Problems with Utopias: Introduction

Over the past few years, I have attempted several retellings of the classic Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. On the one hand, I consider the book to be one of the more interesting and substantive "modern" (1915) utopia novels. On the other hand, like with all utopia novels, it suffers from the burden of its own premise. 

The posts here address the problems of utopia. Each post is connected to one or more chapters in my tribute/critique of Herland, His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding.

First, however, I had to face the issue that it may not be possible to argue with the utopia-mindset at all: 

The best explanation of this issue comes in a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Documents in the Case. The story is told through letters, reports, newspaper articles. One of the reports, written by the murderer's flatmate, John Munting, contains this insightful passage:

 [Lathom] is a real creator--narrow, eager, headlong, and loathing introspection and compromise. He questions nothing; I question everything...I cannot settle and dismiss questions, as he does, in one burst of inspired insight or equally inspired contempt...It was my fault that I did not help Lathom more, for, just because of my uneasy sensitiveness, I understood him far better than he ever understood me. It would have suited him better if I had violently disagreed with him. But I had the fatal knack of seeing his point and cautiously advancing counter-arguments, and that satisfied neither of us.

I have encountered a similar problem when faced with "no, no, Kate, this is the way life is" seamless narratives/theories from people on both the right and the left. 

I cannot agree with them, but I also fail to argue adequately because the response, "But life is more complicated than that--if you research any given time period, you will discover that your theory loses credence and even falls to pieces, especially when you look at history through the experiences of the individuals who actually created it"...comes across as waffling. 

Granted, I am personally drawn to pundits and thinkers who allow for nuance and variety. And I like to think that those pundits and thinkers win in the long-run.

But can one really argue, in the short run, with the "life is this an unarguable seamless theory" mindset?

In my master's program, one of my fellow students would make "life is seamless" arguments, usually by utilizing a shallow version of Marxism that seemed mostly comprised of blame and Marxist terminology. (Not that Marxism offers much--but her narrative was trite, even by Marxist standards.) 

Nowadays, the student would likely wield a trickle-down version of CRT. And, unfortunately, these days, the student might be given more credence than when I attended classes over a decade ago. When I attended classes, the proclamation, "Those workers only said those things because they were brainwashed by the authoritarian establishment" was met with a kind of awful silence. The rest of the students--most of whom were quite leftist--would then move the conversation back to more intelligent ground: let's listen to the workers rather than reducing them to a "poor" group to be pitied, labeled, and disposed of.

I could never figure out whether I should argue with the "I have life all figured out and under my thumb because I have a theory" student or not. It seemed to me that the only person who could argue with her was a right-wing pundit. The two could batter each other with conspiracy theories disconnected from individuality. Everybody in the past was... They could toss labels and derisive comments at each other. 

(I came to the above conclusion about noisy arguers in 2004--it seems a trifle prescient now!)

 

As Kristin says in Last Man Standing (after Mike and Ryan start tossing "Bills" at each other), "Everyone has their own set of facts and a cable channel to back up the opinion that he already has."

In any case, my retelling/reimagining of Herland is an attempt to add nuance and complication to a utopia. And maybe that can't be done! No reason not to try. 

Chapter 1

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of the Closed Narrative or The Problem of Theory

On the surface, identity politics shouldn't be evil. Although I'm not a fan of labels, hey, language is language. It has to exist for people to communicate. Identifying a group is part of that process. (Historically speaking, "stranger" shows up in nearly every language early on in that language's development.)

Unfortunately, inevitably, identity labels get linked to a "closed" narrative, a story that is self-explanatory and set in stone.

An "open" narrative in which people may change based on new information, new goals--where to live, whom to marry, what to work at, what to eat, how to behave--entails two things: (1) risk; (2) responsibility.

That is, a person in an open story will say, Maybe I made the wrong choices. But I made them, and I can't go back, so I'll live with them. But what does that mean for the next choice? After all, I'll have to answer for it.

The popular version of CRT--the secular version of "the Spirit made me do it" (John McWhorter is right about the religious conflation)--is the exact opposite. The underlying ideology propounds that a theory or label supplies all the explanation a person should need or want; recognizing the validity of that explanation will, like recognizing the Spirit, supply all the required (entirely abstracted) sense of self and responsibility. 

Unfortunately, as Jonathan Edwards and other New Calvinists discovered, all the revivals in the world don't necessary lead to anything but...another bunch of revivals. The experience or "performance" becomes its own pursuit.

That is, adopting the group's identity or explanation doesn't automatically entail self-understanding or critical thinking or personal change or long-term change. 

In Chapter 17, Terry is on trial for his attempted assault on Alima. In my version, of course, the assault is a contrived event between Terry and Alima. However, Terry objectively accepts that by all appearances, he did break the law, violate a social standard. 

During the trial or hearing, Terry suggests a reason why people so readily adopt theory--ready-made identities--when life--relationships, communication--gets messy. 

I [Terry] said [to the Councillors], “I assumed agreement existed.”

Rather to my surprise, many of the Councillors nodded. Apparently the “you should ask at every stage of the seduction” approach hadn’t arrived in Troas.

Of course, the women of Troas are realists. People make assumptions about others’ needs. That’s life. Since we are not (yet) tools of A.I., we don't spend every minute of every day filling out questionnaires: check Box A or Box B.

No one wants that form of communication anyway. We want to be instantly understood—the centers of others’ universes—which wish inspires its own problems. Because--also reality--since we don’t adopt others' versions of our best selves, why would they agree to ours?

I waited resignedly for the Councillors to suggest the contemporary alternative. Since most people don’t halt their behavior to ask permission—and only compulsives and high school bullies justify continual “I saw you do that!” policing—the compromise is usually, “But the proper path should have been obvious."

Not obvious due to honor or training. Obvious because of identity. Join the group, adopt the designated label. Proper attitudes will be downloaded into your brain. All answers delivered. All stories decided upon. A closed book.

Don’t tell me modern Westerners don’t believe in fate.

Terry goes on to consider that being excused because of membership in a group sounds good but lacks the moral punch of "you messed up; you should pay." 

And Terry gets thrown out. Luckily, he wants to go. 

Chapter 17

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of Disillusionment

At the end of His in Herland, I had to determine Alim's reaction to leaving his hometown and his country. It would have been easy--too easy--to give him a spat of disillusionment: Stupid utopia! Stupid adult authority figures! Stupid everyone! I'm a rebel, yo! 

I didn't. As mentioned elsewhere, utopias are dystopias in waiting. Utopians are almost always disillusioned souls waiting to be disillusioned all over again. 

And disillusionment would miss the point. 

Reason 1: Despite my criticisms of utopias, my ultimate point is that Herland or Troas isn't one, no matter how much it wants to be. Like Miss Marple always finding the village corollary to the big bad city murderer, I argue, You thought you were so edgy and avant-garde. You're not. You're just like every other social order. Get over yourself. 

Which means Herland/Troas offers good and bad stuff. In fairness to Gilman, she crafts a world that is gorgeously pro-child. Alim would carry that away with him. 

Reason 2: Blaming parents, God, social orders, the past is easy. Scapegoating is easy. Developing narratives and abstracted theories that shovel the blame onto history,  a being, a specific group is easy. 

Personal responsibility is hard and therefore, more interesting. 

I like Alim. As his creator, I want him to grow up, not trade on a self-involved, self-pitying narrative and/or call on a "higher order" that allows him to hide behind rules/someone else's demands. I don't want him to wallow in how unfair his life has been. 

His father died in ancient Troy. His mother was killed by monsters soon after. He wandered for generations underground. He had to hide his sex when he went to the center of his own country. 

Yet as Terry would say, "So what?" 

As Eugene, The Translator, states:

[W]e are all products of our culture and rarely think to question it. Fish discover water last. It's always easier to point at those other people in that other culture. I think there are a whole lot of unhappy people in the Occident [like everywhere else] who can't divorce themselves from the culture that defines the boundaries of their lives and end up trapped by those expectations.

Like the nature versus nurture debate, splitting the difference is a good place to start. But that means half is on you.

Alim is more reflective than Terry. However, Terry is his mentor. Terry's is the perspective he adopts. 

And it lends him grace. He makes choices, then accepts the outcomes, good and bad. That's life. In the meantime, he can appreciate what he has gained, what he hopes to gain, what life offers. 

In sum, hope is more creative and satisfying than disillusionment. 

Chapter 20 & Chapter 21

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of the So-Called Right Side of History

A great many problems with the utopia come down to the idea that there IS a right side of history. 

It's an idiotic concept.

I am not suggesting that right and wrong don't exist. I am suggesting that the phrase is loathsome and mindless (no matter how the phrase is interpreted: the "right" side of history is the side that will win, become popular, be obviously correct to future generation or the side that should win).

The phrase is loathsome and mindless for the following reasons:

1. Babies and bathwater 

Good events and values and outcomes rarely come un-entwined with other stuff. 

There's a great Black Adder episode in which an election takes place. It is the Regency Era and one of the candidates wants "the ending of slavery and the compulsory eating of asparagus."

The reporter says, "I understand your point about asparagus but what's up with your stance on slavery?"

The (entirely historically accurate) point being made is that many people (Abolitionists, Millennialists, and Reformers) in the same era had what we moderns would deem rational and valid ethical points about the treatment of others. Unfortunately, they tended to combine those rational and ethical points with ideas that strike many modern folks as...nuts--such as the compulsory eating of asparagus.  

Likewise, advancements that strike people as utterly rational will get paired with ideas that MIGHT seem valid at the time but in the end turn out very much not to be--such as the pairing of birth control with eugenics in the early twentieth century.

2. Chronocentrism

How much is the "right side" based on perception?

I mention elsewhere that Ancient Athenians in 590 B.C.E. could be excused for believing that democracy as an experiment had entirely failed; Jews and Christians in 70 C.E. could be excused for believing that their belief systems would remain small and constantly under literal fire. And for those people in that time, that was the reality. 

But democracy is now with us as is Judaism and Christianity. 

Wouldn't Ramsesses II from 1200 BCE be surprised?!

As for Henry VIII...actually, I don't think Henry VIII would be surprised to see his line replaced: he was that paranoid. 

But Shelley's poem (above) is entirely appropriate. What people thought would die didn't. What people thought would persist didn't. There can be no "right" side if the sides completely change personality or no longer exist.

3. More chronocentrism

Likewise, saying, "The winners write history" depends ENTIRELY on when one stops and looks back. 

In my posts on the Protestant Reformation, I point out that at different points along the line from Henry VIII to William of Orange (who was more interesting than I realized), any particular group could be excused for thinking, "That's it! My side is over and done with!" or "That's it! My side won! Ha ha ha!"

For that matter, the Calvinists or Congregationalist in late eighteenth-century America could be excused for blithely assuming (as they did) that Congregationalism would always be the most influential Christian sect coming out of New England. 

Yet between 1750 to 1850, they were almost entirely replaced by Baptists and Methodists with the Catholics remaining steady. 

As the late great PJ O'Rourke points out, attitude also contributes to that "when"--see quote above and #4.

4. Arrogance

Are you in the right? Really? 

Really?

The supporters of eugenics believed that they were absolutely on the advanced "here is what the future will look like" side of history. And the philosophy/cause spread across political parties. Political libertarians and Catholics were treated like America's nutty, delusional, cat-mad aunts for standing out against what appeared so good and righteous and inevitable.

Going back further, the Salem Witch Trials were criticized by one Mather and supported--at least the legal aspect--by another.

My posts about the Protestant Reformation involve a queen who was threatened for not going far enough, another queen who thought she was restoring the true religion to the country, a bunch of fanatics who felt entirely justified in killing a king, and so on and so forth. 

I am not arguing against taking a position on a topic. Waffling also has its problems. As Mike Baxter points out, "naming public institutions after the most boring people we know" may have its advantages but can backfire. The "safe" name or position now may not be "safe" tomorrow. 

A position that can't see the flaws, the problems, the possible arguments against itself...

...is not the "right side of history." 

It's just a side with blinders on. 

5. Imperfection makes an event memorable--not someone being lucky.

Like many causes/events that have run out of control, the Salem Witch Trials at their height were almost impossible to criticize. People who dared could end up in jail and then hung. 

And yet people did criticize it. And many of those critics--Puritan ministers from all over New England--believed in things we moderns would deem wrong and bizarre. But they also raised points about what constitutes evidence that we would comprehend and even support. The second trial never went forward due to a combination of political events, scandal (the young women were accusing more and more people unknown to themselves), and growing criticism. 

Within a decade of the trials, some people who had taken part made public formal apologies. 

Is the event memorable because it was so awful? Or memorable because people at the time actually regretted it? The event stands out in colonial memory as being an aberration rather than what it likely would have been a few decades earlier, just another day in court. 

When we are in the moment, the time, the years, we behave like the satire (I believe) by Dickens in the opening to A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times..." We think the entire universe circles around us and our emotions and our experiences.

Professor Aldrete

In truth, whatever we may imagine or wish or dread, life doesn't stop to dole out chastisements or congratulations; it keeps moving forward. In a few years, what seems of great importance fades or, possibly, becomes terribly important and...people still move on to something else. The biggest fault with social media is the fundamental lie that we are the center of other people's worlds. (I suggest that most mental issues surrounding social media come down to our animal natures being forced into a contrived spotlight, a condition that simply doesn't match reality.) 

Truth: most people--most ordinary people within history--have done the best they could at the time the best way they could based on what they could best discern. They weren't the center of anything. Their deeds, in the long run, meant a great deal to the people around them but little to history books. 

In other words, non-wealthy, non-writing, non-powerful, non-remembered people, which is nearly everybody, those people who had families and farms and jobs, who went to festivals and underwent ceremonial rites, who taught things to others and discussed stuff and told stories...those people were muddling along, just like the people before them. Just like us. They deserve respect rather than theoretical labels, name-calling, and "wrong side" disdain.

"The right side of history" isn't just stupid. 

It lacks compassion.

The Problem of Change

Ultimately, the creation of utopias comes down not only to a fear of being wrong but a fear of change. 

The latter may seem unlikely since utopias are so often associated with revolutions, theological, political, economic, and so on. And people can wish to build better environments without, necessarily, wanting to build utopias. That is, there is a distinction between "we are going to tame this wilderness," "we are going to usher in a new world," "we are going to live perfectly," and "wow, those roads really need to be repaired--excuse me, where do we put the sewer lines?"  The Founders of the United States recognized that the new social order would still have to deal with human beings--hence, the debates over how government should be ordered.

The veer towards perfection appears to occur when utopia builders--whatever their political stripes--try to cancel out or override mutability: change, human vagaries, human oddities, human nature. 

The end result is often not only a focus on how the utopia will run but a move to force human behavior into something that won't get in the way of that running. The utopia is no longer there to serve humans. The humans are there to serve the utopia. And the change in focus occurs because change--as a human constant--is seen not as normal but as a threat.

In the epilogue to His in Herland, I needed to figure out, "How would Alima Asytanax adapt to his new environment?"

In truth, I didn't think he would have any trouble adapting at all. My students from outside the U.S. adjust fairly quickly to life in the U.S., those who come from rural areas and refugee camps and those who come from cities in Africa, South America, Russia, and South Korea. They complain about winters in the Northeast. Otherwise, American modern life in a small city is not that big a deal.

However, the ability of a fourteen-year-old, high-energy, intelligent and curious boy to quickly adapt to a new life left me, like for utopia builders, with a writing problem: Oh, no, where's the conflict!?

I wrote The Translator.

Eugene: I agree that human beings evolved to adapt. It's literally in our genes. If anything, unless we actively swim against the tide and (purposely) give ourselves culture shock, we adapt faster than we expect. Language aside, the foreign isn't as foreign as we often want it to be.

The stumbling blocks are usually the mundane day-to-day stuff, not the National Geographic stuff. Like how the plumbing works. Or the sheer density of human activity.

In Non Non Biyori, which takes place in the sticks, pretty much anybody from anywhere else is exotic. So the hometown girl once treated as remarkable because she attends school in a nearby city now finds herself upstaged by the new girl who moved from Tokyo. Tokyo!

A common trope in anime and manga is the alien who shows up in Tokyo and almost immediately fits into daily life. This trope is not without precedent. In the mid-19th century, after 250 years of isolation, the Japanese government sent delegations all over the world and the rest of the world sent delegations to Japan.

I've always thought it's a good model for how an alien invasion would actually play out.

It seems that anime and manga became ubiquitous practically overnight (though it took half a century). Publishers figured out pretty quickly that they didn't have to flip the page order in manga. K-drama caught on even faster.

Kate: Your comment about "mundane day-to-day stuff" reminded me: during my study abroad in England, I got irritated because British stationary stores sold A4 size paper rather than 8-1/2 x 11, and the A4 wouldn't fit well in my notebook (and I'm used to America, which even back then sold every paper size). A peer commented that it was the first time she had seen me behave in an insular fashion (everybody else kept complaining about the weather) but it was the first time I actually felt inconvenienced. I didn't make the mistake of bringing only shorts, short-sleeve shirts, and sandals for a stay in England in July. Different currency was a given. Bank holidays were irritating but not that big a deal. The underground was fun! I adored the ability to buy little cheeses at Sainsbury rather than blocks of the stuff (and I loved the pastries). The dinky kitchen in our flat was cute. Ribena, though gross, was interesting.

But paper of the wrong size? Ahhhhh.

Taking the above into account, I went ahead and had the epilogue focus on Alima's ability to adapt. Life may get overwhelming--and then there's the unfamiliar plumbing.  Otherwise, life is life.

Utopias are static environments. Human beings, however devoted they become to routine or perhaps because they are so good are turning anything into routine, are not. 

Note about image: One of my previous versions of His in Herland took place at the same time as the novel. Terry stowed Alim in Herland and went to fight in World War I. Alim and many of the women helped wounded soldiers who found themselves near Herland. Terry eventually returned, flying his tattered plane the last few miles after a dogfight to crash-land near Herland and be taken in. He survived.

I retained the image (from a previous post) since my point still stands: Alim is willing to take on a supposedly more dangerous, less apparently streamlined world when he leaves Herland. 

Utopias are the equivalent of magical thinking: a desire to pretend that the weirdness and randomness and uncertainty and "we don't know the future" nature of life has been "handled," put in its place, rendered innocuous, non-threatening, manageable, unsurprising. Human beings can be stored and rendered happily not at risk--like Star Trek's brains, in stasis forever.

Alim abandons the pretense.

Epilogue

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding