When did utopia die?

When was the last time you saw a depiction of a utopia?

I can't think of any recent examples. There may be a few here and there, but on the whole, hopeful futures seem to have gone out of style.

Dystopias, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen. Whether it's through climate change disaster, global plague, nuclear war, alien invasion, or zombie apocalypse, we delight in imagining ways that the world as we know it could come to an end.

No news is good news

What does that say about humanity? Have we really lost all hope for a better future? Maybe we have and maybe we haven't, but it certainly seems like we've lost the hope of creating an ideal society.

It's not hard to see why. I don't need to tell anyone that in many areas, things are going badly. Some problems are perennial: war, famine, disease, poverty, and strife. We don't all suffer equally—many of us who live in the West are spared. Yet these evils remain in the world.

There are also new problems, of course. Climate change is probably the biggest and the worst of these. A major part of the issue is the inability to make enough people even take the threat seriously, because denial has become prevalent for both ideological reasons and reasons of self-interest among those who profit from the status quo.

I won't dwell on these issues. They're so well known that there's no need to rehash them. Going back to my point, can we still hope for a better future? Maybe wishing for utopia is too much. Our ambition could be lower. How about a world that's better in some respects, even if not all?

By that measure, things have already become better. It's just that a lot of progress is taken for granted. There's a "no news is good news" effect: We concentrate on the bad things which are threatening, while successes and avoided disasters often get ignored.

Just in my lifetime, for instance, since the 1980s minority groups in many countries have made great strides in achieving equal rights. This isn't to say that racial discrimination and other problems are solved, by any means, but our attitudes are much better than in past eras where prejudice was ubiquitous.

In the early 1970s, there were widespread fears that population growth would outstrip food supplies, causing massive starvation across the world. The Green Revolution ended that possibility, at least for the foreseeable future. Is it celebrated, though? How many people even know about it?

Famine hasn't entirely ceased to exist. That's a tragic reality. Yet it's nearly always an issue of food being withheld from politically powerless areas, rather than there not being enough to go around. We could already feed the world if we chose to. The issue is the political will, not the inability.

What happened to utopia?

So what happened to the idea of utopia? Well, one issue is the utopias themselves. It has to be admitted that many past proposals for utopia didn't age well. By modern standards, they weren't places that people would enjoy living in. Many dystopias were initially parodies of these flawed utopias, attacking them by drawing out and highlighting their negative implications.

For instance, the original Utopia by Thomas More had no private property and draconian laws. For example, the punishment for adultery was to be enslaved. Obviously, we now view this as unacceptably harsh.

That's one big issue with utopias: it's impossible to imagine a society that would please everybody, just as with real political systems. Socialists, liberals, anarchists, fascists, and others across the political spectrum dream of utopias which other people who don't share those ideologies would find to be horrific.

But although you can't please everyone—either in the real world or in fiction—does that mean there's nothing that has common appeal? I don't think so. You will find few people who hold forth in favor of poverty or disease (at least, for themselves).

Still, it has to be admitted that attempts to implement utopia in reality don't have a good track record. Communism promised a worker's paradise, and that didn't happen; it turned out to produce authoritarian, oppressive states. Then again, capitalism in reality also doesn't deliver everything its most ardent proponents promise.

So, should we just give up on the idea of utopia? Well, maybe not. It should, I agree, be approached with caution. Promises to produce an earthly paradise quickly or through draconian means have to be rejected, both for practical and moral reasons. The failure of past attempts should make us more cautious.

Maybe aiming for utopia is too ambitious. Even if we'll never make things perfect, we can keep striving to make things better, defining that in the broadest ways. There's still broad support for efforts to alleviate poverty, war, and diseases which still kill millions.

An unattainable goal, but still useful

However, that doesn't mean we should give up on utopia as a guiding principle. Does it have to mean a perfect paradise, or can it just be the best world we can realistically achieve? Perhaps it could just mean the best yet. Utopia may be an unattainable goal, but it can still be useful as an ideal to strive for.

If you look at the depiction of utopias (or dystopias, for that matter), their authors rarely provide any real detail about how this state of things was achieved. That's unsurprising, since if we knew how to do that, then someone would do it.

With the catastrophic failures of past utopian plans (mostly represented by communism, but also capitalism in certain respects), the idea has lost its cachet. It's unsurprising that many people look around at the sorry state of the world and the failure of past attempts to improve things, and decide that it's foolish to ever hope for better.

We must remember, though, that humanity has survived past crises that doubtless seemed as bad or worse to the people who lived through them. All of Europe must have thought that the world was about to end when the Black Plague ravaged their countries, and around one in four people died. The Cold War brought the threat of total nuclear annihilation. Yet in every time period, people endured, came back and rebuilt.

In the same way, we too may endure and overcome the crises which bedevil us, no matter how impossible they seem. While nothing is guaranteed, the fact that worse times have come and gone should give us a measure of hope.

Change sometimes comes quickly, through revolutions and elections, but more often, it arrives only after a long, slow grind. So, if a utopia is achieved (or simply a better, though not ideal, world) it's likely to happen the same way. It's frustrating, but unavoidable.

This isn't satisfying to people who long for change. Too many are forced to wait too long for their situation to improve, or never see improvement they desperately need. However, slow change also tends to be safer. Abrupt change, which overturns the institutions people depend on, can lead to destructive chaos and instability. Those who promise the overnight realization of everything we want invariably fail to deliver, and usually only make things worse.

Utopia may never come, but it's still beneficial to hope for it. Even if we don't aspire to get there in our lifetimes, that hope gives us the motivation to keep trying. Who knows? At some point, after a long period of improvement, maybe we'll find ourselves living in one—or it may take us by surprise.