Metamodern Critique of Utopia

Discussion

Hanzi Freinacht:

"Even long before Thomas More’s coinage of the term “utopia” through the 1516 “social-science-fiction” novel with that word as its title, utopias (by whatever name these dreams may have taken) have exerted an influence on the sociological imagination of people around the world: how could society be different than it is? Not just different. Radically, dramatically, breathtakingly different, for the better — in a manner that breaks out of the confines of ordinary existence and into the tremendous, that which lets the spirit soar?

“Utopia” was an astute play-on-words, a literary sleight-of-hand on More’s side: The word translates to “no place”. The perfect land of yonder was nowhere to be found. No doubt, More must have been inspired by the European “discovery” of America about two decades earlier: If there are indeed faraway lands on shores so different — could there be, under the sun, genuinely other ways of life, even of large-scale, urbanized life? Ways of life that would seem worthy of the human spirit and not just another grim parody of a society’s own values and goals?

* Utopia: The farther away, the closer you get

We all have an inherent tendency to believe that great changes in ourselves, our archetypal “hero’s journey” of inner transformation, requires us not to look under the nearest rock or in the neighboring village, but travel to a faraway shore— be it the Far East, the vestiges of a glorious past, the rollercoasters of psychedelic weirdness, or mind-bending koans in the shape of quantum mechanical equations — for the transformation to occur in full and earnest.

We tend to believe that a more profound transformation requires a proportionally longer stretch of travel (and, of course, then “outer space is the final frontier”). By the same logic, More places his land of sociological perfection, Utopia, at the farthest reaches of the known world, so far away that it practically becomes “nowhere”. To be perfect is to be far away.

It’s not unlike women in early fantasy writers like J.R.R. Tolkien: the feminine appears as mysterious, pure, distant, ephemeral, light, and beautiful creatures, barely real at all but all the more wonderous for it. In writers on the other side of the spectrum, like Charles Bukowski (who probably met with a lot more women than Tolkien but perhaps under less emotionally nourishing circumstances), the feminine is flawed, dirty, horny, oscillating between the alluring and the repugnant, and always all-too-human.

No utopian dream is possible without distance: In film and literature, fantasy and social realism are each other’s opposites. Distance and utopia depend upon one another. Utopian projects all attempt the impossible: to place fantasy at the heart of the grueling complexities of an admittedly social-realist life, revolutionizing it by magically imbued technology, by fate or by faith, by revealing some kind of secret passage from the “ordinary world” of actual reality to the extraordinary realms of potentiality… Or — at the very least — enchanting an otherwise disappointing life with the sense of clarity and hope of what is, after all, truly possible.

In fact, Utopian dreams paradoxically seem to gain momentum from moments of social realism. From the plight of workers and peasants in destabilized and backward Romanov Russia, to the sparks of the fever-pitched communist frenzy of the Khmers Rouges as the guerillas were stuck starving, sweating, and malaria-stricken in the jungle, to the popularity of millenarian and Age of Aquarius messages among the discontents of today’s globalization — a harsh here-and-now has been fertile soil for a wonderous yonder-and-tomorrow.

Likewise, More’s Utopia would likely never have been written, had not the author found the institutions of his own day and age lacking. Again, Utopia comes alive because of our distance to it — of course, combined with the insight that the world is changing, which grants sense of possibility, an untapped keg of potential.

Such change can be circular (“after this Iron Age we shall enter a new Golden Age”) as is the case on the far-right political spectrum, or it can be one of progression into the unprecedented (“something will arrive after capitalism, something more worthy and humane!”), such as on the Left of the political imagination.

The nowhereland of Utopia thus grows from the very-here-and-now-land of “my life bloody sucks and yours probably does, too”. Through the suffering and belittlement of everyday life, there is, of sorts, a baptism of fire — one that leaves a pure but hardened kernel in the human soul: Life can be different; it must be. The current status quo is barbaric; viewed from a future vantage point, it would be criminal. It must be brought to an end — even if the path to toppling it is dangerous. And since society is changing, since it is going somewhere, the road seems to lead away from here and into the realm of what’s possible. The misery of here-and-now is a pointer towards the glory of yonder, of the future.

* Utopia: Off with their heads!

Perhaps More never meant for his Utopia to be more than a parody-by-reversal of his Renaissance or Early Modern England — a looking glass through which the imperfections and unenlightened practices and norms of his society became apparent. Likely, More himself intended for the distance to be kept; his tone is hardly one of a fiery revolutionary. But already in his days, Protestant leaders were fanning the flames of peasant revolts against all authority on the European continent.

The longing for and premonition of Utopia seem to propel the human spirit to more than More’s wry commentary and critique of social irrationalities and injustices: these motives behoove us to dream, to create, to experiment, to rebel, to subvert, to start anew — but also to risk our lives… and those of others: to kill, to search and destroy.

Beyond More’s spirited novel Utopia, there are the real utopias; serious, entirely unironic attempts to defeat the mundane world we know and to somehow conclusively transcend it once and for all. At once unimaginably bold and vain, such intentions have animated humans in their worst and finest hours, often both at once. Oh, wet communist dreams of a just society! Oh, the elevated spirit of Rousseau, who first noticed that modern life needn’t be this way — that another world is possible! And this Enlightenment thinker was read religiously by the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the architects of The Terror.

The modern ideology of conservatism grew as a direct response in early 19th century Europe to the French Revolution and the utopian dreams of the time. The conservative mind points out — and really has a point in doing so — that all societies have grown organically and not according to schemes, never entirely according to the plan of an architect. Anarchists have their own way of saying something similar: If the project is to recreate society in the mental image of a few visionaries or leaders, it always leads to disaster. Our postcolonial heritage around the world is a case in point — certain plans of new societies and social orders have been pressed upon the world by Europeans, in turn destroying entire cultures.

Utopias have been based on spiritual premonitions gleaned from our peak moments and epiphanies, on rational calculations of what would make sense and should reasonably be within the realm of possibility — and sometimes Utopia is born at the strange crossroads between the religious and the rational: spirit and mind, magic and science, faith and social engineering. Utopian societies set up by Europeans in America always gathered around certain religious denominations — projects that to this day define American culture and its heritage in the birthing planetary culture of our day. Since Antiquity, hermetic and gnostic traditions have mingled with the sense of wonder that technology brings — the mystical with the rational, the ghost in the machine, what Erik Davies called the “trickster of technology” has beckoned us towards Utopia. In today’s world, this technologically mediated hope for a drastic transformation takes forms such as fully automated luxury communism and other visions of post-scarcity, the singularity, transhumanism, and the techno-libertarianism of hackers.

When utopian projects have been acted upon in reality, in real, historical, societies, they have inevitably collapsed — if not destroying their entire populations, at the very least ruining the institutions of society and causing great harm.

Perhaps most importantly — and I am far from alone in pointing this out — this is due to the static nature of Utopian visions: a destination describing how things should be arranged in society. Even more perniciously, there are societies — from socialist people’s republics to downright delirious cults — who declare themselves to be so well on the path to Utopia that they in practice already are the Utopian society; and hence, “nothing can be wrong with it”. But naturally— there is always trouble in paradise. And every such trouble must then be explained away with some exception (because, by definition, this already is the perfect society, right?): class enemies, contra-revolutionaries, traitors, unbelievers in our midst, dark cabals, conspiracies against the public! And what do you do with those? The Queen of Hearts has the answer.

So you can’t have Utopia without “the deject”. The stuff you’re getting rid of. The stuff you’re “throwing away” (that’s what the word “deject” implies). The more light, clear, and fever-pitched the Utopian dream, the darker and more abominable the deject seems to the Utopian mind — and the more murderous an undercurrent comes with it.

* Utopia: It’s weaved into every modern person’s mind, ever

And this brings me back to the idea of Modernity and its inherent connection to Utopia. Modernity is, fundamentally, as I argue in my upcoming book The 6 Hidden Patterns of History, the principle of triangulation: comparing your viewpoint to mine, we can either verify or falsify my claims. This principle originates (pre-conceptually) in the arts of the Renaissance in Northern Italy of the fifteenth century: the arrival of mathematical correct perspective in paintings and illustrations. Here, the natural universe is torn away from the social or cultural world: The king is going to be smaller if he is “farther away” in the painting, even if he happens to be socially more important than other characters in the painting. Everything — and everyone — is placed within a 3D space with one disappearing point at the center of the painting.

Now, what I mean is that — in the mind of its followers and enactors — “Utopia” is such a “point towards which everything else seems to point”. Everything, including the picture of the here-and-now, is situated in space in relation to this point at an infinite or unknowable distance. The structure of the Modern mind itself thus implies some kind of Utopia, some kind of end-point, always present in the worldview itself— albeit one always disappearing into the distance.

Interestingly enough, then, even conservatives and anarchists — who are nominally critics of grad schemes — formulate utopias, as these ideologies are also spawns of Modernity. The conservative formulates the utopia of progress according to society’s already existing institutions (libertarians like Johan Norberg and centrists like Steven Pinker also represent similar views in today’s public debate), and anarchists formulate how people could collaborate their way into a society that is kindlier, more just, working in accordance to the shared will (and goodwill) of the many.

All said and done — Utopia is bound up with modernity itself. As long as the modern project exists, Utopia will keep beckoning, in spiritual, secular, or tech-spiritual forms.

But the modern project, of course, does not lead to Utopia. It’s a mirage. One that has been very understandable and perhaps historically necessary, but an illusion in the distance, no less. Rather, modernity with its “progress narrative” leads to its own demise — to civilizational collapse — due to inherent systemic limitations we shall refrain from discussing here. The striving towards Utopia only accelerates that process of decay.

A static vision of the future, of society perfected, cannot materialize. And the Modern mind, by its very way of structuring reality, drives towards this impossibility. Bold and adventurous as this striving is, it can only lead to collapse. Utopia always was, and always will be, a failure — a road to hell paved with good intentions, as the saying goes."

(https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/protopia-beyond-utopia-8200a20b2c43)