Conclusions

UTOPIAS AND PROGRESS

One of the claims of this book is that identities are linked to conceptions of progress and that these conceptions are developed by distinct kinds of narratives. Golden ages trace the decline of the human race from an earlier imagined state of near-perfection. They are deeply pessimistic and generally deployed to justify and reconcile people to their current miseries and injustices. The Christian version combines this pessimism with optimism as it holds out the prospect of resurrection and life in heaven.

Utopias are generally understood to advance reformist, sometimes revolutionary projects, and are associated with a period of Western history in which intellectuals were optimistic about the possibility of scientific and social progress. Utopias reverse time's arrow, moving golden ages into the future but also making them less allegorical and fantastic. They depend on the prior existence of golden ages. Both kinds of narrative appear to be Western innovations.

Utopias are offered as model societies in which individual happiness and collective harmony are achieved by means of institutions and practices that rest on and reinforce what their authors depict as generic human traits and aspirations. They invariably incorporate the principle of equality and de-emphasize material goods and their use as status symbols. Most utopias are agricultural, valorize artisanship and all are to a significant degree authoritarian. They generally restrict personal freedom, which they consider a threat to order and stability. The Magic Flute is very much in this tradition. There is no visible economy beyond exchanging birds for food and wine and nothing that hints at any institutional structure. The Queen of the Night rules by fiat while Sarastro relies on a kind of carefully managed Politburo. My reading of the opera emphasizes the extent to which Sarastro exercises power by means of psychological manipulation and coercion and, like his adversary, the Queen of the Night, seeks power for its own sake. Utopias put extraordinary and totally misplaced trust in intellectuals -- whether guardians, scientists or philosophers – and their ability to rule by reason.

By raising false hopes, utopias made it more likely that people disillusioned by the failure to transformative projects will regard the existing world as more of a dystopia. Even before attempts to create utopias brought about such attitudes, dystopia emerged as a genre. It was a reaction in the first instance to industrialization and its human costs, and secondarily, to still imaginary utopian projects that sought to transcend it through social engineering, revolution and the creation of harmonious communal societies. Dystopia encourages cultural pessimism. H. G. Well's When the Sleeper Wakes, Zamyatin's We, Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World suggest that the future has the potential, perhaps the likelihood, to be worse than the present.

Magic Flute drives home the extent to which a work written in one genre can be read in another. The opera is seemingly offered as a blend of golden age and utopia but I interpret it as a dystopia. Other golden ages can be read as dystopias for some of the same reasons. Chapter five offers the example of the German reconstruction of ancient Greece as a golden age and intended model for German identity. In retrospect, it was an idealistic project that arguably had tragic real world consequences. Chapter six offers another example: the millennium described in the Left Behind series. It is a utopia modeled on a biblical golden age, but its depiction of Jesus and the world he rules shares so much in common with Big Brother's Oceania that it is convincingly read as a dystopia. Dystopias are more difficult to put a positive spin on, and I am unaware of serious efforts to do so. The closest we come may be science fiction’s treatment of immortality. It is expected to produce various kinds of dystopias from which heroes and heroines seek to escape and return to mortal societies. From their perspective, our society, if not a relative utopia, certainly is more desirable by comparison to theirs.

When texts are read against earlier, contemporary or later ones they encourage connections that may have been unavailable to their authors. We can situate them in broader literary and political developments that allow different and diverse interpretations. Among the most revealing comparisons this strategy encourages are those between the Magic Flute and Communist China during the Cultural Revolution and between Dispensationalism and Marxism-Leninism. Marxism has often been described as a secularized version of Christianity as it seeks to regain paradise, but on earth and by political means. Marxism and Dispensationalism embrace revolutionary change – one man-made, the other divinely inspired – and advance parallel arguments about the unfolding of history based on their respective texts. Both understand the world as full of seeming contradictions that can be reconciled at a deeper level of understanding. They foreground villains with no saving graces, unless it is their myopia. Satan and capitalists are fiendishly clever but strangely shortsighted. They dream up and execute complex conspiracies but cannot foresee how counterproductive they will be. Revolutionary Marxists and Dispensationalists consider society utterly corrupt and incapable of reform. They aspire to replace it with something fundamentally pre-modern in its values and practices. From its inception, Dispensationalism envisaged a millennium that does away with industrialization and all of its consequences. Left Behind fleshes out this vision. It has a political hierarchy that Lenin would instantly recognize as a variant of democratic centralism.

Marxism and Dispensationalism developed at about the same time, represent different paths for escaping modernity and finding human fulfillment. Dispensationalists believe the world is coming to an end in the near future and until that happens believers can find some solace in their solidarity with other believers. This affiliation and the identity that goes with it are important ways of coping with the larger, utterly repugnant society. It is significant that Dispensationalism experienced a phenomenal surge in appeal after the Cold War’s end and communism’s collapse. The communist enemy, that Americans held responsible for so much evil and suffering all but disappeared, but evil and suffering did not, and, if anything, are believed by many to be on the rise. So too seemingly are practices abhorrent to religious social conservatives, including sexual freedom, homosexuality and abortion. The devil has replaced Lenin as the villain.

My typology of identity helps to explain why Marxism and Dispensationalism have so much in common. They both embrace anti-modern strategies to address the tensions generated by conflicts between reflective and social selves. Dispensationalism embraces the second strategy, that seeks to recreate a world dominated by a religious-based cosmic order in the expectation that it will bring about full reconciliation between individuals and their society. Marxism -- in the form advanced by Marx and Engels and practiced in Maoist China, Cambodia and North Korea – is rooted in the first strategy, that attempts to suppress, if not do away with, interiority and reflexivity. Marx is adamant that communism will do away with alienation by creating a communal identity. The two strategies share much in common. They seek to squash individualism, one by religious and the other by secular means, and to do away with, or minimize, individual identities by having people think of and define themselves in collective terms.

Anti-modernism in both projects also finds expression in negative attitudes towards role playing. The Left Behind novels depict role playing as a form of falsehood and deception for evil ends. There is a long tradition in Christianity of the devil disguising himself to corrupt people and win their souls. In Left Behind, the devil's disciple, Nicolae Carpathia, pursues this strategy with great initial success, convincing his countrymen, and then the world, that he is a man of peace and the right choice for Secretary General of the United Nations. He quickly persuades most countries to disarm and give him dictatorial powers. Much of the plot of the Left Behind series concerns Carpathia's use of his false persona to accumulate enormous power and the efforts of a small group of Christians, who make no pretence about who they really are, to expose him.

Most of the science fiction texts I analyzed are anti-modern in a different sense. They offer a more nuanced but still largely negative view of role playing. In Altered Carbon, it is primarily done for nefarious purposes. Criminals regularly assume sleeves that make them more powerful and enhance their reflexes or facilitate subterfuge. They give no indication of being uncomfortable in their new bodies. By contrast, our hero Takeshi Kovacs, only assumes sleeves in the hope of returning to his original self, and never feels comfortable in any of his other bodies. The same is true of a woman he brings back from electronic storage and reunites with her partner. She and her partner feel physically estranged and yearn for the return of her original form.

Beginning in the Renaissance, individuals began to have more choices about how to lead their lives. Role playing is central to the development and exercise of these choices as it is a vehicle for creating new identities or transforming existing ones. Discourses accelerated this process. Utopias that create visions of better worlds can inspire efforts to bring them about, as did Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Herzl’s Altneuland. Dystopias depict negative features of change and efforts to escape them through utopian projects. By the second half of the twentieth century they all but displaced utopias in Western literature. Dystopia is the dominant genre in science fiction, whose writers see little hope of escaping the inequality, corruption and alienation of the modern era. Many, if not most, see these afflictions becoming more pronounced. In contrast to utopias in which science helped build a better world, dystopias uniformly portray its social consequences in a negative light. Immortality is the gold standard of scientific breakthroughs because it has been an enduring human dream and one seemingly beyond the reach of science until quite recently. In science fiction, it often comes as part of a suite of scientific, engineering and medical advances that collectively enhance as well as extend life, but only for those rich and powerful enough to afford them. Ordinary people suffer, and in many novels and stories, so do the rich; a longer, healthier life does not make them any happier, rather less so because they think it should.

Very few science fiction writers believe in feasible escape routes from the bleak futures they describe. This may be why agency features so prominently in postwar science fiction stories and novels. It keeps readers from becoming depressed and holds out some hope about our ability to preserve our individual identities and with them, our humanity. Heroes and heroines are invariably committed to traditional values of fairness, equality, honesty and punishment of evil doers and, like comic book characters, succeed in their quests to uphold them against incredible odds. Huxley and Orwell, and many of their postwar imitators and successors, recognize that utopia and dystopia alike impose high degrees of conformity and compliance. They can only be achieved and maintained by Hobbesian coercion or Durkheimian social control. Both use modern technology. Postwar writers, who lived in an era in which governments became more powerful and social control more effective, have no difficulty in imagining societies that are more malign and restrictive than those of We, Brave New World or 1984. They nevertheless give even greater play to agency, making it possible for people to escape these worlds. They are committed to maintaining the fiction that individual identities can be developed and preserved in the face of even the most extreme forms of coercion and social pressure.

Dispensationalists are even more convinced than science fiction writers of the evil nature of modern life and the impossibility of meaningful reforms. Extreme pessimism motivates their hope of a total transformation of the world through the intercession of Jesus. Divine intervention replaces human agency as the vehicle for positive change, but also highlights the power on human agency. We all have the choice to embrace Jesus and our salvation, a choice not even the most oppressive governments can deny because it is an inward spiritual one. As in science fiction, faithful Christians in the Left Behind books face a series of escalating tribulations but emerge triumphant in the end. They gain entry into a golden age: first a millennium, based on a highly idealized biblical age, and then a heaven, modeled on the Garden of Eden. Golden age discourses, initially a vehicle for justifying hierarchies and their injustices, are here used to overturn them. The fictional paradises they create nevertheless appear to many secular readers as tyrannies in different guise. Left Behind's Jesus, a self-aggrandizing religious leader, relies on supernatural powers – far more effective than mere science -- to impose his will on the masses and foster an unrivaled cult of personality.

Utopias are generally understood as progressive, if flawed, visions of the future. My analysis challenges this understanding. More's Utopia gives the appearance of being progressive, but is demonstrably anti-modern in intent and in so many of its key features. It is an agricultural society, with secondary emphasis given to crafts. While they provided no detailed description of communism, Marx and Engels also emphasize crafts and appear to do away with industrialization. This is also true of William Morris' socialist London. All these utopias turn the clock back on individual autonomy. This is true of many of More's successors, most notably those based on socialist principles. Marx and Engel's vision of communism, William Morris’ News from Nowhere and B. F. Skinner's Walden II are cases in point. Even in novels like Skinner's, where futuristic technology is given prominence, it is generally used for anti-modern or undemocratic ends. Relatively few utopias are unqualifiedly modern, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis being a notable exception. Some utopias straddle past and future, as does Bellamy's Looking Backward. It envisions central planning and mass distribution centers but freezes gender and racial stereotypes, all but does away with politics and turns Boston into a leafy, anti-bellum paradise.

Our reaction to utopias hinges on our conception of modern, and this encourages us to interrogate our understandings. If we think of modernity as characterized by individual autonomy, economic development, civil society, democracy and tolerance, then most utopias are unambiguously anti-modern. If, however, we construct a picture of modernity that emphasizes economic inequality, state centralization, nationalism and imperialism and dehumanization of people through workplace regimentation, propaganda and advertising, than utopias nicely capture key features of our world. Totalitarian, or at least authoritarian, regimes are as much the norm as democracies, as is loss of meaningful agency for all but the most fortunate.

In this unpalatable world, totalizing regimes, like the Church in the Middle Ages, attempt, and to some degree succeed, in "brain washing" citizens to internalize their ideology and its values, denying them internal as well as external autonomy. This is made easier by the well-documented propensity of contemporary people to exaggerate their agency even while they are demonstrating social conformity.⁸⁵ The verdict is still out on the future, and if it comes to resemble this darker world – as so much of science fiction expects – than we will have to revise our reading of utopias. They will have turned out to have been remarkably prescient and to have envisaged worlds that our descendants may regard wistfully – if they are allowed to read them.