Utopia: its Abuse and Use

Utopia's fortunes wax and wane with different historical eras, and lately they've been low. These days its negative image, dystopia, has been enjoying more attention in popular culture, perhaps as befits a more confused and disillusioned time. But even without the long, boring didactics that is the usual stuff of literary utopias, the utopian as such retains an illusory power, of a sort that, in the past, has lured masses of people to catastrophes.

Utopics then casts a critical eye on that kind of project. The problem with Utopia as a realizable vision is that, fundamentally, it's social-cultural Prometheanism, in which human reality is taken as raw material to be molded or engineered for maximal ... what? Efficiency? Utility? Happiness? Good, perhaps, whatever that's taken to mean. Technocratic hubris is a common diagnosis for such ambitions, but the heart of the problem is a kind of selective blindness --  the would-be molders of humanity and their followers fail to see themselves as part of the clay, exhibiting and reproducing all the lumpy distortions they want to smooth out of society.

But, under the scrutiny of utopics, utopia can emerge in a new and improved role -- as a direction rather than an end. In that role it can provide an orientation in a landscape that otherwise seems confusing, without useful markers. It can even take on visionary aspects as an imaginative construct, but one that's situated perpetually on a horizon, receding as one approaches. Though removed in this way from practical reality, it can be a part of a larger construct that gives shape and meaning to the world -- a role in a larger narrative.