Pondering Utopia: A Fool’s Errand?

May’s Elegant Literature prompt was “Fool’s Errand,” and after many false starts involving electroaerodynamically propelled dirigibles I wound up writing a little story called Finding Eden.  The story itself has been accused of being too vague (as of writing this, I do not know how it fared in the contest), which is not surprising; attempting to convey a convincing utopia in less than two thousand words was an enormous challenge, in part because I couldn’t make it convincing if the characters actively thought about it being a utopia.  For that matter, even describing a utopia in an extended blog post dedicated to the topic is probably too ambitious…which is why that’s not what I’ll be attempting.

No, I am not here to describe utopia.  Many, many people have tried throughout history, dedicating significantly more time and effort to the matter than I have, and I do not know that I have anything substantial to add.  Rather, I wanted to share some of my thought process from writing Finding Eden, which was a manifestation of ruminations I’ve been having for a long time about the nature of utopic thinking.  Maybe I could have put it in the author’s note for that story, but it seemed too much of a digression, so I’m giving it its own post.  Simply, I want to explain why I thought of utopia when I thought of a fool’s errand.

Utopias litter the mythological landscape.  They crater the philosophical expanse, and they mar the psychological maps.  Fiction’s forest is dotted with utopias like delicate, diseased orchids that never quite work.  Far easier, after all, to write a dystopia, because can there even be a story in a true utopia?  It can be argued that if stories require conflict, then there can be no story in a utopia, because conflict’s existence would suggest it is not a true utopia.  Classic utopias like the Garden of Eden (and its various other appearances and forms in Fertile Crescent religions, myths, and stories) are usually transient residences at best in which humans ultimately cannot be sustained.  Divine utopias, like the Christian Heaven, occupy a peculiar philosophical place, and human utopias, those that have been attempted, rarely last more than a generation or two.

To understand why I consider the quest for utopia a fool’s errand, it is first necessary to establish my definition of utopia.  Utopia: a place, setting, context, and system in which any individuals will be maximally fulfilled and personally satisfied.  This is not a mere “paradise” in which there is no scarcity or danger, but a fully integrated system to foster maximized human thriving in any and all existing and potential occupants.  You see the difficulty?  Walden Two, a famous documentation of an attempt to create a utopic community, is no true utopia but a peculiar implementation of a particular societal philosophy which appeals to its voluntary inhabitants but cannot sustain itself nor appeal to everyone.

Dante’s Paradisio component of the Divine Comedy attempts to depict a utopic heaven in a more serious fashion than many treatments.  He gives us a paradise in which individual fulfillment is rendered irrelevant because the individual is subsumed into a kind of holy collective consciousness in perpetual, divinely imposed bliss in worship of God.  Conceptually, that might be valid…but does not meet my definition of a utopia.  For a utopia to satisfy me, it must function on a human level, not a divine, afterlife, deific plane.  That’s a little too deus ex machina of an explanation, or maybe just plain deus.

Addressing scarcity, in a sense, is the low-hanging fruit.  Given a small enough population and the right technology, scarcity becomes a non-issue.  That is the first problem that must be solved to create a utopia, and I consider it eminently solvable.  The exact technique is almost unimportant.  Unfortunately, a mere lack of scarcity does not a utopia make, or else you could just have a commune of rich people and call it a utopia.  Yes, that was intended as a joke.

After addressing the scarcity problem, I reduce the utopia problem to two other pillars which are less easily addressed: culture, and purpose.  A functional utopia must have a unified culture.  Not a monoculture, but some strong, binding, common elements that all members share.  Otherwise, conflict will necessarily exist between cultures.  Furthermore, the utopia’s culture must support the utopic paradigm, and it must gain and foster the buy-in of all members.  You begin to see why this becomes a difficult, perhaps impossible, task?  We can barely define this desired culture in the vaguest of terms and requirements, much less describe it thoroughly, and implementing it is another matter entirely.  Even ordinary, institutional cultures are nigh impossible to deliberately affect in a significant way.

As for purpose, this may be contrary to the very notion of a utopia as here defined and is the true reason I call the quest for utopia a fool’s errand.  People need purpose to achieve satisfaction and fulfillment, but purpose implies the existence of a need…and in a utopia, the needs have all been addressed.  Needs are a source of conflict as well as purpose, and so to create a utopia they must be addressed, which in turn eliminates purpose.  Oh, people would still find ways to fill their time, but finding true meaning and purpose in life might be impossible if there are no needs.

Many philosophers, psychologists, and other thinkers have dedicated far more time and effort than I to pondering this notion of utopia, and this is no significant addition to the literature; just my poor thoughts on the matter with regards to notional construction of a utopia for a fictional short story.  These were the considerations that I had in my head as I tried to design the utopia that we never actually see in Finding Eden.  This is why almost none of that story takes place directly in the utopia, why the story is accused of vagueness, and why it is only in finally leaving that the protagonist can begin a quest to find paradise.