One of the striking facets of fictional Utopias is that nobody really wants to live there. Perhaps the author, or a few friends, will profess some eagerness. But seldom do Utopian fictions awaken a real longing to take part.
I suspect this is because most visions of supposedly better societies have features which violate our innate sense of human progress—they don't look like the future. They may even resemble a warped, malignant form of the past.
Time and again, utopists envision worlds where one aspect of human character is enhanced, and much else is suppressed. Plato's Republic was the first and most easily understandable of these; he thought the artists and similar unreliable sorts should be expelled. Too disruptive, y'know.
Should we be uncomfortable with this fact? If we value western European ideals, yes.
Utopian fictions stress ideas, so we need a way to advance the background assumption while suppressing the foreground of plot and character.
Nearly all Utopias have one or more characteristics which I'll call reactionary, in the sense that they recall the past, often in its worst aspects. Here "reactionary" means an aesthetic analogy, no more. It may apply to works which are to the "left" in the usual political spectrum. (I think this one-dimensional spectrum is so misleading that the customary use of "reactionary" means little.) "Regressive" might be an alternate term, meaning that a Utopia seeks to turn back the tide of western thought.
Looking over the vast range of Utopian literature, I sense five dominant reactionary characteristics:
1. Lack of diversity. Culture is everywhere the same, with few ethnic or other divergences.
2. Static in time. Like diversity, change in time would imply that either the past or the present of the Utopia was less than perfect, i.e., not Utopian.
3. Nostalgic and technophobic. Usually this takes the form of isolation in a rural environment, organization harkening back to the village or even the farm, and only the simplest technology. Many writers here reveal their fondness for medieval society. The few pieces of technology superior to today's usually exist only to speed the plot or provide metaphorical substance; they seldom spring from the society itself. (Only those Utopias which include some notion of scientific advancement qualify as SF. Otherwise they are usually simple rural fantasies. This point also calls into question classifying any Utopia as SF if it is drastically technophobic. Simply setting it in the future isn't enough.)
4. Presence of an authority figure. In real Utopian communities, frequently patriarchal, this is an actual person. Historically, nearly all Utopian experiments in the west have quickly molded themselves around patriarchal figures. In literary Utopias, the authority is the prophet who set up the Utopia. Often the prophet is invoked in conversations as a guide to proper, right-thinking behavior.
5. Social regulation through guilt. Social responsibility is exalted as the standard of behavior. Frequently the authority figure is the focus of guilt-inducing rules. Once the authority figure dies, he or she becomes a virtual saint-like figure. Guilt is used to the extreme of controlling people's actions in detail, serving as the constant standard and overseer of the citizen's actions.
These five points outline a constellation of values which utopists often unconsciously assume.
Before backing up these points with specifics, consider some Utopias which don't share all or most of them. Samuel Delany's Triton seems to have none of these features; indeed, it proclaims itself a "heterotopia," stressing its disagreement with the first point. Often Delany depicts societies which express his delight in the freakish. Franz Werfel's Star of the Unborn (1946) depicts a heavily technological future with many desirable aspects, while accepting the inevitability of war, rebellion, and unsavory aspects. Advanced technology is carefully weighed for its moral implications in Norman Spinrad's Songs from the Stars.
Nonreactionary, or genuinely progressive Utopias, often reject regulation through guilt. This divides Utopias roughly along the axis of European vs. American, with the Europeans typically favoring "social conscience"—a term that often just means guilt.
Consider Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (the most prominent Amerian Utopia of the 19th century) and William Morris's reply to it, News from Nowhere. Both stabilize society more through gratification of individual needs than through guilt. Indeed, one of the keys to American politics is just this idea. Huxley's Island (written after his move to California) sides more with gratification, though of course his Brave New World (written in England) depicts the horrific side of a state devoted to gratification without our "sentimental" humanist principles.
Utopists often thought to be forward-looking, chic, and left-wing may be in fact reactionary. Consider, for example, Ursula LeGuin. Arguably her The Dispossessed is the finest American Utopian novel of our time, and much of her work touches on these issues.
A first clue comes from the strangely 19th-century middle-European "feel" of her background society in The Dispossessed. This gives a curious static flavor, and of course recalls her reverence for the European tradition of Utopian thought.
Her Utopian experiment on the world Anarres is strikingly technophobic. Except for minor intrusions of a faster-than-light communicator and interplanetary travel (old SF staples), there is little which suggests the future at all. The vague middle-European feel to the architecture, organization of work, etc. is clearly nostalgic; rural Europe itself isn't even like that anymore. Plainly the author disapproves of the techno-flash and dazzle of the opposite world, Urras.
There, Shevek can't connect with the womanly embodiment of Urras's temptation, and he symbolically spills his seed on the ground before her. Indeed, after this novel LeGuin saw space travel as "a bunch of crap flying around the world, just garbage in the sky."[1] NASA's planetary missions, or Shevek's science, can be clean, serene. Technology, though, is practical, dirty, and liable to fall into the wrong hands.
We learn that the Hainish, who began the colony worlds, are burdened and driven by some strange guilt. Considering their superiority in so many fields, it is difficult not to conclude that LeGuin feels we should regard their guilt as admirable, too. This book is the culmination of her Utopian thinking, a path which leads through the short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." (This parable might be titled "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelettes," because we know what it takes to make one—you must break some eggs.)
The Dispossessed reeks with Old-Testament themes and images, using guilt as the principal social control. The founder, Odo, is the central saint of a communal society. Her pain and suffering during nine years' imprisonment make possible the virtue of the later Anarres society. Citizens remind each other of the events and connect her suffering with their dedication.
The implied lesson is that Utopia will not arrive until man comes to grips with his own inner nature, which means in turn that a citizen is born guilty. This is central. Citizens must repay Odo's pain with their submission to the general will and society's precepts. Living on Anarres has an uncanny resemblance to being nagged by your mother.
The marriage vows in Castro's Cuba explicitly require a couple to raise all children according to "socialist morality." On Anarres a child is not a true citizen, psychically, until he has undergone a guilt-inducing experience—an unconscious, implicit rite.[2] Both processes seek to induce early control. The crucial scene in the protagonist Shevek's childhood is the boy's imprisonment game, described in careful detail. (This incident is clearly central, an act of juvenile delinquency taking up more space than Shevek's entire courtship of his wife!)
Odo is clearly the guilt-inducing authority figure which appears so often in reactionary Utopias, though she is not the customary type: male, dynamic, assertive. Odo dies just before her Utopia begins (see the short story "The Day Before the Revolution") and has some resemblance to LeGuin herself. It is interesting, then, that Odo avoided the problems of building a real Utopia, for LeGuin does this too.
There is a further method of investigating Utopian writings, after first applying the litmus test of the above characteristics: reading the author's silences.
Plausibly, the yearning which motivates a writer to construct a Utopia, devoting narrative energy to it, will in turn lead the author to neglect certain disturbing problems. The novel then reflects the author's avoidance of crucial questions that arise naturally from the imagined world. Conscious avoidance (or, more importantly, unconscious neglect) of these tells us what the writer fears and feels uncomfortable with. We might then expect the inhabitants of a Utopia also never to think of the blind areas in their own society.
The principal ignored problem of Anarres is the problem of evil and thus violence; to LeGuin they are often synonymous. Guilt ("social conscience") simply overcomes such discordant elements. In the middle of a drought in which people starve no matter how evenly food is shared, somehow no one thinks of taking up arms with some friends and seizing, say, the grain reserves. Similarly, there is no on-stage evidence in The Dispossessed of hardened criminals, insane people, or naturally violent types (indeed, violence is "unnatural," and an impulse toward it is the principal offense which calls up guilt). There is a "prison camp" for "undesirables," evidence for the ambiguity of this Utopia. But people seem to go there for offenses such as writing unpopular plays or, perhaps, voting Republican.
LeGuin's silence is conspicuous. This arouses the suspicion that the shying away from violence of any sort is part and parcel of the emotional posture of which The Dispossessed is only one reflection.
Tolstoy is the obvious father of many of LeGuin's ideas, techniques, and even literary mannerisms. As Samuel R. Delany has remarked in "To Read The Dispossessed,"[3] whenever LeGuin begins to discuss politics (a common occasion) or show it (quite rare), she uses a language which ". . . sentence by sentence is pompous, ponderous, and leaden." He surmises that her style owes much to the Victorian translations of the great European novels, and that when she attempts depth she unconsciously lapses into this voice. These are "signs of a 'European' or 'Russian' profundity that the (translated) texts do not have." (This brilliant essay stresses the micro-text and ignores the book's principal strength, its beautiful structuring. As Delany deftly shows, hidden assumptions or avoided problems often show up best at the sentence or even phrase level. He also misses some of the lovely passages which her style achieves.)
Why Tolstoy? He, as well as the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin, took an absolutist position—no cooperation with any state control which used force. It is worth noting that the home of much idealist anarchist thinking, Russia, is now the largest prison state in history. One suspects that this comes in part from the inability of the 19th-century socialist thinkers there to confront the problem of violence in any moderate way.
One would then expect LeGuin's Anarres to evolve, if it ever slipped free of the authorial hand, in the direction of 19th-century Russia—without, of course, the apparatus of the Czar, etc. These are the roots of modern totalitarianism.
Failing to confront the problem of evil and violence gives these forces more power, not less. A quite plausible outcome, then, would see the reduction of Anarres to warring camps, each promising to restore order and ideological purity, perhaps even concluding with a Bolshevik-style victory.
LeGuin attempts to finesse this entire problem. It doesn't work. Her ignoring of a remarkable historical parallel (the demise of Russian socialist idealism at the hands of Lenin) marks The Dispossessed as a deeply reactionary work, concerned more with repealing history than with understanding it to make a better future.
This came up recently when I was discussing Soviet SF with one of the principal SF critics there. Appropriately enough, it was a cold day in 1984 and we were crossing Red Square beneath a leaden sky threatening snow. He remarked that The Dispossessed was not translated into Russian, in part because it referred to ideas the regime didn't like. Then he said rather wistfully, "For us, you know, it is terribly nostalgic. And irrelevant. That's the way some thought it could be, back in the beginning."
LeGuin seems to have tentatively approached the problem of real-world violence in the cartoon version of real politics depicted in The Eye of the Heron. There, descendants of the Mafia confront nonviolent anarchists in highly implausible fashion, leading to retreat of the anarchists into the wilderness—a note oddly reminiscent of many American escape-adventures. One must conclude that LeGuin can hardly bear to confront this crucial issue, and when she does sees no solution.
But there seems to me a deeper reason for LeGuin's silence about the realities of the world: fundamentally, the real world does not matter.
As the British critic Roz Kaveny has remarked in a review of Malafrena, "Throughout there is the sense that fills all of LeGuin's work: that politics is important less for what it can do for other people than as a way of achieving personal moral self-realization. Altruism is seen as good for its own sake and not because it may be useful to the under-privileged, although the altruist is supposed to be too busy to ever think in precisely those terms."
A Utopia of hard-scrabbling scarcity solves so many problems quite cheaply. No worries of distribution of wealth, no leverage for power relationships. And it casts all in a superior light: poor people can have few sins. Throughout, no one questions a system which produces poverty, because, after all, it provides lovely opportunities for sacrifice.
A genuine revolutionary in such a place would be he who puts productivity over political theory. No such figure appears—another author's silence. But reality, after all, is not the principal concern of such narratives.
So the crucial scene in The Eye of the Heron, in which anarchist confronts a Mafia thug and the protagonist dies, is skipped. We learn of it obliquely, via dialogue, in flashback. Partly this comes no doubt from her aversion for violence, but I suspect we are meant to see the moral grandeur of the survivors as the central fact. Even death is another way to strike a moral posture—or rather, to be seen doing so.
Similarly, the street confrontations on Urras in The Dispossessed rang false to many reviewers, and for good reason: they are the only example of real-world political confrontation in the book, and LeGuin knows very little of such things.
So her anarchists, confronting theory rather than facts, come over as nice, reasonable, and fairly boring. They behave like middle-class middle-brows, except that they are scrupulously horrified at the idea of property. (One of the book's assets lies in reassuring the middle-brow reader that revolutions will let him feel moral and yet comfortable. Everyone, after all, believes himself capable of overcoming his own greed and being a nice guy.) The conspicuous villains of the book are a physicist who steals Shevek's work, and of course lots of pseudo-American capitalists on Urras.
But not quite. As Delany pointed out in his essay, she treats the homosexual Bedap with an unconscious condescension. It is clear that Bedap should reform himself—stop being gay—because it does not fit in with the Utopia she is constructing in her head. Which in turn intersects with the reactionary utopist's dislike of cultural diversity. Homosexuals cannot be eliminated from human society (without genetic engineering at least); they are a fact impossible to ignore, but clearly their presence troubles LeGuin's blueprints.
In her world, a quiet talk over herbal tea will surely fix matters up. A romantic, she ignores the problem of evil. In LeGuin's land, crowds watching a potential suicide on a window ledge never shout "Jump!" Averting her gaze from the 20th century, she sees evil people as those unfortunates who have not been given sufficient chance to be good.
The real question here is not the use of violence—which is, in LeGuin's work, an invariable sign of Wrongness—but rather, is moral order compatible with human diversity? Her answer is clear: her societies should opt for the age-old solution known to the Pharaohs—moral authoritarianism. Even in the dystopian future America of her novelette, "The New Atlantis," dissidents retreat into classical music and romantic humanism as a counter to the oppressive state. Old world values can, perhaps, redeem us.
Active thwarting of violence is not allowed, though. LeGuin labels her Utopia as ambiguous, clearly knows something is wrong, but does not confront the deep problems. Rather than think through the hidden assumptions of Anarres, Shevek returns to pursue his own moral self-realization. Perhaps he, too, will become a martyr, like Odo—and thus engender more guilt, more attendant control.
But why are utopists so often reactionary? Obviously, some underlying aspects of LeGuin's thought come from the failures of European Utopian theory. But there's more to it than that.
While there is much in reactionary Utopias we should scorn, I think we should properly look at The Dispossessed and some more obviously feminist Utopias as responses to earlier, more mechanistic and masculine Utopias. (As examples of novels which clearly are such reactions, see Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Joanna Russ's The Female Man.) They depict communal societies with pleasant characteristics: relative lack of government, ecologically virtuous, with diffusion of parenting, freedom of movement, sexual freedom, and no crime.
Women's Utopias often use the family as a model for social structure, but it's "the unowned, non-patriarchal family, headed by nobody."[4] This, with their classlessness, makes them seem like fantasies about how families ought to be (and seldom are).
If masculine Utopias fret over the means of production, feminist ones are bothered by the means of reproduction. They uncouple sex from power. But this is not enough to provide social ordering.
Perhaps it is natural for women to extend the family as a model, since they have not so often experienced society as a focus of conflicting forces. When dreaming of the future, we all tend to take the most pleasant areas of our lives and puff them up into metaphors for better societies.
It isn't surprising, then, that the problem of control doesn't rear its vexing head in such Utopias, and the principal problem seems to be work assignments (who's going to do the dishes?). I recall Lenin's famous remark as he took over the government, little anticipating how hard it would be. He said, "A baker can run the state," and proceeded with a lot of half-baked approaches. In the end, Stalin came along to crack heads and force-march Russia into the future.
In most feminist Utopias, no trace remains of general competitiveness and the desire to be better than others. Somehow, they have been laundered from the human psyche. (Interestingly, few support this by asserting that women are inherently better—that is, uncompetitive. The idea seems to be that men have merely taken a wrong turn lately.)
There is no doubt which authority figure is to set the house rules, as Joanna Russ's choice of words signifies: "Careful inspection of the manless societies usually reveals the intention (or wish) to allow men in . . . if only they can be trusted to behave."[5] If you don't, presumably you are sent to your room, i.e., exiled—unless it's James Tiptree's (Raccoona Sheldon's) Utopia in "Houston, Houston, Do you Read?", where you'll be killed with minimal regrets. In no case should divisive ideas or surging hormones be allowed to thwart the communal good. Unsurprisingly, the authority figure is the only fallback enforcer in such worlds. The problem of control is simply neglected.
These feminist Utopias are primarily reactive, responding to perceived masculine evils. The qualities they long for—stronger communal feeling, harmony with the natural world, violence only if it expresses anger in limited ways or in self-defense, good country vs. bad city (where the streets are unsafe)—reflect current needs. But by concentrating on these concerns they run the risk of forsaking the gains of the present, and becoming reactionary because they cannot imagine new ways to organize a community.
Freedom to do as we please, so long as we all agree with each other and remain in a state of harmony with the cosmos, is no freedom at all. It is little better than a religion in which faith in a deity has been replaced by faith in some supposed truths of the human spirit. It is a single-party system that is as superficially benign, yet as subtly authoritarian, as Disneyland.
Why does much Utopian thought tend in this direction? The central difficulty confronting social planners is just that contained in the name—they must plan, and so must fear the wild card, the diverse, the self-regulating. History provides methods for governing errant wild spirits, so a planner looks longingly backward for models. Few peer ahead to landscapes where men and women have more freedom, can interact swiftly and chaotically yet with good result.
Some SF authors have seen this. Norman Spinrad's depictions of electronic democracy, from Bug Jack Barron onward, are deliberately saturated with lust for power and sharp contradictions. Frederik Pohl has meditated throughout a long career on these problems, notably in the recent The Years of the City, which abounds in Utopian visions threaded with practical lore.
And what about looking at such older (more apparently "right-wing") Utopian novels such as Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty? I suspect they'll prove to be rather more enlightened than some recent chic visions.
It seems to me that reactionary facets spring in part from lack of imagination. Feminists, searching for ways to revise our society, fall upon analogies with the family, even if these do not provide solutions to the genuine problems of a diverse, urban, cantankerous world.
Instead, utopists long for sweeping simplicities. The supremacy of communal values, the need to suppress the individual, the fear of diversity or of science, the longing for a respite from change—these find many echoes in socialist thinking, in Third World societies, in all those who look hopefully forward to a restful era when we could, thank God, sleep off the binge known as modern times.
References
1. "In a World of Her Own," Mother Jones, January 1984.
2. Sheila Finch, Science Fiction Review, December, 1985.
3. Samuel R. Delany, "To Read The Dispossessed," The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Berkley, New York, 1977.
4. Joanna Russ, "Recent Feminist Fictions," in Future Females, Bowling Popular Press, 1981.
5. Ibid.