Let’s Hear it for Utopia! The idea of Utopia is o en dismissed and derided today. In his SOF Conference talk David Boulton gave a passionate defence of Utopia, not as a blueprint but an enabling dream. I am among those who count Don Cupitt’s ground-breaking Sea of Faith TV series in the 1980s one of the most powerful and lasting influences in my life’s journey, and my involvement over the years in the Network which grew out of that TV series has been a vital source of refreshment, learning, intellectual excitement – and much amusement along the way. So many friends here have influenced me, and some have even told me I’ve influenced them – a troubling thought. But that’s our Network – a true fellowship. And you know what William Morris said of fellowship: ‘Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death. Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell. And the deeds that men do, ’tis for fellowship’s sake that they do them.’ That’s Morris’s utopia in a nutshell. I’m aware that by unashamedly making out a case for the Utopian tradition I am revealing myself to be Map of Thomas More’s Utopia somewhat out of touch with current thinking on the subject. Utopianism is out, dystopianism is in. That’s hardly surprising. Too many Utopian projects and blueprints have bitten the dust, gone sour, collapsed in confusion and recrimination. But I’m going to argue that that’s because we have fundamentally misunderstood what Utopian dreams, visions, prophecies and stories are really about. So let’s take a fresh look at the Utopian tradition and see what it might offer in our quest for a better, healthier world. There’s no better way of starting than with a bit of Bible study. Our collection of scriptures, Jewish and Christian, begins and ends with visions
of paradise. The word ‘Paradise’, by the way, is thought to have been coined by the Greek historian Xenophon in the fifth century BC to describe the perfection of a Persian garden. Admittedly, the Garden of Eden in Genesis was a pretty underpopulated paradise, enjoyed by a naked Adam and Eve, a God who used it for his daily walks, a beguiling serpent and presumably a lot of prelapsarian animals, who hadn’t yet learnt how to make nature red in tooth and claw. And the Bible ends in the book of Revelation with the vision of a ‘holy city, the new Jerusalem’, where tears, death, sorrow and pain shall be no more. Between Genesis and Revelation there are the promises of a land flowing with milk and honey, the prophets’ vision of a world where swords are beaten into ploughshares, and – the jewel in the crown of what we might call pre-utopian literature – the visionary kingdom parables and aphorisms of Jesus. The literary genre at the heart of this tradition has inspired millions: that was always its function. But humans are only human, and the visionary gleam has too often turned into a fanatical glint in the eye: that is our bitter experience. The ancient Greeks toyed with their own preutopian dream-worlds: Euhemerus’ Sacred History, Plutarch’s idealised Sparta, the many Atlantis fables, and of course Plato’s Republic. These were all literary texts, imaginative fictions. No-one among Plato’s sophisticated Athenian readership seriously thought to translate the Republic into a political programme.
Thomas More’s Utopia Utopianism proper begins nearly two millennia later with a book published in 1516 by Thomas More called ‘Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. Utopia for short. He describes Utopia in very realistic terms as an island somewhere in the New World. It is two hundred miles across at its widest part and is shaped like a crescent moon. It was once part of the mainland, but its founder King Utopos had a 15-mile channel dug to isolate it. It has no fewer than 54 cities, each housing 6000 inhabitants, organised in households of between ten and sixteen members. Every 30 households are grouped together in a community which elects a councillor, and the councillors elect a supreme council which in turn elects a prince for life, who can only be deposed on suspicion of tyranny. Indirect democracy we might call it. There is no private property on Utopia, with all goods stored in warehouses and made available according to need. There are no locks on the doors of houses. Gold is despised and is used to make chamber pots. Agriculture is the main occupation and everyone, men and women, must participate. Men may have a secondary occupation such as weaving, carpentry and building. They work a six hour day. Everyone wears similar simple clothing. Meals are taken in common dining rooms, with the best food being reserved for the elderly. Utopia runs a welfare state with a free national health service and education system, supports easy divorce and euthanasia, allows its priests (both men and women) to marry, but punishes pre-marital sex with enforced celibacy, and adultery with enslavement. Every household is allowed two slaves, mainly drawn from convicted criminals. Quite who convicts them is unclear, since there are no lawyers, and the law is kept simple so that everyone has a clear understanding of what is right and what is wrong. There is no death penalty. Utopia is religiously diverse, including sunworship, moon-worship, planet-worship, ancestor-worship, and even a hint of imported Christianity. All tolerate the others, even sharing a common prayer, recited regularly, asking God to show them a better way if there is one.
Atheists are despised, but tolerated provided they talk out their erroneous beliefs with the priests, in the expectation that the priests’ views will inevitably prevail. War is forbidden except in defence, when enemies may be taken prisoner but not killed. So, a communist paradise, where all are equal (except for a few who are a bit more equal than others). What was More up to? Thomas More was born in 1478. A lawyer and Member of Parliament for London, he rose to become chief secretary to Henry VIII and succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor. He was a fierce, indeed fanatical, opponent of what would become the Protestant Reformation, responsible for the persecution, torture and burning alive of those he regarded as heretics. But when the king broke with the pope, More refused to sign the Oath of Allegiance and was in turn executed. In 1935 he was canonised by Pope Pius XI and five years later Pope John Paul II declared him ‘Heavenly Patron of Statesman and Politicians’. Robert Bolt depicts him as the Man for all Seasons, more Catholic than the Pope; Hilary Mantel as a political tyrant and religious fanatic. How can we reconcile any of this with the author of Utopia and its apparent message of religious tolerance, social equality, criminalisation of wealth, and enlightened Renaissance humanism? The clue, I suggest, lies in the word Utopia itself. More coined it from the Greek word topos, place, and the prefix ou, (o and u) meaning ‘no’: so outopia, no place, nowhere. But there was another almost identical prefix, eu (e and u) meaning ‘good’: so eutopia, good place. Combine the two and Utopia becomes a good place which doesn’t and can’t exist. It’s good, but it’s nowhere. And that kept it safe from worldly politics, which was about real change in real places. More was a deeply conservative Catholic and a fabulously wealthy Lord Chancellor of England to boot, and the last thing on his mind was any intention to put down the mighty from their seats, turn the rich empty away, or spark off a communist revolt – which is why he published his book in Latin and refused to have it translated into English ‘lest it might fall into the hands of the simple and unlearned who might misunderstand and take harm from it’ – the same argument he used to burn Tyndale’s English
Bible, and Tyndale too for that matter. More was determined to restrict the readership of Utopia to the very elite his Utopia had done away with. There are other clues to this enigma. More’s narrator in Utopia is named Hythlodaeus. Hythlodaeus is a made-up name, derived from Greek meaning ‘dispenser of with More’s Utopia are nonsense’. obvious, but The Law Neighbouring of Freedom is no joke countries to Utopia or satire. Winstanley have Greek names draws not only on translated as Nolandia, mythology but also on Muchnonsense and his own bitter Happiland, and the experience of running river running a commune on St through Utopia is Nowater. It seems to legitimate his pretty clear that utopian politics. He is whether More is deadly serious, calling writing satire, on ‘the rising of Christ imaginative fiction, in sons and daughters’, or an elaborate by which he meant intellectual con- enlightenment, to undrum, what he is usher in the republic not doing is laying of heaven. Unlike out a blueprint for an ideal society. ‘no-place’ Utopia in a Whatever else he mythical ocean, was, More was not a thwarted idealist ‘good-place’ Utopia who dreamed of William Morris’s fron spiece to his building Jerusalem print of his country house, Kelmsco on Tudor England’s concluding harvest home banquet takes place. showed no interest, the green and pleasant republic collapsed, a land. Gerrard Winstanley and a er Move on a century and everything changes. Out of the civil wars and the emergence of an English republic comes a new utopianism, unambiguously focused on good place rather than no place. Gerrard Winstanley’s Law of Freedom (1652) is the world’s first manifesto and constitution for a communist state, albeit a Christian communism, and also the first political programme to propose the extension of the franchise to all heads of households, without property or class qualification (though unrepentant royalists, speculators and those ‘wholly
given to pleasure and sports’, were excluded, and ‘hireling’ priests and lawyers were not only disenfranchised but subject to capital punishment if they continued to practise their evil trade!). I think Winstanley may have softened this a bit when he joined the Quakers a few years later. The similarities Biblical liberation George’s Hill in Surrey More’s communist Winstanley’s was a News from Nowhere, his own intended for the real Manor, where the novel’s world. But Cromwell second Charlie took the throne, and Winstanley joined the Quakers, saying he hoped they would continue the work he had begun – which they didn’t. And yet, and yet… Winstanley’s dream was not forgotten. Across the channel writers like de Foigny, Fénélon and Mercier invented ideal states which anticipated the ideals and slogans of the French Revolution. In 1820 G. A. Ellis proposed a new Britain based on the experience of experimental communities in the American colonies. In America itself Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) inspired the creation of a rash of mostly short-lived utopian communities, and in Britain Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
– ‘nowhere’ misspelt backwards – envisaged a society where machines relieved men and women of daily drudgery. These books are largely forgotten, overshadowed by works of political utopian literature which are still read today for pleasure and inspiration, notably William Morris’s two socialist classics A Dream of John Ball (1888) and News From Nowhere (1890), the one evoking an idealised past where sturdy yeomen of England anticipate a future in which all land and wealth is held in common, and where ‘fellowship is heaven and lack of fellowship is hell’, the other picturing a future anarcho-socialist republic of Hammersmith on the banks of a pure, sweet-running Thames. Both were literary fictions, but Morris was no ‘idle singer of an empty day’: he had abandoned wallpaper and laboured to turn his socialist fictions into political reality. A li le light mockery Utopias were always good for a little light mockery. Shakespeare started it with The Tempest (1611), where Gonzalo expatiates on the ideal commonwealth he would create on Prospero’s island if he were its king: ‘No occupation, all men idle, all; No sovereignty… All things in common nature should produce, Without sweat or endeavour…’ Even Gilbert and Sullivan got in on the act with Utopia Ltd (1893), where the ideal republic is described as ‘Despotism tempered by Dynamite’. The king is accountable to a group of Wise Men and the Public Exploder, who keep him in check: If ever a trick he tries That savours of rascality, At our decree he dies Without the least formality… A pound of dynamite Explodes in his auriculars; It’s not a pleasant sight – We’ll spare you the particulars. It’s a pity Sullivan’s music for Utopia Ltd isn’t up to the standard of The Mikado or The Yeomen of the Guard. It would be better known today. Gilbert, like all good satirists, had a serious point. Checks and balances were what utopias tended to lack. More’s, Winstanley’s and Morris’s ideal states were all static: Winstanley actually made it an offence to change the laws, because any
change to perfection would necessarily be regressive. But while that may work in a storybook, we know it is nonsense in the real world, where no society stands still. A perfect society may need no mechanism for change, but a society with no mechanism for change ceases to be perfect. Today, as we noted at the beginning, utopias are out and dystopias are in. The debasement of the American dream, the unspeakable inhumanities committed in the name of communism and the feeble failures of ‘third way’ social democracy have convinced many that a ‘good place’ utopia is to be found nowhere, whether spelt forwards or backwards. So, the big question: why stick with it? So why s ck with it? I stick with it because I find it has not lost its capacity to inspire. Utopias inspire, not as political blueprints, five-year plans or overarching ideologies, but as visionary gleams, as guides to what, if not to how. I know that the City of God is not going to happen in this world, which means it is not going to happen. But I’m with William Blake. I’m damned if I’m going to cease from mental fight or let my (figurative) sword sleep in my hand, content to leave the New Jerusalem merely a province of cloud-cuckoo-land. Utopias are the stuff of the dreams of the young and the visions of the old, without which the people perish. Like Jesus’s kingdom stories, utopias are inspirational rather than instrumental. They suggest what, leaving us to work out how. They are the stuff of dreams. I don’t mean pipe dreams, day dreams, idle dreams. I mean enabling dreams, energising dreams, dreams which get us on our feet, driving us to action, dreams which pick us up when we fall, refresh our dying faith, energise the wholly human spirit. If we can imagine a better, if not a perfect world, we might convince ourselves that we can take a tiny step or two towards making it happen, at least you in your small corner and I in mine. ‘Action is the life of all,’ as Winstanley put it. We should never assume that we’ll be successful. We are, after all, in Alexander Pope’s words, ‘the glory, jest and riddle of the world’,
incorrigibly fallible! Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, and there is no objective guarantee in heaven or on earth that we can build the new Jerusalem, or, if we do, Heaven that it will turn out any better than the old. William Morris recognised this in The ‘Your first step in heaven Earthly Paradise, where he seems to was a surer thing.’ suggest that paradise lies in the attempt – Tony Cosier rather than the achievement.
Martin Luther King was no daydreamer. He did not dream to escape the real world but to remake it. His was an enabling dream. And while he certainly aimed high, he did not set his Promised Land, his utopia, above the bright blue sky or in the fabulous mountains of the sweet by-and-by but in ‘the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, the heightening mountains of Pennsylvania, the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado… and every hill and every molehill of Mississippi’. Real places in real time! Blake set his Jerusalem on England’s mountains green, Winstanley tried building his on St George’s Hill in Walton-on-Thames, and Morris set his a stone’s throw from the Hammersmith flyover. So let’s dare to hope! We are grown-up. We know we can’t create a perfect society, and we are not sure we’d enjoy it if we did! But we can call on our enabling dreams of a better, a healthier world, drawing on the utopian virtues of community, equality, toleration, peace-making. It will never be easy, but remember William Morris: the consolation of paradise lies in the intelligent attempt rather than the assurance of achievement. Let’s hear it for Utopia!
This is an edited, abbreviated version of the talk David Boulton gave to the SOF Annual Conference in Leicester in July.
David Boulton is a Quaker and Humanist, former head of news and current affairs at Granada TV, former editor of Sea of Faith magazine and author of The Trouble with God and Who on Earth was Jesus?