Four Millennia of Literary Utopias: From Plato to Orwell

by J. Lawrence Scholer

“‘What country can this be?’ said one to the other. ‘It must be unknown to the rest of the world, because everything is so different from what we are used to. It is probably the country where all goes well; for there must obviously be some such place. And whatever Professor Pangloss might say, I often noticed that all went badly in Westphalia.’”

That passage, spoken by Candide in Voltaire’s satire of the same name, reflects Candide’s disbelief upon visiting Eldorado deep in the Amazon. The optimism Candide once embraced is admirable, but he quickly rejects it when he sees what is truly the best of all possible worlds. The women are amazingly attractive, the life expectancy is more than double the norm in Europe, and children play with gold nuggets and precious gems in the streets as if they were merely pebbles.

Eldorado, of course, does not exist, but the utopian vision embodied in it exists in the mind of anyone who has desired to make the world a better place. In The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey has compiled four millennia worth of idealism and desire. This desire is ubiquitous, he writes. “Anyone who is capable of love must at some time have wanted the world to be a better place, for we all want our loved ones to live free of suffering, injustice, and heartbreak.” The problem with many utopias, though, is that they only add to the human suffering.

“Utopia is where we store our hopes of happiness,” writes Carey. Utopias, then, must be an anthology of around 100 hopes of happiness from the past. What emerges, though, is not a collective call for charity and goodwill and change for the better, but something more Machiavellian. Many authors will stop at nothing to achieve their ends. That utopians seek to improve the world using eugenics and genocide seems to undermine their original goal. Utopias, for all their connotations of selflessness, tend to be extremely selfish endeavors.

The problem with utopias is that they require a complete metamorphosis of the world. “[Utopias] aim at a new world, but must destroy the old,” writes Carey. Utopians view much of the world as human constructs which can be changed. However, to change such constructs humans themselves must also be completely changed or, most easily, eliminated. “In a utopia real people cannot exist, for the very obvious reason that real people are what constitute the world that we know, and it is that world that every utopia is designed to replace,” writes Carey.

Of the hundred or so utopias in Carey’s anthology, no two are alike, although classifications do become apparent. The utopias range from sensible and reasonable to truly bizarre. Many authors seem obsessed with height‹as if the taller the population is, the better the society. Others focus on free love, based on the premise that passion is natural and must not be bound by traditional morals. Still, other utopias seem relevant to the present day, with talk of cloning and genetic engineering. Some utopias seem to arise out of the author’s own shortcomings. Fourier’s world of free love is nothing too revolutionary, but it becomes more interesting when one learns that Fourier was a lonely man and probably never had any sexual relationship.

If Women Ruled

In 1995, the Women’s Communication Centre distributed over four million forms and questionnaires to women across the United Kingdom. The forms simply asked, “What do you want?” While the results varied greatly, a great many answers concerned the subservience women felt to men and called for more than equality. A few of the responses:

“Contraceptive pills for men.”

“How is it that men get the world and I get this poxy little postcard? I want more power, more recognition that women are not a minority group, equal access.”

“I don’t want equality; I want women replacing men in all the power positions in the world and a total ban on arms and related equipment manufacture throughout the world. That is the only we are ever going to create peace and save the planet.”

“Equality, fair pay and for men to have babies and periods.”

In a similar bent, feminist utopias generally eliminate men or subjugate them to menial roles. Equality never enters the description. It seems women can either have total control or none at all; there is no middle ground. Many eliminate sex from their societies, allowing women to procreate virginally. Others have men giving birth and nursing babies. The women tend to be exceptionally attractive, but also more physically able than any male they come across.

The poem Woman Free by Elizabeth Wolstenholme describes how menstruation is a disease caused by brutal prehistoric rapes of women. Science, she claims, will cure women of this “disease.” She writes, “For carnal servitude left cruel stain, / And galls that fester from fleshy chain; / Unhealed the scars of man’s distempered greed, / The wounds of blind injustice still they bleed.” Wolstenholme explains herself using medical and sociological data with a feminist slant.

Other feminist utopias present a more futuristic world. In New Amazonia by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, men have been virtually removed from the society. New Amazonia is 25th century Ireland. Corbett imagines that the population of Ireland had been wiped out in the early 20th century when Ireland and France fought the British. Needing to repopulate the island, the British government stocked the island with extra British women (who outnumbered the men three to one). Women now control all facets of island life; men are allowed to live on the island but not to hold government office. And the women are amazingly beautiful and live into their hundreds while still looking as if they were forty. The women are also over seven feet tall.

The secret to the women’s youthful vigor and appearance is “nerve-rejuvenation” in which the nerve force of dogs is transferred to the awaiting women. The procedure is remarkably effective: “The sensation I experienced was little more than a pin-prick in intensity, but, before I left the building with Principal Gray, I felt ten years younger and stronger, and was proportionately elated at my good fortune.”

Wolstenholme wrote her poem four years after Corbett wrote New Amazonia. Both place a great deal of emphasis on science, but put it to different uses. Wolstenholme wants to almost de-gender women, stripping women of physical traits. Corbett feminizes women, keeping them beautiful into old age.

Euthanasia, Eugenics, and Genocide

Plato introduced the idea of eugenics in the Republic, and the concept has been put to insidious means since. Plato wrote, “The children of the better parents they will carry to the creche to be reared in the care of nurses living apart in a certain quarter of the city. Those of inferior parents, and any children of the rest that are born defective, will be hidden away, in some appropriate manner that must be kept secret . . .”

Hitler echoed Plato in his defense of eugenics in Nazi Germany. “Defective people” may not reproduce, and all who are defective are to be “mercilessly isolated.” Hitler’s utopian vision also led to the genocide of millions of Jews, saying that if Jews do not leave Europe, “I see no other solution but extermination.”

In The Fixed Period, Anthony Trollope outlines a plan to put older citizens to death. In Britannula, citizens are sent to “Colleges” when they reach the age of sixty-seven and a half. The selfishness of this euthanasia is shocking: “But we should save on an average £50 for each man and woman who had departed. When our population should have become a million, presuming that one only in fifty would have reached the desired age, the sum actually saved to the colony would amount to £1,000,000 a year. It would keep us out of debt, make for us our railways, render all our rivers navigable, construct our bridges, and leave us shortly the richest people on God’s earth! And this would be effected by a measure doing more good to the aged than to any other class of the community.”

Such a statement is so ridiculous that one would think that it would had to have been written tongue and cheek. Trollope wrote this when he was sixty-six, only a year and a half from when he might enter the “College.”

Hedonism, Drugs, and the Individual

In antiquity, Epicurus garnered quite a few followers. He saw the main obstacle to happiness as anxiety and taught his followers to live according to the “Four-part Cure.” This would facilitate happiness by eliminating pain and thus creating pleasure.

Hedonistic utopias seem to follow Epicurus’s formula, but they do it irresponsibly. The creators seem to forget that Epicurus did teach the idea of living prudently and that “the things which produce certain pleasures bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures.”

In the poem The Lotos-Eaters Tennyson uses the classical theme to describe a slothful and indolent state very contrary to Victorian mores. The Lotos-Eaters appear in the Odyssey and the fruit of the lotos, which the Lotos-Eaters eat, draws men away from their duties and causes them to lose all drive to go home to Ithaca. The society of the Lotos-Eaters is not a society at all, but a selfish and lonely non-community.

Tennyson depicts the change in men. He begins his poem with a strong leader exhorting his men toward land. “Courage,” he shouts. However, by the end of the poem, all good qualities have been abandoned for the sweet fruit of the lotos. The once brave leader now lies about lazily forgetful of his original mission: “Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore / Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; / Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”

The mariners waste away eating lotos, ignoring their responsibilities and junking their lives. This is, at best, an individual utopia, an escape from reality for the self.

In Brave New World, citizens are encouraged to take soma, a mild hallucinogenic drug. Soma, advocated by the government, keeps people happy and too lazy to consider the nature of the world in which the live. Huxley seriously considered the idea of escape from reality and utopia. In 1953, Huxley took mescaline, a hallucinogen, and decided that mescaline and other hallucinogens should be used for what they afforded the senses--a transcendence. “The longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul,” he wrote.

Drug-induced utopias do nothing to change the world, but they do change the individuals. The human becomes ignorant of his surroundings, goaded on by the false notion that one is transcending reality and reaching a higher state of perfection.

Nature

Solitude and nature seem propitious for founding a utopia. However, this solitude often leads to a distrust of other people. A utopia in nature is solitary.

Upon his shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe settles his desert island. He begins to farm and builds comfortable quarters. His lonely life goes very smoothly until he discovers the footprint of another man in the sand. He becomes very suspicious and paranoid: “I came home to my fortification, not feeling--the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps--and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.”

Just as Huxley thought hallucinogenic drugs could expand and open up perception, nature, too, has the ability to transcend normal sensory perceptions. The solitude of nature makes one more observant and conscious of his surroundings.

In Innisfree W.B. Yeats dreams of going to live alone by a lake. There he would take notice of things normally ignored: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, / Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; / There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, / And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”

Thoreau, perhaps, wrote the most influential and well-known back-to-nature utopia. His Walden describes his escape from society to the woods outside of Boston. His two years at Walden were marked by diligent observation. Unlike Yeats, Thoreau not only takes in the beauty of his surroundings, but also explores the more subtle intricacies of nature. His careful study of Walden Pond reveals uncanny characteristics. The stones around the pond appear as if they were placed there by human intervention, and he finds that the deepest part of the pond is the exact center strange.

Whereas Huxley advocated expanding sensory perceptions with hallucinogenic chemicals, Thoreau searches for more meaning quantitatively.

The nature utopias may seem to be the most peaceful, but they require an individual to remove himself from society. While these utopias do not impose beliefs on others like so many do, the rejection of society seems selfish and anti-social.

High Modernism

In Seeing Like a State James Scott defines the “high-modernist ideology” as “a strong, one might even say muscle bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.” If an authoritarian government implements this ideology, the results, writes Scott, are incredibly destructive.

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the inspiration for 1984 and Brave New World, deals, in part, with the elimination of human imagination. The utopia, “The One State,” urges citizens to be more machine-like: “Every spark of a dynamo is a spark of purest reason; every thrust of a piston is an immaculate syllogism.” What separates man from machines is man’s ability for fantasy. “Did you ever hear any cranes tossing restlessly in bed and sighing of nights, during the hours appointed for rest . . . However, you are not to blame for these things‹you are sick. And the name of your sickness is FANTASY!”

In the Piano Player, Kurt Vonnegut warns of an age dominated by computers and machines, which do the work of society and provide the unemployed, the majority of the population, with material goods. All citizens carry smart ID cards which contain an entire personal profile, from immunization records to measures of intelligence.

Four men take it upon themselves to destroy machines to prove that humans can live without them. “They would make the ruins a laboratory, a demonstration of how well and happily men could live with virtually no machines. They saw now the common man’s wisdom in wrecking partially everything.”

The men do destroy the machines, but are shocked when people try to build them back. They then surrender to authorities.

High modernist utopias are stratified. The common people are made slaves to science. They live meaningless lives--as machines and science have robbed them of their imaginations. The rulers, then, are free to do as they please, knowing that the masses are unable to dissent.

The Future of Nowhere

Utopias are imaginary “no-places.” The name, in fact, implies that they cannot exist. They were created by idealists who sought to form the world in a way appealing to them, regardless of the implications to humankind. Some of the greatest atrocities have been committed in the name of utopia.

The varieties of utopias in this anthology are a testament to the fact that no utopia has ever been successful. That there are so many ideas, and some so different, of ways to improve the world seems to suggests that most utopias are not created out of goodwill, but out of the author’s selfish desire. How else could you have two utopias that contrast so fiercely?

In the Philosophy of the Bedroom de Sade writes, “It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her.” Contrast that to the concept of sex in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. In this excerpt a male visit proposes intercourse to a Herlander: “’It seems to me a singularly foolish idea,’ she said calmly. ‘And if true, most disagreeable.’” Herlanders, by the way, are able to conceive children virginally.

But, as long as people have hope, they will continue to formulate new utopias. The question really comes back to the nature of man. Take the following exchange from Candide.

“‘Do you think,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other, as they do today, that they have always been false, cozening, faithless, ungrateful, thieving, weak, inconstant, mean-spirited, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloody, slanderous, debauched, fanatic, hypocritical, and stupid?’

“‘Do you think,’ said Martin, ‘that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they could find them?’

“‘Of course I do,’ said Candide.

“‘Well,’ said Martin, ‘if hawks have always had the same character, why should you suppose that men have changed theirs?’”

In this context, the future of utopias seems bleak. People have created utopias and watched them fail. People have created utopias and killed millions in the process. It seems as if man’s nature cannot fit within the constructs of a utopia.

But, as Carey points out, just as a man can be weak, thieving, and drug-addicted, he can also be benevolent, strong, and moral.

With this in mind, the quest for utopia does not seem wholly unreasonable. Perhaps, one day, thousands of years of idealism will pay off.