Where have all the utopian thinkers gone? – ABC Online

Posted April 24, 2017 09:18:14

Decades of failed visions, like the collapse of communism, mean the idea of utopia has come to have pejorative connotations.

It's been tarnished by an association with fanatics, like Hitler and Pol Pot.

And to pragmatists, utopia might be a byword for the pointless pursuit of impractical and unachievable goals.

But although we live in a very different era to when Thomas More coined the word in his landmark book The New Island of Utopia, just over 500 years ago, there are scholars who say these ideas still have a place.

Jacqueline Dutton is an expert on the history of Australian utopias, and sees manifestations of utopianism all around us, in ideas like co-housing, urban agriculture, recycling, "second chance" food, and "sharing economy" innovations like Uber, Airbnb and couchsurfing.

"These ideas were considered counter-cultural and only belonging to hippy communities or radical people in the 1960s and 70s," she says.

"[They] were incredibly radical and marginalised ... and it's actually only taken us 50 years really to embrace [them] as part of our everyday life."

Even commonplace technocratic language like "alternate scenario planning" hints at utopianism, Dutton believes.

"It sounds a bit more boardroom than utopianism, but essentially it's about projecting a different way of being," she says.

"Basically, behind utopia, there is this desire for a better way of being in the world."

It is easy to dismiss grandiose gestures and lofty ideals as unworkable even if you are a philosopher striving to live a life according to your moral principles.

When asked to address an "abolish fishing" rally, philosopher and author Peter Singer, a practising vegan, says he challenged the organiser: "Isn't it a bit utopian to think that you are going to, by marching, abolish fishing?"

According to Singer, the organiser replied: "What I want to do is to plant the seed so that maybe in 100 years' time, people will realise that fish are sentient beings ... that we cause a lot of suffering to them."

"In one sense," Singer continues, "you could say it's utopian to think we will stop eating animals.

"In another sense, you could say, who knows? Conditions could change. We'll find other things to eat. We are already producing more plant-based foods."

Singer and Dutton were speaking at a recent Utopia 500 forum at the National Library of Australia, organised by ANU's Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities.

Dutton revealed, astonishingly, that there was a time when Australia existed only as an exotic, fantastical utopia in the imaginations of those living in the Old World of Europe.

"For about four centuries, Australia was imagined by the Europeans," says Dutton, "before it was actually known."

She says one of the first utopian visions of Australia was conceived by a Frenchman, Gabriel de Foigny, in 1676.

"It was called The Southern Land, Known, and it was a 'projection' of the Australian continent, the southern land it wasn't known as Australian at this stage," she says.

Inhabited by people de Foigny described as "hermaphrodites", the imagined Australia was "a place of hybridity, monstrosity [and] extreme otherness ... that cannot really be reconciled with a European understanding of the world".

"The idea that anything could be possible in this southern land made Australia a blank canvas a tabula rasa upon which pretty much anything could be projected," Dutton says.

The 16th century, when More was penning his Utopia, was an epoch of wonder and possibility. Europeans made landfall in what would become known as the Americas. The New World was coming into being. There were voyages of discovery and exploration. These were fertile times for imagined utopias.

Yet, we now know, complex civilisations in the New World predated the arrival of the Europeans by millennia.

Indigenous Australians, of course, existed on the great southern continent for tens of millennia prior to European exploration and colonisation. But did they have a concept of utopia in their dreaming stories?

Aboriginal writer and Miles Franklin-winning novelist Alexis Wright doesn't think so.

"I think our culture is structured differently. It's structured around the ancestral story, the creation story ... and our responsibilities were to maintain harmony and balance in the country, to traditional lands," she says.

"I think we were realists and we were tied to the land. There was a law structure, a spiritual structure.

"There's only one utopia I know and that's a [former] cattle station," she jokes, in reference to the Aboriginal homelands region near Alice Springs.

Dutton says while the notion of a desire "for a better way of being in the world" transcends cultures, the idea of utopia is essentially "a Western Christian construct".

Within these cultural parameters, though, there are virtually limitless visions.

One version, which harks back to More, envisages an age of leisure even if it is unclear how this lifestyle would be achieved in the modern industrialised world.

"Thomas More had this idea that work is not good for you. It's bad for your health. It should be minimised, as opposed to expanded," UCLA's Professor Russell Jacoby told the Utopia 500 forum.

In this respect, More may belatedly get his wish. Advanced automation, enhanced technology and robotics are predicted to result in the widespread displacement of labour in the near future.

"The question of labour is the vexing issue of contemporary society," Jacoby says.

"As we become more productive, increasingly we can't find jobs for people. Where is the work going to come from? We can't figure it out."

But unemployment and underemployment do not equate to leisure. Not unless the idle are paid not to work, as some have indeed argued they should be.

Utopian thinking does not provide tangible solutions to society's wicked problems. Nor is it intended to. Instead, it widens the scope of what might be possible in the future; of what we should aspire to.

Perhaps, too, it ought to prompt us to consider not just the possibilities, but also the question of what is perfection and what is socially desirable.

"Is there a role for people with a disability in a utopian society?" an audience member asks Singer at the conclusion of the Utopia 500 forum.

Singer, whose writing on bioethics has been controversial, responds: "I suppose you could imagine in a complete utopia there might be ways of learning what causes people to have disabilities.

"And then maybe people would choose not to have children with disabilities. That's a possibility.

"Some people would say, in that case, you lose something from society. You lose a certain kind of diversity, a certain kind of caring. But my view would be, if you did have the knowledge, then parents ought to have the choice.

"In many respects we do have that choice now through prenatal diagnosis. And the overwhelming majority of parents, when they have a prenatal diagnosis of a serious condition ... decide to terminate the pregnancy.

"I don't think in any utopia you would remove that right of choice."

Topics: philosophy, history, community-and-society, australia

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Where have all the utopian thinkers gone? - ABC Online