In Our Time - Utopia

Episode Date: October 7, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of Utopia. Both the idea of, and the longing for a perfect society have been in our imagination for centuries, even millennia. Utopian dreams have driven fantasy, Fascism and fine feeling.Utopias, by definition, do not exist. The literal meaning of the Greek is “nowhere”. And yet, we are still enthralled by its allure. Why do some of us still believe in it - after the devastation wreaked this century by the utopian ideals that gave rise to Fascism and Communism? And what do utopias in fiction tell about the present - and even future?With Dr Anthony Grayling, human rights campaigner, lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck College, London and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford; John Carey, distinguished critic, journalist, broadcaster, Merton Professor of English, Oxford University and editor of, The Faber Book of Utopias.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, I'm joined today by John Carey and Anthony Grayling to look at utopia's real and fictional in the past, present and future. Utopia, by definition, does not exist. The literal meaning of the Greek is nowhere.

And yet, coming up to the third millennium, we're still enthralled by its allure. Why do some of us still believe in it, after the devastation reached this century by the utopian ideals that gave rise to fascism and communism. And what utopias in fiction tell us about the present and even the future. John Carey is the editor of a new fascinating anthology on the subject, The Faber Book of Utopias. He's a distinguished critic and journalist and Merton Professor of English at Oxford University.

Dr. Anthony Grayling is a lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck College London and a fellow of Sedans College Oxford. He works for human rights as a member of the Writers in Prison Committee of P.E.N. and the China and Tibet human rights group June the 4th. John Kerry, utopia means no place. Why is it so often being taken to mean a good place? Well, I think the idea came before the word. The idea, as you said, has been there, really, I think, since human thought began

the idea of some golden age or some time in the past or some possibility in the future, heaven or paradise, something that would be better than now. And when Moore called his Utopia, Utopia, No Plays, I think it was a sort of joke, that is to say, that actually the title page of Utopia does to call it the best place. But calling it no place really beg the question, well, could you ever have it? Is it possible?

And, of course, there's enormous disagreement still about whether Moore thought it was or whether he thought it was good or bad. People say, oh, no, if he was a Catholic, he couldn't have believed in divorce and so on. Others say, well, look at the conditions in the England of his time, Henry's England, the poverty and so on, this would seem bliss to peasants of that time. So I think that it came to mean good place before more invented the word no place. And that was a sort of cagey, a little caveat. But in your 1001 utopias that you give us in this favour book, you start with, a fascinating idea that there was Egyptian poetry of that standard in ancient Egypt. You start with ancient Egyptian poetry, you would go to Hesiod.

We have idealised places, don't we? Great golden places. So there's no doubt at the start that utopias are wonderful places. Yes, it's idealised to start with. And I think that the first surviving utopia, which isn't idealized, that is to say there's some hope of practical materialization of it, is Plato's Republic, enormously influential in the West. And Plato sets out not to describe a fortunate isle, a happy land, golden age, but to say, if we have this kind of ruler, if we can have rulers who do not make money, do not have political careers, are totally dedicated and wise and unselfish. And if we regulate the race, we produce better people by eugenics, strict eugenics, then we shall have a better world, a tougher world, a better world. And I think he's the first to have that practically.

programme written into its utopia. Anthony Grayling, why do you think we're still as enthralled by the idea of utopia? Or do you think we aren't anymore? No, I think we are, and I think we are because we always have been. In fact, the whole of human history, both collectively and individually, is a quest for utopias. I mean, all individuals are looking for a state of being, a state of life, which is good for them, perfect for them. You know, we're all hoping to retire to somewhere sunny.

You know, that's our own personal little utopia. and human societies have always striven really to produce conditions, produce institutions, produce ways of life that would be utopian or the closest thing to utopia that could be acquired. Some of those endeavours have been aimed at providing the best conditions for everybody in the society, but they're rather in the minority. Most endeavours have been aimed at producing optimal conditions for the ruling class in society, and quite often they've succeeded.

Do you think the religious ideas of paradise, afterlife are closer link with utopias? I think they're all of a piece because, you know, the facts, the realities of life seemed so harsh that people think, well, there must be, there could be, let's hope that there is a dispensation of things where we'll all be happy and pain and suffering and inequality and injustice will be gone. You know, heaven as the ultimate utopia poses for us a very, very powerful ideal. You say, John Gary, that writing, I'm quoting one of you, writing utopias comes from our

wish to evade death. Could you expand on that article? Well, I suppose that's true in an obvious sense when you're inventing heavens and afterlives. But also I think because that is the ultimate anti-utopian thing. If you can only stretch life out, if you only find a means of eternal life or eternal youth, well, that's a very common utopian idea. Some utopian and dystopian writers see through it. Swift, for example, invents these creatures called stold brugs, who are immortals, but are extremely miserable because they're very, very old,

and what they do, he says, is envy, as I recall, the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. But if only you could, yes, if only you could get beyond death, then that would be a sort of ultimate utopia. I'm interested by what Anthony says, though, about utopia for whom? It's true that utopia is a very selective. And if you think of the heavens, well, I have some of the heavens in the book, they do often not only reject certain people, certain people go to hell,

but in some cases get pleasure from watching the sufferings of the people who go to hell. There's a utopia by Tatalia where he's trying to persuade Christians of his day not to go and watch the Roman shows and spectacles. So he writes this utopia where he's saying, At the last day, at the last judgment, it would be wonderful because it'll be much better than now. The actors will be shrieking far more realistically than they do on the stage because they'll be covered in flames and the acrobats will be much more nimble because they'll be in the fire

and so on. Well, that kind of idea that some people are not going to be there may seem barbaric in Tertullian's case, but actually when any of us plans utopia, some people will not be there. I suggest in the book, for example, tyrants won't, torturers won't, terrorists won't. Some people have got to be cut out, and the great question in planning a utopia is how that's to be done, it seems to me. Well, look at some practical examples. I mean, one of the things that runs through the book is that the simplicity of some of the utopies, John Ruskin talking about watching the corn grow, to read, to think, to love, to hope,

people cheerfully paying more taxes in Mercia's utopia, and on it goes. But the practical utopia is the first, as John said, was, Plato's Republic, which you went through a few of the points of a few moments ago. Now, a lot of people think that that laid down a totalitarian template. Children and wives were in common. There were rulers who were rulers, and you couldn't be a ruler, unless you were born to be a rule. And if you showed talent for ruling, you were plucked out from the lower class and turned into a ruler, or any, alchemized into a rule, there were slaves and so on.

And it does, poets were banned famously, as we know, what do you think that was the played. And why did practical utopias, why have there to be so authoritarian? Well, it's certainly the case that Plato's Republic is terribly authoritarian, and it does provide a model for a number of utopian ideas, where the thought is that the intractability of human nature is such that you really have to crack down hard to make sure that the utopian idea can be realized. Of course, there's the competing model in which everybody has, you know, maximum freedom, and everybody only has to reach out a hand to pluck the fruit from the bow,

and so there's no need to labour, there's no need for hierarchy. Those sorts of utopians thought that authority and social structures of a military kind were introduced in order to preserve inequalities to protect the people at the top of the food chain from the resentment of the people at the bottom. So it's certainly true that authoritarianism and totalitarianism is a very, very strong theme, and we've seen a tragic application of that theme

in our own time in the 20th century. But oddly, I mean, you talked to you said earlier, have we lost the utopian ideal? I mean, on the contrary, it's been the case all through history that not only has there been a striving towards utopian conditions, either in societies a whole or for some caste, but also lots of groups of people have set up their own little utopias. You can think of the monastic idea as utopian in a way. And in the 20th century, if you look especially at the United States, but all over the world, There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little utopian communities,

very communistic in their ideals, based on all sorts of models like B.F. Skinner's Warden 2, and there actually are some. Here in front of me on the table, I've got a statement by the Twin Oaks community in the United States which claims to embody the Skinner ideals, which we can talk about a bit later. And these are very non-authoritarian.

These are, you know, everybody's equal. In fact, there is an organisation called the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, which is a Federation of these Utopian Communities, and there, you know, political power authorities is shared. Yes, I was talking the other day to a young man who grew up on a kibbutz, and we talked about kibbutzim as utopias. I was most impressed the more he went on about to see how much the ideals were things that I've been reading about in past utopias, for example. He said the idea in Kibbutz is that everyone gets what he or she needs and those who can work, work at what they can work at.

And that is actually, it seemed to me, really just a paraphrase of what Marx said. Marx's idea was from everyone according to his ability to everyone according to his need. And they'd have taken this over. Now, Anthony says that's non-authoritarian. The problem, it seems to me, I mean, you're talking about it. to me. I mean, the utopia is very problematic, I think. I don't know what I think, no, but think about them really. The problem is, what he said was that when the teenagers grow up, they want a car, they want to go to Tel Aviv, they want possessions. Their parents who

are idealists and join the kibbutz. So that is wrong. On the other hand, to thwart it would be, of course, authoritarian. How do you manage this? How do you make people realize that they don't need private wealth and possessions when they think they do. It's clear that selfishness, if that's what you call it, or self-fulfillment, if you're in favor of it, are things that find it hard to survive in utopias. How do you combat them? Whichever utopia you look at, it requires an enormous sacrifice of the self to the whole, doesn't it? Of the individual to the big body, whether it's these idealistic ones, you have sheets in front of you,

or whether it's Plato, authoritarian one, or the communistic examples we've had this century. Do you think that is ever attainable? Well, I think that that happens because, you know, the non-ideal reality that we're faced with is pressure of numbers and therefore conflict of interests, limited resources, competition over those resources. And that's where these difficulties arise

and why it's so hard to, to consider. construct institutions that would allow people to live happily and flourishingly and independently. But if you had a situation where there wasn't so much conflict for resources, and that's exactly what some of these contemporary little communes are endeavoring to achieve, then those conflicts could be resolved or wouldn't arise, and there wouldn't be that problem. And that indeed is exactly the hope of some of these communities. Let's try to set up a situation, they say, where there's enough for everyone. enough to go around so people don't have to pinch one another's apples and we don't

have to quarrel about who's going to do what and then we'll all be happy. But that doesn't seem to me to be a solution at all because you might as well say, well, the English middle class has got enough apples and so on and is perfectly happy, but it's not a utopia. I mean, it seems to me that if we're going to have a utopia, it's got to extend further than some little commune in the corner of the United States. The great utopian thinker in the 20th century, in late 19th, 20th century is H.G. Wells, and Wells thought the first step to you,

utopia must be a world state. You can't have Africa starving and call it utopia because you've got a little commune that works for all right in the United States. Now, I agree with you absolutely. I wasn't in, I'm depending the king. No, no. I agree with you absolutely. But I think the point I'm making is that the English middle class do have enough apples and they are much closer to utopia than the people who don't have the apple. Absolutely true. And indeed, if you look at the way the English middle class live and then read utopias in the past, you see that we're in it. We're in it. I mean, there's Bellamy's utopia. Looking backward, famous 19th century, American Utopia, where this chap who visits it gets taken to...

And said in 2000. 2000. He was going to set it in 2000. He was going to set it in 3000. Then he became convinced it could change much more quickly, so he said it in 2000. And this chap's taken along to a room where the girl of the family presses them buttons and music comes out. He's amazed, a symphony orchestra.

She explains there is a menu. You can choose your piece. And he says it would be heaven to live like this. of course we've got it. We've got transistors, but we don't think it's heaven. Well, a lot of people in the past would have thought that. Anthony's point about, I think, conflict for resources is the vital one, because actually Plato didn't have that. I mean, there's no suggestion that Plato's Republic is there because food is short. It's there because the Athenians have been defeated in battle, and they've got to get a tougher race going. But now, and for Wells, of course, Wells is the first generation to realize that the world has a population explosion. which means that many people are starving and going to starve.

How are you going to combat that? And Wells, for the first time, starts to introduce, and all utopias after Wells have to face the problem of birth control. And the idea that anyone can reproduce for Wells is just old hand. You can't do that. It's extremely selective. And that seems to me to be that problem of overpopulation, well says since Malthus, every utopian must face it, and I think that's right.

And otherwise, what the 21st century is going to hold is horrendous. Absolutely. There are some very, very interesting things in what John's saying now. I'll pick up on two. One is that it's a deep paradox that Plato's utopian republic is premised on the thought that Sparta, which was the victor in that conflict, embodied an ideal, an ascetic, pure, healthy, vigorous, masculine, military ideal. They lived according to the warrior virtues, which had been lost in Athens,

which in the view of Plato and fellow aristocrats have become rather effete and that substituted the wrong kinds of civic virtues for the warrior virtues. But of course it's precisely the effete civic virtues type state, which produced the leisure, which produced the philosophy and the science that enabled Plato to say, let's have the Spartan ideal instead. So there's a deep self-defeating paradox in that. But the other point that the job made that I found terribly interesting is that we are in Bellamy's Utopia. Here we are. We press buttons, music comes out. We have a hoover, we have dishwashers, you know, all the immunities that people dreamed about in the 19th century who had to carry coals and draw water from a pump. And yet we don't

seem so a skeptic or a critic would say any happier, if anything, we seem a great deal unhappier. And this is the interesting point. It's post-Darwin that we realize, or seem to be realizing, that it's not institutions or artifacts that are going to help to realize utopia, modification of human nature, that human unhappiness or happiness is something somehow genetic or inbred or psychological and is not a function of what's out there in the outside world, which is why in the 20th century we've seen some good and horrific experiments at the manipulation of human nature. Because the human nature has been the battleground of uterpes, hasn't it?

Particularly since the Romantic Age, where you have Coleridge's wonderful idea of the Pantisocracy, they'll all go by the Susquehanna and they will devote to, I can't remember John you remember six hours to labor and three hours to reading and two hours to bringing up children. And then you have Voltaire's Eldorado, which is a complete send-up of the whole thing and that wonderful explosion at the end of it saying men have always been vicious, miserable, cosoning and they will never change. So the battle is over human nature, isn't it? Absolutely.

And that bit in Voltaire, as you say, because he talks an old man who says, have hawks always killed pigeons? Why should you think humans going to change? Anthony, of course, he's right about that. Now, how is human nature to be changed? It seems to me that we're having some pretty horrendous answers to that question presented to us right now. The last piece, I think in the book, is by Lee M. Silver, Princeton,

who says that within 100 years, genetic engineering, particularly the production of synthetic genes, will allow parents who can pay for it, parents wealthy enough, to buy for their offspring immunity from a whole range of diseases, including schizophrenia, alcoholism, so on, and not just that, but proficiency of an unbelievable kind in business, in art, in music, the great athletes, the successful scientists will come from what he calls this little group of the gene-enrich,

this subspecies of the race, and the rest of us will be what he calls naturals, that is menials and underclass. Furthermore, he says within another century interbreeding will be impossible. They will become genetically irreconcilable. It will be unthinkable that a gene and rich will breed with a natural as a human being with a chimpanzee. There won't be just one race. Well, that'll solve the modification of human nature in a way.

It is. It is the two things so, there. One is that I was talking to Jonathan Miller the other day when I was in the States and reading Steve Jones book the other week. One opposition to that is that the viruses are now going so strong that Steve Jones and Jonathan Miller both think that they'll get us in the next 50, 100 years, and that they will, you know, bacteria will have its revenge. And that's one thing. The viruses will have the revenge. Put that to one side, but I still think that's quite interesting.

It's beside the point here. That is a dystopia. You're seeing that sort of in the U.S. say already, aren't you? I mean, because the massive wealth, the massiveness of the wealth, when you go, I've been going there since my 20s, one reason, and going there now the massive distance, the 400 richest people in America are worth the whole of the wealth of China. It's becoming unimaginable. And they are in take-off. I mean, heads are be, excuse me, people are setting up places for themselves to be frozen so that when the antidote for their disease is discovered,

they can be unfrozen and relive again. So that is, like Bellamy, translated by Tolstores, sold millions of coffers. We are living in Bellaby now. We press a book and the music comes up. This man, Silver, just might be right. Yeah. I think it's absolutely right.

In fact, I mean, in one sense, we've already got a version of Silver's utopia with us now because we've got the nutrition-rich versus the nutrition poor, and we know that, you know, mothers who, pregnant mothers who eat well, produce healthier and more enchanted babies and so on. I mean, in a sense, there's a little foreshadowing of that already. That's such a little.

I mean, Steve Jones, I'm sorry to keep of honesty, but I don't see why not. One said, if you want to live longer in this country, be born as far as you can from the inner city. Exactly right, exactly right. I think, you know, there are two utopias at the end of John's book, which, if you were to put your money on which are likely to be realized in the future, that's one of them. Lisa was one of the gene rich, and the other one is Micho Kaku's intelligent planet. That's on its way, too. This is the one where you have Molly, your computer, doing everything for you, telling you where the traffic jams are on the way to work, testing your urine in the morning to see if you're healthy and so on. I mean, these things are on their way.

You can put your money on there being on their way. And the question arises, are they entirely a bad thing? Or in what respects are they a bad enough thing for us to want to modify them? Well, we have to ask, don't we? I mean, I entirely see that argument. We have to ask, how long can it go on, so to speak, how long can what Melvin's been talking about this, pre-fifurricular? really of the silver situation with huge inequality. How long would it go on?

I think of Montaigne, who is in the book, in his essay on cannibals, who said after talking of these cannibals from Brazil, they said they were astounded by the differences in wealth in Europe. In their country, they said they called men halves of each other. Everyone was a half of someone else, and they were astounded that in Europe the poor halves didn't get up and cut the throats of the rich ones. And indeed, how long will it be before they do?

they do, can one really have this kind of inequality without something like communism and very militant communism coming back? We think it's dead, but it's been in utopias right through from Plato. I mean, that's the common strain of utopias. Then the other thing about the viruses, actually, I believe about the virus, is I think that's a very likely, on the most of the occasion. That's a dystopia, and that leads me. When you were talking about modification of human nature, you might say if that is what we're going

to have, that kind of dystopia, then what we've got to be. do is go back into ourselves, as Rathkin says. It's not going to be institutions, as Anthony Duthson said. It's not going to be that. It's how you actually go back in yourself. That's why I put Thomas Treherne in the book. Thomas Treherne in the 17th century, I noticed in your review you slightly objected to this, is not utopian.

But I think it is utopian, because if it's like that outside, all you can do is cultivate your soul and make it seem as through the eyes of a saint or a child in a way that makes you happy. There's a great fear of utopias on the part of fiction, It seems this century to have been justified. The template being Zamiatins, we, which Orwell came from 1994, and Huxley came from. And that, you know, it's the inhabitants, not names, their numbers.

They all live by a rigid timetable, and everything's made of glass, so you can see through, you get 15 minutes for sex, you have a ticket for sex on a certain day, you can draw the blind for 15 minutes. The fictional men this century have really been against it, haven't they? They've said, watch out. they're going to, these places, these ideals are going to crush you. And on the whole, very much this century, they've been right.

Well, writers are reactors and commentators, aren't they? And if a person driven to write, he lives in a very dystopian setting and tries to imagine a world where he and his fellow human beings would be happier, he'll give us a portrait of it. If he lives at a time as Orwell and Huxley and so on did, where there were gross utopian experiments, or would-be utopian experiments of the kind that we've seen in this century, and actually they write against it in order to warn us.

And they're responding in a way to a claim about a would-be dispensation for human beings handed down from an elite, you know, the vanguard of the revolution, which they very, very rightly and very, very properly disagreed with. But you see, the fictional writers, when you look at their fears, are fearing quite different things. For example, what Huxley fears, frankly, is the lower classes with their pop music. What Orwell fears is precisely the opposite. Hope lies in the proles, he says.

He fears authoritarian communism. So, although they're all fearful, they're very fearful, it seems to me, they're fearful in different ways. And I like to look back to the utopians like Joabwin Stanley in the 17th century, for example, Baburth at the time of the French Revolution. wonderful, who are so noble, so selfless, so moving, not afraid. Baburf was on trial for his life. He was guillotined next day, but he speaks out for equality. And if you put the fears, these muddled fears of the 20th century beside that,

they seem to be very impoverished. I think that's a... But I think that's because the babel of voices, the confusion of voices, has grown and grown from the 19th century, because of the contribution that the 19th century made to horrors like nationalism and racism. And prior to that time, in the rather clearer air, as it seemed to people of the Enlightenment, and the idea that reason, human reason is somehow competent to solve some of these problems, you get it, you find it possible for people like Berberth to say what they

did. They are noble, I agree. And I mean, you know, every now and then, here and there, in the forest of utopian ideals, you see one or two silver birches gleaming away like that. Because, you know, it's not impossible. It's not impossible. It's not a impossible to find a dispensation of things. I think most of us that sometimes in our lives actually find ourselves in communities or with people or with friends where we

serve as windows in a way, to give us a glimpse to a dispensation of things where we can relate to one another comfortably. And that in the end is what the utopians desire. You're bringing Dyson, who has a great idealized view of our future that we will spread through the universe,

we will inhabit galaxies, and implied in that that we will be benign doing that. I mean, how seriously did you take that, John? Well, I do think that at the moment there are two utopian ideals. One is, as you say, Fumann Dyson represents that, where we colonise the galaxies, in his case comets, actually, where we plant trees that will melt the interiors of the comets, and we live in these huge, I mean, trees hundreds of miles high, we live in them.

And the other ideal is represented by Richard Jeffries, which is that people will disappear, will reduce the planet's population very much, and trees and things will take over this planet would become green. I call these, as you know, in the book, the greens and the space invaders. And I think we divide into those two, and I am a green. Yes. And you think that, do you think that there will have to be some sort of utopias because of overpopulation? I mean, do you actually see utopias these fumblings as being models for societies that will come about necessarily? Yes, necessarily or a terrible alternative. And this is what the dystopians foresee.

After all, we've discovered nuclear fission, and it was prophesied by utopians, HG, well, well before it was discovered as the dystopian way out that there would be nuclear war famine plague and so on. And I think in the 21st century that choice will have to be made. Do you agree with that? Well, I'm not so sure. I think one premise there, which is that the virus is an overpopulation are going to get us. That's far too pessimistic. One mustn't underestimate the power of human intelligence and the human immune system.

After all, we've been living with these viruses for a long time. We've also been living with overpopulation, relatively speaking, all through history too. I don't think utopia is possible, but dystopia is not too bad. Well, thank you very much. Thanks. The book's called The Faber Book of Utopias by John Carey, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you, both. Thank you, Billings, John Carey. Thanks for listening.

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