Utopia and its discontents

Sir Thomas More wrote his Utopia, aka “A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in a state and about the new island Utopia,” in 1516. This book was a satire on the state of Europe at his time, with, glaringly, an attack on the Catholic Church of which he was a devout member, and for which he would be martyred by his one-time patron, England’s King Henry VIII.

The word “utopia” is a Greek neologism, which means literally “no place.” It does not exist, and never will. The reasons for his writing it are debated, but this seems to be relevant:

One highly influential interpretation of Utopia is that of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner.[13] He has argued that More was taking part in the Renaissance humanist debate over true nobility, and that he was writing to prove the perfect commonwealth could not occur with private property. Crucially, Skinner sees Raphael Hythlodaeus as embodying the Platonic view that philosophers should not get involved in politics, while the character of More embodies the more pragmatic Ciceronian view. Thus the society Raphael proposes is the ideal More would want. But without communism, which he saw no possibility of occurring, it was wiser to take a more pragmatic view.

Be that as it may, the fact that “utopia” is a “no place” is relevant to our discussion.

The reason I am dwelling on the idea of utopia is due to something I have been thinking about for a couple of weeks. I actually wrote about utopia before, and you can see my previous musings here. Obviously, it's one of my leitmotifs, as I return to it again and again.

I met my now-wife on the internet in the late 1990s. This was before dating sites, before dating apps, before the monetization of the Internet. I began on the Internet in the early 1990s, on bulletin board systems, or BBS’s. I eventually migrated from them to the raw internet, with no mediation. I was on Internet Relay Chat—IRC, the first mass social media—around 1994. It was as a channel moderator that I met my wife. All this is to say that I have been on the internet for longer than most people have.

My nephew was over the other day, and we talked about Elon Musk and Twitter and the cesspool of social media. And I told him that prior to the year 2000, the Internet as it then existed was very much a utopian experiment. It had yet to be monetized. Innovative technologies were bursting forth. Most all the Internet was free, aside from the cost of a connection and the price of a computer. No one had yet to figure out how to monetize it. Those of us in that six-year period, from about 1994 to 2000, were engaging in something in which humanity had never engaged. We were sharing information and ideas. We were engaging socially with people from around the world instantaneously. We were creating new ways of creating relationships. I look back on those days now, and I recognize how heady they were. It really was our utopian moment.

But as I told my dear nephew: All utopias fail. Their ideologies are no match for human frailty and freedom. You will get people who do not agree with what you are doing, or who see a chance for a fast buck. Eventually, the masters of money see a new technology, and figure out how to exploit it. Eventually governments find a way to co-opt it. Eventually, humans fuck up.

The past two hundred years have been filled with such utopian experiments, from Brook Farm to the Summer of Love. And none of them could get past the problem of human weakness and human agency. Communism was utopian. Fascism, in its way, was utopian. The hyper-capitalism which dominates our world is also a utopian dream. And all will fail, because that is the fate of any human creation which places ideology over human needs. No one can seriously still argue for the validity of internet utopianism.

Rather than Utopia, what we need is, as Quentin Skinner argued, a broad pragmatism. The world will never be perfect because it is transitory. The world will never be perfect because it is mortal. The world will never be perfect because of fallible humans. But what we can do is to is to create the most good for the most people. Not all will benefit from this. For assorted reasons, some will always chafe at this, either because the systems we create are not good enough in their estimation, or because some people simply want to watch the world burn.

We can never and never will achieve perfection. But we can keep working towards it. We can continue to make a world which responds primarily to what people need to lead a fully human life. Rather than demanding this thing or that thing now, or hold our breaths because we weren’t given ice cream with dinner, what we need to do is figure out how to move the ball down the field. There will be setbacks. And we will never quite reach the goal-line. But the goal is to keep the game going. The goal is to keep humanity moving along, imperfect as it is. The goal is to not allow the game to end abruptly, or to descend into chaos. That is not utopia, and it will not appeal to some who want everything at every moment. But in the end, it is the best we can do as mortals, aware of our limitations. Any project which fails to consider human limits is doomed to failure. And that is why all utopias have failed.