Henry Castaigne :I believe in democratic peace theory. Like Freud recommended the Nazis to anyone, so also do I recommend to anyone world war…. If you believe a catastrophic war has become impossible, sure—maybe you will have less silly opinions than the pacifists of yesteryear. Bombing people into democracy is one way to do it. The nice part about doing that is that when democracies are around for awhile they tend to remarkably resilient.
Some theorize that you need 12 elections before the democratic process sticks Japan and the parts of Europe that America invaded have stayed democracies. Tunisia is now listed as a free country by Freedom House and there was not war there to facilitate it. There will always be people in the world that are not trustworthy. Utopia can only exist when everyone acts in good faith with trustworthiness and friendship. I agree with your religious reasons, Jennifer, but I would add that God gave man free will for a reason.
But we have to have a choice or our obedience would be meaningless. So, every generation the world as Jonah Goldberg reminds us is invaded by barbarians.
They are called children—children of God in fact—but they have to be taught and raised and allowed to exercise their free will.
A whole lot of these barbarians will make bad choices that will lead to bad things, including the idea that taking a way free will will lead to utopia.
Let me add that by free will, I do not mean the will unhampered by social mores, custom and law. Humans have a will to order and these things are necessary for order. We always walk a fine line. We must be most wary of those who would impose overarching ideological systems that severely hamper the freedom and will of most people while allowing a few to control everyone else. Many people are attracted to overarching ideologies and, of course, power, and many have great confidence in their ability to select the ideology that works best for other people.
Some will seek change to address real or perceived problems. The universe is imperfect, and though we may be able to optimize a corner or two, we lack the intellect to do much more. Merina Smith :I agree with your religious reasons, Jennifer, but I would add that God gave man free will for a reason.
Henry Castaigne :Yes. What do you mean. You seem to me a blessedly happy man, unconcerned with the horror. England is superior in avoiding that in its days of political freedom, but had horrifying wars before its civil war.
Have you heard of the recent horrors following the change of regime? Merina Smith :. Furthermore, horrible wars are a normal part of human existence, until you can get rid of slavery and firmly establish capitalism, democracy and liberal values. Well going through ugly wars is what you usually do. If North Korea had a horrible civil war to become a democracy, would it be more horrible than another mass famine? Jennifer Johnson : In short, since every human person is a sinner, utopia is always an impossibility.
Sin is one reason. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we say we suffer only because we have sinned, though, we also deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. Not every regrettable decision is a sinful decision. In a world of costly information , even a completely virtuous person would not always have enough information to guarantee the right decision, and so would be forced to gamble on some decisions, and might, in gambling, lose.
Christians are told that, when Sin is done away with completely, nature itself will be restored, which might mean that knowledge costs are done away with, too we can speculate that something like this must happen, though we cannot know for sure.
But yes, utopia would take an alteration of nature itself. Even perfect human virtue would not be enough. Henry Castaigne :. I suppose everyone who has an experience of horror could be dulled to other horrors. Maybe that is the case with you. Always the pacifist concedes, the war to end all wars might come! The evidence for that is nil. I suppose it is a faith with some.
Yes, if only-. Noting that the scriptures said that He sent them out by twos, it seems time for my contribution. Adam had not been introduced to a supernatural state when he sinned, so what Adam lost at the fall was part of his nature. He lost control over his passions, which is not sin itself but has come from sin and leads to sin. Adam lost integrity which is the absence of conflict between right reason and the urges of nature.
When Adam lost these things, he lost them for his posterity, noting that even those who have been baptized still experience this conflict in their persons. So we have an inclination toward sin. Yet, given Who made us, we also desire good. Utopia is a recognition of that desire, but it is beyond us. Some will undoubtedly take cause against me. I would recommend reading history. There have been leaps in understanding and those leaps have been applied to agriculture, animal husbandry, and the gradual conquest of many difficulties and physical evils, such as polio and other maladies.
Larry :. And yet, what some libertarians want would be an tyranny like open boarders. But add those factors, and utopian dreamers can turn into dystopian murderers. If you pull the switch, it will divert the trolley down a side track where it will kill one worker.
If you do nothing, the trolley kills the five. What would you do? Most people say that they would pull the switch. If even people in Western enlightened countries today agree that it is morally permissible to kill one person to save five, imagine how easy it is to convince people living in autocratic states with utopian aspirations to kill 1, to save 5,, or to exterminate 1,, so that 5,, might prosper.
The fatal flaw in utilitarian utopianism is found in another thought experiment: You are a healthy bystander in a hospital waiting room in which an ER physician has five patients dying from different conditions, all of which can be saved by sacrificing you and harvesting your organs. Would anyone want to live in a society in which they might be that innocent bystander?
Of course not, which is why any doctor who attempted such an atrocity would be tried and convicted for murder. The Marxist theorist and revolutionary Leon Trotsky expressed the utopian vision in a pamphlet:. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens , will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.
And above this ridge new peaks will rise. As for Trotsky, once he gained power as one of the first seven members of the founding Soviet Politburo, he established concentration camps for those who refused to join in this grand utopian experiment, ultimately leading to the gulag archipelago that killed millions of Russian citizens who were also believed to be standing in the way of the imagined utopian paradise to come.
When his own theory of Trotskyism opposed that of Stalinism, the dictator had Trotsky assassinated in Mexico in Sic semper tyrannis. In the second half of the 20th century, revolutionary Marxism in Cambodia, North Korea, and numerous states in South America and Africa led to murders, pogroms, genocides, ethnic cleansings, revolutions, civil wars, and state-sponsored conflicts, all in the name of establishing a heaven on Earth that required the elimination of recalcitrant dissenters.
All told, some 94 million people died at the hands of revolutionary Marxists and utopian communists in Russia, China, North Korea, and other states, a staggering number compared with the 28 million killed by the fascists. When you have to murder people by the tens of millions to achieve your utopian dream, you have instantiated only a dystopian nightmare.
In Pacific Edge, the direct brand of politics Extinction Rebellion advocates is central to social and ecological wellbeing. Extinction Rebellion urges efforts of wartime proportion to decarbonise by — a utopian target that has been met with scepticism in some quarters. But whether or not it is achievable, such a demand has been crucial in highlighting that what is presently deemed politically possible is not sufficient to stop catastrophic climate breakdown.
Their radical visions have shifted the climate and ecological crises to the forefront of the political agenda. And, crucially, they have switched millions on to the idea that fundamental transformations in the way we organise and power our societies are possible.
To some, the serious political proposals outlined by Extinction Rebellion and in the Green New Deal might seem as unrealistic as the literary works that imagine their realisation. But living examples of ecotopian imagination can already be found in the world we live in. Thousands of intentional communities across the globe are already creating spaces with social and ecological justice at their heart. Many of these eco-communities have been directly inspired by the communities imagined in ecotopian novels.
In shattering the perceived rigidity of the present, utopianism paves the way for change.
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