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Utopia/Dystopia

  • What makes a perfect society?

  • What can lead a utopia to become a dystopia?

  • How do we define “happiness”?

  • Will robots and artificial intelligence help us perfect ourselves and our world, or will they make humans obsolete?

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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?

ACTIVITY 1

On one side of a blank piece of paper, briefly describe your own utopia. What specific qualities of the society would make it “perfect”? Try to be as specific as possible. Then, sketch out a rough picture that illustrates your utopia. Leave the back of the paper blank.

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Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1834. Oil on canvas, 29 5⁄16 inches x 35 ½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
This painting by Edward Hicks presents a utopian world in which predator and prey lie side by side in peace. Notice the scene in the background in which William Penn is signing a treaty with the native inhabitants.
What is Hicks suggesting about America? Is he suggesting that America is a type of utopia? Why or why not?
Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA/Bridgeman Images

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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.

ACTIVITY 2

Exchange your piece of paper from the previous Activity, the one on which you described your idea of a utopia, with a classmate. After you have read your partner’s description of a utopia, turn the card over to the back side and explain what might go wrong with those perfect qualities and change the society into a dystopia. In other words, what is the mirror image or worst-case scenario of the utopia described on the other side? Then, sketch out a brief illustration of what this dystopia might look like.