Utopias

 An Indiana writer turns up in The Los Angeles Review of Books: The Lost Utopia. Zach Gibson reviewed a reissue of Marguerite Young’s “Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias” (1945).

The same issue of The Los Angeles Review of Books also had David K. Seitz's A Woman in the Captain’s Chair, Trump in the White House; an appraisal of “Star Trek: Voyager.” 

Zach Gibson review starts with the following paragraph:

UTOPIAN LITERATURE, writes Lyman Tower Sargent, is a form of “social dreaming.” According to Sargent, utopian literature—as opposed to concrete, historical experiments in utopian living—expresses “the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives.” Utopian texts “envision a radically different society from the one in which the dreamers live,” and this is far more important than whether these texts depict a society that we can actually achieve—or one where we might want to live.

That covers, for me, The Star Trek world. Mr. Seitz writes notes the discrepancies in that utopian society:

Although the Kazon do ultimately steal Voyager’s coveted Starfleet technology, then, they do so only after Janeway has deemed them morally unfit for such a transfer from a wealthy society to an impoverished one—a recurring point of contention in climate negotiations on our own planet. If the Kazon can thus be criticized as racial caricatures of the wretched of the Earth, they might at the same time be read as allegorizing unmet demands for global climate justice. In such light, we might understand Janeway as both a target of Culluh’s grievous misogyny and an unfortunate exemplar of what Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar call an “imperial feminism” and what Ajay Singh Chaudhary calls “right-wing climate realism,” representative of a wealthy society that hoards resources for weathering climate destruction. In our own time, as liberal officials embrace abortion rights with a long-awaited enthusiasm, but fracking and draconian border policies have seemingly become objects of a troubling bipartisan consensus, Janeway’s contradictions, and not only her vaunted heroism,

What is Star Trek but what Gibson describes as the hope in Young's writing?

 Young’s writing is animated both by the memory of lost innocence, which always recedes into the past, and by the expectation of an elusive utopia, whose advent is always deferred. She envisions a world unlike our own by looking in two directions at once. Where her characters are not convinced that the world was better before, they believe that it will be better soon. In the present, however, resolution is beyond reach.

Okay, maybe Stark Trek does not achieve its utopia soon, but science fiction is not really about the future. It is about a mirror to the world as it is now, showing what it could be. That also follows from how Gibson describes what Young was doing with her history of New Harmony, Indiana:

Etymologically, “utopia” (borrowed from the Greek for “no place”) can only be without site and beyond reach. The philosopher Paul Ricœur writes that, because “no connecting point exists between the ‘here’ of social reality and the ‘elsewhere’ of the Utopia,” utopias “avoid any obligation to come to grips with the real difficulties of a given society.” Young breaks from the tradition established by Thomas More that situates utopia “elsewhere,” a line of thought carried forward by Edward Bellamy and William Morris and later critiqued by Young’s contemporaries Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. She does this by situating not one but two utopias in the very real town of New Harmony, Indiana, in the early 1800s. Young inverts the framework Ricœur describes in utopian fiction, starting from history and working towards an appeal to the imagination to “conceive of a nowhere.” In doing so, she examines both “the paradoxes of Utopia” and the “eccentricity of the Utopian imagination.”

I read Seitz as pointing out the contradictions imposed by imperialism on utopia.

“Year of Hell” is best remembered for Janeway’s final iconic suicide run on Annorax’s ship, resetting the entire timeline with her quip, “Time’s up!” But I came away from this viewing with a new appreciation for the writers’ tight juxtaposition of Annorax’s imperial calculations with scenes set in Voyager’s newly opened astrometrics lab, a kind of 24th-century map room. Even as “Year of Hell” indicts Annorax as a genocidal maniac, then, it also suggests that both crews share an investment in the epistemic and political command of space and time, reminding us of geographical empiricism’s long and ongoing history of service to empire.

Utopia could be an imperialist venture. Utopian thinking grows out of the thinker's culture. Gibson touches on this last point:

In juxtaposing their contrasting projects, Young mines Rapp’s and Owen’s failed experiments for salvageable, concrete traces of the loss and hope that fuel her fiction and poetry. Though the book is ostensibly a work of nonfiction, the “fairy tale” frame Young uses to narrate her histories draws it much closer to Sargent’s poetic “social dreaming” than to a dispassionate study of real-world utopian communities.

***

While living in New Harmony in the 1930s and ’40s, Young “gradually” began to write about the town’s history. In the book’s embryonic stage, there “was no artificial research, except for the experience of living there and talking to the beautiful old-timers in that town,” some of whom were still “believers in the party of Father Rapp.” Angel grew out of a side project that took shape as Young wrote from “about six to midnight” after teaching during the day.

 ***

“Father Rapp chose America first,” as Young has it, “not because he believed that God’s voice would speak out of the marsh more clearly than it had spoken out of the vineyards in Württemberg, but because the land was fierce and cheap.” She writes that life in Württemberg “nurtured many clouded dreamers, […] who aspired, like Faust, for infinite space, infinite power, and oranges in winter.” The sprawling, open space of the American frontier beckoned to Rapp. He first set up shop in Pennsylvania before moving west, where he founded the town of Harmony on the Wabash in Indiana. Rapp’s religious sect, the Harmony Society, was so successful that, in 1823, Indiana’s newly formed treasury petitioned Harmony for a financial loan to keep the seven-year-old state solvent.

***

According to Fredric Jameson, the utopian vocation is, historically, one of failure. Its “epistemological value,” however, lies in how it helps us find the limits of what we can imagine. A work of utopian fiction helps us feel “the mud of the present age in which the winged Utopian shoes stick, imagining that to be the force of gravity itself”—an artificial constraint on the imagination that we wrongly take to be natural. 

True ethical problems are those where action demands choosing between two equally bad situations. That we have to make such choices in this world should encourage humility - whether of our intellect or our moral sense is a matter of "six of one, half dozen of another." Seitz  makes this same point in a different way:

Revisiting Voyager for its contradictions need not mean loving it or its captain any less. Indeed, many of my students who share an appreciation for Janeway are also thoughtful and brave advocates on a host of international solidarity and anti-genocide concerns. If we can muster the maturity and critical intelligence to look back to the 1990s for more than consolation—if we are open, in other words, to mapping the contradictions that still define culture and politics in our colonial but contestable present—then a look at back Voyager can prove all the more enlightening.

Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated President in a few more hours. He and his followers look back to a utopian America. That I do not see their glorious past is beside the point. That they have the power to create their visions is the important point. I felt this even more after reading the following from Gibson's review:

Both the Harmony and New Harmony communities manifest two literary conceptions of society that the critic Northrop Frye believed to be the proper space of myth: the “social contract,” which “presents an account of the origins of society,” and utopia, “which presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at which social life aims.” As newly formed, future-oriented societies, the utopian enclaves that appeared in the United States throughout the 19th century underscore the interdependence of Frye’s twin mythologies.

As with so much of Young’s other writing, her story of utopia demands that one eye look toward the past as the other looks toward the future. The utopian social contract is founded upon a vision for the future; this utopian vision grows from a social contract that hoped to amend a fallen world. Such is the double articulation that Miriam Fuchs sees in all of Young’s books, which are “utopian in the sense that each one recognizes the universal struggle for ideality and the impossibility of reaching it.”

 The radical - of either the right or the left - wants to tear up the social contract as a fraud, restricting their visions. Where they have been successful, blood and death have followed. The fascist dream is born of narrowness, and hate. The Marxist-Leninist/Maoist dream is born of the idea that the person must disappear for the People to arise. The former has for its memorial the concentration and death camp; the latter has the gulag and the killing field. 

Yet, we are seeing the end of the liberal vision that privileged the social contract after becoming intoxicated by the neoliberal fetishization of the market. Although my cynicism always led me to doubt any utopia (not that George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, and/or Anthony Burgess did give support to my cynicism), Gibson gives me an idea of what has happened to liberal government. It did not pay attention enough to the social ends of government.

Where does identity politics address its social ends? For all that I agree that all are created equal, I do not know what was the goal of identity politics. If it meant redressing past injuries, then it was poorly articulated. If it was meant to privilege a class as victims of history, then it was too exclusive and ran counter to an egalitarian society. We are all victims of history to some degree or another. 

With four more years of Trump and MAGA, I find much to worry me in how Gibson closes his review. MAGA is "discouraged nostalgia."

For Young, loss can lead to a sense of despair driven by a discouraged nostalgia. This response draws attention away from the present and often makes hope for a better world difficult. Nostalgia and loss, however, take on an entirely different character when viewed through the mythologizing lens that Young turns toward Harmony and New Harmony. Rapp’s and Owen’s complementary visions do not so much stand for a lost utopia as for a larger sense of lost hope. Though utopia rests on a horizon far beyond both Owen’s and Rapp’s reach, Young, who “refuses to settle for anything other than fragmentation,” according to Fuchs, also sees the impulse that spurred them toward it as one worth preserving and carrying forward.

After having dwelled in hopelessness to the point of attempting suicide, I do not want a return to the thinking that fueled my despondency. I made a decision that how I had been living and thinking had to be rejected, and that meant learning how to live. Hope that we can make things better - maybe not always in the big things, but always in the smaller things - is choosing life. Yes, it is a lost cause - human venality will remain a constant obstacle. Death will come for all of us. Yet, a lost cause is better than meekly accepting the slave's yoke offered by authoritarianism's Whore of Babylon.

Imagining a utopia is hoping for the best of humanity.

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