The Problem of Chronocentrism, Part II: Old Games

Utopias often insist that nothing has gotten better and/or nothing has ever been as awful as it is now and/or nobody recognized the awfulness of the world until now. 

Why? Because--

Awfulness must exist to justify the utopia.  

People can honestly believe that something is wrong with a government or educational institution or town or family or themselves. They can honestly wish to fix what is wrong. 

However, utopias, to a great extent, rest not on grunt work (making something better one difficult task at a time) but on revamping the system based on a bunch of ideas. And those ideas often directly correspond to the self-perception of the utopia builders. 

They don't want to acknowledge the awfulness--or fix the awfulness--as much as they want to be congratulated for calling attention to the awfulness. Their egos (sometimes their reputations) are on the line.   

In my fan fiction, I use the common trope of an after life where people can move between heavens. Yet one character insists on staying in a heaven that makes her unhappy. When she was alive, she associated with the same people. Back then, her sophisticated and dispassionate worldview made her special: she was enough like the people in her clique to speak their language but enough unlike them to be "cool" (though she would never describe herself in that way). 

She could transfer to a heaven that actually agrees with her worldview, but if she did, she would no longer have the cache, the zing, of being more worldly-wise and clever and say-it-like-it-is than others.

She is only unique and unusual and above-it-all if she can stick around the people she used to stick around. Except they care less, now that they have other heavens they can run off to. So she is increasingly unhappy, waiting endlessly to be admired once again. 

In her book, Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles makes a similar observation about cancel culture--that the mutual act of canceling creates warm and fuzzy feelings among the cancelers. But then, one has to have someone to cancel in order to be achieve those warm and fuzzy feelings. And people mustn't get bored with the canceling and go do something else (if they do, they are traitors). 

In sum, utopias and utopian thinkers depend to a degree on having something to correct or criticize or dislike or triumph over. Achieving tasks is less important than putting someone or something in that someone or something's place (the world has been temporarily well-ordered: ahhhh--and I do believe there is a kind of accompanying endorphin rush).

Again, utopias, especially in nineteenth-century America, were often honests reaction to troubling and unfair conditions. The problem, of course, is that the initial upwelling of fellow feeling so often descended into monolithic pictures of awfulness followed by attacks on the "other side" followed by an insistence that everyone follow the current rules...and the utopia became a dystopia (see the French Revolution). 

The descent from utopia to dystopia doesn't appear to come about due to a desire for charge or due to that fellow-feeling upwelling. It appears to come about because the utopia builders--like my fan fiction character--can't stop thinking about their status and reputations. They can't stop setting up hoops for others to jump through to prove how far the utopia builders have risen as some kind of "I'm more saved than you" social posturing.  

In Herland, for instance, the mentors query Van if the old games in his culture "develop the faculties you wish to encourage."  Under the pressure of weighty expectations, despite his lack of actual experience and direct knowledge, Van tells the mentors--leaders of an elite group--what they want to hear; he determines that most children are bored by old games; one child always has to initiate play to get the duller children moving; in addition, "unoccupied children" commit "foolish, destructive, sometimes evil things."

No Calvin & Hobbes in Herland! 

But then, Gilman was far less observant about children than the Opies.

In His in Herland, Terry remarks on the mentors' criticism of "old games": 

I grinned at the image of irrepressible Alim as a correct and deferential tour guide. And I’d already corrupted him. He knew I was teasing with the word “proper” and glared at me. 

“And she knows excellent games,” I added.
 

“Yes, well, Alima prefers the old games,” Tyra [a mentor] said. 
 

And that’s how I got the low-down on Tyra.
 

Maud, Somel, and Zava were more direct in their observations. Tyra is the type of bully, male or female, who insults through “code.” Troas citizens are supposed to prefer new games, the ones carefully crafted to help students discover their potential. No doubt the old games involve dirty limericks, scuffles in the dirt, and “unhealthy” competition alongside Calvin & Hobbes incomprehensible rules, the kind of rules that don’t improve anything or go anywhere. 

Alim played a game from the mountains of rushing a line of peers with linked hands. No doubt, like most playground games, he learned it from older peers who learned it when they were younger. At some point, the parents played it too. Wasn’t honoring parental role models a virtue? 

But Troas claimed not to practice “ancestor worship.”

Chapter 8

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding