So let’s talk more about utopia.
Thomas More’s Utopia 🤣
Utopia is a very clever pun coined by More. It is a play on the Greek “eutopia” or good place, with the U making the meaning no place.
An imaginary good place.
And “topia” is also the root of “topic”, the word for an idea or a theme.
So a utopia is an imaginary good place about a single idea.
Thomas More’s Utopia is an island state that has abolished private property to live communally. It’s often called the pre-cursor to communism.
A few centuries later John Stuart Mill, a founding philosopher of liberalism, which much very believes in private property, called More’s Utopia a “dystopia”, a play on the Greek term for disorder.
(Yes…liberals literally invented the idea of dystopia to describe how horrified they were by the idea of not being allowed to own stuff 🤣)
So we get these two ideas utopia / dystopia that are the same thing seen from different perspectives.
An imaginary place built on a single idea, a good place to some, a bad place to others.
One man’s utopia is another woman’s dystopia.
Like The Handmaid’s Tale. One of the great modern dystopias for anyone who respects the rights of women. But for the kind of men who dream of having a tradwife and listen to too much Jordan Peterson it’s their utopia.
Or for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was the brutal loss of rights of women in the Iranian revolution that inspired Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction.
And the recognition that the same could happen in the United States. Iranian Fundamentalist Islamism and American Evangelical Christianity are exactly the same thing, in two different nations.
When Handmaid’s Tale was published it seemed unlikely Evangelicals could take over America. Now they run the Trump regieme and have declared a lunatic crusade on their Islamist cousins.
So I think Utopia / Dystopia are less about imaginary futures, than about very real anxieties about Other People’s ideas having too much power.
And maybe a reminder that relativism isn’t always a good idea. Some ideas, like religious fundamentalism, really are worse than better ideas like liberal demicracy. And even good ideas like liberalism could be improved with better ideas
like communism.
Damien Walter 