Utopia in the Age of Uncertainty

The lives of even the happiest people among us (or, by a common and somewhat envy-tainted opinion of the unhappy, the luckiest) are anything but trouble-free. Few of us are ready to declare that everything in their life works as they would like it to work - and even those few know moments of doubt. We are all familiar with unpleasant and uncomfortable occasions when things or people cause us worries, we would not expect them, and certainly not wish them, to cause. What makes such adversities (‘blows of fate’, as we sometimes call them) particularly irksome is that they fall unannounced - we do not expect them to come, and quite often will not believe that they might be near. They hit us, as we say, ‘like bolts out of the blue’ - so we can’t take precautions and avert the catastrophe, since no one expects a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky . . .The suddenness of the blows, their irregularity, their nasty ability to appear from any direction - all that makes them unpredictable, and us defenseless. As long as dangers remain eminently free-floating, freakish and frivolous, we are their sitting targets - there is pretty little we can do, if anything at all, to prevent them. Such hopelessness is frightening. Uncertainty means fear. No wonder we dream, time and again, of a world with no accidents. A regular world. A predictable world. Not a poker-faced world; even if some philosophers, like leibniz, are right when they argue that even a ‘perfect world’ would not be perfect if it did not contain some measure of evil, at least let that evil be confined to enclosures that are reliably fenced off, well mapped and closely watched and guarded, so that one can know what is what, what is where and when one should expect something to happen - and be ready to meet it when it comes. To put it in a nutshell, we dream of a reliable world, one we can trust. A secure world.

‘Utopia’ is the name which, courtesy of Sir Thomas More, has commonly been given to such dreams since the sixteenth century; that is, since the time when the old and apparently timeless routines began to fall apart, when old habits and conventions started to show their age and rituals their seediness, when violence became rife (or that it was how people tended to explain the profusion of unorthodox demands and actions they were not accustomed to, and which the powers they had heretofore believed to be omnipotent found too unruly and/or too unwieldy to be held in check, and too potent and intractable to be tamed in the old and apparently tested ways). When Sir Thomas More penned his blueprint for a world free from unpredictable threats, improvisation and experimentation fraught with risks and errors were fast becoming the order of the day.

Sir Thomas knew only too well that as much as it was a design for the setting of the good life, his blueprint for a world cleansed of insecurity and unanchored fears was only a dream: he called that blueprint ‘utopia’, hinting Simultaneously at two Greek words: eutopia, that is ‘good place’, and utopia, which meant ‘nowhere’. His numerous followers and imitators, however, were more resolute or less cautious. They lived in a world already confident, rightly or wrongly and for better or worse, that it had the sagacity needed to design a preferable, fear-free world, and the acumen required to lift the unreasonable ‘is’ to the level of the reason-dictated ‘ought’. That confidence gave them the courage and the gumption to try both.

For the next few centuries, the modern world was to be an optimistic world; a world-living-towards-utopia. It was also to be a world believing that a society without utopia in not liveable, and consequently a life without utopia is not worth living. If in doubt, one could always rely on the authority of the brightest and most adored minds around. For instance, on Oscar Wilde:

“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 realization of Utopias.”

With the benefit of a hindsight, one is inclined to correct the last sentence, though - and this on two accounts. First, progress was a chase after utopias, rather than their realization. Utopias played the role of a dummy rabbit - ferociously pursued but never caught by racing dogs. And second: most of the time, the movement called ‘progress’ was more an effort to run away from failed utopias than an effort to catch up with utopias not yet experienced; a run away from the ‘not as good as expected’, rather than a run from the ‘good’ to the ‘better’; an effort spurred by past frustrations rather than by future bliss. Realities declared to be ‘realizations’ of utopias were more often than not found to be ugly caricatures of dreams, and not the dreamt- of paradise. The overwhelming reason to ‘set sail’ again was an aversion to what had been done, rather than the attraction of what might yet be done . . .

From across the Channel came an opinion which chimed well with that of Oscar Wilde, set down by another wise man, Anatole France:

“Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city . . . Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

Evidently, at the time of Anatole France’s birth, utopias had him tied so firmly into public awareness and the pursuits of day-to-day life that human existence without utopia appeared to the French writer to be not only inferior and terminally flawed, but downright unimaginable. It seemed obvious to Anatole France, as it did to many of his contemporaries, that even the troglodytes had to dream their utopias so that we might no longer live in caves . . . How indeed, Anatole France would ask, could we otherwise be able to stroll along Baron Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards? There could be no ‘first city’ unless the ‘utopia of a city’ had preceded its building! At all times we tend to project our own way of life onto other life forms if we wish to understand them - and so, to the generations tutored and groomed to be pulled by as yet untested utopias and pushed by already discredited ones, such a question would have seemed purely rhetorical, and its truth all but pleonastic . . .And yet, contrary to the opinion voiced by Anatole France and grounded in his contemporaries’ common sense, utopias were born together with modernity and only In the modern atmosphere were they able to breathe.

First and foremost, a utopia is an image of another universe, different from the universe one knows or knows of. In addition, it anticipates a universe originated entirely by human wisdom and devotion. But the idea that human beings can replace the world-that-is with another and different world, a world entirely of their own making, was almost wholly absent from human thought before the advent of modern times.

The grindingly monotonous self-reproduction of premodern forms of human life, subject only to changes too sluggish to be noted, gave little inspiration and even less encouragement to ruminations on alternative forms of human life on earth, except in the shape of apocalypses or the last judgment, both of them of divine provenance. To take the human imagination to the drawing board at which the first utopias were sketched, an accelerating collapse of the human world’s self-reproductive capacity was needed; a kind of collapse that went down in history as the birth of the modern era.

To be born, the utopian dream needed two conditions. First, an overwhelming (even if diffuse and as yet inarticulate) feeling that the world was not functioning properly and was unlikely to be set right without a thorough over haul. Second, the confidence in human potency to rise to the task, a belief that ‘we, humans, can do it’, armed as we are with reason which can spy out what is wrong with the world and find out what to use in replacing its diseased parts, as well as with an ability to construct the tools and weapons required for grafting such designs onto human reality. In short, confidence was needed that under human management the world could be put into a shape more suitable for the satisfaction of human needs - whatever those needs already were or might yet become.

We may say that if the premodern posture towards the world was akin to that of a gamekeeper, it was the gardener’s attitude that would best serve as a metaphor for the modern worldview and practice.

The main task of a gamekeeper is to defend the land assigned to his wardenship against all human interference, in order to defend and preserve, so to speak, its ‘natural balance’, that incarnation of God’s or Nature’s infinite wisdom. The gamekeeper’s task is promptly to discover and disable the snares set by poachers and to prevent alien, Illegitimate hunters from trespassing — lest the perpetuation of that ‘natural balance’ be jeopardized. The game keeper’s services rest on the belief that things are at their best when they are not tinkered with; in premodern times they rested on the belief that the world was a divine chain of being in which every creature had its rightful and useful place, even if human mental abilities were too limited to comprehend the wisdom, harmony and orderliness of God’s design.

Not so the gardener; he assumes that there would be no order in the world at all (or at least in the small part of that world entrusted to his wardenship) were it not for his constant attention and effort. The gardener knows better what kinds of plants should, and what sorts of plants should not grow in the plot under his care. He first works out the desirable arrangement in his head, and then sees to it that this image is engraved on the plot. He forces his preconceived design on the plot by encouraging the growth of the right types of plants (mostly the plants he himself has sown or planted) and uprooting and destroying all other plants, now renamed ‘weeds’, whose uninvited and unwanted presence, unwanted because uninvited, can’t be squared with the overall harmony of the design.

It is the gardeners who tend to be the keenest and expert (one is tempted to say, professional) utopia-makers.

It is at the gardeners’ image of ideal harmony, first laid out in blueprint in their heads, that ‘the gardens always land’, a prototype for the way in which humanity, to recall Oscar Wilde’s postulate, would tend to land in the country called ‘utopia’.

If one hears today phrases like ‘the demise of utopia’, or ‘the end of utopia’, or ‘the fading of the utopian imagination’, sprinkled over contemporary debates densely enough to take root in common sense and so be taken as self-evident, it is because the posture of the gardener is nowadays giving way to that of the hunter.

Unlike the two types that happened to prevail before his tenure started, the hunter could not care less about the overall ‘balance of things’, whether ‘natural’ or designed and contrived. The sole task hunters pursue is another ‘kill’, big enough to fill their game-bags to capacity. Most certainly, they would not consider it to be their duty to make sure that the supply of game roaming in the forest will be replenished after (and despite) their hunt. If the woods have been emptied of game due to a particularly profitable escapade, hunters may move to another relatively unspoiled wilderness, still teeming with would-be hunting trophies. It may occur to them that sometime, in a distant and still undefined future, the planet might run out of undepleted forests; but if it does, they wouldn’t see it as an immediate worry - and certainly not as their worry. Such a distant prospect will not after all jeopardize the results of the current hunt, or the next one, and so surely there is nothing in it to oblige me, just one single hunter among many, or us, just one single hunting association among many, to ponder, let alone do something about it.

― Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty.