On the Improbability of Utopia
When Thomas More coined the word utopia — from Greek ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’ — to use it as title for his book, about an imaginary island endowed with an ideal political and social system, he probably had in mind the impossibility of attaining such a supreme goal. He considered it a no-place, somewhere out of our world and out of our reach. Over time utopia has got a slightly different meaning and currently it represents a setting out of our time, but not out of our reach; given enough time it might be attainable. Unfortunately, utopias still remain highly improbable today due to a number of moral and practical reasons.
Utopias are based on ideas coming from a single individual or a small group of people. However convinced they may be about being drafting a model for a perfect society, others may not be willing to accept their vision or even listen to them. The definition of ‘right’, ‘desirable’, or ‘perfect’ may be met with disbelief or even strong opposition, and this basic disagreement has the potential to derail any lofty ambitions. We shall remember that all tyrants and dictators of the past had their very own definitions for those terms.
Utopias are conceived in a simplistic and schematic way, basically because it is not feasible to attempt a thorough description. If we were to offer a complete explanation of the ideal climate conditions in our planet we might have to account for each cubic meter of our atmosphere, approximately 10^19 (assuming a 20 km thickness). There may be some theories and laws that explain, in general, the main trends of climate but the objective would be to describe it in the utmost detail. If we wrote one page to explain what happens, and why, in each cubic meter, we would need 10^19 pages, which makes the Encyclopedia Britannica pale with its 32 volumes and 32,000 pages (last printed edition in 2010). Additionally, if it took us ten minutes to write each page, we would need 1.9x10^14 years to write our description of climate, which is ten thousand times longer than the entire life of the universe (1.3x10^10 years). Definitely not a feasible endeavor.
Utopias fail to consider important external elements and conditions that may greatly affect their chances of success. Let’s imagine that someone devices the perfect agricultural strategy, with the optimal land allocation among farmers, the ideal varieties of seeds and high-yielding crops, all the required equipment and machinery, a comprehensive irrigation system, a fair acquisition and distribution of produce, etc. But what if a severe drought reduces harvests to a minimum for years, or plagues of pests decimate entire swaths of crops? The most perfect system might yield no benefits at all. It feels odd when some people, still today, try to envision an ideal future by simply extrapolating trends and strategies over a period of fifty years, after having endured a major economic crisis, a pandemic and a war that is destabilizing an entire continent in little more than a decade.
Utopias are eventually implemented and adopted by individuals who, as most of you may know, are far from perfect. During the communist revolution in Russia, Lenin proposed to abolish the police force and standing army and replace them with a self-organized people’s militia, to ensure the basic survival of the state. His idea was that violence and crime were the result of capitalist oppression; in the socialist paradise, therefore, there wouldn’t be crime. In fact, not only did violence and crime not decline but also the ruling party soon became aware of the police’s potential for political and social control. Eventually, Russia and the entire Soviet Union became one of the most police-controlled states in the world.
