Somewhere Over the Rainbow

‘People who have made up their minds to rush headlong” down one road, avowed Raphael, a character invented by Thomas More in 1516 to report on the strange happenings of a distant island, “are never pleased with the man [who] tells them they are on the wrong course.” Raphael was mistaken, for his report of the island, which More called “Utopia,” has pleased the world ever since. To be sure, over the last five centuries, the literature on Utopia has gone far beyond More. He gave us a term and place, but utopia has come to designate a vast and bewildering series of plans and notions, many of which existed well before him.

Utopias are more than foggy expressions of perpetual longing; they address time and place and often protest against specific injustices. Before Raphael turned to his tale of Utopia, he decr1768252448crime. “It would be much better to enable every man to earn his living,” he writes, but rapacious gentry, who found raising sheep more profitable than collecting rents, evicted men from fields and turned them into beggars and robbers. Hanging thieves, Raphael declaimed, “may look superficially like justice, but in reality it is neither just nor practical.”

Herein lies a paradox of utopian literature: Utopias are not only utopian. Situated though they may be in a distant island or future, utopias also damn the contemporary world and its ills. Of course, if this is all they did, they would not differ from social criticism. Utopias straddle two worlds, this one and another. While prefacing his work with cutting remarks about poverty and punishment in the England of his day, More paints an unearthly portrait of life on Utopia. There is no “want” since “there is plenty of everything.” Men “live joyfully and peacefully, free from all anxieties, and without worries about making a living.” Money has disappeared, and gold and silver are scorned as useless metals. To express their contempt for these precious substances, Raphael explains, the Utopians came up with a plan that may seem “ridiculous to us, because we prize gold so highly.” The Utopians make their chamber pots out of gold.

Utopian thought and experiments shifted gears after More, so that by the 19th century, utopian impulses intersected with socialist ideas and triggered an outpouring not only of utopian theories, but of ideal communities-from Brook’s Farm outside of Boston to Llano del Rio outside of Los Angeles. In fact, North America proved to be a favored location for utopian experiments and novels. Edward Bellamy’s 1888 “Looking Backward,” a 19th-century bestseller that has never been out of print, exemplified these utopian energies; it tapped a discontent with industrial America, as well as a longing for a society in which fraternity and equality were not mere phrases but reality.

The 20th century, however, proved more forbidding for utopianism. Except in 1917 at the time of the Russian Revolution and in the 1920s with the Surrealists and perhaps in the 1960s, utopianism seemed spent, if not defeated by murderous and authoritarian states. If the 16th century gave us the term utopia, the 20th added dystopia or negative utopia, such as the universes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984.”

Yet is dystopia the opposite of utopia-in the same way that slavery is the opposite of freedom-or does dystopia grow out of utopia? Few would claim that freedom leads to slavery, but many do argue that utopia leads to dystopia, or that little distinguishes the two in the first place. This lavish volume, “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World,” the catalog for an exhibit mounted at the New York Public Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, generally seconds the opinion that utopia spells totalitarianism. Under the rubric of “the search for an ideal society,” the exhibit and book include anti-Semitic posters and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Totalitarianism, writes Frederic Rouvillois, one of the contributors to this volume, is nothing but “the tragic execution of the utopian dream,” an unfair comment about the dream and the dreamers of a perfect society. Utopias, however unappealing they sometimes are, cannot be lumped together with genocidal states, as if something linked a Nazi concentration camp (represented in this volume by an inmate’s etchings of Dachau) and an Israeli kibbutz (represented by a photo of its nursery school teacher and her charges). If these are both utopian, then the word is meaningless. In addition, More, Bellamy and a host of other utopians like Charles Fourier were gentle men with gentle ideas. In More’s island, war was despised as “an activity fit only for beasts.” In Bellamy’s utopia, compassion was extended toward all creatures, even animals, giving rise to vegetarianism. These notions are hardly comparable to the Nazi idea of Aryan supremacy and the elimination of “lesser” races.

To be sure, as Lewis Mumford justly commented years ago in his “Story of Utopias,” many utopias are dictatorial and inhospitable. Even More described seating plans at the communal meals in his Utopia, the order of food and conversation, which begins with the “elders” introducing a topic for discussion. The imaginative Fourier adored details, setting out the composition of his community, which in one version had nine groups of nine eating at three tables in each of three dining rooms with meals at five different hours of the day. Bellamy described the workforce of the future as if it were an army with ranks and uniforms. More often than not, the strength and weakness of many utopias coincide. Utopian authors express both an unleashed imagination about a liberated humanity and boundless enthusiasm for specifying what this humanity should be doing. On one hand, they offer sketches of superior societies of abundance, peace and fraternity; on the other, they connect every dot and color in every square.

The conflation of utopianism and totalitarianism, if misguided, does, however, raise the question of what a utopia is. Unfortunately, “Utopia” does not further our understanding. The book begins by surveying mythological and biblical ideas of paradise, moves on to the medieval notions of a Christian good government and takes up the exploration of the New World with its attendant ideas of a promised land. It discusses the French Revolution and 19th-century socialism and utopian communities, and it takes up utopianism in the 20th century, including dystopias, art movements such as Russian constructivism, technological and urban development (including Lewis Hines’ photos of New York City) and contemporary planned communities. The capaciousness is exhilarating; anyone can find something of interest in this volume.

But if everything considered here-from Plato’s “Republic” and St. Augustine’s “City of God” to maps of the New World, the robot from Fritz Lang’s movie “Metropolis,” the Gulag, the Empire State Building, the 1963 March on Washington and Disney’s town, Celebration-is utopian, what, then, is not?

We live in a post-utopian age. Few harbor the belief that the future will be radically superior to the present, and we meet utopian sentiments with cynicism. Nevertheless, as the New York and Paris exhibitions, this volume and other recent writings suggest, utopianism continues to strike a sympathetic chord, the feeling that without utopian hope, the future looks gray. Even those who savage utopias have second thoughts. It is usually forgotten that Huxley, the author one of the great 20th-century dystopias, “Brave New World,” later wrote a utopian novel, “Island.” In his mythic island, Pala, a local explains: “We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets” will make us happy. “And we don’t squander our resources “preparing for World War III” or for “Local War MMMCCCIII.” Nor do we have “Christian pie in the sky” or “Communist pie in the twenty-second century.” We are “just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now.” Perhaps we can learn from Huxley: The path leads not only from utopia to dystopia, but back again. *