‘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
The arts group had arranged a swim in the River Tay at Broughty Ferry, a posh suburb of Dundee. We were hosted by ‘Ye Ancient Amphibians Society’ and met at the harbour. There is a little building there with toilets and small changing rooms. It was June, but as each of us emerged ready to take to the water, we displayed multiple layers of swimwear and wetsuits. All that is except Doug. A cheer went up as he strode out in just a tiny pair of pink Speedos. Someone had a camera and we gathered for a group photo. Doug was at the front, striking a series of body-building poses.
The tide was low, so it meant a long climb down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the harbour wall. But at last, in the water, we just bobbed around and chatted. I spotted someone I knew and swam over to her. She had so many layers of wetsuit it was like she had become an inflatable dinghy.
A proper sandy beach starts from Broughty Ferry and continues North and East for many miles on the North side of the Tay Estuary. After our swim we headed there. Sand was blowing in a stiff breeze, but someone had brought a tent. I gratefully clambered inside, along with four or five others. It’s a bit of a squash, but luckily I had some resources in the form of a flask of hot chocolate and a large bar of fruit and nut. I explained to the others that fruit and nut chocolate counts towards one’s five a day. I shared out the goodies and everyone seems contented.
Outside, meanwhile, more hardy souls had built a bonfire. As the sun went down and the wind dropped, we all enjoyed some simple food and drinks around the fire.
Our first spoonful on the pudding journey is a delicious one. What better place to start 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. Within this mission there are numerous aims required to bring about the detailed functioning of the better world that is being proposed.
Utopias and Ideals
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 whilst we try to get to the pragmatics in this book, we need to keep an eye on the ideals as well. Indeed, 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.)
Origins of Utopia
Beyond that simple sorting of the idealistic and the pragmatic, there is a mass of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that 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 this 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.
Some suggest that More’s work was in some ways a practical joke. We have to remember though how dangerous publishing such a work must have been in the time and place where More lived. Whatever his intent, he has left us something of immense value.
Golden Age — Looking Back
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. Nonetheless, a lot of Western thinking has been about trying to regain something that has been lost. In the meantime, paradise is delayed.
The christian tradition has a problem with trying to re-create Eden, because of the Fall. 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
Some authors set aside notions 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 myth of Cockaigne that has given this book its title 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. And, well, that three miles of rice pudding. Sometimes utopias are designed by people of an especially dreamy and useless sort, not dealing with people as they really are. Cockaigne, for all its subversive cheek, recognises 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’.
Golden Age — Looking Forward
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. Our starting place in Cockaigne is 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. The little story at the head of this chapter plays on themes of connection.
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 says:
‘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.)
Three Utopias
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.
Privatopia
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.
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 des