"There are just no cultures where “no one is managing things,”" --
Yes, but there are also no cultures that were designed with the pre-assumption of every citizen having a globally connected computer in their pockets. Whether or not central management is an absolute requirement for avoiding chaos is a function of what tools for self-organization and distributed decision-making and distributed process management we have. Even just a few decades ago it was clear: we do not have good enough tools for self-organization, we do need central management. Today... I'm not sure. I'm not sure either way, the answer may easily be that yes, we still need centralization, but I definitely think it's something that hasn't been fully explored.
Pretty much all the social structures we have were designed centuries ago, and a lot of their design was informed by the technology (mostly communication tech) that was available back then. The way our once-every-four-years elections, and one-representative-per-geological-region political systems work, they made sense in the past, but not necessarily with the tech we have today. Technically we could easily build a system where any citizen can delegate their vote to anyone, possibly to multiple persons depending on area of expertise, changing their setup any time, overriding on a case-by-case basis, etc., etc. Similarly, I think a whole lot of the areas where we think central management is essential, could now be replaced with distributed, self-organizing cooperation.
I really would love to see what kind of structures we'd come up with if we re-designed it all from scratch but with today's tech in mind. And I don't mean getting it designed by a committee, but what would organically evolve out of the chaos, under today's circumstances instead of those centuries or millennia ago. Unfortunately not only do we not know, but we also don't have good ways to play around with such questions. (If I were a billionaire, I'd build online games that could serve as sandboxes for such experiments.)
You're so right, and that's just it! We need to be able to experiment and see what else might work. In practice, Singapore works the way you say. The people who live there provide feedback on EVERYTHING, and the government takes that into account and then changes the laws and the structure based on the feedback from citizens. (But they are still a benevolent dicatorship, technically, so that could change!)
I'll actually be experimenting with various models in an upcoming series on government. I'll be curious what you think!
"What makes this multiplicity significant, Berlin believed, is that our values are also often incompatible and at times incommensurable – that is, not jointly measurable on a common scale. To take only the simplest examples, more justice means less mercy, more equality less liberty, more efficiency less spontaneity; and there is no objective procedural rule that enables us to balance one value against the other in such a conflict and decide where to draw the line. Each value is its own yardstick, and there is no independent measuring-rod that can be used to referee clashes between them.
One of the most important results of this state of affairs is that the systems of value that we find embedded in different cultural traditions are also plural, like the separate values that contribute towards them. This means that there can be many different value-structures, many different moralities, without it being possible to rank them in an order of approximation to some ideal blueprint for human life. And this is crucial for the understanding and management of differences between cultures, nations, traditions, ways of life. Aggressive, triumphalist nationalism and most mainstream forms of religion (especially but not only in fundamentalist form) have to be rejected, on this basis, as radically wrong-headed, built as they are on the anti-pluralist (or ‘monist’) assumption that there is only one right way, superior to all other candidates.
This doesn’t mean that we must go to the other extreme and say that any aspirant code of values is as respectworthy as any other: a position of that kind is sometimes called ‘relativism’, though this is a dangerously slippery and ambiguous word. Pluralists are natural advocates of the maximum of toleration and variety, certainly, but they also recognise that human nature sets certain definite limits to what is desirable, and makes certain key requirements that any decent, civilised culture will need to satisfy. Cruelty is out, for instance, as is the arbitrary use of force. So, probably, although this is more controversial, is the kind of neglect of basic human rights characteristic of some modern regimes, for all that they sometimes urge different cultural traditions as the rationale for their conduct."
Contrasting cycles are what form life…..eternal peace is just a moment of time……find your peace amidst this chaos in connection here…..instead of praising control over others, beware people pretending to serve The Good by sending orders all the way from the top down, they tyrannize by suppression…let the bottom up utopic variations rise to the infinite sky…
Historically I think you're wrong that all human communities have had "an authority" or a formal hierarchy that makes decisions for everyone else. That is not a universal. It may be that modern nation-states are something of a political monoculture in that respect--though we also have plenty of people celebrating free-market capitalism or other formulations of "the wisdom of crowds" as something that supposedly 'makes decisions' without an intervening authority or hierarchy. But there are definitely "stateless societies" that have existed in the past, and some of them have been quite complex in institutional terms, in terms of population density or territorial extent. I think the job of utopian fiction might be at times less about imagining the future and more about having a more imaginative and broad-ranging understanding of the relative diversity and variety of how human beings have lived together across their history as a species.
I'd suggest starting with David Graeber and David Wengrow's recent Dawn of Everything, which does a great job of generally critiquing the assumption that all societies have centralized authorities or particular kinds of governance. Here's a lovely short review of it that lays out some of the force of their argument: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/political-mythologies/articles/there-are-thousands-of-other-ways
Some of the cases they work with are worth further exploration. They do a nice job pointing out that there's plenty of reasons to think that the large complex Mesoamerican city Teotihuacan was not the center of an empire or a centralized state or particularly centralized or hierarchical despite having complex large-scale architecture. In my field of expertise, the early West African city Jenne-jeno is another good example: a large, complicated settlement that persisted for centuries and doesn't seem to have had kings or emperors or centralized administration--it was a kind of economic entrepot where fishers and potters and weavers and hunters and farmers and blacksmiths all had their neighborhoods, and merchants came in from regional trade routes, and it just kind of worked for a good while.
A more complicated example, just because the scholarship is sort of dense, would be Igbo-speaking communities in what is now Nigeria from about 1500-1750, after which the Atlantic slave trade began to gnaw away at things. Densely populated, very complicated settlements, a lot of complicated social differentiation, but no kings or chiefs or rulers as such, no codified or formalized law, lots of different competing hierarchies that didn't produce civil disorder. Not a utopia, perhaps, but a world where people more or less got along and engaged in trade, production, farming, culture-making etc. without any formal political hierarchy that organized that activity.
Oh I'm so sorry, somehow I missed this comment in my notifications! YES! The Dawn of Everything is on my reading list, so I'm glad they'll be covering some of these communities. Thank you so much for sharing these with me, I didn't know that about Teotihuacan, so interesting! And I would love to know more about Jenne-jeno! I'm immediately adding them to my research list.......... Any particular books you think would take me deeper? Or is the Dawn of Everything the best one?
The discussion about what "utopian" means clarifies something for me.
I would argue that to count as "utopian" a vision has to include some element of, "a better world will create better people." Without that it's just a theme park. That could be, "people raised in a world with education and without deprivation and inequality will be more respectful and empathetic." Or (in a bottom-up utopia), "people with meaningful responsibility for creating their own world will rise to the challenge and be more thoughtful and responsible."
I think that's part of the difficulty of making a utopia convincing; it's easy to be cynical, and I don't think it requires that we imagine a world that is so boring and placid that there aren't stories to tell and conflicts occurring.
But, I would argue, to deserve the name "utopia" requires some belief that a better world will not only do a better job of feeding and clothing people, but will also nurture and cultivate more generous and thoughtful people.
I agree that a utopian vision portrays some element of a better world. And that that world can still have (will have) conflict. But I am definitely realizing through this series that people are using the word "utopian" to mean "perfect" which is not how I see it at all.
I'll add a personal note. I am skeptical about the idea that a utopia could be perfect ("Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made"), but I think it is possible to create spaces that change people (on some scale).
My parents were part of a group of people involved with a long-running adult summer music camp. I'm not particularly musical; so it wasn't my community, but seeing the experience of people there, part of the magic wasn't just the music but spending a week with a hundred people who are all being the best version of themselves. It created an environment in which people were creative, attentive, supportive, engaged, experimental, and contributing to a genuine shared experience.
It didn't work for everyone, of course, but it worked for a lot of people and it was surprising that it was repeatable for decades that it could maintain that spirit (I heard more than one person say that people should be very wary about making major life decisions in the weeks after camp because normal life could feel so different.
Obviously many people feel similar about burning man (I haven't gone to that either).
It's daunting (and arrogant!) to imagine trying to create better people, but I don't think we should completely avoid the idea.
Upon reflection the biggest challenge in writing a utopian book is how not to be boring. A true utopia would have no stories. “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Then there is the time honored genre of people trying to make things better and accomplishing the opposite. See all of human history for examples.
Wonderful piece, Ellie. Yes, we need thinkers to help think us out of this mess and positive utopian visioning seems vital. To answer your question, top down or bottom up, I think it not either/or but both/and, a genuine collaboration but with a new top. The current top cannot be reasoned with because it is creating a mass formation psychosis so the bottom must topple the top in order to create a new accountable top dedicated to solving problems instead of allowing this profit-motivated system of institutionalized usury to continue creating them. I think it important to understand the dystopia we live in, to envision a path out of it toward a better world. I think we need to have an international ‘Sankofa’, examining our history to determine where we took the wrong fork in the road and make the correction.
I've always thought, whether true or not, that most dystopian fiction is a future projection, or reflection of what the writer is perceiving in their society. Huxley and Orwell wrote two versions of a totalitarian dystopia based on how they saw the world and its governance around them progressing. Today we kind of have those two versions manifested in the Biden v Trump fascisms which I think are illusory creations of global finance, our collective nemesis. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in which both fascisms are employed may be more accurate.
However, I am at a loss to find examples of places where the leadership/government is making good decisions. Finland and Ladakh are better but problems for them are increasing due to the actions and policies of the global financial hegemon. There are lessons to be learned in those examples. If you would, please share the examples you refer to.
I have never written a book and now it seems to late to do so, as you say who reads books anymore? The book I want to write is all about the money and titled Healing Our Dystopia but perhaps it makes more sense to be a newsletter as new information and thinking continue to flow.
I agree that it's both. And also probably that many dystopian writers wrote from their perspective of the world, and even that many people today think they live in a utopia.
But I would argue that that worldview is innacurate! Yes, we could look at our mess of politicians and think everything is all going to hell. But if we had no idea what was going on with our politics, if we had no idea what was happening at the top, and were just living our lives without that knowledge, most of us in the Nordic Countries, New Zealand, Switzerland, and even the United States, would think we were living pretty good lives.
We will always complain that our reality could be better. But it is already so much better than it was 100 years ago! To think that we are living in a dystopia today seems a direct reflection of the chaos we read about in the media, not the actuality that has been unfolding for hundreds of years.
i've mentioned this in a few other comments, but i don't think it can be overstated: it matters very much whether we're trying to respond to a political crisis or a spiritual one. i think that politics is built around mythology—even in supposedly secular societies—and the process of fixing our politics has some unavoidably metaphysical elements. focusing on those elements relieves some of the pressure on civilians who are otherwise expected to repair a mess of complicated (and often dangerous) administrative machinery.
Yes, I agree. I think the political and spiritual, as Gandhi noted, go hand in hand. As someone said, "We have already tried everything possible, now it is time to do the impossible." One thing is, we underestimate the subconscious psychological influences of the money system we have toward alienation/loneliness, non-cooperative isolation, and unethical/criminal behavior. Here lies the impetus for change from a individualistic might-makes-right for-profit mindset to a cooperative for-care mindset.
Changing the system from a private profit-motivated system issuing all money as enslaving debt, to a public care-motivated system issuing all money as a permanently circulating asset would set us on a path to resilient and sufficient prosperity. That is what Lincoln's Greenbacks did and the bankers hated them because they were eliminating debt, creating a cash economy were debt enslavement barely existed and in time would have eliminated it had they banned bank-created money as the progressive populists called for at the end of the 19th century. It is also what hundreds of economists, world-around, called for in the 30s to end the Great Depression, what Congressman Wright Patman called for in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and what Dennis Kucinich called for when he introduced the NEED Act in 2011, to stabilize and eliminate the systemic cause of depression cycles, wars, and environmental destruction. Such a change would have profound psychological benefits for society.
And there is more. Monetary history shows us that the legendary prosperity of ancient Egypt was due to the monetary system they had, as was the astonishing prosperity of the High Middle-ages and demonstrated again in Germany and Austria during the Great Depression. What newspapers called The Miracle of Wörgl was probably the most powerful modern demonstration of the system, which was based on Silvio Gesell’s monetary proposals where $2.5 million in public works were accomplished in 15 months but only issuing $6000 in the local currency. This was due to the currency having a parking fee (demurrage) attached to it to eliminate any tendency to hoard the currency which massively increased its circulation velocity. The citizens of Wörgl, seeing the benefits of paying their local taxes coming back to them so fast that they began paying their local taxes in advance.
These were tremendous physical benefits for the community but there was also a profound psychological consequence as short-term thinking was replaced with long-term thinking and public investments in the future increased. This was due to the dynamics of Net Present Value where the money is worth more in the future instead of less, as with our debt money system. The Great Pyramids of ancient Egypt and the 1000 Cathedrals built during the High Middle-ages were other examples of this kind of long-term thinking.
All this to say that changing the system, the “impossible,” is possible and that we can empower a new human consensus, an abandonment of patriarchal religions worshiping an all-powerful male God to instead embrace the sunny side of the divine feminine, the Great Mother Goddess architype. For Egypt (3000 years) it was Isis, for the High Middle-ages (250 years) it was the Black Madonna, for Wörgl 15 months wasn’t enough time for such a shift as well as being much further removed from the beliefs of their indigenous roots. I think these, along with making the Earth sacred again, are all steps toward a realistic more utopian future.
Wow, lots to unpack there. Do you have a link to an article or book on this different monetary system(s)? I don’t even remember Kucinich’s proposal, so I’ll have to look that up.
Right, you didn't hear about it because the press didn't bother to report the most revolutionary and Constitutionally aligned proposal to change the system in over 200 years. Yes, I meant to include these links. https://www.monetaryalliance.orghttps://internationalmoneyreform.org/
You are very welcome. Come join us if it interests you. We think monetary reform (actually a system change) should be at the top of our political agenda and activism because it is the Constitutional governing factor.
we're definitely thinking in a similar direction. the trouble with political fixes is that they all start with a "we should"—without examining whether there is a cohesive "we" who can do *anything* in the first place.
starting with a narrative about who "we" are, what inherent dignity "we" have—both as individuals and as a collective—and what obligations "we" have to one another is indispensable. if we're not careful, when times get hard, this need for a "we" can easily tip into the too-familiar Blood and Social nationalism that we're already seeing crop up in supposedly progressive, educated, modern countries around the world. the only remedy is a more expansive "we" that is based on our shared humanity and transcends our physical circumstances. (unfortunately, modern philosophy has been working diligently for centuries to eradicate exactly this kind of thinking from our definition of "human.")
“When we think of “AI” we immediately think of AI taking over the world and killing the whole human race.” How about an AI taking over the world in order to save the human race (and the Earth?). Some small part of me would welcome a benevolent AI overlord. 😉 But seriously, I’ll try to have a more substantive comment when I get back from volunteering at my local nature center. (Trying to create utopia in a small way.)
Ha!!!! That reminds me of Leo's short story where he imagined AI didn't take over the world, but started their own. https://leoflynn.substack.com/p/wired
I’ll check that out! I’m wondering if some of the pushback you’re getting has to do with our culture’s celebration of the individual. Maybe a truly non-coercive utopia could only grow out of a more community-oriented culture.
This reminds me of the end of The Expanse sci-fi novel series. Things seemed to be moving toward a merging of consciousness of all beings in the universe. Cosmic oneness. Sounded pretty good to me. Without spoiling anything, there were a few twists...
Or Mass Effect 3, with its three endings. I chose the one where biological life and AI merge, but a lot of people hate that ending. (None of them can be considered a utopia, because it’s really a 3-choice trolley problem. Each ending has some major drawbacks. The lesson being, don’t end your story with a trolley problem, because everyone will be dissatisfied.)
The answer as always is it depends. What qualities make them good as not attributable to top down management. Systems that work are emergent. Often what seems to be top down management is just control freaks hijacking ideas and processes that emerged from necessity and problem Solon the ground. I have such a fundamental disagreement with your point of view it’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll try. There’s a reason utopiaa become dystopian every time. Utopia is a static condition incompatible with life - in other words growth. We’re not here to have a perfect time in the best of all possible worlds. Can we improve things for some of the people some of the time? Yes, because this is compatible with life. But it takes honesty about what does and doesn’t work, and the ability to change when you find out something you didn’t know. These are qualities not notable in top down systems.
I think we might be in agreement just using different semantics. Because you say: "Can we improve things for some of the people some of the time? Yes, because this is compatible with life. But it takes honesty about what does and doesn’t work, and the ability to change when you find out something you didn’t know."
I agree.
Then you say: "These are qualities not notable in top down systems" to which I would say, don't you think many democratic countries have improved things for many people many of the time? Especially compared to countries without a democracy who haven't? And aren't democratic countriers still top down systems? Even if they are informed by the bottom?
We don’t have a remotely democratic system. I don’t attribute the improvements we’ve seen to top down management. Successful people who run things usually like things the way they are and because that’s how they prospered. Take child labor or abolition. The people who cared had to become annoying and be willing to be rejected - by those who were doing nothing more than following accepted common practices. In both cases it was bottom up agitation and not top down beneficence that (eventually) changed things. Most people even in democracies go along to get along and will not bother to risk rejection and failure by standing up for something just to make strangers’ lives better. What you call democracy I call outsourcing human responsibility.
i'm linking to my comment on yesterday's post below (hopefully)—to keep it visible, and also because it goes directly to what we're discussing in this section.
i'm still not sure if "leadership" and "governance" are the correct terms to contrast. but it feels intuitively true to me: when you say that you can't imagine a culture where "no one is managing things"—i agree, but that's not the same thing as imagining a culture in which there's no government. this is getting into a whooole big can of worms about how we define things like "government" and "state," and i'd love to have that conversation. for my purposes, just on the surface, i think there are plenty of communities and cultures at all points in history (including today) that are guided by leaders who aren't necessarily part of a remote, abstract "government." i think that will increasingly be the case in the future, as governments struggle to keep up with the unpredictable effects of climate change and political instability.
there's the rub: what unites a group of 300 million people?
if it's a centralized government, and that government is increasingly unable to carry out its functions, because of internal or external pressure—what keeps the people together?
if it's fear, then that's a dystopia.
if it's a shared commitment to a place and to one other, then that transcends any administrative arrangement that might be (temporarily) constructed.
at that point, we're not talking about utopian fiction: we're looking for better mythologies—and i am 100% here for that!
I agree that large governments are difficult and unwieldy to manage (I personally think that smaller governments are much better, which is why I have pieces coming up on state government and city government) but the citizens of our government are not here because we are united by any kind of idealogy, we are only here by birth. That we needed someway to organize people who lived in a particular place, so that they wouldn't harm other people who lived in a particular place, is why those governments were created.
certainly. the question is—are the governments we've created the only way to keep people from harming each other? i think there are communities existing in this country, right now, that would complicate that assumption, let alone globally or historically.
(do nomadic communities have a government? indigenous communities in geographically remote places? the Amish? hard to say!)
i'm not advocating for anarchism: i'm saying that we might get to a point in the future where the powers of the government are so attenuated that we might have no choice but to find other ways to self-organize. while that could be utopian in a certain light, i think the realistic challenges of those conditions would always be less than ideal. but not unlivable!
Governments are the only way we've been able to keep people from harming each other so far. Do you have an alternative?
Nomadic communities, indigenous communities, and the Amish, have their own local communities that I think are very valid and beautiful. But they still aren't able to murder people, conduct sacrifices, or otherwise harm other people. So yes, they are still part of the government, and that is still the best way to ensure bad activities don't happen.
You may not be advocating for anarchism, but are you saying it might be inevitable we get there? Because sure, I don't think democracy is a given, it has been taken away many times before in the past. But rarely does it result in anarchism, mostly it results in totalitarianism. But I still think we can prevent that and that's what these conversations are in service of!
i think that's central to what we're exploring in this series... part of the challenge is deciding on a definition of what "utopian" even is. Elle prefers a broader definition of "utopian" than I do, and that's perfectly fine. for my part, i'm skeptical of the idea that a realistic portrayal of an "ideal" society is even possible. i can imagine ideal *circumstances* for a human community—but those will always be changing over time, responding to internal and external pressures, and succumbing to entropy. ideal circumstances inevitably deteriorate. in my opinion, realistic portrayals of any community should acknowledge those periods of deterioration in the past *and the future*, and recognize that—historically—efforts to forestall that inevitable deterioration will often turn authoritarian. when that deterioration takes hold, is it still a "utopia"? or does it turn into something else?
I think the definition of 'utopia' includes both 'perfect' and 'impossible'... thus the fiction that portrays it has to break one of those walls... either deal with 'impossible' by having it be sheer fantasy (the land that Bilbo goes to at the end of the LOTR, for example) or deal with the 'perfect' by making it, in fact, not perfect: making the ideal world actually be illusory, or contain some great evil. The Truman Show, for example.
The other idea, obviously, is to have a universal benevolent dictator. Thus the ending of the Last Battle.
Having it be at one point in history breaks the 'perfect' wall, because obviously being unstable isn't perfect.
I think another thing that is going on in your discussion with Elle is a certain naivete, as well
It seems to me that part of what you’re differences are is actually a difference of definition. I would not have said that any of the children’s books that you listed were utopian.
None of the children's books you present are anything like an 'ideal' world. Just to take Narnia, you have death, slavery, witchcraft, human sacrifice, etc etc. Always winter and never Christmas. The list goes ever on...
Ahhhh, but that's not true. The idea that utopia is unobtainable is something we have applied to the genre later on. That the word "utopia" meant both a "good place" and "no place" was a play on words. That's why William Morris followed in More's footsteps and called his utopian novel "News from Nowhere."
The idea was that it didn't yet exist, but it could. (And there are many satires that went in the negative direction with this, depicting it as entirely unobtainable, and even dystopian for its perfection).
Something meaning a good place, or even no place, is very different from something meaning a "perfect place" (that is unobtainable).
I would be interested in reading about this transition from 'possible' to 'impossible'. The idea of 'nowhere' in the original does seem to leave open the possibility 'because it can't be anywhere'. Certainly, the idea that it can't be anywhere is prevalent in modern thought about utopias.
And, as I think I have said elsewhere, many, if not most modern 'utopias' are actually dystopias in disguise... they look good or fun on the surface but underlyingly have a rotten core, or an illusory core... like the Truman Show. Star Trek played with that a lot.
I see I miscommunicated with my 'Star Trek' example. I was referring to certain of the shows where they visited a planet and everything on the planet seemed to be 'just perfect'. All of the perfectly sculpted and healthy young men and women sat around eating grapes and all perfectly happy.... and then Kirk and Spock disovered that... something was really wrong!
I would have said that Star Trek itself had some utopian (and unworkable and contradictory) elements to it, but was far from a true Utopia. Especially if you wore red.
I also think politically More was making a statement that utopia is "nowhere" (meaning it didn't exist in his own government, which would have been sacrilege, and also dangerous, to admit!)
I think many people (including me) think he was saying 'here is perfection which can't exist anywhere'... very much in the constrained vision theme ala Thomas Sowell.
I’m having a little bit of difficulty with my computer, so I basically answered this in a note that I wrote because I couldn’t get my computer to do restacking.
"There are just no cultures where “no one is managing things,”" --
Yes, but there are also no cultures that were designed with the pre-assumption of every citizen having a globally connected computer in their pockets. Whether or not central management is an absolute requirement for avoiding chaos is a function of what tools for self-organization and distributed decision-making and distributed process management we have. Even just a few decades ago it was clear: we do not have good enough tools for self-organization, we do need central management. Today... I'm not sure. I'm not sure either way, the answer may easily be that yes, we still need centralization, but I definitely think it's something that hasn't been fully explored.
Pretty much all the social structures we have were designed centuries ago, and a lot of their design was informed by the technology (mostly communication tech) that was available back then. The way our once-every-four-years elections, and one-representative-per-geological-region political systems work, they made sense in the past, but not necessarily with the tech we have today. Technically we could easily build a system where any citizen can delegate their vote to anyone, possibly to multiple persons depending on area of expertise, changing their setup any time, overriding on a case-by-case basis, etc., etc. Similarly, I think a whole lot of the areas where we think central management is essential, could now be replaced with distributed, self-organizing cooperation.
I really would love to see what kind of structures we'd come up with if we re-designed it all from scratch but with today's tech in mind. And I don't mean getting it designed by a committee, but what would organically evolve out of the chaos, under today's circumstances instead of those centuries or millennia ago. Unfortunately not only do we not know, but we also don't have good ways to play around with such questions. (If I were a billionaire, I'd build online games that could serve as sandboxes for such experiments.)
You're so right, and that's just it! We need to be able to experiment and see what else might work. In practice, Singapore works the way you say. The people who live there provide feedback on EVERYTHING, and the government takes that into account and then changes the laws and the structure based on the feedback from citizens. (But they are still a benevolent dicatorship, technically, so that could change!)
I'll actually be experimenting with various models in an upcoming series on government. I'll be curious what you think!
One (group's/individual's) definition of utopia imposed from the top down on others is oppression aka tyranny....bottoms up!
Which makes you wonder whether it's possible for all of the utopias to co-exist.....
I realize that's a rhetorical comment, but probably not. . . https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/writings_on_ib/hhonib/isaiah_berlin%27s_key_idea.html
"What makes this multiplicity significant, Berlin believed, is that our values are also often incompatible and at times incommensurable – that is, not jointly measurable on a common scale. To take only the simplest examples, more justice means less mercy, more equality less liberty, more efficiency less spontaneity; and there is no objective procedural rule that enables us to balance one value against the other in such a conflict and decide where to draw the line. Each value is its own yardstick, and there is no independent measuring-rod that can be used to referee clashes between them.
One of the most important results of this state of affairs is that the systems of value that we find embedded in different cultural traditions are also plural, like the separate values that contribute towards them. This means that there can be many different value-structures, many different moralities, without it being possible to rank them in an order of approximation to some ideal blueprint for human life. And this is crucial for the understanding and management of differences between cultures, nations, traditions, ways of life. Aggressive, triumphalist nationalism and most mainstream forms of religion (especially but not only in fundamentalist form) have to be rejected, on this basis, as radically wrong-headed, built as they are on the anti-pluralist (or ‘monist’) assumption that there is only one right way, superior to all other candidates.
This doesn’t mean that we must go to the other extreme and say that any aspirant code of values is as respectworthy as any other: a position of that kind is sometimes called ‘relativism’, though this is a dangerously slippery and ambiguous word. Pluralists are natural advocates of the maximum of toleration and variety, certainly, but they also recognise that human nature sets certain definite limits to what is desirable, and makes certain key requirements that any decent, civilised culture will need to satisfy. Cruelty is out, for instance, as is the arbitrary use of force. So, probably, although this is more controversial, is the kind of neglect of basic human rights characteristic of some modern regimes, for all that they sometimes urge different cultural traditions as the rationale for their conduct."
Oh yes, I very much believe various utopian ideas can coexist and my upcoming series is about just that! Thanks for helping my research as always 😍
Contrasting cycles are what form life…..eternal peace is just a moment of time……find your peace amidst this chaos in connection here…..instead of praising control over others, beware people pretending to serve The Good by sending orders all the way from the top down, they tyrannize by suppression…let the bottom up utopic variations rise to the infinite sky…
That’s why democracy is one of the best things we’ve discovered yet. It’s a bit of both!
Historically I think you're wrong that all human communities have had "an authority" or a formal hierarchy that makes decisions for everyone else. That is not a universal. It may be that modern nation-states are something of a political monoculture in that respect--though we also have plenty of people celebrating free-market capitalism or other formulations of "the wisdom of crowds" as something that supposedly 'makes decisions' without an intervening authority or hierarchy. But there are definitely "stateless societies" that have existed in the past, and some of them have been quite complex in institutional terms, in terms of population density or territorial extent. I think the job of utopian fiction might be at times less about imagining the future and more about having a more imaginative and broad-ranging understanding of the relative diversity and variety of how human beings have lived together across their history as a species.
Interesting, could you point me to some of those stateless societies so I can take a peek? I'd love to do more research there!
I'd suggest starting with David Graeber and David Wengrow's recent Dawn of Everything, which does a great job of generally critiquing the assumption that all societies have centralized authorities or particular kinds of governance. Here's a lovely short review of it that lays out some of the force of their argument: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/political-mythologies/articles/there-are-thousands-of-other-ways
Some of the cases they work with are worth further exploration. They do a nice job pointing out that there's plenty of reasons to think that the large complex Mesoamerican city Teotihuacan was not the center of an empire or a centralized state or particularly centralized or hierarchical despite having complex large-scale architecture. In my field of expertise, the early West African city Jenne-jeno is another good example: a large, complicated settlement that persisted for centuries and doesn't seem to have had kings or emperors or centralized administration--it was a kind of economic entrepot where fishers and potters and weavers and hunters and farmers and blacksmiths all had their neighborhoods, and merchants came in from regional trade routes, and it just kind of worked for a good while.
A more complicated example, just because the scholarship is sort of dense, would be Igbo-speaking communities in what is now Nigeria from about 1500-1750, after which the Atlantic slave trade began to gnaw away at things. Densely populated, very complicated settlements, a lot of complicated social differentiation, but no kings or chiefs or rulers as such, no codified or formalized law, lots of different competing hierarchies that didn't produce civil disorder. Not a utopia, perhaps, but a world where people more or less got along and engaged in trade, production, farming, culture-making etc. without any formal political hierarchy that organized that activity.
Oh I'm so sorry, somehow I missed this comment in my notifications! YES! The Dawn of Everything is on my reading list, so I'm glad they'll be covering some of these communities. Thank you so much for sharing these with me, I didn't know that about Teotihuacan, so interesting! And I would love to know more about Jenne-jeno! I'm immediately adding them to my research list.......... Any particular books you think would take me deeper? Or is the Dawn of Everything the best one?
I think the best starting place; the literature on many stateless societies or not-so-hierarchical places gets pretty technical pretty quickly.
That reminds me that the Hexapodia episode on "four lost cities" was quite good, and I should make a note to check out the book at some point: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-is-e-key-insight-d47
In the future, it is probable that there will be a times of utopia as well as a times of dystopia. God knows best.
The discussion about what "utopian" means clarifies something for me.
I would argue that to count as "utopian" a vision has to include some element of, "a better world will create better people." Without that it's just a theme park. That could be, "people raised in a world with education and without deprivation and inequality will be more respectful and empathetic." Or (in a bottom-up utopia), "people with meaningful responsibility for creating their own world will rise to the challenge and be more thoughtful and responsible."
I think that's part of the difficulty of making a utopia convincing; it's easy to be cynical, and I don't think it requires that we imagine a world that is so boring and placid that there aren't stories to tell and conflicts occurring.
But, I would argue, to deserve the name "utopia" requires some belief that a better world will not only do a better job of feeding and clothing people, but will also nurture and cultivate more generous and thoughtful people.
I agree that a utopian vision portrays some element of a better world. And that that world can still have (will have) conflict. But I am definitely realizing through this series that people are using the word "utopian" to mean "perfect" which is not how I see it at all.
I'll add a personal note. I am skeptical about the idea that a utopia could be perfect ("Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made"), but I think it is possible to create spaces that change people (on some scale).
My parents were part of a group of people involved with a long-running adult summer music camp. I'm not particularly musical; so it wasn't my community, but seeing the experience of people there, part of the magic wasn't just the music but spending a week with a hundred people who are all being the best version of themselves. It created an environment in which people were creative, attentive, supportive, engaged, experimental, and contributing to a genuine shared experience.
It didn't work for everyone, of course, but it worked for a lot of people and it was surprising that it was repeatable for decades that it could maintain that spirit (I heard more than one person say that people should be very wary about making major life decisions in the weeks after camp because normal life could feel so different.
Obviously many people feel similar about burning man (I haven't gone to that either).
It's daunting (and arrogant!) to imagine trying to create better people, but I don't think we should completely avoid the idea.
Yes exactly! That sounds like a utopian experience for those people (even if it might not be for others).
Upon reflection the biggest challenge in writing a utopian book is how not to be boring. A true utopia would have no stories. “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” Then there is the time honored genre of people trying to make things better and accomplishing the opposite. See all of human history for examples.
Truly. I've been finding that such a challenge for my own novel. But I think I'm figuring it out (at least I hope so!)
Obligatory link for the earworm :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFjWRsLl5QI
Wonderful piece, Ellie. Yes, we need thinkers to help think us out of this mess and positive utopian visioning seems vital. To answer your question, top down or bottom up, I think it not either/or but both/and, a genuine collaboration but with a new top. The current top cannot be reasoned with because it is creating a mass formation psychosis so the bottom must topple the top in order to create a new accountable top dedicated to solving problems instead of allowing this profit-motivated system of institutionalized usury to continue creating them. I think it important to understand the dystopia we live in, to envision a path out of it toward a better world. I think we need to have an international ‘Sankofa’, examining our history to determine where we took the wrong fork in the road and make the correction.
I've always thought, whether true or not, that most dystopian fiction is a future projection, or reflection of what the writer is perceiving in their society. Huxley and Orwell wrote two versions of a totalitarian dystopia based on how they saw the world and its governance around them progressing. Today we kind of have those two versions manifested in the Biden v Trump fascisms which I think are illusory creations of global finance, our collective nemesis. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in which both fascisms are employed may be more accurate.
However, I am at a loss to find examples of places where the leadership/government is making good decisions. Finland and Ladakh are better but problems for them are increasing due to the actions and policies of the global financial hegemon. There are lessons to be learned in those examples. If you would, please share the examples you refer to.
I have never written a book and now it seems to late to do so, as you say who reads books anymore? The book I want to write is all about the money and titled Healing Our Dystopia but perhaps it makes more sense to be a newsletter as new information and thinking continue to flow.
I agree that it's both. And also probably that many dystopian writers wrote from their perspective of the world, and even that many people today think they live in a utopia.
But I would argue that that worldview is innacurate! Yes, we could look at our mess of politicians and think everything is all going to hell. But if we had no idea what was going on with our politics, if we had no idea what was happening at the top, and were just living our lives without that knowledge, most of us in the Nordic Countries, New Zealand, Switzerland, and even the United States, would think we were living pretty good lives.
We will always complain that our reality could be better. But it is already so much better than it was 100 years ago! To think that we are living in a dystopia today seems a direct reflection of the chaos we read about in the media, not the actuality that has been unfolding for hundreds of years.
i've mentioned this in a few other comments, but i don't think it can be overstated: it matters very much whether we're trying to respond to a political crisis or a spiritual one. i think that politics is built around mythology—even in supposedly secular societies—and the process of fixing our politics has some unavoidably metaphysical elements. focusing on those elements relieves some of the pressure on civilians who are otherwise expected to repair a mess of complicated (and often dangerous) administrative machinery.
Yes, I agree. I think the political and spiritual, as Gandhi noted, go hand in hand. As someone said, "We have already tried everything possible, now it is time to do the impossible." One thing is, we underestimate the subconscious psychological influences of the money system we have toward alienation/loneliness, non-cooperative isolation, and unethical/criminal behavior. Here lies the impetus for change from a individualistic might-makes-right for-profit mindset to a cooperative for-care mindset.
Changing the system from a private profit-motivated system issuing all money as enslaving debt, to a public care-motivated system issuing all money as a permanently circulating asset would set us on a path to resilient and sufficient prosperity. That is what Lincoln's Greenbacks did and the bankers hated them because they were eliminating debt, creating a cash economy were debt enslavement barely existed and in time would have eliminated it had they banned bank-created money as the progressive populists called for at the end of the 19th century. It is also what hundreds of economists, world-around, called for in the 30s to end the Great Depression, what Congressman Wright Patman called for in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and what Dennis Kucinich called for when he introduced the NEED Act in 2011, to stabilize and eliminate the systemic cause of depression cycles, wars, and environmental destruction. Such a change would have profound psychological benefits for society.
And there is more. Monetary history shows us that the legendary prosperity of ancient Egypt was due to the monetary system they had, as was the astonishing prosperity of the High Middle-ages and demonstrated again in Germany and Austria during the Great Depression. What newspapers called The Miracle of Wörgl was probably the most powerful modern demonstration of the system, which was based on Silvio Gesell’s monetary proposals where $2.5 million in public works were accomplished in 15 months but only issuing $6000 in the local currency. This was due to the currency having a parking fee (demurrage) attached to it to eliminate any tendency to hoard the currency which massively increased its circulation velocity. The citizens of Wörgl, seeing the benefits of paying their local taxes coming back to them so fast that they began paying their local taxes in advance.
These were tremendous physical benefits for the community but there was also a profound psychological consequence as short-term thinking was replaced with long-term thinking and public investments in the future increased. This was due to the dynamics of Net Present Value where the money is worth more in the future instead of less, as with our debt money system. The Great Pyramids of ancient Egypt and the 1000 Cathedrals built during the High Middle-ages were other examples of this kind of long-term thinking.
All this to say that changing the system, the “impossible,” is possible and that we can empower a new human consensus, an abandonment of patriarchal religions worshiping an all-powerful male God to instead embrace the sunny side of the divine feminine, the Great Mother Goddess architype. For Egypt (3000 years) it was Isis, for the High Middle-ages (250 years) it was the Black Madonna, for Wörgl 15 months wasn’t enough time for such a shift as well as being much further removed from the beliefs of their indigenous roots. I think these, along with making the Earth sacred again, are all steps toward a realistic more utopian future.
Wow, lots to unpack there. Do you have a link to an article or book on this different monetary system(s)? I don’t even remember Kucinich’s proposal, so I’ll have to look that up.
Right, you didn't hear about it because the press didn't bother to report the most revolutionary and Constitutionally aligned proposal to change the system in over 200 years. Yes, I meant to include these links. https://www.monetaryalliance.org https://internationalmoneyreform.org/
https://greensformonetaryreform.org/ and one of my personal favorite books online: https://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/index.htm
Thanks for those!
You are very welcome. Come join us if it interests you. We think monetary reform (actually a system change) should be at the top of our political agenda and activism because it is the Constitutional governing factor.
we're definitely thinking in a similar direction. the trouble with political fixes is that they all start with a "we should"—without examining whether there is a cohesive "we" who can do *anything* in the first place.
starting with a narrative about who "we" are, what inherent dignity "we" have—both as individuals and as a collective—and what obligations "we" have to one another is indispensable. if we're not careful, when times get hard, this need for a "we" can easily tip into the too-familiar Blood and Social nationalism that we're already seeing crop up in supposedly progressive, educated, modern countries around the world. the only remedy is a more expansive "we" that is based on our shared humanity and transcends our physical circumstances. (unfortunately, modern philosophy has been working diligently for centuries to eradicate exactly this kind of thinking from our definition of "human.")
It’s hard to even agree on a “we” when a local road is proposed to change from one-way to two-way, so yeah, I get that.
“When we think of “AI” we immediately think of AI taking over the world and killing the whole human race.” How about an AI taking over the world in order to save the human race (and the Earth?). Some small part of me would welcome a benevolent AI overlord. 😉 But seriously, I’ll try to have a more substantive comment when I get back from volunteering at my local nature center. (Trying to create utopia in a small way.)
Ha!!!! That reminds me of Leo's short story where he imagined AI didn't take over the world, but started their own. https://leoflynn.substack.com/p/wired
I love your utopia!!!!!!!
I’ll check that out! I’m wondering if some of the pushback you’re getting has to do with our culture’s celebration of the individual. Maybe a truly non-coercive utopia could only grow out of a more community-oriented culture.
This reminds me of the end of The Expanse sci-fi novel series. Things seemed to be moving toward a merging of consciousness of all beings in the universe. Cosmic oneness. Sounded pretty good to me. Without spoiling anything, there were a few twists...
Or Mass Effect 3, with its three endings. I chose the one where biological life and AI merge, but a lot of people hate that ending. (None of them can be considered a utopia, because it’s really a 3-choice trolley problem. Each ending has some major drawbacks. The lesson being, don’t end your story with a trolley problem, because everyone will be dissatisfied.)
“And aren’t there societies that already know how to?” The answer to that is no.
There are no countries that are a good place to live?
🤔 ...
The answer as always is it depends. What qualities make them good as not attributable to top down management. Systems that work are emergent. Often what seems to be top down management is just control freaks hijacking ideas and processes that emerged from necessity and problem Solon the ground. I have such a fundamental disagreement with your point of view it’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll try. There’s a reason utopiaa become dystopian every time. Utopia is a static condition incompatible with life - in other words growth. We’re not here to have a perfect time in the best of all possible worlds. Can we improve things for some of the people some of the time? Yes, because this is compatible with life. But it takes honesty about what does and doesn’t work, and the ability to change when you find out something you didn’t know. These are qualities not notable in top down systems.
I think we might be in agreement just using different semantics. Because you say: "Can we improve things for some of the people some of the time? Yes, because this is compatible with life. But it takes honesty about what does and doesn’t work, and the ability to change when you find out something you didn’t know."
I agree.
Then you say: "These are qualities not notable in top down systems" to which I would say, don't you think many democratic countries have improved things for many people many of the time? Especially compared to countries without a democracy who haven't? And aren't democratic countriers still top down systems? Even if they are informed by the bottom?
We don’t have a remotely democratic system. I don’t attribute the improvements we’ve seen to top down management. Successful people who run things usually like things the way they are and because that’s how they prospered. Take child labor or abolition. The people who cared had to become annoying and be willing to be rejected - by those who were doing nothing more than following accepted common practices. In both cases it was bottom up agitation and not top down beneficence that (eventually) changed things. Most people even in democracies go along to get along and will not bother to risk rejection and failure by standing up for something just to make strangers’ lives better. What you call democracy I call outsourcing human responsibility.
(my first comment broke, this is Take 2.)
excited to see the conversation continue!
i'm linking to my comment on yesterday's post below (hopefully)—to keep it visible, and also because it goes directly to what we're discussing in this section.
i'm still not sure if "leadership" and "governance" are the correct terms to contrast. but it feels intuitively true to me: when you say that you can't imagine a culture where "no one is managing things"—i agree, but that's not the same thing as imagining a culture in which there's no government. this is getting into a whooole big can of worms about how we define things like "government" and "state," and i'd love to have that conversation. for my purposes, just on the surface, i think there are plenty of communities and cultures at all points in history (including today) that are guided by leaders who aren't necessarily part of a remote, abstract "government." i think that will increasingly be the case in the future, as governments struggle to keep up with the unpredictable effects of climate change and political instability.
here's the link to my comment from yesterday. hopefully it works this time! https://open.substack.com/pub/ellegriffin/p/how-do-we-define-utopia?r=1onphg&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=39995381
I think I see what you are saying here. But is it possible to be a leader of a 300 million person community? Or are you then a governor?
As in, do you think it's possible to have a culture where there is no governance, only leaders???
there's the rub: what unites a group of 300 million people?
if it's a centralized government, and that government is increasingly unable to carry out its functions, because of internal or external pressure—what keeps the people together?
if it's fear, then that's a dystopia.
if it's a shared commitment to a place and to one other, then that transcends any administrative arrangement that might be (temporarily) constructed.
at that point, we're not talking about utopian fiction: we're looking for better mythologies—and i am 100% here for that!
I agree that large governments are difficult and unwieldy to manage (I personally think that smaller governments are much better, which is why I have pieces coming up on state government and city government) but the citizens of our government are not here because we are united by any kind of idealogy, we are only here by birth. That we needed someway to organize people who lived in a particular place, so that they wouldn't harm other people who lived in a particular place, is why those governments were created.
certainly. the question is—are the governments we've created the only way to keep people from harming each other? i think there are communities existing in this country, right now, that would complicate that assumption, let alone globally or historically.
(do nomadic communities have a government? indigenous communities in geographically remote places? the Amish? hard to say!)
i'm not advocating for anarchism: i'm saying that we might get to a point in the future where the powers of the government are so attenuated that we might have no choice but to find other ways to self-organize. while that could be utopian in a certain light, i think the realistic challenges of those conditions would always be less than ideal. but not unlivable!
Governments are the only way we've been able to keep people from harming each other so far. Do you have an alternative?
Nomadic communities, indigenous communities, and the Amish, have their own local communities that I think are very valid and beautiful. But they still aren't able to murder people, conduct sacrifices, or otherwise harm other people. So yes, they are still part of the government, and that is still the best way to ensure bad activities don't happen.
You may not be advocating for anarchism, but are you saying it might be inevitable we get there? Because sure, I don't think democracy is a given, it has been taken away many times before in the past. But rarely does it result in anarchism, mostly it results in totalitarianism. But I still think we can prevent that and that's what these conversations are in service of!
that's why i'm writing stories and not running for office :)
Can you think of a serious utopian book that is not either a fantasy or a dystopia in disguise?
i think that's central to what we're exploring in this series... part of the challenge is deciding on a definition of what "utopian" even is. Elle prefers a broader definition of "utopian" than I do, and that's perfectly fine. for my part, i'm skeptical of the idea that a realistic portrayal of an "ideal" society is even possible. i can imagine ideal *circumstances* for a human community—but those will always be changing over time, responding to internal and external pressures, and succumbing to entropy. ideal circumstances inevitably deteriorate. in my opinion, realistic portrayals of any community should acknowledge those periods of deterioration in the past *and the future*, and recognize that—historically—efforts to forestall that inevitable deterioration will often turn authoritarian. when that deterioration takes hold, is it still a "utopia"? or does it turn into something else?
I think the definition of 'utopia' includes both 'perfect' and 'impossible'... thus the fiction that portrays it has to break one of those walls... either deal with 'impossible' by having it be sheer fantasy (the land that Bilbo goes to at the end of the LOTR, for example) or deal with the 'perfect' by making it, in fact, not perfect: making the ideal world actually be illusory, or contain some great evil. The Truman Show, for example.
The other idea, obviously, is to have a universal benevolent dictator. Thus the ending of the Last Battle.
Having it be at one point in history breaks the 'perfect' wall, because obviously being unstable isn't perfect.
I think another thing that is going on in your discussion with Elle is a certain naivete, as well
My first comment broke, too. I had to reboot my computer. Or maybe it was just substack :)
It seems to me that part of what you’re differences are is actually a difference of definition. I would not have said that any of the children’s books that you listed were utopian.
Oh interesting! Why not? Is it because they are philosophical or aesthetic utopias moreso than systemic ones?
Ok, now that I am able to comment here from my computer...
The historic definition of 'utopia' is something like 'an unobtainable perfect world':
utopia
yoo͞-tō′pē-ə
noun
An ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects.
A work of fiction describing a utopia.
An impractical, idealistic scheme for social and political reform.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=utopia+defintion&atb=v349-1&ia=definition
None of the children's books you present are anything like an 'ideal' world. Just to take Narnia, you have death, slavery, witchcraft, human sacrifice, etc etc. Always winter and never Christmas. The list goes ever on...
Ahhhh, but that's not true. The idea that utopia is unobtainable is something we have applied to the genre later on. That the word "utopia" meant both a "good place" and "no place" was a play on words. That's why William Morris followed in More's footsteps and called his utopian novel "News from Nowhere."
The idea was that it didn't yet exist, but it could. (And there are many satires that went in the negative direction with this, depicting it as entirely unobtainable, and even dystopian for its perfection).
Something meaning a good place, or even no place, is very different from something meaning a "perfect place" (that is unobtainable).
I would be interested in reading about this transition from 'possible' to 'impossible'. The idea of 'nowhere' in the original does seem to leave open the possibility 'because it can't be anywhere'. Certainly, the idea that it can't be anywhere is prevalent in modern thought about utopias.
And, as I think I have said elsewhere, many, if not most modern 'utopias' are actually dystopias in disguise... they look good or fun on the surface but underlyingly have a rotten core, or an illusory core... like the Truman Show. Star Trek played with that a lot.
I love the Truman Show! Such a good example!
Star Trek was definitely a utopia, but of course there is still conflict (there always will be!)
You love the Truman Show in what sense, tho? As a false Utopia?
If the Truman Show had been real, would it have been a Utopia, in your view? IE If it hadn't been a TV show?
Indeed I would say that, for me, Star Trek was in many ways a dystopia.
I see I miscommunicated with my 'Star Trek' example. I was referring to certain of the shows where they visited a planet and everything on the planet seemed to be 'just perfect'. All of the perfectly sculpted and healthy young men and women sat around eating grapes and all perfectly happy.... and then Kirk and Spock disovered that... something was really wrong!
I would have said that Star Trek itself had some utopian (and unworkable and contradictory) elements to it, but was far from a true Utopia. Especially if you wore red.
I also think politically More was making a statement that utopia is "nowhere" (meaning it didn't exist in his own government, which would have been sacrilege, and also dangerous, to admit!)
I think many people (including me) think he was saying 'here is perfection which can't exist anywhere'... very much in the constrained vision theme ala Thomas Sowell.
I’m going to reboot and see if I can get my computer to work
I’m having a little bit of difficulty with my computer, so I basically answered this in a note that I wrote because I couldn’t get my computer to do restacking.
https://substack.com/@vonwriting/note/c-40012840?r=6csnm&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action