Snarl

During times of economic hardship, the word “Utopian” emerges, usually spat out as a curse. The idea of a harmonious social and political order has devolved into a contemptible pipedream of radicals and revolutionaries. When I recently suggested that the enormous taxpayer funds spent to reinvigorate the economy might be better used helping the now insolvent common man — the taxpayer — with his upside-down mortgages and in retraining him for new and emerging technologies a listener responded with a snarl, “That’s utopian!” His loathing for my proposal was evident: his posture threatened combat, his face contorted in loathing. “Utopian” was evidently, to him, not a pleasant concept. How did a word suggesting a place of political, social, and economic perfection come to such low regard?

Sir Thomas More invented the word, loosely translated from Greek as “No place,” for his imaginary city in his book Utopia in 1516. Five hundred years later the rugged individualist American acquires his disdain for all things Utopian from the welfare state described by More and Utopian dreamers before and since him. We are more comfortable with the heroic stature of an Ayn Rand protagonist than with the idea of the citizen as a minor function in a vast socio-economic machine. A lone person struggling against great odds to amass wealth and fame is a worthy hero to a culture coming of age in an environment of war and celebrity. In that mindset, a contented drone is nevertheless a drone. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), describing a dysfunctional utopian future, continues to sell while his Island (1962), chronicling a near-perfect society on a remote south-seas island, remains an out-of-print book discussed only among bibliophiles and daydreamers.

Plato’s Republic, written 2,000 years before More’s work, did nothing to promote perfect social order as an attainable goal. His perfect world, ruled by a philosopher-king who was a model for Ayn Rand’s heroic industrial magnate, fares better among readers in the western world, though his handling of women as state property and the use of slaves leaves many readers squirming with unease. His was a Spartan world where a socialist economy prevailed, children were wards of the state, and art censored. The Republic served as Plato’s personal fantasy. It benefits the philosopher-king but is no Utopia to women and slaves.

Saint Augustine, too, promoted a Utopian vision. His Heavenly City on earth led to the founding of religious settlements seeking a perfect society of like-minded pilgrims, but those…

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