NOWHERE IS A CONUNDRUM!

NOWHERE!
AN ESSAY ON A CONUNDRUM

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

My book "Near Journey's End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man" has failed to interest any publisher. It could be converted to a utopian novel of the negative variety, but I have too many other projects in various states of completion to consider that option.

I am thinking of publishing the complete book, less than 150 pages, on my blog, but with a title change: "NOWHERE! THE CONUNDRUM OF TECHNOLOGY AS SALVATION."

The reason for this change of heart was inspired by my reflection on a selection of utopian novels. It occurred to me that "NOWHERE" on my blog might be thought provoking enough for the reader to pursue the subject more deeply. That is the essence of utopian novels. They get you thinking.

"NOWHERE" is not a utopian novel, but yet it has a surprising connection with the genre, as I hope to show here.

"NOWHERE" is about ecology, or the lapse of it over the centuries, illustrating how "cut and control" thinking has tended to gamble on a new advantage without assessing the irrevocable price exacted for it.

The book might better be described as dealing with the ecology of the mind, as it is the mind, after all, that is preventing man from getting his ducks in a row to appreciate the threat to his freedom, his dignity, his self-respect, his integrity, and his need for love in a shrinking world that obsessively wants him to become a "thing" to be used and disposable without conscience as things can be.

Writers immemorial have addressed this conundrum and often through the utopian novel.

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The word "utopian" can be literally translated as "nowhere."

We have had several positive and negative utopian views of "nowhere" throughout the centuries.

How to make a better world for men to live in has fascinated the minds of thinkers in every age. From Plato to the present day, men have been thinking and writing about what the world would be like if men could create an earthly paradise. There have also been those that have felt compelled to paint an otherwise bleak picture of that possibility, especially in the last century.

Thomas More's "Utopia" (1516) combined a most penetrating criticism of his own society, its irrationality and injustice with a picture of a society, which, though not perfect had come to solve most of the human problems, which sounded insolvable to his contemporaries.

Less well known are the Italian friar Tommasso Campenella's "City of the Sun" (1602) and the German humanist Johann Andrea's "Christianopolis" (1619), the latter being the most modern of the three.

Closer to our time is the utopian novel by Edward Bellamy "Looking Backward" (1888). This novel is part of the great American tradition as expressed in the thinking of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in support of man's individuality and social perfectibility.

Bellamy, looking ahead 112 years to 2000 from 1888, envisions a society where there is no money; the state gives everyone no matter what his job, a card that contains the same amount of credit for a year's expense. There is no chance, however, for anyone to spend his credit foolishly as the government takes care to see that he is supervised.

Crime is treated as a mental disease with criminals placed in hospitals and treated as mental cases. Bellamy showed how crime was cut down considerably once money was abolished. Theft became silly when everyone had the right and power to own the same things.

The head of government was the President, who was controlled by Congress. Older professionals who reported to the President controlled education and medicine. A woman chosen by the women of the country had the power to veto any bill concerning the rights of the female population. There was no public discontent with government, and there was wonderful international cooperation. More than a socialist utopia, Bellamy rationalized a case for economic revolution.

In the twentieth century, this optimism and positive utopian mindset, after nearly two thousand years of Western tradition, saw hope transform into a mood and temper of despair, as 20 million mortals perished in World War I and World War II.

Man felt betrayed by capitalism, and then by socialism, and finally by Western Christianity. Barbarism, reactionism, and terror bordering on insanity appeared to grip the oldest centers of culture in the Western world.

War, too, had come to cause moral fatigue and disenchantment with conventional and institutional society stamped as the nemesis.

It is no accident that existentialism was given poignant expression by resistant fighters Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus after the terror they experienced in France and North Africa during World War II. "Now" and "nowhere" were on a collision course as they developed a dialogue to capture this. Nihilism, nausea, boredom and self-estrangement were their themes.

George Orwell would publish his compelling novel "1948" (1949) shortly after that war depicting the new mood of hopelessness, powerlessness, and meaninglessness, which would come to pervade our own age.

Then there was Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We: The Mathematical Society" (1923), where total regimentation is reduced to precise bureaucratic algorithms; Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), where a world six hundred years into the future is described with human beings turned out by mass production; Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (1966), where books are banned and combusting at that temperature; and Jack London's "The Iron Heel" (1906), which anticipated fascism in all its repressive ugliness.

These books express the mood of our present from some distance in the past with a warming for the future in a way similar to Orwell's.

These negative or anti-utopias sensed the mood of powerlessness of modern man just as the earlier pro-utopias anticipated the incipient mood of self-confidence of post-medieval man.

Utopian books alert us to change and access its price.

We see this as we have moved from the agricultural period, which placed some strain on Mother Nature with its "cut and control" clearing of forests for planting, and redirecting rivers for irrigation, while giving little mind to their impact on fragile eco-systems or the stability of the environment.

This "cut and control" inclination was then compounded in the industrial age which found economic reasons to justify slavery, exploit natural resources, regiment citizens into hostile slums, while ignoring the demands of public health and sanitation, or the consequences of population explosion, urbanization and toxic crime.

With positive utopia, everyone would have enough to eat, war would be unnecessary because technical progress would give every country so much wealth there would be no need for territorial conquest, and the globe would become unified in cooperation. This was the mantra of "Looking Backward."

On the other hand, Zamyatin's "We" envisioned a totally bureaucratized society in which man is a number and loses all sense of individuality. In Huxley's work the main tool for turning man into an automaton is "hypnoid mass suggestion," which allows the dispensing of terror.

The message of negative utopian novels is clear:

Fear is dominant as modern society rushes to control man into a manageable "thing," to change his human nature so that he will forget his longings for freedom, for dignity, for self-respect, for integrity, and for love.

In Zamyatin's "We" a brain operation similar to a lobotomy is necessary to get rid of the human demands of human nature. In Huxley's "Brave New World" artificial biological selection (similar to cloning) and drugs are necessary, while in Orwell's "1984" it is unlimited torture and brainwashing to erase the conscience

War is also a "1984" theme. Arms production is an economic necessity or society could not function. So, it is constantly preparing for war, constantly afraid of attack, obsessed with finding new weapons to annihilate its enemies.

There are many other utopian novels that are meant to spike our attention. One that made me painfully aware of Nazism as a boy during World War II was "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) by Sinclair Lewis.

The Lewis novel was written during Hitler's rise in Germany. He could see the long tradition of irrational demagoguery in American politics being a perfect climate for a Hitler-like rise in our midst. It is perhaps the reason I was never taken in by Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s when I was in college and the communist "Red Scare" was the hysteria of the moment. McCarthy used this hysteria creating "the big lie," causing people in power, including the president, to cower to his demands. McCarthyism is now a word in our dictionary to describe this deceit.

Reading these books has caused me to appreciate how much they have contributed to my awareness of what is now happening. Yet, I must admit that NOWHERE IS A CONUNDRUM that cannot be solved by a book. Man must solve his dilemma, but he cannot solve it if he does not sense it; and once he senses it, he must take ownership of it, or he will remain like one hand clapping in the forest.

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