Should we stop searching for a Utopia because it is unattainable?
It’s raining! Again! In my Utopia it wouldn’t rain like this. You would never have to wake up to the sound of miserable dripping on the panes of glass in your bedroom that fills you with an impending doom before you’ve raised yourself completely from slumber.
Of course, I’d want it to rain at some point in the day, occasionally. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to look out of the aforementioned window and see the delight of the richness of greenery in my garden. At this time of year it is beautifully vibrant.
I’ve just noticed on the news that they are reporting weather conditions in the UK in the year 2080. Apparently, it is going to be 45 degrees on a June day 2080. Our forthcoming generations will be basking in glorious heat here in the UK on a regular basis, so may be my Utopia is realistic after all. Sadly, I won’t be around to feel it, and I may even wish for the morning rain when I am 92 and unable to muster enough energy to rise from my bed due to heat exhaustion as we head towards that date.
My Utopia would include plenty of other things. It would essentially enable my passions to flourish and be realised. There would be honour and reason in individuality. There would be liberty of thought and no fixed ideas on how one should live one’s life – Utopian anarchy, I guess.
In my Utopia, every house would be filled to the brim with books that everyone wanted to read, hungrily eager to learn about the world around and beyond them. There would be opportunity for all to express themselves in whatever way they chose and there would be love; plenty of love.
I could carry on talking about my Utopia. I could hope for all sorts of things. I could be more realistic and state other more attainable aspirations for my ideal world; small changes that could actually happen, recognising little steps towards an ideal.
It would take reams of paper to express my Utopia and I presume that is why Thomas More wrote his book because he couldn’t explain his idealism in a simple essay – it was too complicated for that.
Talking of Thomas More, I am not sure that I would want to live in his Utopia. Women are subservient; individuality in parts seems to be discouraged. More suggests that people should worship different Gods and there are other quotes that don’t lead me to wanting to share this vision. However, there are exceptional parts of his vision that I definitely buy into.
Take this quote.
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
I don’t think I could argue with that.
Or with this one either.
"For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
Of course, if I believe in individualism, then I cannot criticise another person’s Utopia for it is precisely that; their own, just as my idealism is personal to me, and I guess herein lies the problem in achieving one’s personal perfection.
If I espouse freedom, another’s Utopia is possession. If I favour equality, others want domination. If I want wall to wall sunshine, others want inclement weather conditions.
Each individual has an idea of what they want for their ideal world but they are all too frequently incompatible with the views of people that one has to or chooses to live with and amongst.
Whilst healthy debate is part of my Utopia, one thereby has to assume that people have differences, which indeed is exactly as it should be. But if people have these differences, even if they are slight and difficult to differentiate, there is always the potential for total anarchy and discord.
My Utopia and your Utopia are mutually exclusive for all their similarities and therefore, neither of them, if working in parallel is achievable.
Here is another quote from one George Orwell, one of our greatest Dystopia writers.
“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”
This is a rather negative view of aspiration but of course, there is a strong element of truth in it. Often people aspire to the one thing that they cannot have or the direct opposite of what they do have without thinking of the repercussions of this alleged perfection on both themselves and others.
However, I worry about this phrase and I can hardly believe that I am sitting here writing and about to challenge one of the greatest writer’s of our time.
There is a certain amount of truth in that final phrase. If one imagines “perfection” then there is the implication that one is not experiencing the ideal, and therefore by aspiring to perfection one is certainly revealing elements in their lives that are not fulfilled.
Herein lies my concern and the purpose of my writing. If an ideal is unachievable, if aspiration is exaggerated beyond the attainable then should we simply give up and accept life the way that it currently is?
Yesterday, I read a comment stating that the current mess that we call the Labour Party was not an issue about ideology but about dysfunctional politics. It wasn’t that there was a problem with the vision but how it was being developed in flawed policies.
Whilst at face value, this makes sense there is an assumption that there is any vision or purpose in the first place. The commentator in this case clearly said “It is not about ideology”. How can fundamental changes to our society not be about ideology? The very problem with this government at the moment is that it has lost all sense of ideology, all rational thought, all substantial vision. It has no Utopia in mind whatsoever other than the Utopia of continual governance at all costs, and that is no vision in my opinion.
Returning to Orwell, one could certainly argue that the government has shown one hell of a lot of “emptiness”. Disappointment after disappointment has led me to take drastic steps that included voting for another political party this week but the sadness of all of this is that the void and emptiness doesn’t come from an “imagine(d) perfection”.
Maybe I am too steeped in ideology. Maybe my belief system is beyond reason and by that I am clearly showing the emptiness of my aspiration. But if you don’t have vision or aspiration or hope then where on earth does that leave you?
If a vision is seemingly unachievable should we really just shrug our shoulders, turn away and give up? Should we allow the status quo or even worse, let reactionary negativity prevail?
In times such as these, it is all too easy to be dejected, depressed and dull. There is plenty to angst about. There is too much inequality and injustice in the world but to merely sit and accept this is not feasible.
It is way too important for that.
Even if the only thing we can do is sit in sedentary silence contemplating or writing about our grievances, then that is far better than lapsing into inertia unable to even think about alternatives to the current state of affairs.
I live my life in a certain way. I make choices based on need and greed and hope and aspiration. I have my vision of how I want to live my life. I have my aspirations for others; those I know, those I am yet to meet and those that I will never meet. And of course, there are times that this reveals a major emptiness in my life and those of others. It saddens me and even hurts me when I know that my Utopia is a pipe dream, an unattainable desire but that does not and will not deter me from walking along my own path. It will not prevent me from thinking about what could and indeed should happen to myself and my world.
Take this writing lark. I never believed that I was a writer. I never believed that it was possible for me to spend my days thinking in any sort of coherent manner that could be placed on a piece of paper or keyboard for others to read, and yet, for the majority of my adult life, I have subconsciously wished to write. My imagined perfection, in my opinion, was never achievable and therefore definitely revealed an emptiness. Nobody was going to want to read my inexperienced, grammatically incorrect, content impoverished drivel but that hope never went away. It never disappeared.
I didn’t ever, and still don’t believe in my ability to write but even this does not deter me from wanting to do it, and plucking up enough courage to place it in a domain whereby others can also read it.
Without my vision and ideology, I wouldn’t be doing this. Without encouragement and criticism, this hope of mine would have remained unachievable.
It is but a small example of what I am trying to say but it does, I think, show that you should be able to dream. You should be able to think about an ideal and take small steps along a pathway to the fulfilment that you desire.
And it can happen!
Of course, the other problem with Utopia’s is that there are some who think in the terms of Utopia where others can only see the exact opposite. Despots; the likes of Hitler and Pol Pot had their Utopia. It was and is deeply flawed, abhorrent, vile, oppressive.
Their dystopic Utopia’s would have succeeded if enough people had been persecuted and indoctrinated. Flawed vision, I suspect, is stronger than no vision at all.
Yet, their vision didn’t work. Did it not succeed because it was unattainable or did it not succeed because there were more people with stronger visions that were simply not prepared to allow this demonic form of existence?
What would have happened if those who opposed Hitler had not had an ideology and a Utopia that they so believed? What would have happened if they could not use these thought to counteract the hideous alternative? Where would we be now?
Having a vision is vital. Working towards that vision is purposeful. Being overridden by that vision to the point of absolutism can incur depression and repression.
As with so many things in life, it is all about balance but a world without ideology isn’t one that I want to be a part of, and even if in having an ideology it reveals life’s setbacks and emptiness, then I would still rather have the vision in the first place.
But then I always was comfortable in Fantasyland!
