Soul of the Future: Utopia or Oblivion

A continuing series...

Though H.G. Wells first articulated it for modern times, and the Bomb made it a real possibility, apocalypse as a story is at least as old as the Bible.  But so, too, is its opposite:the story of paradise. The western Bible begins with the Creation and the Garden of Eden, and ends with the Earthly Heaven after the Last Judgment.

As a literary form (as a tale in writing), the story of paradise on Earth is the older, at least in the form we call utopias, after the prototype with that title by Thomas Moore in the 16th century.

The form which utopias take has changed.  From an isolated and separated but nearly ideal society--usually on an undiscovered island or hidden land--it became a society of the future, or on another planet, or in a parallel reality.  These were all locations in 20th century utopian novels by, once again, H.G. Wells.

Wells also insisted on utopia as a better but not perfect society, and one that changed itself to become better--a "kinetic utopia" as he called it.

Utopian tales led to stories in which societies became far worse: a story form called "anti-utopia" or more often now, a dystopia.

For stories of apparent opposite extremes, utopias and dystopias are closely related.  Most utopias were motivated by what their writers saw was wrong with existing societies, the dystopias of the times.  Utopias were veiled criticisms of existing societies, especially when opposing one's own government and society was too dangerous to do overtly.

The dystopias of stories, on the other hand, were often utopias gone wrong.  Some dystopias were meant as critiques of fictional utopias, showing that instead of a better future, they were more likely to create a much worse one.  This also suggests an overall problem with both types of stories: one person's utopia might well be another person's dystopia.  This is also a feature of politics and the real world.

Some dystopian stories were in fact critiques of actual societies purporting to be utopias-in-the-making, at least partially.  Probably the best example of this is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, critiquing features of the Soviet state. (Not coincidentally perhaps, Zamyatin also wrote one of the most perceptive appreciations of H.G. Wells.)  Dystopian stories may even describe a future that already exists somewhere, though unfamiliar to most readers.

Underlying many utopias and dystopias alike is the question of equity and inequities, which is a conspicuous factor in an even deeper question: what does it mean to be human, and how does a human society express that?

Many utopian and dystopian stories accented one particular solution or flaw, but in general both types of stories divided on the question of modern technologies. There are utopias based on the rejection of technologies (classic examples include Samuel Butler's Erewhon and William Morris' News From Nowhere), and there are dystopias or post-apocalyptic futures that have little technology left.  Equally there are both utopias and dystopias enabled by high techology.

Dystopias based on techologies are the most familiar.  Either technologies are too dominant in a wealthy society (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World)  or technologies are used by the powerful few to dominate a society of the many deprived (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.)  Whether uniformly prosperous or a mix of elite and relative poor, technological dystopias institutionalize too much control, either by the machines themselves, or of the many by the few.  In all cases they lead to soulless lives, while ruining (or simply abandoning) the natural world.  A variation of this story is dominance by a particular technology, like computers or robots.

Too little technology can also result in the few who control what technology and resources survive, cruelly dominating the many.  The result is often a kind of Dark Ages model, of warlords in a form of feudal relationship with the downtrodden.  Various aspects of this model play out in, for example, the middle section of the 1936 Things To Come film as well as more recent movies like The Postman and The Hunger Games series.

Things To Come is also a classic example of another relationship: the utopia that comes after apocalypse and dystopia.  In fact, this movie contains three alternatives in its three parts.  In the first part, set at Christmas 1940, a modern city is bombed from the air, starting a mechanized war that goes on for decades.  No large cities had yet been bombed in this way in 1936, and these scenes eerily presage the London Blitz. The film's second section presents a post-apocalyptic dystopia, devastated and plague-ridden, ruled by a warlord called the Boss.  The third section depicts the building of a technological utopia.

Apocalyptic and dystopian stories can function as cautionary tales: they tell us what to avoid.  Apart from our frequent failure to avoid doing in the real world what such stories in the past warned us against, the dystopian mode is insufficient.  It suggests what could go wrong.  But it does not offer a vision to emulate, that  may serve as motivation in making a better future.  That's the job of utopias.

Wells wrote of utopias enabled by technology (though he also wrote dystopias caused by the misuse of technologies.)  But these utopias are perhaps more familiar as stories told in advertisements, promotional films and speeches on the glories of progress.  Worlds Fairs--especially the famous 1939 New York Worlds Fair-- can be seen as three-dimensional stories of utopia enabled by technologies. (The look of the Fair was influenced by the utopian city of Things To Come.)

For our time there is, as far as I know, only one major example of a utopian future enabled by technologies: the Star Trek saga.  It is known around the world, and goes far beyond technology itself, or any other such utopian story, to model and embody the process of making a better future.

Though the utopia based on rejection of technologies has its most famous origins in England, in its forms most relevant to the actual future it is characteristically American.  Even actual utopian communities (such as the New England Brooks Farm experiment in the time of Emerson and Hawthorne) were established based at least partly on this rejection.

But in a larger sense this utopian idea can be said to have arisen from the essence of America, beginning in the Elizabethan Age when the New World of the Americas was, to Europeans, the embodiment of utopia.

But perhaps the most potent myth for the actual human future arose in America at a peculiar historical time.  In the late 19th century, just as H.G. Wells was imagining his Time Machine in England, the United States was at the point of finally and tragically ending its uneasy balance between the land of natural bounty with the cultures that lived within that context, and the machine-dominated urban civilization largely imported from England and Europe.

It was the last moment that at least a few indigenous peoples existed in America with their cultures intact, in the final free remnants of their lands, in the same country that was building great cities of iron and steel.  The last clash led to the symbolic expression of the lost and future utopia of America called the Ghost Dance.

It is my belief, and the main thesis of this project, that both of these utopian visions are crucial to envisioning and enacting a hopeful future in our real world. That a synthesis of their best elements must be achieved to even have a human future.

For with the nuclear age, and now even more clearly in the climate crisis age, the alternate if interpenetrating extremes of possible futures have become a binary choice.  We will have utopia (a much better and more just society) or we will have apocalypse. Or as Buckminster Fuller said in the 1960s: utopia or oblivion. For not to go in one direction is to go in the other.

Our leading utopian storyteller today, Kim Stanley Robinson, has recently taken to commenting that our future prospects are so dire that survival without a major extinction event constitutes a utopian vision.  In other words, utopia is defined as simply avoiding apocalypse.

But even to get there requires extensive and even basic change.  To get there wisely requires imagination and evaluation.  So it seems to me still worthwhile to examine these two basic visions for a better future: Star Trek, as expressed in the initial or Gene Roddenberry era of its television and film stories, and the Ghost Dance, as it has been expressed since in the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and Ursula LeGuin, for example.

So next time, we start with Star Trek.