in a derisory way and the term is frequently scorned in modern societies. Sometimes the criticism is that utopias are idealistic — so we need to take a look at this claim.
Ideals are abstract concepts, like freedom, equality and justice, and it is true that some utopias are very much about these things. On that basis we would have to agree — utopias can be idealistic. Russell Jacoby, however, contrasts ‘iconoclastic’ utopias (that’s the idealistic type) with what he calls ‘blueprint’ utopias. Blueprint utopias are much more concrete in describing what a better world might be like. The blueprint, concrete types of utopias are the pragmatic visions.
But, in truth, we need a bit of both. So we keep an eye on ideals in this book, but also try to dig into the pragmatics. French philosopher Raceour told us that utopias are the challenge to ideals. Ideals can become too static and fossilised without the bold practical visions of utopia. Starhawk reminds us: ‘We need more than psychology, more than spirituality and community: We need an economics, an agriculture, a politics of liberation, capable of healing the dismembered world and restoring the Earth to life. Most of all, we need to make a leap of the imagination that can let us envision how the world could be. Then we need to consider, step by step, in great detail, how to bring our vision about.’ (Starhawk — Truth or Dare.)
Beyond that simple sorting of the idealistic and the pragmatic, there is a mass of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, which looks at utopias of every kind. It is hardly possible to give even the briefest of summaries to the subject here. Instead I am looking to try to tease out some essential thoughts that will be our guide through the rest of the book.
In this chapter we will consider utopias that look backwards for inspiration — sometimes described as Golden Age utopias. We’ll also consider utopias that look forward to a future Golden Age. All of this is with the aim of seeing that there are utopian stories already playing out in our contemporary cultures. It’s these stories that will then be our main focus, as we examine their pros and cons, and how their ideas may be adopted, adapted or rejected as we seek to forge a new story.
The work from which the word utopia is derived is the tale of the mythical island of Utopia, by Thomas More. Although many utopian ideas have been around for much longer, it is More’s work that really started things off in the modern era. More seems to be punning two Greek words — Outopia — meaning no place, and Eutopia — meaning a good and beautiful place. This sets up an ambiguity that has been essential to the notion of utopia ever since: It suggests that it is both an abstract vision and a practical, realisable reality — so again that contrast of the idealistic and the concrete that we have discussed above. Patrick Geddes (Our Social Inheritance) took up that theme in his work.1 Geddes never lost sight of the need for a broad vision, whilst being deeply involved in the practicalities of trying to bring the vision to life.
Referring to Thomas More’s Utopia, Andrew Keen (How to Fix the Future) says:
‘Today, on its five-hundredth anniversary, we are told that this idea of utopia is making a ‘comeback’. But the truth is that More’s creation never truly went away. Utopia’s universal relevance is based on both its timelessness and its timeliness. And as we drift from an industrial toward a networked society, the big issues that More raises in his little book — the intimate relationship between privacy and individual freedom, how society should provide for its citizens, the central role of work in a good society, the trust between ruler and ruled, and the duty of all individuals to contribute to improve society — remain as pertinent today as they have ever been.
‘….By inventing an ideal society, More demonstrated our ability to imagine a better world. And by presenting his vision of this community to his readers, he has invited them to address the real problems in their own societies.’
In the first part of More’s book, a traveller who has visited Utopia discusses some of the issues raised by its existence. (We could say this digs into the ideals of society, by carefully contrasting the values of Utopia with the values of the current society.) When it comes to the story of Utopia itself, the vision is a pragmatic one. Utopia is a large island, with several cities more or less identical. A hinterland of farms surrounds each city and provides for its sustenance. For the most part, the inhabitants work as farmers. They live communally and have no personal possessions. There is a tiered system of governance, from the local neighbourhood, to city, to nation. Freedom of religion is encouraged and the utopians are ever curious about new knowledge. Strangely perhaps, a few sorts of dissent are strongly discouraged, such as questioning the political status quo and unauthorised travel. Whilst the technology is inevitably of the Middle Ages, the sentiments expressed in this remarkable book are especially prescient.
More himself was a complex character, apparently very amiable in his personal life, but also quite ruthless in his working life, especially towards religious heresy. He was executed for treason — a charge he may well have been able to get out of. He even told a joke to his executioner when his head was about to be removed. So, some have speculated that Utopia was not an altogether serious work. Whatever the true motives behind it though, it’s fair to say that it became the model for all future utopian speculations. It is difficult to think of any later work that can now be held up without comparison to More.
Western culture, along with many other cultures, has its creation myth and closely related time of a ‘Golden Age’ of humanity. In the christian tradition perhaps the focus is more on the ‘fall’ that follows closely behind the creation story. The details of Christianity’s Golden Age can often be disregarded in the process.
The Golden Age of the Garden of Eden has some interesting features. Eden is set apart from whatever lay beyond (Wilderness? Chaos?). This is not too surprising for a desert culture, where a harsh wilderness contrasts so vividly with the occasional oasis of lush vegetation. (This idea did not start with the Hebrew or Christian faiths of course, but has come down to us mainly through them.) That split, between a protected place and the dangers of a wilderness, has stayed with us down the centuries. It is only in very recent years that wilderness has started to be seen as something positive. The split persists though in our ongoing contrast of city and countryside. A lot of utopian thinking is city thinking, with nature the poor cousin. Evan Eisenberg (The Ecology of Eden) examines this contrast through history as the mountain (nature) and the tower (city/civilisation). In this book, I keep the split going in a slightly different form, contrasting the tamed garden (where we produce things to be used in our lives) with the wild nature that lies beyond. So, whether the contrast is between city and countryside, or garden and wilderness, the splits that Eden laid out for us are not necessarily problematic. Rather they keep us mindful of the ways in which we treat our cities, our agriculture, and the wilderness.
Another feature of Eden is the implication that nature, at least within the garden, was not premised on death and rebirth, predator and prey, but instead could endure forever.
The past Golden Age can become a fixed and unchanging perfection. Darren Anderson (Imaginary Cities) warns us:
‘…the appeal of lost mythical cities requires a curious retrogressive nostalgia; the seductive deceptive idea that there was a golden age that requires resurrecting (often the purveyor’s youth or their time-misted view of it). The problem with the past is that we are still living in its wake yet it is unreachable. We survey it with the torment of Tantalus; it is there just out of reach. Times which never really existed are elevated, as gilded eras of impossibly exacting perfection, often to justify fundamentalisms in the present. Even conservatives are Utopian!’
The legacy of Eden then is partly that we look upon nature and think she could be improved. Rather than embracing nature’s ways, we directly or indirectly fight against her. What Eden seemed to promise stayed with us, with our dreams of taming the wild and conquering death. The story of the Fall added to this, suggesting that nature herself is ‘fallen’ and imperfect.
A further split, implicit in the story, is the difference between nature and society. This was often used in colonial times as a justification for exploitation and indeed extermination of foreign peoples. To describe a culture as ‘in a state of nature’ was already to do violence to it, by removing it from the normal circle of social conventions and moral principles. The people of such a society could then the more easily be treated as if they were a natural resource rather than a valid society in their own right. (See, in particular, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.)
The Fall for humans is a difficult idea. After all, knowledge of good and evil does not seem such a bad thing. Was ignorance really bliss? Implicit in the Eden story is that the state of innocence cannot be regained, so the christian tradition has a problem with trying to re-create Eden. Paradise cannot be regained, or at least paradise is delayed. Nonetheless, a lot of Western thinking has been about trying to regain something that has been lost — so this ambiguity continues to play out. In more secular times, we are more easily able to adopt a Golden Age myth without concerns over any heresy regarding a Fall. There is no longer such a problem with re-creating Eden, perhaps minus the innocence.
Other cultures that look back to a Golden Age have, in contrast to the christian tradition, a somewhat easier time. In China, for instance, rebuilding a past Golden Age is seen as a distinct possibility.2 Meanwhile, some Western authors set aside the idea of a Fall. They want to dispel the notion that we are a ‘fallen’ humanity, somehow violent and evil in our basic nature. They wish to believe there was a time when human culture was as we might like it to be again. In a sense then, they are promoting a Golden Age myth as a means for modelling the future. If there was an age of a ‘noble savage’ — or we can demonstrate that a nobility is still present in current indigenous, ‘organic’ (to use Murray Bookchin’s term) peoples today — then there is hope for all of us, according to these authors and others like them. Most fundamentally, it means that human nature does not need to be changed. Instead, suitably arranging the basic living conditions and political circumstances of a society would be enough to realise a peaceful and harmonious culture. Possible? Apart from the fact that such authors may be projecting their own ideas back into people who we have no real hope of understanding, we cannot in any case go back. The Golden Age and the noble savage, if they ever existed at all, cannot be a model for the future. Even if we were to believe that human nature, of itself, is fundamentally good, we still have the massive and pervasive influence of culture that seems to go against this. Of course this is partly about the issue of trust I mentioned in the Introduction. I think the answer — at least in terms of looking at history — is that we have evolved culturally not so much as good or bad individuals, but as groups. Whatever disagreements there may be about what people in the past or today’s indigenous peoples may be like, there is general acknowledgement that we are very kind and protective of each other when we recognise a group identity. Any utopian vision, to prove effective, needs to recognise this. Utopias are primarily social constructs.
So, at best some very mixed messages are brought to us by Eden, and we will see these recurring as we look at alternative versions of utopias below. One thing potentially positive from the biblical account though, is the idea of stewardship. If nothing else, we might take this on board as an affirming message for today’s world.
The medieval myth of Cockaigne is in a way a provocative forerunner of re-creating Eden. Eden of course, would lie to the East of Europe, whilst Cockaigne is set in the West. In Cockaigne, food is abundant, with birds and fish seemingly all too willing to be cooked. (So there is meat, in contrast to Eden’s veggie diet.) There is even edible architecture. It is always Spring in Cockaigne. There is a fountain of youth and Cockaigners earn money whilst sleeping. Strangely, there are cheeky nuns, who seem intent on baring themselves for the delight of the Cockaigners. Understandably, people of the middle-ages would be obsessed with food. What is most interesting about Cockaigne is its deliberate flouting of established order. All utopias need to have that sense of challenge and defiance in them to be vital and relevant. Most strange about Cockaigne was that it could only be reached by eating through three miles of rice pudding. This is not so bizarre as it might first appear. Ancient versions of paradise were often thought to be contained within a womb, or to be walled in by something, often an organic substance of some sort. Perhaps the message was that Cockaigne could at least be reached, whilst we are forever barred from entering Eden. Cockaigne, for all its subversive cheek, perhaps recognised that our dreams are hard-won. We must struggle through our rice pudding before we can reap the rewards of our efforts.
Like Cockaigne, many other utopias seem to lie to the West of Europe. The city of Ys — allegedly in Brittany, France — lay to the West. From Ys came the myth of Atlantis and the name for Paris — Par Ys — like Ys. Atlantis itself also lay to the West. The first of many accounts of Atlantis came from Solon and from Dionysius of Miletus. Plato also described Atlantis. ‘The Island of the Blessed’ (from Lucian) is a story similar to Atlantis, except that its inhabitants are bodiless, ethereal beings. They dwell in a city of gold with emerald walls. The Celts, meanwhile, had the story of Avalon, or, ‘Apple Island’, also in the Atlantic. There are stories of a land called ‘Bresal’ dating from the fifth century, and from which, perhaps, Brazil takes its name. The ‘Fortunate Isles’ are described as early as 1100, and may be a reference to the Canary Islands. A map of 1367 refers to the ‘Fantastic Islands’.
When Christianity looks forward to the consummation of history — its future Golden Age — then the vision is a city. The new Jerusalem is literally made of gold. That split between the human world and nature would then be more or less absolute. Getting there entails the destruction of the current world, or our physical death. The suggestion is that all that is good transcends us and is set in a future that we cannot bring about by our own efforts. All of these ideas resonate so much with our current Western culture and with consumer capitalism. What is so strange is that it is a vision of a completely sterile world, and yet even in this we are set about re-creating it. A place without dirt, or flaws, or contradictions, or diversity, utterly known and therefore never surprising. Today’s ‘smart city’, is such a vision, as we will see. A Golden Age looking forward is arguable the defining myth of our times.
Two further, and useful, distinctions in utopian stories can be made here. One is the contrast between what we might call ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ utopias. Cockaigne for instance was very much a static utopia. All of its features are sustained essentially by magic. If anyone were to question how things actually worked, that would introduce an element of contingency to the story — and crucially perhaps it is a contingency based on the potential failings of humanity. (For Cockaigne, maybe it is only to ask how things are maintained. But for other utopias, the problems of governance are tackled head-on. So, such systems we would have to call dynamic. More’s utopia sits just at the threshold of the two types. The island of Utopia is isolated and restricted enough to maintain a fairly static society. But nonetheless, the dynamic questions of governance still intrude.)
The final distinction I’d like to draw out is the degree of connection or disconnection between people in various utopias. This is perhaps most obvious in utopian and dystopian novels. It has to be said that many visions of future golden ages are distinctly lacking in human connection, despite their promises of material and technological wonders. The stand-out exception is Mare Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.
We might conclude that utopias allow for elements of both looking back and looking forward and perhaps both could be accommodated, or synthesised in some way to create a modern vision. Murray Bookchin said:
‘From a “backward-looking” utopianism, commonly based on the image of a bountiful nature and unfettered consumption arises a “forward-looking” utopianism based on the image of a bountiful economy and unfettered production. Between these two extremes, religions and anarchic movements develop a more balanced, although equally generous, vision of utopia that combines sharing with self-discipline, freedom with co-ordination, and joy with responsibility.’ (Murray Bookchin — The Ecology of Freedom.)
As I’ve alluded to above, I am suggesting that we are, right now, living in three particular utopian worlds. To explore this, I am going to describe them as three specific ‘flavours’ of utopia. The first is Privatopia — a name taken from the title of a book by Evan McKenzie. Privatopia is the name I’m giving to our current Western consumer society, and to its neo-liberal political and economic systems. Cornucopia, the second utopian flavour, is a follow-on from Privatopia and is the mostly technological and very positive future that is often promised by today’s society. Ecotopia is our third flavour. The name Ecotopia is taken from the title of a novel by Ernst Callenbach. It covers a broad range of ideas, from high-tech futures to a romanticised return to a more rural past. Sometimes Ecotopia can also be an apocalyptic vision.
The explanations and implications of these three flavours of utopia will hopefully become clear as we progress. Indeed, by studying visions, we will be able to explore all the issues that we need to cover by way of understanding society as it is now, and the directions it may be heading whilst offering various promises of a good life. These utopias are, to a greater or lesser extent, dystopias, but they clear the way for a synthesis of everything that is good and serve as an introduction to what I want to propose in this book. We look at each of them in turn below.
Arguably, at least in the wealthier nations of the world, a lot of the promised abundance of a Golden Age has been delivered by the joint efforts of technology and capitalism. We have food of all kinds, in all seasons, from anywhere in the world. We are clothed and housed in relative comfort. Health care is good and improving. Life expectancy is improving. Politically, societies are relatively stable and there is at least a semblance of democracy through representative government. Wars are less frequent. Violent crime is for the most part reducing. Freedom and tolerance are increasingly prevalent. Equality of all kinds is at least recognised as a reasonable goal, even as we may struggle to realise it in reality.
Capitalism is often set up as the enemy, but in terms of material prosperity, it has delivered. We will look in more detail at the problems later, but for now, let’s look at what kind of utopia capitalism and technology have created. I’m calling it ‘Privatopia’, and I hope the reasons for the choice of name will become clearer as we progress. The more we gain, the more defensive we are of our property. The more services are monetised, the less reliant we are on friends and neighbours. All that we need in life can be bought, and we can achieve this simply through work that often has no relation to our own neighbourhood. Life then is increasingly driven towards being private, isolated and atomised. Even entertainment, once something shared with a whole community, has shrunk down through radio and cinema to television, video games and now all of this is delivered to individuals through mobile phones and earbuds. Privatopia is perhaps a middle-class phenomenon — the more wealth the more there seems to be a desire to be separate from community and society. But that is not to say that poorer people would not aspire to the same exclusivity, given half a chance. If we are happy like this, who needs the outside world? But in fact, we desperately do need the outside world, in a variety of ways, and the outside world desperately needs us. Something is very wrong with Privatopia.
Privatopia is about a mindset of who we are as individuals as well as how things stand with the surrounding culture. Privatopia aims at personal happiness, but this happiness carries a price in stress, bad relationships and an impoverished natural world. Consumption is an addiction that adds to our stress. This is not just about capitalism. If capitalism were to collapse or be overthrown, there may well still be a Privatopia.
Even the style of modern houses is beginning to reflect the mindset of Privatopia. In years gone by, ‘public rooms’ faced towards the street. Today, the main living space is often towards the rear of the house, looking out onto a private garden. Windows to the street are getting smaller and the front yard is reserved for vehicles. By implication, we only engage with our surrounding communities when we are climbing into our cars to go somewhere else. When we are at home we are absorbed just by our own private space. As economic crises proliferate and climate change begins to bite, then the desire to shut out the surrounding world only seems to grow. The more money an individual or family own, the more pronounced this exclusivity becomes. Darren Anderson says:
‘As conditions decline, the need to become physically detached increases through private security, gated communities, tinted windows. This process of islanding finds its most blatant form in tax havens. For all their parasitism, these are nevertheless utopias, however selective or morally questionable.’ (Darren Anderson — Imaginary Cities)
When we buy a house today we just look at the physical thing — the building — and we have little opportunity to meet the community we will be living with, until we’ve moved in (and it’s too late). We are buying a house, not a home, we are buying a thing, not a context, a relationship, an ecology. The material dominates over the social relationship.
Meanwhile, Richard Sennet stresses the independence and autonomy of Privatopia:
‘Modern family life and, even more, modern business practice, has extended the idea of self-containment: dependency on others is taken as a sign of weakness, a failure of character; in raising children or at work, our institutions seek to promote autonomy and self-sufficiency; the autonomous individual appears free. But looked at from the perspective of a different culture, a person who prides him- or her-self on not asking for help appears a deeply damaged human being; fear of social embeddedness dominates his or her life.’ (Richard Sennet — Together.)
The vision of Privatopia, if it could be said to have a vision, is to suck what we can out of life without much thought to the consequences. Privatopia is so insidious because it is more or less the dominant mindset of the developed world today. So it feels ‘normal’ — it is not recognised as an ideology. I have to confess my own Privatopia leanings — I am equally culpable. Privatopia is ultimately a vision that is paranoid and narcissistic. Behind our gates and picket fences, there is something of a siege mentality. Our hard-won wealth is always vulnerable. The obsession with property and boundaries is a clear symptom, and so too is the addiction to materialism. Privatopia wears a false smile whilst stress and depression hit record levels. Privatopia also ignores the looming disaster of economies ‘growing’ only because of debt and it ignores the ecological crisis that is unfolding across the planet.
Privatopia, in turn, is pointing towards and changing into a promised technological utopia — the future Golden Age of Cornucopia.
Cornucopians are people who believe that advances in technology will allow all of us to live in abundance. Also, within this, there is often a belief that either environmental problems will be solved directly, or we will easily adapt to a natural world that has been greatly changed by climate upheavals (rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, etc.). Technology is indeed advancing at an accelerating pace. Wi-fi technology, which seems innocent enough, is part of this. But it’s a lot less benign than it might appear. The infrastructure for wi-fi will soon overtake aviation in terms of its impact on Carbon Dioxide emissions. If this seems remarkable, even with five billion mobile phones in the world, well, part of the reason is called the ‘internet of things’. This refers to objects that are connected by wi-fi. At the time of writing, around 20 billion such connections exist. By 2050, the number could be into the trillions. Such a prospect could make wi-fi the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, ahead of transport, ahead of energy, ahead of agriculture. This is happening right under our noses, as part of the natural progression of Privatopia into Cornucopia. I recognise that a Cornucopia can seem very appealing — after all, it means we can just live our lives and let technology deal with all the problems. But there are tricky issues that the Cornucopians seem to gloss over — the problems their high-tech world could bring about, the impacts on nature they choose often to ignore, the question of how an economy can be sustained when most work is automated, and the issue of whether society can psychologically cope with so much leisure. Evan Eisenberg (The Ecology of Eden) makes a contrast between ‘managers’ and ‘fetishers’, which is roughly equivalent to the Privatopia and Cornucopia stories I’m discussing here. We might say that Cornucopia fetishises the future and its associated high-tech society. There is no question, from the Cornucopians’ point of view, that more technology is good and any problems we might have will be answered by technical solutions.
As we’ve seen, utopias, including our modern Privatopia and future Cornucopia, are often premised on abundance. Having to work for a living is an evil that many utopias hope to abolish. Many utopias try to deal with this matter of greatly increased leisure time and how we might spend our leisure. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, by contrast, saw an importance to work and limits to abundance.3 (Whilst Proudhon spoke of ‘pauperism’ and contrasted this with ‘poverty’, a more modern reading might contrast destitution with voluntary simplicity.) The more pragmatic utopias (including More’s original) recognise the importance of work and the dangers of excess. Proudhon lived before the dangers of climate change and ecological collapse were recognised, but his observations to some extent anticipated the issues. Our third utopia — Ecotopia — takes up these concerns as its key premise.
Ecotopia — the name made famous by the utopian novels of Ernest Callenbach — envisions a world that achieves full ‘sustainability’, for people and for nature. Ecotopians can often see this as coming about through some sort of revolution, such as the collapse, or deliberate overthrow, of capitalism. Or it may be that it is ecological collapse itself that brings about a new world order, as a result of extreme climate change. Some Ecotopians seem to positively relish the prospect — essentially they may be better designated ‘survivalists’. But be careful what you wish for. A sudden collapse of capitalism, or a large-scale natural disaster, is not the start of a newer happier world — it’s a zombie apocalypse. The timescale for transition to a sustainable world is therefore critical.
‘Sustainable’ is a difficult word to define and has been much misused of late. Chiefly, it is the continued endurance of nature that is important, as human society relies, in turn, on nature for its sustainability over time. Without an apocalyptic narrative — a disaster story for the future — Ecotopians are faced with the challenge of trying to get us all to radically change our lifestyles by choice. It is a tall order, but arguably this would be a more pragmatic vision than simply saying that capitalism is about to collapse — or to try to speed its demise. Ecotopians though, with some notable exceptions, can be a bit lacking in proposals for political, economic and social change that might go along with the lifestyle changes they seek.
The vision for Ecotopia is for a world that could endure in perpetuity with a reasonable standard of living for its human inhabitants and abundant and sustained life for all other creatures on the planet. The positive message of stewardship is something that the Golden Age of Eden contributes to Ecotopia. Ecotopia tends to look more to the past than to the future for its inspiration, so Ecotopians are often ‘retro’ in their outlook, with close communities and ‘gift economies’ (or at least more direct means of exchanging goods) compared to today’s societies.
So Ecotopia often romanticises primitive technology and has an aversion to high-tech. Ecotopia is often a rural vision, with human habitats reduced (somehow) to villages and great emphasis on farming methods such as organic farming, Permaculture, and Regenerative agriculture, along with sustaining nature through re-forestation and re-wilding. More people, therefore, would be returning to the land — the reverse process from the last 150 years of industrialisation — and the Ecotopians may well endorse Proudhon’s views on the value of work and of thrift, mentioned above. Some technology is embraced by the Ecotopians, especially, of course, various means of supplying renewable energy. And oddly, computer and mobile phone technology doesn’t seem to be a problem for the Ecotopians. (I’ve highlighted the impact that the wi-fi network has on the planet in the previous section.) It almost feels like the Middle Ages with laptops. The ‘hipster’ character captures this technical ambivalence especially well.
There are some unashamedly high-tech versions of Ecotopia however. In particular, Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline) sees an urban rather than a rural future and fully welcomes the contribution of technology towards a sustainable future. See also, David Owen’s, Green Metropolis.
Ecotopians must in some way deal with the convergence of high-tech and low-tech that the future is likely to require. I feel that a problem with Ecotopia is that it adopts the nervous calculation of targets and strategies — aping consumer capitalism. ‘Net zero carbon’ and ‘350 parts per million’ are abstract targets, that make no sense to a great many of us. They are, in effect, a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ of the future. Remember Einstein’s famous quote: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ A problem with the Ecotopians is that they try too hard to appear normal, whilst the future world that they rightly consider necessary is, in fact, a radical departure from our current lifestyles. I think they would be better to recognise their inner hippy and genuinely embrace the changes that are proposed. But for all its faults, Ecotopia recognises the urgent need for change — a feature mostly lacking in Privatopia and Cornucopia.
We could summarise our three utopian stories by saying that Cornucopia romanticises the future, Privatopia romanticises the present and Ecotopia, to a large extent, romanticises the past. We will be exploring different aspects of the three stories as the work progresses, and see how each may contribute. For an excellent exploration of the different aspects of utopia, see Gregory Claeys’, Utopia — The History of an Idea. Also, Krishan Kumar’s Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times gives excellent reviews of some of the best-known utopian and dystopian novels. Frank E. Manuel and Fritizie P. Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World provides excellent historic detail.
Modern governments often try to defeat the concept of utopia. Perhaps they feel that if too much is promised then citizens’ hopes and expectations will be raised. What I’ve suggested in this chapter is that despite the cynicism of politics, utopias are very much with us. We have stumbled into a Privatopia, accepting it as just the way the world is. And we are in danger of stumbling into a Cornucopia, with its fanciful aims of a fix-all without consequences. Are utopias ‘pie-in-the-sky’, as they are sometimes accused of being? What would that mean? It would mean having a dream of a better world that has little or no hope of fulfilment. In the meantime, we must muddle on with our unsatisfactory ‘real world’. By contrast, as we’ve explored earlier, there are more pragmatic utopias and a pragmatic utopia would tell a different story.
A viable utopia needs to be built as a conscious alternative to a vision that offers no hope of fulfilment. It needs to be a utopia that is being built in the here and now and that has everyone on board from the start. To achieve this we need to step back and consider the questions raised in the Introduction — questions about owning, sharing, making and trading, and about the type of lives we ultimately would like to live. These questions will lead us on to consider the commons, governance, peace-making, community and compassion. Let’s not however lose sight of some of those wilder and more sensuous visions of utopia that are often proposed. That drive for pleasure is telling us something about human needs and aspirations. We will need to keep pleasure always in our minds as we seek to explore a new story.
How is it that we achieve utopia? Three main choices have been proposed — Revolution, Anarchism or Reform. The three options slide into each other to an extent; a mild revolution is reform, whilst the personal autonomy that is valued in most societies has elements of Anarchism.
Advocates of revolution need to keep in mind how complex the modern world is. We are heavily reliant on infrastructure — internet, wi-fi, telephone, railways, roads. We are equally reliant on institutions — schools, banks, the police, the judiciary, fire-brigade, hospitals, prisons, as well as the offices of government itself. Interrupting any of these, even for a few hours, would bring chaos to a modern society. So I say again, be careful what you wish for. The more extreme forms of Ecotopia are on the edge of revolution in a sense, as they often believe in the imminent collapse of capitalism. (See, for instance, Charles Eisenstein and David Fleming.)
Anarchism can have a revolutionary flavour, but it offers a broad range of scenarios. Whilst a revolution might suggest a change in government, Anarchism challenges the institution of government itself. As I’ve suggested above, there are hints of anarchism in most societies, not least today in the neo-liberal stated desire to be free of government regulation and to allow free reign of the market economy — which we will be looking at more closely in a later chapter.
Change of any kind could be sudden or could be a slower transition. Reform suggests a gradual transformation from the existing situation. Depending on the nature of our utopia, this may be a possibility. Indeed, as I’ve suggested above, we are already creating and recreating Privatopia, at least for some of us, within the existing culture and within a capitalist economy in (for the most part) representative democracies. We may be sliding into Cornucopia, the natural extension of Privatopia. So reform of a sort is happening, even although we may not be consciously pursuing it.
Whether we look for revolution or reform, or even if we advocate anarchism, our societies still somehow need ways to organise themselves. If there is a problem now, it is a problem of the state rather than a problem with politics. The state is the institution — big government, top-down authority. Politics, by contrast, is the way we organise ourselves — and this can be very local and personal as well as national and international. We are quick to condemn politics, but this is to confuse state power with the need for co-operation. From politics we have the word ‘polity’ and we will take a closer look at this in Chapter 4.
To fuel our imaginations, I want to finish up this chapter with a few visions of future worlds. The reader may be inspired or appalled by what follows. But hopefully, either way, this will be food for thought. So here goes:
‘I have a dream of an astonishing plurality of cultures for the year 2050 — all in which friendships, networks, organisations, learning, storytelling and the arts flourish, in ways specific to their place and geography. City centres are highly walkable and bikable with millions of meeting places for chats and fun. The buildings are designed with care for the location, have passive ventilation with better air and uplifting day lighting. There is flirting, gossip, philosophical cafes, street theatre, peaceful protest marches, farmers markets and rock concerts a plenty. The cars hum quietly around and do not spread toxic compounds from combustion engines, except for the occasional retro shows where noisy Formula 1-type events draw the petro-nostalgic with great beer and barbecue. Markets and trade are vibrant, and treated more as conversations of value than as efficient mechanisms of price equilibrium. The food is short-travelled, healthy, highly varied, and incredibly tasty and we will happily pay its full cost. The jobs are green and stimulate well-being through personal mastery and acknowledgement for work well done. A liveable minimum wage makes the freedom of social mobility more than a cliché. There is greenery everywhere in sight, on the streets and buildings, so sparrows and hawks have re-colonised the inner-city rooftops.’
Per Espen Stoknes — What we think about when we try not to think about Global Warming.
‘Let’s imagine a world where both light-hearted play and purposeful work, not drudgery, are the order of the day for all human beings — a world where our reality overflows with material abundance and where everyone can focus on maximising their potential instead of on scrounging for money. My greatest hope is that one day each human being — every one of us — will be able to participate in a society that is inherently just and that also considers well-being for future generations. To achieve this, we have to work together in appreciation of our differences and on behalf of common humanity. When enough of us work together for the common good, then, to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, we will one day create a world that works for everyone.
Martin Adams — Land.
‘…my generation will live in a world unimaginably more beautiful than the one we were born into. And it will be a world that is palpably improving year by year. We will reforest the Greek isles, denuded over two thousand years ago. We will restore the Sahara Desert to the rich grassland it once was. Prisons will no longer exist, and violence will be a rarity. Work will be about, “How may I best use my gifts?” instead of, “How can I make a living?” Crossing a national border will be an experience of being welcomed, not examined. Mines and quarries will barely exist, as we will reuse the vast accumulation of materials from the industrial age. We will live in dwellings that are extensions of ourselves, eat food grown by people who know us, and use articles that are the best that people in the full flow of their talents could make them. We will live in a richness of intimacy and community that hardly exists today, that we know, because of a longing in the heart, must exist. And most of the time, the loudest noises we hear will be the sounds of nature and the laughter of children.’
Charles Eisenstein — Sacred Economics
‘My utopia would probably include three levels of society, rather like medieval days, with knights, clerics and peasants. The warriors would be the aristocrats, and it would be their job to sit around doing nothing except creating and tending beautiful gardens, having parties and festivals in their big houses and acting as patrons of the arts, and being hospitable, giving away beer and food…. The clerics would be the writers, poets, artists and so on. They would live like peasants, freely and self-sufficiently. And the peasants would be the craftsmen, the stonemasons, shoemakers, woodworkers, ceramic-makers, potters, blacksmiths. All three classes would be involved in the creation of music and architecture. The money-spenders, the thinkers and the craftsmen.’
Tom Hodgkinson — How to be Free.
My own vision for utopia takes up similar themes. Conversation is the most prized resource in my utopia. People feel that their voices will be heard, so they are much more willing to participate in local democracy, centred around a new understanding of the commons.
Scotland (my home nation) has been largely re-forested and people seek out the forests, beaches, lochs and rivers for quiet retreats into nature. The spread of forest across Scotland is not an isolated phenomenon — natural habitats, from mangrove swamps to coral reefs and wetlands, are protected and expanding across the globe. Many of these places are seen as sacred and religions have morphed into ceremonies for Earth-centred worship. Farms are smaller, but farming is more intense. There is a lot of space given back to hedgerows, ponds and small copses of trees. Organic farming has largely replaced industrialised farming and the new farms serve a mainly vegetarian and vegan population.
There are a lot of parks and other small pockets of nature within towns and also numerous allotments and market gardens. With an intensely managed use of land, even the largest of cities can more or less feed itself. Greenhouses provide for many foodstuffs that would formerly have had to be imported into the UK.
Technology has greatly advanced. There are colonies on Mars and on one of Jupiter’s moons. Probes have been sent to some nearby stars, to explore possible Earth-like planets. Even so, back on Earth, technology is discreet. People prefer things to be hand-crafted and traditional, if at all possible.
Towns and cities are more compact, with layouts returning to a more traditional style of streets and squares. The suburbs are largely gone — replaced by more compact development and surrounded by farms and with nature. The private car is also gone, and with this many roads have been narrowed or removed. People generally walk or cycle, or use trains and buses. People woke up to the needs of the planet — perhaps a little too late — but in time to avoid total disaster. Genetic engineering has developed sufficiently to allow many extinct species to be resurrected from their saved DNA. Carbon emissions are steadily reducing, but even so, it will be several decades before global warming and sea-level rise stops. In the meantime, many major towns and cities are being rebuilt on higher ground.
Murray Bookchin told us: ‘Rarely has it been so crucial to stir the imagination into radical new alternatives to every aspect of daily life. Now, when imagination itself is becoming atrophied or is being absorbed by the mass media, the concreteness of utopian thinking may well be its most rejuvenating tonic. Whether as drama, novel, science fiction, poetry, or an evocation of tradition, experience and fantasy must return in all their fullness to stimulate as well as to suggest.’ (The Ecology of Freedom)
The ideas of a Golden Age looking back or looking forward have inspired visions of a better world. There are utopias about consumption, abundance, indulgence, sensuousness, and indeed decadence. There are utopias that are more grounded and look at the pragmatics of a good society. But a pragmatic utopia still has to acknowledge this drive to pleasure that underlies society. Pleasure always needs to be kept in mind. The delights of the more sensual utopias are sending a message that the joy we need to find in our lives is not to be ignored.
I have suggested that today’s modern society has three flavours of utopia — Privatopia, Cornucopia and Ecotopia. These visions have their good points, especially Ecotopia. However, I feel that any one flavour on its own cannot fully address the problems the world faces and offer us an inspiring vision and practical solutions. Hence, the need to dig some more and explore all aspects of the visions in greater depth.
So to make a start, we will step back a little and take a close look at ownership, the commons, governance and community — building blocks that will help to address a couple of those questions from the Introduction: What do we own? What should we share?