Utopia is often accompanied by such adjectives as impossible, unrealistic, and impractical. In spite of that, it is not so hard to find some renowned people who actually maintain that is a very helpful and practical concept. Zygmunt Bauman (Socialism: The Active Utopia) argues that “utopian thinking belongs in the same category as invention” and invention is what a society needs in time of crises when all traditional solutions fail tragically. It also needs hope to cope with the crises and utopia provides just that. But even in normal times utopia is very useful since it “is an integral element of the critical attitude,” something that the conservative mind lacks dramatically. Last but not least, utopias “exert enormous influence on the actual course of historical events,” as they not only motivate human action but also guide it.
Also Ruth Levitas (Being in Utopia) speaks favorably of utopia. According to her, “imagining ourselves otherwise is a central element of the utopian project.” And the utopian project serves to find “a better way of being and a better way of living.” So for her utopia is not so much a goal of human action but rather a method of reconstitution of society. “Hope and imagination are central to this.” Hope energizes the action and imagination “allows people to understand their own potential to change.” In this context, Levitas speaks about “prophetic identity,” which is “self-understanding in terms of who we might become.” This prophetic identity should be the goal of education.
But not only people whom we associate with the left political spectrum advocate utopian thinking. A libertarian philosopher, Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia), argues for meta-utopia, i.e. a minimal state and a society based on free market and voluntary associations. That’s the only possible utopia since utopia is “the best world imaginable, for each of us.”
It should not surprise that the vast majority of those who have a rather critical attitude towards utopia comes from the conservative corner. Thomas Molnar (Myth and Utopia) traces the roots of utopian thinking to ancient perception of reality. Ancient societies believed that they needed to re-immerse themselves in “the original outpouring of being” whenever they felt that they were not longer able to function. This re-immersion took form of rituals and festivals based of myths dealing with “the original outpouring of being.” Molnar notices that modern society has little room for myths, which however does not mean that they vanish. Instead, the myth “undergoes a succession of metamorphoses until the ‘true story’ turns into a ‘false story,’” where “false story” is a “second reality,” the only true reality. This “false story” is a pseudo-myth, a shadow of myth, also known as utopia.
According to Molnar this change from myth to utopia is connected with the rise of Christianity and its linear conception of history, which makes it impossible to return to “the original outpouring of being.” Nevertheless, modern societies are still caught by nostalgia. “The utopian designer . . . holds dear the images of Paradise, but only as fragments of a coarse myth: freedom from work, nudity, sexual gratification, the destruction of time and of rationality.” The linear perception of history makes him believe that utopia lies in an undefined future, which means that “the most important element of the myth, experience, is absent from utopia; in fact, its building blocks are the negation of the structure of the real.”
This last observation leads us to Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies) who, trying to explain utopia, also goes back to the ancients but this time to Plato and finds common elements in the Platonic approach and in utopian engineering. Both can be described as total approaches since both believe that for any action to be rational, one has to choose the end first. In this case the end is a blueprint for the Ideal State. And this is exactly the problem that Popper points at. “Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale.” Another problem is that “the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship.” Moreover, utopian social engineers must face the question of succession: how to ensure that the next generation of leaders will be willing to pursue the same project as they do?
According to Popper these problems can be solved only if the “Platonic belief in one absolute and unchanging ideal” is true and “that there are rational methods to determine once and for all what this ideal is.” However, even Plato himself would admit that this is not possible. The chase after the impossible doesn’t pay off, because it stands in the way of what Popper calls “piecemeal engineering,” which adopts “the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.”
Popper believes that the ultimate source of all utopian thinking can be found in aesthetic perception of reality. “Plato was an artist; and like many of the best artists, he tried to visualize a model, the ‘divine original’ of his work, and to ‘copy’ it faithfully.” This is why any “artist-politicians” who follow Plato has to start with “canvas-cleaning.” “He must eradicate the existing institutions and traditions. He must purify, purge, expel, banish, and kill.” But when doing this, the “artist-politician” has to get rid of himself, too, since he is a part of the canvas which has to be cleaned. To construct a fully other social order, one has to transcend it, but this is something that no man can actually do. “The political artist clamors, like Archimedes, for a place outside the social world on which he can take his stand, in order to lever it off its hinges. But such a place does not exist.”
Aurel Kolnai’s (The Utopian Mind) argument against utopia is similar to Popper’s. “Utopias are in fact intrinsically at war with the basic structure of reality.” First of all, utopian thinking ascribes to men divine like abilities, what should not surprise us, since any utopian project aims at constructing a new world: not so much with the materials acquired from the old one, but ex nihilo. This however contradicts our experience. “Real [human] power is always somehow divided, finite, and hampered. . . . It remains subject to mundane barriers and limitations. . . . It is part of history and depends on contingency.”
Another headache with utopia is its perfectionism which leads to what Kolnai calls “the utopian contradiction.” Utopia is a “monistic conception,” and as such it is not only all embracing but also shielded from any external evaluation and reality. It is also not aimed at “getting rid of a definite evil” or “realizing a definite good” but instead “it hankers after deductive and necessary truths in preference to contingent facts and empirical discoveries.” The end result is that utopia disdains what people actually want and need.
Roger Scruton agrees with Kolnai that utopian thinking is stained with contradiction but, like Popper, adds that the most important criticism of utopia is that “it destroys the institutions that enable us to solve our conflicts one by one” (The Uses of Pessimism). The solutions to our problems do not exist as any blueprint but are discovered one by one, over generations, and are preserved in customs and traditions. But these are exactly what utopian mind abhors. It does so because it is intoxicated by “a prelapsarian bliss,” which “urges people to destroy the structures that stand in the way of a recovered innocence.”
All the above criticism of utopian thinking may be called commonsensical. But there is also a distinctively Christian criticism of utopia. As Lyman Tower Sargent (Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction) observes, the most common Christian objection against utopia is the Fall of Adam. “The theological argument against utopianism is much simpler than the one in favor of it because it is based on the common assumption that utopianism is rooted in the denial of original sin”. Since men are fallen, it should not be expected that they can build a utopia or be able to live in it.
But there are more arguments than that. It is true that there is what could be called a utopian element in Christian faith, namely the Kingdom of God. However, as Wolfhart Pannenberg (Basic Questions in Theology, Vol. 2) observed, the Kingdom of God is bestowed on us by God and is not something we can build on our own. This means that the Kingdom itself is not our ultimate hope, but God is, or rather our communion with Him. This also means that as Christian we are called not so much to build the Kingdom, as if we had some blueprint for it and all the needed resources, but to receive it with gratitude and obedience.
Hans Urs von Balthasar (Christianity as Utopia) adds that the Christian hope, as much as it is dissatisfied with the present earthly conditions, does not despise the world we live in, so the hope is not otherworldly. It is rather a hope for the redemption of the fallen world. Even if we are called to give up this life and this world, we do it so that we can regain it or, to be more precise, receive it anew. This way the Christian hope is based not so much on any longing for an entirely different reality, but rather on the promise to redeem the present reality and this promise is confirmed by the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ.
Jürgen Moltmann (Theology of Hope) speaks in the same manner. He admits that hope is a crucial element of the Christian faith and it has critical effects upon history, even to the point of shaping it. He also concurs that there are similarities between utopia and the Christian hope. Both share a deep dissatisfaction with the present reality and a deep longing for a better future. But what distinguishes the Christian hope from any utopian longing is the person and history of Jesus Christ. “Without faith’s knowledge of Christ, hope becomes a utopia and remains hanging in the air.”
Bogumil Jarmulak is pastor of Evangelical Reformed Church (CREC) in Poznan, Poland. His PhD is from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.