Using Utopia is a review of Joad Raymond Wren – can a good society exist? | | Literary criticism

By meaning, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, the educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia must have appreciated the contradiction between these two new words: the Greek word “eu-topos”, meaning good place, and “ou-topos”, meaning no place at all. It can be a small warning against trying to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried often find the groups they founded end up in dysfunctional groups, strangely sexualized groups, or both.

In this intellectually diverting history, we begin, as we must, with Plato, with the zany advice of his Republic (“we must end the influence of poetry on women”). By keeping silent on Jesus’s potentially worst thoughts, we arrive at More’s utopia, where “nothing is hidden”, so that “public events are quickly monitored”. Renaissance great scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis presents a worthy scientific experiment – which, Wren astutely points out, may have inspired Wakanda in Marvel’s Black Panther films. The 17th-century Duchess of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess chosen by a world of science-loving hybrids. In the 1800s, Sarah Scott’s Millenium (sic) Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in the first world war.

Other methods are evident: many utopias use a plot device in which the narrator is accidentally or mysteriously transported to another world, and then observes how it works. Marriages are often dissolved, and children are raised together. And in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Back, Wren pointedly states, “there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here like so many utopias”.

Marriages are allowed, however, in Voyage en Icarie, by the 19th-century French socialist Étienne Cabet, who envisions a strictly controlled communism. In 1849 Cabet founded his model group, Icaria, in Illinois. Unfortunately, after a few years, “the people of Cabet were keeping their property; they were doing bad things like hunting and fishing, swearing, tobacco and alcohol; women were wearing cosmetics, jewels and perfumes.” Cabet’s response to these scandals was to insist on a strict constitution, and make himself president “for four years instead of one”. In the same way utopia always threatens to become tyrannical.

It is surprising that Wren never mentions the popular calculation with the idea of ​​utopia. In 1974, the American political scientist Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argues that a legitimate state is a “minimum” that guarantees property rights and security, and enforces contracts. People should be free to form whatever associations they like above them, as long as members are not coerced. But for Nozick, utopias are always compelling because not everyone can freely agree with their principles. “It’s useful to think of cavemen sitting together to think about what, at all times, will be the best group and plan to implement,” writes Nozick. “Doesn’t every reason that makes you smile involve us?”

Most of the utopias in Wren’s beautiful pamphlet, after all, are tragic. In Gilman’s Moving the Mountain, “There are no pets, because they destroy.” In Voyage en Icarie, “Decorative paintings contain important information, unlike abstract paintings.” Victorian artist William Morris, in News from Nowhere, describes an elite group of “samurai”, the nobles of his kind, who “must neither act nor sing…

But since utopias are essentially “the natural thinking machines of our minds”, Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some have been science fiction. He mentions here the “anarchist utopia” of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but perhaps the most popular genre of fiction in recent decades has been the series of cultural stories by Iain M Banks, which put a stable communist society in a place of mass mobilization.

However, things go awry all the time in this beautiful community, from attacks by unsympathetic humans, abusive AI, or strange artifacts from the past. Thus, the best utopian fiction can be anti-utopian; at its highest level of practice, perhaps, utopia disappears in the great flow of literature itself.