Utopia, a word compounded from the Greek by Sir Thomas More in
the sixteenth century, means No Placewhich is why Sir
Thomas chose it for his fanciful ideal society, one that had not yet come into
being anywhere on earth. It also carried, hiddenly, the sense of Eutopia (the
Greek prefix eu, attached to all things pleasant, as in euphoria) and was
intended to suggest a land both glad and good.
Sir Thomas envisioned material abundance sufficient for all,
so that no man will ask more than he needeth. For why should it be
thought that that man would ask more than enough, which is sure never to
lack? In a despotic agehe was executed as a martyr to his Catholic
faith by Henry VIIISir Thomas invented an elected officialdom so
organized as not to oppress the people by tyranny, and a governing
council where nothing foolish would ever be spoken. He mandated formal public
meals, half supper and half symposium, which would begin with readings
that pertaineth to good manners and virtue, followed by witty
talk, music, and the wafting of fragrant perfumes. His utopia was a wistful
fabrication: knowing it to be nothing more than a fiction, he nevertheless
longed for it.
Nearly five centuries later, our longing presses in the
opposite direction. If only utopia had been manifested nowhere, if only
utopia had never been realized in substance! The old adage applies: be careful
what you wish for, or you may get it. In the twentieth century, utopia came to
fruition twice, and twice turned out to be hell. In the new twenty-first
century, a dread utopia looms again. Perhaps it can be forestalled.
Consider the twentieth centurys twin utopias. Both were
dreams of the ideal, and both were politically rigid; the ideal always adheres
to a disciplined design. The first to be born was largely economic, promising
unlimited equality. Like Sir Thomas, it had its urtext, its manifesto, a lyrical
document promulgating the end of greed, the workers paradise, the
collective farm as pastoral idyll. Everythings changing for the
better, Isaac Babel mockingly described that dawning utopia (which
finally shot him at dawn), miraculous things are happening...express
trains, free food for children...youll have your diamond-studded
sky.
The last centurys second utopia, while it too had
economic goals, was primarily aesthetic in purpose, a painterly dream of a land
of perfect unanimity, with no discordant asymmetry. Nothing expressed this
artistry more harmoniously than the luminous films of Leni Riefenstahl, with
their orderly marches, their stirring music, their identically raised arms,
their unified adoration of the uniformed Leader, their brilliant lines of flags
in scarlet and black, emblazoned with the broken-legged cross.
Out of the egalitarian utopia came the gulag and millions of
corpses. Out of the aesthetic utopia came the chimneys and millions of corpses.
These utopias were modernisms industrial offspring: neither could have
been conceived without the relentless structure of the assembly line.
The utopia of the twenty-first century is, by contrast,
premodern; it has been visited upon us before, most acutely from the thirteenth
to the fifteenth centuries. This was the utopia of religious exclusivity: it
engaged in the murderous crusade, the Inquisition, the stake, the blood libel,
the pogrom, the forced conversion, the merciless expulsion, and all for the sake
of, and in the name of, the spiritual revelation of a salvational God. The
martyrs then were the victims. The martyrs now, under the dispensation of holy
jihad, are the perpetrators.
Utopia is the imposition of an ideal of purity. Masked as
inspiration, it programs civic conduct in conformity to a prescribed definition
of virtue; it demands compliance; it seeks ruthless perfectionism. A utopian
society, even when it pledges the abolition of tyranny, is tyrannys
dollhouse.
Let us imagine a different kind of polity: call it Messtopia,
meaning, in its careless way, Messy Place. It is characterized by a thousand
asymmetries, a thousand dissonances. No arms lift in unison; there is every
variety of dress and face. Since family resemblances are infrequent and
scattered, it is clear that this cannot be a kinship-based society. What rules
here is not blood but the rollicking and mysteriously workable compact of
messiness. Every taste, without interference, has its habitation and practice:
football fields for some, museums and concert halls for others. Rap vies with
Mozart. No religion is officially decreedas a consequence of which, the
range of religious preference is boundless. You are likely to see, on the same
street corner, the saffron-clad, the wicca, the black-hatted, the
Jesus-intoxicated. Eating habits too are limitless, and often enough as informal
as possible; all culinary styles are represented and lavishly accessible, a
telltale sign of decadence. Disagreements are conducted publicly in innumerable
forums, a cacophony of radio and television, newspapers and journals, and
electronic exchanges encompassing every conceivable opinion, whether
constructive or dire. Elections are vituperative and contentious (and sometime
contended). There is plenty of kitsch, a goodly amount of historical amnesia,
and schoolchildren who are noisier and looser in discipline than anywhere else
in the world. Conservatives and left-leaning thinkers are regularly in a
condition of mutual despising, yetso elastic and negligent is this
higgledy-piggledy politythey do not shoot each another.
Negligenceor, more radically, neglectis
Messtopias chief trait. No one troubles to require the citizenry to
behave alike or think alike. Childhood lasts longer in Messtopia than in any
other nation, encouraged by the notion that the young ought to be
carefreean egregious instance of neglect, especially as compared with
societies where children under twelve are organized for serious political
purposes, and are even urged to carry guns. Nothing exposes the depth of
Messtopias indifference to societal well-being than the lack of
regimentation in all aspects of life. In a more rationally designed and
conscientious polity, a poor boy from an undistinguished neighborhood, born into
an immigrant minority family, would never be permitted to rise to one of the
highest posts in the land. Such unopposed mobility, a salient symptom of
Messtopias heedlessness, is hardly to be found elsewhere.
All these mattersthese infamous freedoms of faith,
choice, opinion, inclination, and the restexplain why practicing utopians
nearly universally view Messtopia as a notoriously rowdy dystopia deserving of
erasure. We have witnessed, in the memory of the living, two perfected utopias;
two in a span of one hundred years are more than enough. Then hear this, Sir
Thomas: fie on utopia, hooray for dystopia! And three cheers for Messtopia, the
most scandalous dystopia of all!
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