Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Utopia, dystopia

Utopia means no place, as we were saying... But it's still good to dream and entertain visions of a better world. Unfortunately, dystopia looks a bit more threatening lately.

I mentioned Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward...

And was trying to remember William Morris''s News from Nowhere:

News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris and the only significant English utopia to be written since Thomas More's. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these "Chapters from a Utopian Romance" recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx...

More reading recommendations on the subject (and its opposite):


UTOPIA & DYSTOPIA

The concept of a perfect world has been with us since ancient times, but it was Thomas More, in his book Utopia (1516), who first coined the phrase. The humanist—who went on to become Henry VIII's chancellor and also a Catholic saint—was making a pun in ancient Greek. Utopia is a place (topos) that's both good (eu) but doesn't exist (ou).

Since then utopia and its opposite, dystopia, have inspired countless books as human beings try to make the world a better place, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing in spectacular fashion. As tech policy adviser Mahlet Zimeta reminds us, "It’s worth remembering that utopia is an impossibility, and yet we still feel compelled to think about it a lot."

3 comments:

  1. Nicholas Perrone H02- I have always been interested in learning more about utopias and dystopias. Last semester in global politics, I learned about many people including Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler who were discontent with the current government, so they envisioned a perfect world that, as we know, did not turn out so perfect. I love political philosophy so I have always been interested to think about the closest to utopia society can get before reaching it. Also, I question what exactly constitutes utopia since its direct translation is "no place." How do humans have a correct interpretation of utopia if it does not exist- or at least to our knowledge?

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    1. Perfection is not a realistic ideal, for humans. But a vision of better possibilities is a good motivator for meliorists, those of us who are committed to doing what they can to improve the human condition for all humanity. Hitler's vision, among so many other ideologies, was never for that. It was for German/Aryan hegemony and the dogmatic suppression of individuality in service to the state. The Marxist vision, in the hands of Stalin and his ilk, became something similar (though masked by the rhetoric of solidarity). Beware rigid ideology in whatever form. (That's why I'm a pragmatic pluralist.)

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  2. Carly Coleman H01- I’ve never given to much thought to utopias. I feel like I’ve always been drawn more so to dystopias due to their threatening nature. I also feel that that is also true for many other people, especially younger generations. Media today seems to always focus on the negative aspects of life, rarely hitting the positive. I believe that this has affected how morbidly curious people are becoming. With the rise of true crime fanatics and grotesque films, it seems that humanity is becoming more and more fascinated by threatening feelings, whether its in fiction like dystopias or real life events.

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