Cities at the End of the World

Using Utopian and Dystopian Stories to Reflect Critically on our Political Beliefs, Communities, and Ways of Life

David J. Lorenzo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441142566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book undertakes a critical examination of contemporary political problems through discussions of three utopian and three dystopian texts. Selected stories from Morris, Orwell, More, Bellamy, Neville, and Zamyatin are used to generate questions about fundamental economic, political, and social problems, human nature, and conceptions of the good life. This unique work is an exceptional resource for all students of political philosophy and utopian literature, as well as for general readers interested in political affairs.

1

Introduction

Cities at the end of the world

Thinking through the fundamental elements of politics is always timely, but it is especially so now. Every 30 to 40 years nations rethink themselves. Understandings based on new experiences and events overthrow the prior cluster of views, which were themselves generated and shaped by the experiences of previous generations. The West in general and the United States in particular is now at one of these points. The rethinking generated in the 1960s, which itself replaced the views of the generation that experienced the Depression and World War II, is outmoded. The same is true of the variety of criticisms of this view. We no longer need to come to grips with the Cold War and Vietnam. We are dealing with the triumph of both sides of the culture wars—the right has prevailed in outlawing the consumption of most intoxicating substances, resulting in a high rate of incarceration and the perpetuation of drug wars. The left has triumphed in terms of redefining privacy and expression, ironically resulting in a reinforcement of capitalism’s privileging of individualism, a deterioration of public and social solidarity, and a fierce conflict with the government over security requirements in an age of possible terrorist threats.

Consequently, the dichotomies that generated political debates over the past several decades do not necessarily make sense of our political and social environments. Debates over foreign policy take place in the context of American unipolar dominance rather than a bipolar world. Rather than arguing over whether big government or the private sector can deal more effectively with the problems of generating economic growth, eliminating poverty, providing health care, and educating our children, we are faced with the failure of both to perform these tasks and the need to redefine economic well-being and the good life. The science fiction fantasies of computers and technology are now real, as are the economic possibilities of everyone living a relatively affluent life. We inhabit a more economically integrated and culturally pluralistic world than 40 years ago, all the while facing important problems involving pollution, the depletion of global resources, and probable climate change.

I propose that part of our confrontation with these problems be a reading and consideration of the utopian and dystopian stories that previously played important roles in fundamental political debates. The title of this book refers to the idea that utopian and dystopian stories often describe endings. “The ends of the world” refers importantly to frontiers, in that these stories exist at the limits of our imagination. Ends can also signify the completion of historical journeys, trips that can conclude badly or well. In yet another sense, endings can be the termination of things. Poverty, war, or alienation may cease to exist. But it could be that it is freedom, civilization, or the essential nature of humans that expires. Endings can be good or bad, the result of much hard work and planning, the culmination of a large process, or the outcome of a fortuitous or unfortunate accident. All are relevant to thinking about politics.

As exercises of imagination, accounts of completed journeys or processes and descriptions of how some things may cease to be, utopian and dystopian stories in particular address fundamental questions and dilemmas of life that are important to consideration of the issues and problems we now face. Most importantly, they address the problems of life lived collectively. They are concerned with the dilemmas of the city rather than of a scattered existence, of politics rather than just of individuals. In discussing cities at the end of the world, we engage in a conversation about fundamental political understandings and assumptions. What works and what doesn’t work economically, politically, and socially? What is relevant about human nature in the context of community life? What does it mean to live a good life in a polity? What problems of our shared existence can be solved and which must we live with or work around? How do we avoid tyranny, disorder, and terror? How might we live in peace, prosperity, and freedom?

Utopian and dystopian stories are therefore useful because in focusing on ends, they explore fundamental propositions and assumptions and raise these types of important questions in interesting and accessible ways. They also provide a foundational set of dichotomies that allows us to sharpen our vision and develop our critical capacities. On the one side are narratives that describe how we can provide ourselves with radically better lives. They portray societies in which people are secure, happy, and often (though not always) free. These stories allow us to contemplate whether problems and conditions we consider unsolvable might be subject to resolution. On the other side are stories that alert us to the fact that even the ordinary quest for a good life contains trends that can overwhelm us. They depict societies that allegedly provide justice, security, and freedom, but deliver instead a radically unsatisfying and usually terrifying existence.

Given the need to rethink our understanding of politics, a case could be made for only reading utopias. We wish, after all, to make politics and society better. Utopias provide models of the good state, a good economy, and more generally the good life. But one should not consider one set of stories without the other. Dystopias remind us that utopias can be cloaks for all sorts of political treachery. More’s Utopia may turn out like Zamyatin’s One State; Bellamy’s creation may lead us to the uncivilized conditions Neville describes. Rethinking requires not only models of what we desire and how to attain it, but also explorations of what we don’t want and how such undesirable situations may arise, given existing contexts.

As indicated above, these stories pose a plethora of useful, indeed crucial questions: What tasks should government perform? What do we fear most? Now that we have the technical means to live well physically, what constitutes the good life and how is that life related to our political and economic systems? Is the quest for a perfect place dangerous? What, at bottom, is human nature? Is it preset, formable, programmable? Is it good to be socially constructed, or should we somehow strive to preserve some sort of natural existence? Is the provision of material security conducive to order and the good life, or does it spur degeneration, a lack of discipline, and the loss of productivity? What accounts for disorder and are there ways of dramatically reducing the amount of disorder we experience? Is civilization something we should strive to maintain and push forward, or is it a dangerously artificial existence that empowers states and ultimately robs us of our humanity? Each of these questions in turn raises other questions and issues. What kind of government do we want? What type of economy? What type of good life? Can we eliminate parties, factions, and politics as usual? How should we deal with disorderly people? How do we motivate people to work, and do we need to do so? At what point do collective arrangements endanger the level of individual identity and freedom necessary to live a good and truly human life? What roles do justice, equality, and freedom play in our understanding of the good life?

There is no universally accepted set of answers to any of these questions. While I have my own favored positions, the intention of this book is not to persuade readers to adopt them. It would be a simpler and less contentious world if everyone did gravitate to the same answers. But that is not the world we live in. Rather, my purpose is to encourage readers to think about these questions anew as they pursue formal and informal educational endeavors. Being aware of where we stand, what assumptions we hold, what analyses we accept, what we fear most and desire most keenly is valuable knowledge to possess in a world of inescapable pluralism and inevitably knotty problems.

Discussing utopias and dystopias

Given these aims, this discussion has particular characteristics that differentiate it from other treatments of utopias and dystopias. It analyzes these stories as political literature; that is, it discusses them as examples of political philosophy. Unlike most brief academic studies, it addresses several stories rather than one; however, it does not seek to provide an encyclopedic overview of either genre.¹ It provides far more discussion of each story than is possible with such an approach. It is not a reader of these stories, nor does it contain long passages from them. It likewise does not set out to explore in depth the utopian or dystopian temperament or philosophical stance, but to grapple with the message of each story. In doing so, it covers stories that are written and set in a large variety of contexts, contain very different messages, and spin out disparate philosophies; it also addresses stories that are famous and lesser known. Set in chronological order, the stories discussed are Thomas More’s Utopia, Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Evgenie Zamyatin’s We, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This approach allows us room to investigate, compare, contrast, think about, and generally explore the questions these stories generate. Given that focus, we see that there are interesting similarities and differences among the stories. Both Utopia and News from Nowhere, for example, think that greed can be mastered. Likewise We and Nineteen Eighty-Four are concerned with outside interference in humans’ abilities to process information. But there is also a great deal of variety both within and across the genres. Neville is concerned by the potential loss of civilization, while Zamyatin fears that civilization may proceed too far. More and Bellamy argue that leisure is what allows humans to fulfill their potential, while Morris argues that it is labor that allows humans to construct themselves and Neville sees too much leisure as the enemy of civilization. Orwell fears the loss of rationality and the impact of that loss on individual autonomy, while Zamyatin depicts mathematical logic as potentially hegemonic and dangerous to such autonomy. More sees important improvements coming about through the training of people in morality, while Zamyatin and Orwell dread what might be done to the insides of people through attempts at programming them.

It is up to us to decide which of these positions to accept. Are institutional changes or attempts at programming and thereby socially constructing citizens the most important for positive change or the most important thing to fear? Is civilization good or bad for us as humans? Should we go forward or backward in our search for a better way of life? Does the provision of material security allow us to remove most problems and conflicts and set the stage for better, more cultured citizens, or does ease breed intractable problems of its own, including the loss of science and civilization and the dangerous empowerment of the state? Is it possible to have a collective economy and significant negative individual freedoms? One cannot have an informed view of politics without coming to grips with questions of this type and confronting the arguments and assumptions that underpin them.

The literature on utopias and dystopias

While I do not provide an exhaustive discussion of the literature on these genres, nor of the literature on the particular stories treated here, it is necessary to touch on some important questions regarding the nature of utopias and dystopias.

It is important to note that the very vocabulary by which utopian and dystopian stories are described is contested, as Levitas and Claeys among others have documented.² I provide a set of definitions to settle terms. As used here, utopian stories are tales told about imagined communities that provide through their organization of political, economic, and social matters a superior way of living when compared to contemporary communities. As Frye among others notes, the message of the utopian story is two-fold.³ First, in revealing the better community, such stories seek to delegitimize through comparison and often blunt condemnation the organization and living conditions of contemporary society. Second, these stories support fundamental alterations to society in the direction of the institutions and practices described in the utopian community. To reveal a utopian community as promising a better life is to attempt to persuade people to think about how the problems that community is said to resolve can be addressed concretely. Most famously, Bellamy’s Looking Backward became the catalyst for the formation of political clubs meant to initiate change.

Several related types of stories are loosely associated with the utopian genre. As defined here, dystopian stories are stories that serve as warnings regarding the future of contemporary society. They take what their authors perceive as problematic trends and by projecting those trends into the future (or onto another location) lay out their consequences in the form of societies that produce highly undesirable ways of life. Anti-utopias are a type of dystopian story whose warnings serve to oppose utopianism in both its literary and philosophical forms.⁴ That is, they oppose the projects of searching for and devising radically different and more perfect social, political, and economic institutions and of advocating fundamental changes in the ways we understand and organize our lives. Anti-utopian stories make good this opposition by depicting the unforeseen and perverse results of radical reform and by generally illustrating the futility of fundamental changes, thus employing important elements of conservative rhetoric.⁵ Dystopias, in general, warn us against what is already present in our society and deliver the message that the deepening of problematic trends must be resisted, possibly through radical reform. Anti-utopias identify radical change and the striving for perfection as one of the problematic trends. So where Nineteen Eighty-Four is a generic dystopia, Zamyatin’s We and Neville’s Isle of Pines are dystopias that take an anti-utopian form.

A final alternative form is a satirical utopia. This is a story of a community whose substance mirrors and distorts the institutions and practices of contemporary society for the purposes of ridicule. It does not, however, provide explicit ways of dealing with the absurdity of those institutions and practices. Such stories, therefore, perform the first function of utopian stories, but only implicitly perform the second and do so not by depicting a perfect society, but by painting a community that is manifestly undesirable. Its orientation toward change is more ambiguous than is the case with most utopian stories. Though not addressed at length here, I do on occasion reference Erewhon, which is a good example of a satirical utopia.

We can usefully generalize about these genres by observing that utopias emphasize the proposition that existing institutions are dysfunctional and the current understanding of the good life wrong, incomplete, or harmful. They reject the usual charge that to be utopian is to be impractical and usually criticize existing political, economic, and social institutions as unreasonable and contrary to common sense. Their authors claim to be the true realists and hold that conventional society is founded upon grave mistakes.⁶ They argue that the prevailing wisdom erroneously takes central problems and harmful conditions as natural or intractable, then point the way toward resolving...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Utopia
• 3 Isle of Pines
• 4 Looking Backward
• 5 News from Nowhere
• 6 We
• 7 Nineteen Eighty-Four
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index