Figure 20. Thomas More, A Map of Utopia

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Hobbes’s endorsement of governmental autocracy, but equally disturbing, lie a variety of mainly right-wing libertarian factions which encompass American and British neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, neatly summed up in the person and works of Ayn Rand. In her most well-known work of fiction, Atlas Shrugged, described by Gore Vidal as ‘nearly perfect in its immorality’ (Vidal, 1961), Rand, novelist, playwright and political philosopher admired by figures as influential as Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006, depicts a dystopian world and the recipe for setting it to rights: a world ruled by the principle of ‘rational egoism’ (rational self-interest) in which the individual must exist for his or her own sake, rejecting the concept of self-sacrifice. For Rand, existing reality advantages the weak, unproductive an unintelligent because they benefit from the achievements of those at the top while contributing nothing to them. In Atlas Shrugged (Rand, 1957), the most creative scientists, artists and industrialists ‘stop the motor of the world’ by going on strike and retreating to a mountain hideaway where they set up an independent, self-sufficient economy. Without them, society collapses, opening up the possibility of starting a world from scratch which includes only the elite chosen among those who were there before.

All members of society are predestined and conditioned as embryos and as infants for the functions they will perform as adults, and to accept the values that the World State idealizes, including (as in Fahrenheit 451) intense consumerism as the bedrock of social and economic stability. Absolute conformity is achieved by genetic modification and by social and pedagogical training (Elementary Sex, Elementary Class Consciousness, etc.), in the form of phrases repeated to children while they sleep (hypnopaedia).

The conditioning system eliminates the need for professional competitiveness; each individual, in as much as the term has any significance, is bred to do a predetermined job and cannot desire anything else. Incurable dissidents are allowed to escape to securely contained geographic areas (Savage Reservations), where they lead primitive lives.

Problem Children

Bernard, the central protagonist of Brave New World, is a psychologist and an outcast. Although he is an Alpha Plus, something appears to have gone wrong during his incubation. He is shorter than the average for his caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. He defies social norms, despises his equals and is vocal about being different, on one occasion stating that he dislikes soma because he would rather be himself, sad, than another person, happy (an echo of John Stuart Mill’s dictum that it is ‘better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’ (Mill, 1863: 14). While holidaying with Lenina, a Beta Minus woman, on Malpais (Bad Country) a Savage Reservation (the equivalent of a visit to the zoo or to a wild life park), Bernard, unlike Lenina, becomes interested in the aged, toothless natives (savages). While sightseeing, the couple encounters Linda, a woman formerly of the World State who has been living in Malpais for many years, after becoming separated from her group while on holiday. She has since born a son, John (later referred to as John the Savage) who is now eighteen. Bernard arranges permission for Linda and John to leave the reservation and travel with him back to civilization. Once there, John is treated as exotica and fêted as a pet, but Linda, too old to fit back into society, retreats into a permanent soma holiday. John, appalled by what he perceives to be an empty, wicked and debased society, isolates himself in a remote location, but becomes an object of curiosity, gawped at by tourists, and eventually hangs himself.

Beyond Freedom

In the end, a variety of different circumstances may result in the large-scale collapse of social structures and human communities as narrated in film and fiction: natural disasters (acts of God), human error (unforeseen developments in scientific/military/demographic activity) or intentional agency (chemical, biological or nuclear warfare). Post-apocalypse, however, and irrespective of the original trigger, certain common patterns tend to emerge, and structure the emerging survival scenarios: the desire to re-build the world based on the principle of necessary change; the awareness of the dangers of repetition; and, paradoxically, the near-certainty that repetition will not only prove unavoidable but, in the emerging new statuses quo, it will exaggerate the factors that resulted in cataclysm in the first place (intellectual hubris; non-consensual community organization; belligerent inter-group relations; and the polyanesque inability to accept the need for envisaging and forestalling worst-case scenarios).

Defining Utopia

Albeit in some ways counter-intuitively, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the end of the world may be unleashed by arrival at a state of utopia. And in any case, just as apocalypse in the original sense of the term does not necessarily mean universal wipe-out but a stage towards a new beginning, the significance of the term utopia, too, is not necessarily restricted to the common parlance meaning of perfect social, communal or individual bliss.

In P.D. James’s The Children of Men (James, 2000), already discussed, in a world where no children have been born for twenty-five years, where there is little to do, no danger of unwanted pregnancies and no future to plan for, one might expect that socially unregulated sex would have become a carefree universal pastime. The reality, however, is somewhat different: people have lost interest in sex, and the state has had to open pornography centres to encourage on-going sexual activity (in case fertility makes a comeback). In a world now peopled by the last generation of human beings, women under 45 undergo a gynecological examination and men have their sperm counted twice a year, in the hope that human life might not, after all, be doomed to extinction. Paradoxically, or perhaps not so, in the awareness that when they die they will not be missing out on anything because there will be nothing left, life becomes worthless for these dwellers at the end of the world. This problem will be examined in greater detail in a subsequent section.

Are You Happy yet?

In Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the hero of the post-apocalypse explains to the other survivors that they must strive to endure because ‘the Unknown exists and we would make it Known’ (Farmer, 1971: 98). For Farmer, presumably, knowledge is both power and worthiness, and leads not to the Fall but to utopia, a new paradise. Apocalypse in this interpretation, hypothesizes an ending but also the beginning of a hitherto unknown possibility:

On a more secular plane, commenting on Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney (Dick, 2007) Fredric Jameson argues that widespread nuclear destruction leads to the removal of corporate capitalism and opens the way to alternative social and economic possibilities which closely approximate another critic’s definition of utopia as a ‘Jeffersonian-style commonwealth beyond the bomb’ (Aldiss, 1975: 42). The problem at the heart of Jefferson’s thought, however, which both Jameson and Aldiss opt not to confront, but which will be addressed here presently, is that Jeffersonian utopias, like all other utopias, incorporate fundamental principles of self-contradiction, discrimination and autocracy that in the end erase the line separating them from autocratic dystopias. Jefferson (a slave-owning abolitionist), indeed, himself exemplifies a phenomenon common to almost all utopias: namely that under them, just like under any demagogy, all animals may be equal but some are almost always more equal than others.

Let’s not go there

Philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre (Sartre, 1947) and Rosemary Jackson (Jackson, 1981) argue that fantasy (which in a broad sense can encompass science fiction, horror and utopian writing), is the genre within which the forbidden, the dreaded, the desired and the unutterable can be contemplated. If so, it may after all not be surprising that absolutist politics, translated as the dream of power – including global power or totalitarianism – may after all underpin utopian imaginings of a perfect world.

As regards a definition of an utopian imagined world, clearly, not only is one man’s meat another man’s poison (an expression which, taken literally, in any case dismisses the female half of humanity), but, given enough time, even one’s own meat of choice can grow stale. Historically, it has often been true that the occurrence of cataclysmic events in nations’ economical, political and territorial systems has not infrequently led the way to dictatorship under the guise of the only (final) solution to systemic instability. Utopia, taken to be the solution to scenarios of universal collapse, retains an affinity to destruction that links it to the catastrophic events that possibly made it desirable in the first place. And not unexpectedly, in response to the anarchy of the immediate post-apocalypse, the establishment of utopian order often exhibits some of the defining characteristics of dictatorship.

In Levin, Wei’s vision of a world population genetically created to be born perfect, is not quite achieved, and people must still be chemically controlled by means of weekly ‘treatments.’ In Atwood’s more fully achieved nightmare, Oryx and Crake (Atwood, 2004), that dream is already a reality. In the research laboratory aptly named Paradice, the genetically engineered Crakers are ready to begin re-populating the planet from tabula rasa, in the aftermath of a virus by means of which their creator, Crake – scientist turned quasi-divine destroyer and demiurge – sought, albeit failed, to annihilate the entire human species:

They are, however, mistaken. The permanence of Big Brother requires more than outward conformism: it requires people to have the right opinions, and, more importantly even, the right instincts, ‘a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this:’

As in Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, albeit with greater brutality, the Party seeks not to suppress dissidence but to ‘cure’ it; it is as interested in crimes of thought (‘thoughtcrime’) as in crimes of deed: ‘we do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them’ (Orwell, 1983: 218). Perfect, heartfelt conformity is the requirement for any utopia, however defined. Thus, in the end, it does not suffice that Winston betrays Julia: he must want to betray her. And likewise, the status quo can only afford to execute him when, rather than merely appearing to love Big Brother, he actually does:

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, is an extreme, distorted example of how utopia, in the sense of perfect contentment (unconditional acceptance of, and love for, that which forcibly controls us, be it God the Father or Big Brother), is not only difficult to imagine but, contradictorily, carries its own problems. But there are others, which even Orwell did not fully explore. For example, can utopia be trusted to be real or is it in fact a figment, a quasi-psychotic state with an inevitable wake-up call (Brave New World, Huxley, 1977; This Perfect Day, Levin, 1994; The Time Machine, [1895] 1982; ‘The Machine Stops’)? In addition, and even more disturbingly, if followed to its logical conclusion, a question remains as to whether, having reached utopia (imagined or even real), it can last forever.

This Dream is not My Dream

Narratives that have addressed this last question include John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen (Wyndham, [1960] 1982) and Julian Barnes’s episode (or, tantalizingly, inconclusive half-episode), ‘The Dream,’ in History of the World in 10½ Chapters (Barnes, 1990). In Wyndham, as discussed already, a biochemist discovers, if not actual utopia, the secret of eternal life, or at least the means of radically slowing down the ageing process, thereby extending life expectancy indefinitely. One of Wyndham’s strengths as a writer lies in his ability to imagine unusual situations and explore their unintended consequences. In Trouble with Lichen the social and demographic consequences of a massively increased life span constitute the central preoccupation of the narrative, and typically he leaves us not with a facile solution to the problem but rather with questions still unanswered at the end. Paradoxically, and contrary to any acceptable utopian outcome, in Trouble with Lichen one obvious consequence (or problem) of finding the Elixir of Life is death: the non-viability of non-finite human existence in a world with finite resources.

A related problem revolves around the paradox that even if unproblematic utopia is achieved, it might eventually grow stale (at which point, by definition, it ceases to be utopia, and, because unchangeable, becomes a torment: Room 101). If so, achieving the dream of eternal life becomes ultimately a poisoned sweet: a recurrent theme in literature of all genres: from Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic short story ‘Ligeia’ (Poe, [1839] 2003), J.K. Rowling’s creation of Voldemort in the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 2000, 2008), Neil Gaiman’s cult comic book series, Sandman (Gaiman, 1991-2007), Julian Barnes’s satire, ‘The Dream’ (Barnes, 1990) to John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen, already mentioned:

Only the mad or the bad can countenance non-finitude without stumbling into paradoxical self-destruction, or without at least desiring it, like Phil Connors, who in Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993), farcically seeks to escape entrapment in the perpetual present by repeated (and repeatedly failed) suicide attempts. In Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen Zephanie comes to a conclusion not dissimilar to Barnes’s Heaven-entrapped hero, to be discussed: namely, that perpetual enjoyment of what you enjoy paves the path to satiation, to the inability any longer to desire, and thence to misery: ‘After a while, getting what you want all the time is very close to not getting what you want all the time’ (Barnes, 1990: 309). Similarly, in a clear Faustian pact, J.K. Rowling’s Voldemort, the most dangerous wizard in the world, curiously representative both of Satan and of the latter’s doomed business associates, seeks to buy immortality in exchange for his soul: he performs magic that rips it into seven different shreds and stores those fragments in external objects (horcruxes): ‘I, who have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality’ (Rowling, 2000: 566). As with every dream that comes true only to betray itself, by separating himself from portions of his soul, Voldemort (previously Tom Riddle), becomes the architect of his own destruction:

Rowling’s concept of the split soul which grants immortality to the earthly body albeit at a price, appears in a variety of myths including the Norse tale, ‘The Giant Who Had No Heart in his Body’ (Asbjørnsen and Moe, 1888) and is discussed in various myths in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1993):

In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, winner of several awards including the Nebula, the most prestigious prize in science fiction, Hob Gadling, the central character, not unlike the knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957), meets Death and her brother Dream in a tavern in London in 1389, and on a whim is granted eternal life by the former. In the course of six episodes taking place over the centuries, Gadling meets Dream several times, the last time being in 1989. As the series progresses, we learn that in the aftermath of Dream’s death, Gadling is sometimes offered the option of death by Death herself, and on at least one occasion is tempted. Although he never actually takes up the offer, it becomes increasingly clear that eternal life may not after be as desirable as he had supposed.

The Problem with Perfection

Barnes’s scenario, like the other examples mentioned, takes the act of imagining utopia to an extreme which is also its negation. And in doing so it also echoes less explicit problems common to much utopian writing. John Carey’s panoramic survey of utopias (there are many different kinds and they seldom agree) defines utopia as the imaginary site of desire, and dystopia as a place of fear (Carey, 1999: i-xii). It is to be reasonably expected that dystopias should depend upon the destruction of whatever/whoever was in place beforehand. Dystopia and utopia, however, rather than necessarily antithetical, may be categorically contiguous. If being in a state of desire implies that that desire is not yet satisfied, the attainment of utopia (absolute contentment) must invariably require the abolition of human longing (for that which might be but which is not yet achieved). And the elimination of the ability to desire, even if not actually dystopian, may in fact be either equidistant from both dystopia and utopia, or else impossible, because, as Barnes’s hero discovers, in a place where your wishes are automatically fulfilled, the only impossible desire turns out to be the wish to become someone who never gets tired of eternity, which in turn may only be possible by means of ceasing to exist (obliteration): ‘you can’t become someone else without stopping being who you are’ (Barnes, 1990: 308); and stopping being who you are is dying, by any other name.

Nothing is Perfect

In Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (Vonnegut, 1999), much as in Time out of Joint (Dick, 2003), The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), This Perfect Day (Levin, 1994), ‘The Machine Stops,’ The Penultimate Truth (Dick, 2005), The Simulacra (Dick, 2004) and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams, 1979), or indeed the Old and New Testaments, individuals,’ or even the whole of humanity’s existence is the product of Deus ex machina manipulators; a concept later used with mass market appeal in the unprecedented box-office smash trilogy The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions (Wachowski Brothers, 1999, 2003, 2003). In these three films, preposterous plot lines involve abundant Biblical allusions (including, as in the The Terminator series, the insistence on trinitarian references). Of note is for example the central casting of a saviour (aptly named Neo), who in the final instalment lays down his life to free humankind from the Matrix: a computer-generated simulated reality created as a device for pacifying humanity in a world controlled by machines which, in the early twenty-first century, had taken over the world in order to use human beings as bio-fuel.

Other than Jehovah’s Eden, most of the pseudo-demiurgic worlds described above are classifiable as utopias in the sense that with some exceptions they are, at least from the point of view of their creators, ideal settings, ‘good places,’ or, as the terminology of current political discourse would have it, ‘fit for purpose.’ The purpose in question refers of course to the requirements of each of the overlooking demiurgic powers: in Dick’s Time Out of Joint (Dick, 2003) the military establishment; in Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide (Adams, 1979) the mice running the laboratory experiment; in Levin’s This Perfect Day (Levin, 1994) the tiny minority of about one hundred ‘programmers’ who exercise world domination; and in Weir’s The Truman Show (Weir, 1998) the producer of a soap opera serving the interests of corporate profit.

In Plato’s ideal Republic and in his Symposium, for example, an over-arching definition of good and bad or right and wrong sets out a series of imperatives: the banishment of artists and poets; the causal link of goodness and beauty, ugliness and wickedness; the necessity of censorship; the desirability of eugenic practices; and the idealization of paedophilia (sex between adult men and young boys of unspecified age) within an ideology that brooks no argument. Similarly, the protagonists/ subjects of the various plots (in both senses of the word ‘plot’) detailed above are impotent against the underpinnings of their existences: they have been removed from reality, cast into someone else’s narrative and disenfranchised from the exercise of free will by existential scripts of monumental proportions, predetermined by someone other than they themselves.

Happiness Beyond End-Time

The latter is also true in re-constructed worlds following apocalypse: Dr. Bloodmoney (Dick, 2007), This Perfect Day (Levin, 1994), Brave New World (Huxley, 1977), The Chrysalids (Wyndham, [1955] 1984), The Kraken Wakes (Wyndham, [1953] 1980), The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham, [1951] 1984), Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Wilhelm, 2006), Earth Abides (Stewart, 1973) and numerous other works.

Until the End of the World sets up a dialectic of apocalypse as cataclysm synthesized into revelatory epiphany. But if at the end Claire is presented as a space-age guardian angel, even so the resolution reached is characterized by a dimension of alienation that Booker likens to Foucault’s disciplinary (carceral) society and he himself calls routinization:

The Bliss of Non-Difference

Fredric Jameson (Jameson, 1984) argues that fantasy and science fiction articulate a desire to escape routinization and alienation. If so, they may also sometimes provide a path through that which is most feared, thus safeguarding arrival at a state of safety beyond apocalypse which one might define as utopia. If apocalypse was brought about by the unleashing of unbridled force (terror), of randomness (error), and of the forces of chaos, utopia requires absolute, highly regulated conformism. By the same token, under utopia, the price of nonconformism (the freedom to be different) is unhappiness and ultimately punishment, writ small, large or very large (global), something which accounts for its forcible elimination in many of the works discussed. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is the distillation of the misfit, a rebel without a clearly identified cause, who deviates not in the name of any particular agenda (he has no plan for an alternative society) but simply because he cannot do otherwise. Ultimately, from the point of view of the status quo but also of himself, since he is unable to effect change his unhappiness has only one solution, namely the abolition of the very essence of what he is, followed by non-being. After being tortured into submission to the will of Big Brother, Winston dies happy because he no longer exists in any real sense. Instead, he has learnt to love that against which he had previously defined himself, which had destroyed his mind and which will now destroy him.

In Huxley, Levin and Bradbury alike, sameness is enforced by drugs or censorship or both, supposedly for the good of all: ‘We’re the Happiness Boys […]. We stand against the tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought’ (Bradbury, 1990: 68-69).

In This Perfect Day, Chip’s propensity for dissent may be due partly to a congenital flaw (manifested also in his having one green and one brown eye) but its full potential is awakened initially as the result of the teachings of a destabilizing agent, Papa Jan, his grandfather, who is one of the old, never fully ‘normalized’ generation dating back to pre-unification (amalgamation of global social regulation under the control of one vast computer). Papa Jan initially urges the young Chip to try thinking something different in the days just before his monthly treatment, when its effects are at their weakest, and in doing so sets his grandson on a path towards irremediable misfit. The pros and cons of individuality are later clearly articulated by a group of untreated rebels:

The Dark Side of Utopia

Under the new regime established in The Children of Men (James, 2000), drastic measures have been taken to pacify citizens and maintain the illusion that a comfortable life will be possible in the years to come. By decree of the Council of England, every citizen is required to learn skills such as farming, which they might need as the last generations of humans gradually die out. Foreign immigration is encouraged for the purposes of hard manual labour, but immigrants are forcibly repatriated at the age of sixty. As is the case in other utopian/dystopian writings, native citizens are not permitted to become a burden to the community by reason of age or infirmity: among the elderly and the sick, the privileged few are put in nursing homes. The rest must choose between unassisted deaths at home, state-assisted suicide, or death through participation in one of the regularly-held ceremonies of Council-sanctioned drownings known as The Quietus. Utopia, the New Jerusalem, can only be set up after the unfit have been eliminated.

Not only is utopia, therefore, a relative concept (one size clearly does not fit all, as demonstrated by Montag, Chip, Winston Smith, and Kuno) but, moreover, the process of imagining it whether in myth, culture, science or political thought, always comes with significant caveats: specifically, the prerequisite of the cleansing out of the prevailing status quo, the elimination of elements in it deemed to be undesirable, and the abdication of both free will and the entitlement to choice. The wider complexities of the concept of utopia, therefore, must be considered with particular regard to the common thread linking diverse and sometimes antithetical implications of utopianism’s original political, ethical and ethnographic paradigms.

The Big Spring Clean

As already suggested, utopia, from Plato to the Russian Jewish writer Ayn Rand (via the Aryan Nazi Valhalla whose vision Rand disturbingly mirrors), can only begin after undesirable elements have been eliminated. Plato’s ideal Republic, for example, required the exclusion (by unspecified means) of numerous categories of undesirability (artists, poets, the sick, the ugly and nonconformists, to list but a few).

The move from individual exclusion to death, thence to genocide and from the latter to global annihilation as the ultimate purge, arguably, involves steps which are too small (imperceptible) for comfort. With regard to genocide, H.G. Wells’s vision of utopia in Anticipations, for example, concluded that quality life on Earth could only be preserved by means of the extermination of the entire populations of Africa and Asia (Wells, 1999), and more than fifty years before Hitler’s Final Solution, many distinguished members of the respected Fabian Society (including names such as George Bernard Shaw, whose reputation, like Wells,’ astonishingly, remains unsullied to this day) were strong supporters of eugenics as an instrument of social progress.

Even more drastically, he went on to elaborate the necessity for genocide:

Figure 21. Michelangelo Buonarroti, Christ as Judge of the World

While in his nonfictional polemics, Wells defended the genocidal policies, (outlined above) in some of his novels, including The War in the Air (Wells, [1907] 2005) and A Modern Utopia, he indicates that following a Last War, a new stage in history will be inaugurated leading, in due course, to ‘the dream of a world’s awakening’ (Wells, 2005: 369): not quite like Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, but also not absolutely unlike it, since it, too, envisages a world globally converted to the basic ideology and sociopolitical structures of the West.

Fukuyama’s thesis is at worst foolish, but elsewhere things can get nasty. In Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (Findley, 1987), a re-writing of the Noah’s Ark episode in Genesis, prior to embarking on a journey that will signal the end of one world and the beginning of another one, the law-abiding Dr. Noyes, in an echo of other final solutions, orders his sons to kill Lotte, a mentally handicapped child. In Not the End of the World (McCaughrean, 2005), a re-writing for children of the same Biblical episode, friends’ and neighbours’ supplications are ignored by Noah who, in his determination to act by the (Lord’s) book, lets them drown. Likewise, in Earth Abides (Stewart, 1973) Christian principles inform the actions of the community patriarch, who, although admittedly with mild regrets (which however are effortlessly overridden by a needs-must certainty), condemns a mentally disabled young woman to death lest she should give birth to similarly damaged offspring. In this enduringly popular novel whose affinity to the logic of Hitler’s Germany is never remarked upon by a loyal public, Evie is eliminated on the breathtakingly level-headed grounds that it would be bad for the community if her defective genes were passed on.

Figure 22. El Greco, The Opening of the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse

Much more worryingly, in the must-read essay pithily entitled ‘Armageddon,’ Gore Vidal describes how the belief in the need for a tabula rasa wipe-out prior to a new beginning was also espoused by such influential voices as James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, and by Reagan himself, his presidential finger, of course, at all times poised on the nuclear button. Vidal summarizes the rationale whereby, as Watt explained to the American Congress in 1981, the end of the world could be relied upon to happen sooner rather than later (‘I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns,’ Vidal, 1989: 192):

Gore Vidal knew whereof he spoke: some years earlier, Reagan, then Governor of California, had stated:

All as It Ought to Be

The Rapture envisaged by evangelical Christian fundamentalism has a species similarity to the fictional universes achieved after suitable social cleansing or even absolute discarding of the old world/universe in works such as Brave New World (Huxley, 1977) and Tau Zero (Anderson, 2006) respectively. In the resulting utopia, as under the average dictatorship, human difference comes to be regarded as at best an inconvenience and at worst a sickness, treatable, eradicable or genetically modifiable in the name of the preservation of authorized forms of happiness.

The Ideology of Utopia: What Goes Round Comes Round

What if I Say No?

Another obstacle to utopia, which stems from the imperative of homogeneity, is a fundamental characteristic of human nature, namely its contrariness (the urge to differ), the satisfaction of which can be a prerequisite to existential well-being. In Machado de Assis’s short story, ‘The Devil’s Church’ (Assis, 1987), the Devil decides to break God’s theological monopoly and establishes his own church, based on the worst instincts of humanity (greed, envy, selfishness, violence). The corporate take-over fails when a beleaguered Satan comes to realize that after his new faith’s initial success, its long-term survival is threatened by the fact that its members are increasingly guilty of clandestine virtue practiced by stealth. The despondent Wrong-Doer begs an amused God for an explanation and is told that there is none, other than the eternal contradictoriness of human nature (Assis, 1987). This being so, if conformity is an essential component of utopianism, either humanity itself has no place in utopia or the latter is doomed to failure at the hands of its customers. Julian Barnes’s beneficiary of heavenly utopia, in the end asks to be allowed to die (again, and this time with no option of an Afterlife): anything – even death – it would appear, is better than having all one’s wishes fulfilled in perpetuity, because if whatever one asks for the answer is always ‘yes,’ how can one enjoy the bliss of saying ‘no’?

Philip K. Dick’s predictably eccentric take on this problem in The World Jones Made (Dick, 2003) is set in a post-holocaust world drawing away from the brink of a destruction that originated in a variety of conflicting fundamentalisms. In Machado de Assis, the eternal contradictoriness of human nature was what ultimately obstructed the Devil’s agenda (his pyrrhic victory ultimately amounting to no more than the reduction of God himself to a position of moral relativism). In Jones’s world, the new status quo’s response to destructive fundamentalisms secure of their various monopolies over Truth, is to implement a mandatory kind of pluralism which makes it illegal to proclaim any belief as being right. Ironically, this postmodern paradise of enforced relativism gives rise to a population hungry for clearly identified dictates, even at the price of enforced submissiveness to demagogy. As is the case in Levin, Bradbury, Huxley, Orwell and most of the other works discussed, the most disturbing conclusion – one which carries implications for the life of any community – may be that in the end, the majority of human beings has no use for freedom. (As an illustration of this, it should be noted that the percentage of the electorate that vote in any given election in both the UK and the US at present is at most between 50% and 60%.)

The Luxury of Saying No

What Price Freedom?

In the end, the question that ought to be posed is ‘Is this necessarily so?’ And the answer might be either ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ the real tragedy being that, whichever one we plump for, we may never know whether we were right. To quote a well-known song, ‘the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible’ (or anywhere else, we would now add), ‘it ain’t necessarily so.’ (George and Ira Gershwin, 1935)

It Ain’t Necessarily so

If the political agenda of utopia in one way or another is dictatorial, involving the purging of difference, the effects of hypothesizing it can also be paradoxical, encompassing both moral conservatism and radical revolution, or at least the possibility of either: moral conservatism, because under utopia, good and evil, however defined in specific contexts, are respectively rewarded and punished; and radical revolution, because outside the rules of the fictional scenario, the author as Deus ex machina offers a critique of the underlying requirements for the definition and establishment of any given utopia. In that regard, time and context are also significant factors. Recent fiction and contemporary science fiction (Huxley, Orwell, Huxley) tend to analyze utopian scenarios critically, rather than, as was the case of earlier philosophical excursions into utopianism (Plato, More), envisaging it as desirable.

Utopia and the Suppression of Desire

Unpalatable as it may be, however, it is also true that in the long term dictatorships, whether more or less brutal, endure only by the will or at least the acquiescence of the majority, since no political regime can remain in place for any length of time against the power of numbers. Hitler, for example, outlined his plans for ethnic cleansing in the clearest terms in Mein Kampf, published in 1925 and 1926. Contrary to general belief, the work was widely read at the time. It sold 240,000 copies before he was democratically elected Chancellor in 1933, by which time sales had earned 1.2 m reichsmarks (the average annual income of a teacher being about 4,800). Moreover, during his years in power, a free copy of it was given to all newlywed couples, as well as, after the war began, to all soldiers fighting at the front. (Worthington, 2003; Hinrichs, 2006; BBC News, 2004). Regimes like those of Pinochet in Chile, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy and Salazar in Portugal also endured until opposition ceased to be that of a minority and became that of a majority.

To Make or not to Make Waves

Within this broad understanding, of course, various twists may apparently contradict the overall principle. In Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, utopia is represented by life in the quiet village of Midwich, which ‘was, almost notoriously, a place where things did not happen’ (Wyndham, 1984: 11). Or it was so, at least, until babies of unknown origin are born, changelings who prove a threat to the very survival of humanity.

On the part of the invaded community of Midwich, albeit with greater hesitancy than in the evangelical Christian tribe in Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, an understanding of the survival implications (for the community and eventually for the human species in its current state) of a superior life form is nonetheless eventually impressed upon the minds of people ‘weakened’ (in the eyes of the Children in Midwich) by the parameters of an existence on the surface distanced from the law of the jungle but which, as only Zellaby understands, under new conditions will only be able to survive by regressing either to it or to the autocratic rule of one-man decision-making (which may amount to the same thing). ‘I know what is best for us all.’

The irresolvable impasse in concepts of utopia, thus, lies in the fact that while Perfection by definition cannot be improved upon and cannot therefore be construed as temporary, its in(de)finite perpetuation, whether in the Eloian paradise, in Barnes’s Heaven, or in Browning’s melancholic musings, inevitably leads to satiation and decadence. Not only does it appear to be true, therefore, that ‘a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ (Browning, 1883) but moreover, where reach and grasp (or thesis and antithesis, or signifier and signified, pick your lexicon) become the same, final synthesis or meaning, in other words utopia, rather than being fulfilled becomes demonstrably flawed, oxymoronically undesirable and essentially void.

This is the case for example with children who, instinct dictates, should be protected in the name of the interests of the species, but who, in some of the works discussed, as well as in many other classic horror narratives (Rosemary’s Baby, Levin, 1967; The Omen, Donner, 1976; To the Devil a Daughter, Sykes, 1976), must be destroyed for the sake of those self-same interests. Under utopia, citizens must be docile, homogenous and (in the disparate but also oddly akin readings of Fabianism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis) loyal to the interests of the greater good, rather than to the narrower ones of individual desire. For the status quo of an established utopia to be preserved, therefore, difference and free will must be abolished, undesirables, whatever the nature of their undesirability, must be eliminated or made to conform, and perpetual vigilance must be maintained against their return (‘treatment’ and/or genetic tampering in Levin and Huxley, violent extinction by fire or other means in Bradbury and Orwell, the rule of law in Wyndham and Pullman). When stasis is achieved, the Hegelian dialectic is immobilized and final synthesis (the end of history) is attained. Which of course, arguably may be counter-productive.

The alternative, for the imperfectly docile inhabitants of utopia, is a return to a (Darwinian) jungle of change, mutation, difference, unpredictability, upheaval and chaos, as narrated in the more or less (usually less) factual accounts of history maintained by the existing powers that be.

In any case, no status quo, regardless of its power, is impervious to an Act of God or of individual will. The intervention of randomness in systems rigidified into inalterability, even if it is the inalterability of perfection, in the end is capable of reducing eternity itself to nothingness. In Julian Barnes, paradise itself (not granted the dignity of a full chapter, merely half, in the overall narrative), is threatened by apocalypse in the shape of Thanatos, the Death Wish (Barnes, 1990). And, counter-intuitively, in modern depictions of reconstructed post-apocalypse, it is the act of voluntarily exiting utopia (the rupture with whatever is defined as orthodoxy, even if that happens to be eternal life and endless bliss) that signals the resurrection of the right to (and risk of) being different. Which, under the requirements and principles of evolution, is the right to continuity and to being.