I spent the last year consumed by utopias. Or at least the idea of utopia, of people imagining an idealized place and trying to make it a reality. If you listened to Nice Try!
It seemed like everywhere I looked in , there was a story about a utopia staring back at me. When North Korea completed its new planned town of Samjiyon, state media billed it as a socialist utopia. In a dark year, we looked for something brighter. The utopian stories I came across while researching Nice Try! But really, they were stories about about justice, liberation, free will, freedom of thought, happiness, wealth, agency, and ideology.
They were also cautionary tales about the consequences of dogmatic prescriptions for how to live and the hubris of individuals who think they alone have the ability to create utopia.
New Harmony , a small town in southern Indiana, became the site of two utopian experiments in the s. The first, founded by a Christian Perfectionist sect, failed after hostility from their neighbors and remoteness from like-minded groups forced them to relocate.
Utopia is hard work, after all. Casting a wide net to bring more bodies to the town led to ideological differences that ultimately doomed the experiment. The issue of like-mindedness in utopias is a complicated one. Most of the main characters are working hard for an outcome they honestly believe in; allowing them each a voice gives the reader a chance to identify with each and, hopefully, engage more deeply on these difficult questions. Robert Charles Wilson: The Affinities is a book about the utopian impulse, of which I feel we should be skeptical but not dismissive.
The book holds open the possibility of even newer, more radical communal inventions. There is a lot of anti-utopian science fiction, in which we are shown a world which seems utopian but turns out secretly to be achieved through oppression or brainwashing etc.
Looking at real history, that is how historical change tends to work, improvements on some fronts but with growing pains and trade-offs; for example, how industrialization let people own more goods and travel more freely, but lengthened the work week and lowered life expectancy, gain and loss together. At the same time, without expecting perfect, we need to keep demanding better, and better, and better. Robert Charles Wilson: Seems to me that utopia—if we define utopia as a set of best practices for enabling justice, fairness, freedom, and prosperity across the human community in its broadest sense—is more likely a landscape of possibilities than a single fixed system.
Maybe utopia is like dessert: almost everybody wants one, but not everyone wants the same one, and only a generous selection is likely to satisfy the largest number of people. I hope Infomocracy brings readers to question their assumptions about democracy, nation-states, and government in general, to think creatively about all the other possible systems out there and the ways in which we might tinker with ours to make it more representative, equitable, informed, and participatory.
Ada Palmer: Lots of new, chewy ideas! Malka Older is a writer, humanitarian worker, and Ph. Ada Palmer is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas.
She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Robert Charles Wilson was born in California and grew up in Canada. He has won the John W. Campbell and Philip K. Dick awards, as well as the Hugo Award for Spin. I read Too Like the Lightning and I thought it was a jewel.
But these assumptions are largely incorrect. Utopianism is the lifeblood of social change, and has already inspired countless individuals and movements to change the world for the better. Utopianism is in fact a philosophy that encompasses a variety of ways of thinking about or attempting to create a better society. It begins with the seemingly simple yet powerful declaration that the present is inadequate and that things can be otherwise. Present in communities, social movements, and political discourse, it critiques society and creatively projects futures free of the strangleholds of the time.
Put simply, it embodies a longstanding human impulse towards self-improvement. Utopianism is manifest in countless historical examples of those that have dared to challenge the status quo and assert that things can — and indeed, must — change. Healthcare, education, and meaningful employment are available to all.
Extreme wealth disparities have been eradicated through income caps and minimum earnings schemes. But judging from the way she has been promoting the Green New Deal, she certainly sees the value in painting visions of utopia.
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