The Peripatetic Philosopher has

SOME THOUGHTS ON UTOPIA

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR. Ph.D.

© November 17, 2016

I have never been comfortable with the idea of utopia since reading “Utopia” by Thomas More.  I ran into it again when I read the works of William Morris, and found he was a great influence on America’s Elbert Hubbard.  Then I read Marx who repudiated utopianism while creating a utopian system of idealism that was thoroughly utopian (dialectical materialism). 

Wherever you look, when you get under what is said or being implied, it is the insinuation of harmony into a clash of common sense values of society and individualism with some utopian scheme.  This idealism is often in plain sight bombarding our sense with subliminal stimuli. 

I remember when quite young how I was rankled by General Electric’s constant mantra, “Progress is our most important product.”  Then to my dismay, once that got discarded by GE, I saw science in its quest for promoting its brand using the same idea with “perfection” and “value free analysis,” when both are utopian unrealities.

Then I read Einstein’s treatise on religion (“Science and God,” Forum and Century 83, 1930) and found early in his career that he encountered – in his own community – the reification of such ideas of absolutes justified by mathematics, when mathematics are an invention of man that approximates nature but is not and never can be privy to nature. 

I was programmed from birth with my Irish Roman Catholicism, which is different from Roman Catholicism as represented elsewhere in that Irish Catholicism has never left its primitive Celtic roots, which existed long before Christianity, but still envisions itself with the same Roman Catholic claim of being the ideal crucible for man to expiate his guilt, atone for his sins and seek absolution and salvation with the utopian promise of heaven being his final resting place. 

Utopianism is a closed rather than an open system of thought which can only be realized by the repression of defeat in reality. 

Utopianism is expressed in everyday life when dreams become work-in-progress social engineering project.  Social engineers believe they have the key to reform by destroying “what is” and replacing it with “what should be.”  We are in that current matrix with the dizzy headed belief in electronics, the Internet and the social media as being, collectively, the new religion but under another name. 

The problem with social engineers, and I am one, is that the methods for correcting problems invariably produce new and more catastrophic ones.  We see this in the ballooning corporate bureaucracies and the quest for greater and greater profits and larger and larger share of the marketplace while markets recede with accelerating entropy with everyone dancing on that carcass. 

The irrationality, the very madness and fragility of utopia never dawns on advocates.  If they are students of history, they fail to see that the pattern of utopia is repeated over and over again with the same dystopian results proving that humans are not the wisest of animals on the planet. 

More specifically, the primitives, whom we can only imagine because judging them from our perspective is not only in error, but insane, were able to learn from animals without the sophistication of modern man and to live with a certain economy.  We see this in our American Indians.

Utopianism, which seems always popular in periods of crises, is not only nurtured on suspect social theories, but on myths that cannot be refuted taking a page from Christianity and its heaven and hell, salvation and resurrection theology with the promise of a new day. 

The fact that utopian projects are not achievable, and often laughable or should I say totally imaginary, doesn’t discourage reformers (who are utopians) from surfacing everywhere with definitively sounding ideas and absolutes in their promises. 

Yet, I sense that there is a school of thought that believes the utopian imagination is indispensable for man to survive this wilderness called “life.”  Paradoxically, while I insist that utopianism is a closed system, utopian thinking opens the vistas to otherwise depressives who could not countenance a future without prospects. 

It matters little that history’s prescience has often been based on the futility of thinking that finds believers in that unreality putting one foot in front of another and marching obediently forward into the cloud even if swallowed up into oblivion.

I have always found more solace in Goethe’s idea of active courage than Obama’s passive hope.  Courage demands action to test boundaries whereas hope is passive acceptance of oppressive limits, dreaming that they will somehow disappear without doing anything constructive to make it so.

Again, it will appear I am waffling when I reflect on the American Revolution and the American Civil War in utopian terms.  I think both are instances of utopian belief in right champion wrong, but impulsively so (“Boston Tea Party” in the American Revolution and the South firing on Fort Sumter in the American Civil War) rather than a planned strategy to inhuman conditions. 

My words are not likely to diminish the pull of utopianism in any case however it materializes. 

We have just witnessed a utopian election of the President of the United States.  The radical desire – the utopian imagination to create jobs and restore harmony, prosperity, international prominence, and security -- has put a rank amateur in the White House, a man who is neither a Democrat nor Republican, neither a passionate liberal nor conservative, but rather a pragmatist that knows the art of the deal. 

The pull of utopian results is so powerful with a passive people for in its unrealistic promises the irrational mood, which is, of course, denied, decimates any semblance of the rational.  Look at the Dow Jones Industrial Averages!  Stock prices are going through the roof to all-time highs purely on speculation with absolutely nothing to do with the health of the American economy or international security. 

Although coming from working class poor, I have been a registered Republican since I was eighteen-years-old, believing in limited government, self-direction, self-realization, self-acceptance and individualism with the belief we come in alone and go out alone, and should suffer the  consequences of our actions because we get a report card every day of our life. 

I am not a utopian.  Utopians are dreamers believing in collective deliverance from what concerns them refusing to admit that in waking life utopianism only fosters nightmares. 

Utopian thinkers – and there have been many – are obsessed with such words as “order” and “harmony” and “equity” and “tranquility,” seeing revolution as the means to such an end, which only nurtures chaos, conflict, disparity and discord.

More pragmatically, poignantly and personally, I find the best barometer to life in the micro not the macro sense, having written this (in THE WORKER, ALONE! Going Against the Grain, 2016):

Order comes from within.  To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change of attitude.  Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in how you view the world.  Such radicalism requires the individual going against the grain.

That said people take comfort in the utopian thinking of the collective.  There they have a sense of belonging to something that gives them the confidence that they are not alone, and they don’t have to do this – whatever “this” is – on their own; that they will have the comfort of other true believers. 

But, alas, change does not occur in the collective as we have seen in the recent election.  Tens of thousands of self-important utopian idealists didn’t find the time to vote, and now they are surprised and angry and want to take it out on the television entertainer who has become their president.  What could be more absurd!  Yet, this is the current absurdity of those fallacious believers in a fixed, ultimate, unchanging human nature that thinks like they do.  They can shout to the rafters, walk out of their classrooms, post hate messages on their iPhones, block the streets of commerce in protest, or riot and destroy other people’s property in reactionary stupidity, but they cannot undo what is done. 

Utopianism involves the hubris of people in power constantly putting off until tomorrow problems that are crippling everyone today.  I will close providing one such monumental budding situation.

Progress, which is the main thrust of utopianism, has promoted creative destruction without limits denying the portending calamity on the horizon.  The dogma of progress is radically changing our planet, evidenced is in the population explosion which is increasing beyond the capacity of the environment to cope with much less sustain the life of humans.  Here in Florida, it is estimated that 15 million more souls will reside in the state by 2070.  Given that assessment, utopianism in the form of revolution or civil war is likely to follow, and it will not be about jobs, or oil, or even food, but about water.   

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