For advanced details, contact penny.mawdsley@btopenworld.com A one-day Sea of Faith conference broadcaster and editor of the Irish political and arts presenter of BBC Radio Northern Ireland’s "Sunday Utopian dreams and the republic of heaven David Boulton commends “enabling” utopian dreams for a social vision In his play Three Sisters, written just over a hundred years ago, Anton Chekhov gave one of his characters a touching encapsulation of the utopian dream. "In a century or two," muses Colonel Vershinin, "or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won't be there to see it, but it’s why we live, why we work, it’s why we suffer. We're creating it!
That’s the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal." Thanks to Noel Cheer of NZ SoF for sending me this quote when I was writing something on utopias. It moved me, as utopian dreams always move me - but I was soon asking myself why. After all, in Vershinin’s own country, the "new way" in which people were living only three or four decades after Three Sisters was written was hardly "happier": it was the way of the commissar, the thought police and the gulag, a dream turned nightmare. Isn’t that what happens to all utopias when some fool takes them off the page and tries to turn them into action blueprints?
Look at the American dream! The "new way" of living prophesied by William Penn, Thomas Paine and the utopian founding fathers gave way to the ethnic cleansing of the Plains Indians ("These people must die... God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree" - Horace Greeley, 1859). It was one short step from Greeley to Bush Junior and his Iraq war rant that "We will export death and violence to the four Utopia is a good place which is nowhere: nowhere is a good place creationism (48%), and vast stores of thermo-nuclear WMDs in Iraq...).
There’s Israel’s utopian land flowing with milk and honey, to which sweet liquids was soon added the blood of not chosen peoples who just happened to be there first... And Muhammad’s virtues of tolerance and compassion, which mutated into the Taliban and suicide bombers... And Jesus’ kingdom of heaven, which became the Church... Utopian dreams can’t boast much of a record. Every visionary gleam seems to end up as a fanatical glint in the eye. So should we wake up, get real, settle for the world we've got, stop praying for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, and settle for eating, drinking and clubbing?
Well, what exactly is a utopia? My trusty Oxford dictionary tells me it derives from the Greek ou-topos, meaning "no place", but some lexicographers prefer eutopos, meaning "good place". Now there’s serendipity!
Utopia is a good place which is nowhere: nowhere is a good place. Thomas More, in 1516, gave its name to his imaginary island where unfettered capitalism was replaced by communism. Of course, as a conservative Catholic and Lord Chancellor of England to boot, More had no intention of promoting a peasants’ revolt, and published Utopia in Latin to restrict its readership to the very classes his utopian island had done away with.
More’s utopia was a good place, but it was not England: it was "no place", and he was quite clear that it should stay that way.
Plato’s Republic is often credited as the first utopia and as the model not only for More, but also for satirical utopias such as those of Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), 1888, and Samuel Butler (whose perfect Erewhon is "Nowhere" corners of the earth in defense of our great nation”.
Paine’s imagined utopia collapsed over two centuries into an all-too-real dystopia, the high temple of Mammon and his dark angels: galloping consumption, private wealth, global power, might is right, fundamentalist superstition and a readiness to believe in what isn’t there (e.g. the Devil, which 68% of Americans claim to have encountered, scientific imperfectly spelt backwards), 1872. None of these utopias were intended as practical blueprints for a real ideal society. The nowheres only became wouldbe somewheres with the political and socialist utopians of the seventeenth century onwards. James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), which argued for the redistribution of land, and Gerrard Winstanley’s The Law of Freedom (1652), the world’s first communist manifesto and constitution, were both sof 60 June 2003 written as practical programmes for Cromwell’s English Republic. The socialist utopias of William Morris - A Dream of John Ball (1887) and News from Nowhere (1890) - are visionary depictions of what a very English Marxist envisaged as the triumph of liberty, equality and fellowship. ("Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell: fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them" - John Ball).
Socialist utopias, from Winstanley on, inspired millions so long as they remained literary fictions, but the catastrophic failure of the twentieth century’s attempts to refashion society under the banner of communism inevitably lessened their appeal, if it didn’t wholly discredit them.
Ironically, Marx himself despised utopianism and insisted that "utopian socialism" was the enemy of his own "scientific socialism" - as indeed it was, and remains. But I must get back to the question I asked myself earlier: why do I, and many others beside me, continue to be moved by utopian ideas and ideals when history demonstrates all too plainly that when we try to realise them the dream usually turns into a nightmare?
I'll try to answer that with reference to the most utopian idea of all: the notion of the kingdom of God, or heaven, which has been at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition for nearly three millennia. The concept long predates Jesus. It reaches back into Old Testament times, when, after the loss of its independence in the sixth century BCE, Israel looked to a new David to establish God’s visible and institutional rule, first over the Jews, then, in triumph, over the Gentiles. This was to be accomplished by divine intervention and supernatural force. But Jesus gave Jewish kingdom teaching a new twist. This is how Ernest Renan summarised it in one of the earliest biographical (as distinct from devotional) studies, his 1863 Life of Jesus: "A vast substitution of classes would take place. The kingdom of God was made, first, for children, and those who resemble them; second, for the outcasts of the world, victims of that social arrogance which repulses the good but humble man; third, for heretics and schismatics, publicans, Samaritans, and Pagans of Tyre and Sidon... The doctrine that the poor alone shall be saved, that the reign of the poor is approaching, was, therefore, the doctrine of Jesus, as it had been the doctrine of the Hebrew prophets who had ‘thundered incessantly’ against the great." For Jesus Seminar scholar John Dominic Crossan, Jesus’ kingdom of heaven is "a kingdom of nobodies...
Jesus spoke of a kingdom not of peasant or artisan classes but of the unclean, degraded and expendable classes... the abused and rejected" (The Historical Jesus).
But as Crossan’s colleague Robert Funk puts it in Honest to Jesus, “His basic metaphor... was God’s reign or God’s estate, but he never (in the parables and aphorisms which were his principal means of expression and best exemplify his genius) spoke about it directly. He regularly compared it to something else, Sof 60 June 2003 without telling his followers how the two things were alike or related." Jesus left his hearers to figure out for themselves what on earth he was saying about this kingdom of heaven. He threw out clues and left them to solve the riddle, challenging them to share with him the task of carving out from the stories their full meaning. He did not provide blueprints or constitutions for his utopia, but stimulated the appetite for a wondrous new world without geographical boundaries or any fixed ideological framework.
I have written elsewhere of a republic rather than a kingdom of heaven, both because we (which, as usual, means people like me) have ceased to believe in the King and because the collaborative effort Jesus invited in the realisation of this wondrous new world seems to me (if not, alas, to all my readers!) to fit modern and progressive categories of democracy and republicanism rather better than they do conservative and outdated concepts of monarchical rule. But the terms "kingdom" or "republic" (or "realm" or "domain’) are not the issue here. The point is that Jesus’ utopia is inspirational rather than instrumental. It tells us what, but leaves us to work out how. Which is what the best utopias do - and which is why I remain moved and inspired by their enabling Ambrosius Holbein, dreams, while fully aware of their The Island of Utopia’, Woodcut, tendency to become nightmares. What else for Froben's edition of of value, after all, has religious culture Sir Thomas More's Utopia, 1518 bequeathed us, now that we no longer look for metaphysical salvation, life after death, divine rewards and punishments, and the consolation of fabies and lies?
In Three Sisters, Baron Tuzenbach muses on Vershinin’s enthusiasm for a "new, happier way" which is "the purpose of our existence". "Well," says the Baron, "maybe we'll fly in balloons, the cut of the jacket will be different, we'll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it - I don’t know. But life will be the same - difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. Ina thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They'll still be scared of death, and won’t want to die." We don’t have to choose between Vishinin and Tuzenbach. Some things will indeed always be the same - our fears, foolishness, fallibility, and, hopefully, our aspirations for something better - but there’s lots we can change, and God knows there’s lots that need changing in our broken world. "True religion", wrote Penn, "don’t take us out of the world but excites our endeavours to mend it". We need our enabling dreams and their excitement if we are to make any progress in building our imaginary republic of heaven on earth.
David Boulton is a humanist and Quaker, and former editor of the British TV series, ‘World in Action’, former Head of Current Affairs Arts and Religion, at the independent Granada TV company, and former editor of SOF magazine.
His most recent book, "The Trouble with God: Religious Humanism and the Republic of Heaven" (O Books, John Hunt Ltd, £7.99 ISBN 1-903816-19-X) is available from Sea of Faith, 15 Burton Street, Loughborough LE11 2DT or through bookshops.