A utopia is a society that has abolished the difference between public and private life. That definition of a utopia is superior to the usual one which regards a utopia as a perfected society, whether that means everyone is equal or everyone is in their properly subordinated social positions, because the new definition reveals the mechanism by which some perfect ordering is accomplished and also because it does away with the need to distinguish between utopias and dystopias, all of whom have this same characteristic, the observer to decide whether one or another utopia is to be admired. In Plato, everyone’s character as either a soldier, an artisan or a philosopher is in keeping with their role in society. In Orwell’s “1984”, everyone is being retrained so that the only emotions that are felt internally are the ones approved of by the state, and so sex, which is personal, is a revolutionary concept. In his far more probing “Brave New World'', Aldous Huxley suggests that a person’s chemicals have been balanced and re-balanced since before birth so that the person will be an appropriate social being, only the savages who live on the fringes of society going their own way. This new definition explains the paradox of Bertrand Russell’s witty observation about Plato’s Republic, which is that it is a place where everyone is equally unhappy. It is why both North Korea and an Amish community are utopian in prospect if not in reality. The definition applies to the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, where people get what they deserve which is what each of their nature’s require, whether that is some degree of pain for those assigned to the levels of Hell, or the equality of the ecstasy that will be achieved in Heaven. Nobody in Hell deserves to be anyplace else and there are no slackers in Heaven. So, in utopias and dystopias, there is supposedly no struggle between the internality of the individual and the person’s public function.
The difference between public and private life is crucial for understanding life as we know it, what might otherwise be called everyday life. It isn’t just that people work during their lives at two careers: their work lives where they go from junior accountant to high level partner at their firm while also following a path in personal life from courtship through marriage through children and then retirement, the office and the home being different places where different kinds of relationships are pursued. In fact, the separation between office or factory, on the one hand, and family life, on the other, predates the invention of the factory which took people out of their homes for the length of the workday. It reaches back into ancient times. Romans knew to show up at the house of relatives to show their respect before proceeding to their other activities, sometimes those based on family connections. Even then, Caesar knew that the reputation of his wife had to be unstained, which meant that the two kinds of lives had to be coordinated. David knew that he was betraying his role as king by sending Uriah to his death over a personal matter. Samson knew he was interrupting his duties as a warrior by getting involved with Delilah.
Beyond these structural and emotional matters is the sense of the self as something individual, personal, unalienable, while work is practical, rational, ends driven. It did not take Fifteenth Century Italians to discover the individuality of the human soul. It was there so long as there were ways and times whereby people could protect and engage in their privacy, contemplate what were their own motivations. This interiority is as old as literature, just as what is external to the self, and so constraining of the self, and so more to be identified with social structure rather than the self, is also as old as literature. When Cain asks whether he is his brother’s keeper, he is reflecting on his own guilt because he is giving an excuse which might be used by a sheepherder, while God is the keeper of the public good, of the scruples that should guide mankind.
Utopias are supposed to be stable in that once established they should be able to last forever unless there is some fatal flaw, and all of them do. The anti-utopian view is that you cannot really knock out the human spirit, a question I do not take to be settled in that the Soviet regime had a run at doing so and Hitler might have done so if he hadn’t taken some very risky steps in foreign policy. A permanent reborn Germany would have dominated the Continent even if it had not ruled its parts directly. The rub in James Hilton’s Shangri La is that a native who leaves it will shrivel up and die. The cost of a Christian heaven is lifelong adoration to a God who might or might not answer your prayers, and so you have to put aside your doubts that this is a good deal if you have any right to expect that God will keep his part of the bargain. Even Plato’s Republic breaks down. The Republic can deteriorate into a democracy because the youth get a taste for unnecessary pleasures, such as wealth. So the lapse from utopia is caused by something that amounts to a sin. People, not the system, are the source of the system’s decline.
What most of those visions of utopia do is suppress private life in the service of public life. There are some visions of a perfect society that do it the other way around. They suppress public life in the service of a perfected private liffe. That occurs in the sexual communities of the American Nineteenth Century which engaged in experiments with group sex and polygamy. It also occcurs in pornography, which Steven Marcus defined many years ago as creating a pornotopia in which all other motives than the sexual one were suppressed, though that is to neglect the fact that even pornotopias are put in the context of the social conditions that will sustain them. “The Story of O. '' took place among well to do people who had nothing better to do with the time on their hands.
The utopias of private life reaches, however, beyond these extremes. “Father Knows Best” and “The Ozzie and Harriet Show” were early television examples of situation comedies that defined an idyllic life within the family. Later situation comedies, such as “Everyone Loves Raymond” up to the present day “Blackish” are more cynical in that they provide some characters who are abrasive, yset those are to be seen as stereotypical portraits of people who are to be found in all families and therefore to be tolerated and even loved because they are just a part of any family, and that makes them legitimate, safe, and comic. Proof of the vision that family life is a superior vision to one that asks people to coordinate public and private life is the fact that very few situation comedies focus on work life, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Office” notable exceptions.
Fantasies of a perfected society portray them as very remote and difficult to reach. This is not because they are rare, which is what Thomas More said of his utopia, which became the generic name for all of them. More thought utopias were more important than the rare species of animals that could also be found in far places because they could be a model for how to construct society at home, wherever that was. It should be said, however, that More’s utopia was not truly one. It was just a hierarchical one laden down with the legal precepts that would keep it that way, the families, at their meals, sure to serve the oldest first, and that any excess in population would result in the building of new towns. Legality was more important to his vision than any reconceptualization of what a truly different society might be like, as if making customs and changes codified into law somehow transformed the place into a better place.
Contrary to More, utopias are rare because they are fragile. They are easily destroyed either by outsiders (which is what happened to an idealized sense of how wonderful was the life of the Plains Indians) or by internal corruption, given the inevitability of humanity’s baser instincts (which is the problem, as I have suggested, for Plato’s Republic). They are subject to deterioration because of a surrounding environment that undermines the values and structure of the utopia. That is the challenge faced by the Amish who prefer to follow a simpler style of life, which means shunning modern inventions and that partly so as to avoid the intrusion of modern life. The Amish did not want their children to get much education even though they would drive their products to New York City for sale in Grand Central Station. That would be enough of a distraction, I would think, for a young Amish mind. The Mormons, for their part, left civilization entirely so as not to be persecuted, but even more of an upheaval than the Great Trek to Utah, much treated as the defining experience of Mormon experience, was the fact that in order to gain statehood they abolished polygamy and those who still believed in it fled to Mexico. That was a case of politics trumping religion and it suggests that entrepreneurship was more at the heart of the Mormon enterprise than their theology.
Sometimes that fragility of utopias is largely economic. Hippies left the communal living arrangements they had established for themselves in Vermont and elsewhere when they ran out of money or when fathers who had subsidized the community decided that enough was enough. The Israeli kibbutz, which held itself out as having established a new communal way of life, collapsed when Israel became more prosperous and so people no longer had to put up with communal child raising or menial jobs because they could get jobs in the cities, the kibbutzim which survive having evolved into prosperous factory towns void of the old ideology.
But sometimes the fragility of a utopia is the result of the memory of the bourgeois life left behind, of what is pleasant and satisfying about the two track system of private and public life, both the vainglory of the public life and the sweetness of the private life and how the two could successfully be brought to terms with one another: a comfortable income earned in a not unpleasant setting and where one had the satisfaction of rising in the ranks and so becoming a success, that income allowing a family to be supported in the fashion to which it had become accustomed and with some promise of even greater reward. Why put aside personal achievement either at work or with a family for some communal relationship which did not free you from the hassles of personal interaction? Nuns learn soon enough that they have to learn how to put up with one another even if the monastic life is devoted to being a community of prayer that focuses on the afterlife and has a hierarchically driven non-family system and so is kind of a utopia. Very few utopias suspend all human bad feelings, even if that is one of their aims.
There might seem to be another intruder on the utopian dream. These would be the dreams and memories that drag back into an awareness of a person’s past failures and successes in the public and private arenas, those dreams and memories the real touchstones of psychological development from which a utopia is a mere escape, an exercise in the rhetoric of righteousness or the rhetoric of alienation. Or else dreams can recall the anxieties and other bad feelings that are excluded from the pornotopia. And everywhere there are reminders that the adoration of children or a successful trip on the road for a salesman provides rewards that utopias cannot emulate because those pleasures are so ordinary. But that does not seem to be the case. Rather, utopias are places which are prepared for by bad realities and result in people unaccustomed to dealing with ordinary realities. John Updike has a young man in his “In The Beauty of the Lilies” willing to accept life in a cult group because he had a bad relation to his mother and no sufficient father figure. Jonathan Swift has Gulliver having to accustomed himself to the company of his wife after his sojourn with the houyhnhnms, the talking horses who live content and unambitious lives without family structure.
Yet people who live in perfected communities do not double down on their beliefs in their communities but drift away from them when they are not, as in the case of Gulliver, exiled from them. Many of those at Jonestown drifted away rather than take the poison ladden Koolaid even though they had been trained to drink it by repeated trial runs at mass suicide. So, the fear goes, people will drift away from the Catholic Church by, at the least, not making contributions, because of the child abuse scandal. This is different from what the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues claimed in the Fifties when they said in “When Prophecy Fails” that people intensified their faith when it was disproven, that demonstrated, they thought, by the behavior of a small cult group most of whose membership were confederates of the psychologists, Festinger applying his result to early Christianity, where people believed more devoutly in Jesus as the Savior because he had died on the Cross. According to the alternative view I am suggesting, the followers of Jesus were motivated by something other than the fact that their messiah had died. It may have been that the early Christian movement was motivated by a syncretism of the various cult groups in operation at the time that were uniting the law with a profound sense of sin, the syncratists also deciding to invest with cultic status a person rather than a place.
In the twenty years after the Second World War, when everything was understood under the shadow of totalitarianism, Erving Goffman proposed a theory that would turn most utopias into dystopias. He proposed that supposedly benign institutions, such as monasteries and mental asylums and British public schools were places where the personalities of people were destroyed, even if in an effort to recreate newer and undamaged personalities. This was because those institutions imposed so much on the privacy of the patients or the recruits. Boys at Eton acted as servants to senior students. Inmates of asylums were checked to see if they were wearing underwear, which would be a sign of holding it together, but was done by nurses simply lifting up skirts, and so diminishing the patients. Most large scale institutions could be accused of these dehumanizing measures to some degree or other. Is there no relief from dystopias?
The answer to that is available if we consult the Victorian Era when, among its other accomplishments, it invented science fiction, which is to be understood as futuristic but not utopian. Edward Bellemy’s “Looking Backward” looked forward to a society that was mildly socialistic and where telephone lines pumped scheduled symphony concerts into people’s living rooms. Bellemy had not abolished the difference between public and private life; he had merely invented radio. Similarly, Samuel Butler in “Erewhon” does not abolish the difference between public and private life. Rather, he explores how people will adapt to the machines that they invent. The future is not an absolutist regime of one sort or another.
And so the concept of utopia or dystopia is not inevitable but an historical invention, even if one of longstanding. In the classical world, reference can be made to Plato’s Republic and also to Vergil’s “Georgics”, which portrayed a pastoral society in which everyone occupied their natural place, a rural setting more suitable for a utopia because the social classes more clearly reflect the “natural” occupations of people as shepherds and musicians. But there are no utopias in the Old Testament. There were appeals to solve social problems, as when the prophet Hosea says that a nation will be judged on the basis of how it treats its poor. Joseph wants to provide food for people during a drought, not reconstruct family structure. The call in Deuteronomy is to take over the Promised Land from the peoples who lived there, but not to reconstitute the society into becoming something very, very different. And it is not clear whether the salvation offered by Jesus in the New Testament referred to a heavenly afterlife or just to a world where everyone had become deeply ethical beings.
The most developed of the utopias springs from the imagination of a Christian author, Dante, where all three parts of the Divine Comedy are utopias in that people get what they deserve, whether that is perpetual punishment in Hell, just to make them suffer, extended punishment in Purgatory so as to rehabilitate them, or a surfeit of joy in heaven. The paradox that Dante points to is that if people are to endure their suffering or accept their punishment or achieve their proper fruits in heaven, then they have to retain the personalities they had in life, or else their conditions would be meaningless and, at the least inappropriate. Why punish a sinner who has lost all of his fight because of the pain he has already been through for countless eons? He will certainly lose heart and so become nothing more than a victim. So he has to retain his moxey, as that includes the character which inhabited him on earth, so as to be a worthy recipient of eternal punishment. So that means those who dunk beneath the wavers to avoid the spears of the people we call devils retain their desire to avoid pain and can even elaborate on their lives when they are asked to do so by visitors to Hell. To my mind, that makes them heroic rather than figures to be scorned.
The consequence of this thought is that any utopia will have to keep its enemies alive at least in spirit so as to keep its own ideal alive. Identities are to be retained rather than abolished and that is accomplished by recognizing reformed persons as the persons they always were. The actual artisan is the idealized artisan and visa versa. No such regime can ever say it has abolished its enemies for then there would be no need to goad on its supporters to be ever more perfect embodiments of the revolutionary ideal, a goal achieved only by such stock legendary figures as Stackov, the worker in Stalinist Russia who worked himself to death. Every Nazi had to worry about whether he carried around the taint of Jewish blood. So the residents of utopias eat themselves up with guilt and regret in the name of their ideal, and that applies to Christians, idealistic utopians, and totalitarians. Why the dual structure of family and work life is so much more stable is a very difficult question and so to be delayed for another time.