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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
I remember a BBC Radio Programme from the late 1940s and early 1950s with the title "I was there." Using modern reporting techniques, the programme reenacted historical events as if they were happening then and there. The title appeals to me because now that so many years have passed, I feel I too was there on many and various occasions.
Man has always been searching for an ideal society, a utopia. It is the dogged pursuit of happiness, in vain. One is reminded of Dr Johnson, for whom happiness, "is never to be found," while "each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself."
What brings this up is a book that has just been published in England, The Faber Book of Utopias, by John Carey, a Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Extensively and variously reviewed, the book seems to have shaken up many conceptions of utopia. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, for example, contends that the compiler "puts dystopias in the same volume along with supposedly ideal worlds of the imagination." Utopias, as perceived by man, have proven unlivable; no person of critical intelligence or decent sensibility, according to Fernandez-Armesto, could bear to live in them.
In the Sunday Times, the author of the book explains how visions of heaven soon turn into communist, or other, hells. He begins by pointing out that humanity still believes that there must be some way, "if only we could hit it, of achieving universal happiness. We long for a smiling world with everyone loving everyone else." I could not agree more. This, it would seem, is the most ancient dream of mankind. When Carey goes on to enumerate the different expressions of utopias of the late 20th century, particularly since the start of global warming, one glimpses the green movement, which is not as new as we might think. It has a long history, "stretching from the Garden of Eden to Adolf Hitler, a keen green, who lamented the 'injurious industrialisation' that had scarred the German countryside."
Carey believes that HG Wells deserves credit for inventing green politics. In his utopia mankind would live rationally in a pollution-free global garden. The world's forests would grow again, animal species would be preserved. But the key to the whole plan was to keep the population of the world below the safety limit of two billion. Unfortunately, says Carey, the current population estimate for 2025 is about 8.6 billion.
Today's alternative to the green utopia is "technotopia", a world released from dependence on nature by the marvels of science. But this is not new either. Carey takes us back to Francis Bacon, whose science fiction novel New Atlantis (1627) foretold the flying machine, the telephone, the submarine, as well as something that "sounds remarkably like napalm." Again in 1972 an English physicist, Freeman J Dyson, predicted the human race's colonisation of space.
One of the oldest of utopian ideals, writes Carey, is communism, though it seems to be taking a break these days. Its "built-in weakness," he believes, "is that it expects people to be less selfish than they are." Plato's Republic was communist. So was More's, as well that of Edward Bellamy in the America classic Looking Backward (1888) and, of course, William Morris's pseudo-medieval News from Nowhere (1891). Carey's conclusion is frightening: "If the history of utopias teaches us anything, it is that communism will be back."
Carey also examines the utopian claim that relations between the sexes can improve, "though," he points out, "there has not been general agreement about how."
Propagators of utopia have believed in excluding bad and weak types of people. In Plato's Republic, according to Carey, males and females were paired off on eugenic lines; and Tacitus, in his utopian account of the German nation, admiringly added that marriage with foreigners was strictly banned in an attempt to preserve the purity of the race. "Thanks to the Nazis," Carey wryly explains, "eugenics became a dirty word for a time after the war. But it is fast regaining ground."
Here too the conclusion is simple: "If that is utopia," Carey says, and I wholeheartedly second that opinion, "my vote would be to make do with the world we have got."
