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Utopia/Dystopia

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Some see the past as a better, purer time. Ideas like the Garden of Eden, the pastoral Arcadia of ancient Greece, King Arthur’s Camelot, and El Dorado, the lost city of gold make us long for the way things used to be.

Others hold out hope for the future. We seek better technology, faster travel, healthier lives—and in a lot of ways we’re making progress. In 1900, for example, the average life expectancy in the United States was about fifty years, but by 1990 it had risen to about seventy-five. Productivity has skyrocketed, and the general standard of living has gone up with it. The computer in your smartphone is roughly thirty thousand times more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer that landed men on the moon in 1969. In many people’s minds, this rapid technological progress holds the potential to solve a lot of the world’s problems and create societies in which everyone is happy, healthy, and prosperous.

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On the other hand, technology is rapidly eliminating jobs and changing how we define ourselves and our role in this world.

What these dreams of the past and hopes for the future have in common is a longing for happiness. But do we even know what that means? What makes us happy? Is it money? Love? Entertainment? Freedom? Peace? What if the thing that makes one person happy makes another person miserable?

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The term “utopia” was coined in 1516 by British political philosopher Thomas More, who published a book about a fictional land of the same name. In it he laid out his ideals for the perfect government, social institutions, religion, and employment, all of which were intended to be a critique of the England of his day.

Interestingly, More invented the word “utopia” by combining the Greek words ou and topos. An almost identical-sounding Greek word, eu-topos, means “a good place,” but More’s ou-topos means “no place” or “nowhere,” slyly suggesting from the very beginning that the concept was both an ideal and an illusion.

The opposite of a utopia is a “dystopia.” In many imagined dystopias, the pursuit of perfection gets exaggerated and twisted, and the utopia sours into something that is far from ideal. Dystopias challenge the very possibility that the world is perfectible. After all, it is often a very flawed humanity that is defining what perfection is. Depending on the context, likes and dislikes, socioeconomic status, race, gender, or other factors, two people might view the same society in very different ways: one person seeing a dream, and another person seeing a nightmare.