Tag: dystopia

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Have we been seduced by Dyst-hope-ia?

I am a scholar of dystopia – a dystopian if you will. I am an aficionado of dystopia, a connoisseur of the literary and artistic genre in its myriad of forms and nightmares.

I consider dystopian thinking to be an evolution, or sometimes an extrapolation, from the precautionary principle, which warns against change for the sake of change. Dystopia is a form of negative imagining, an attempt to envision and render in realistic terms a truly ‘negative place’, the etymological meaning of the term.

In this sense, I find dystopian thinking to be significantly more culturally useful than utopian thinking, which to a large extent has been reduced to a singular political ideology derived from a Marxist strain of post 1960s counterculture.

Whereas utopian thinking has devolved to activist academic attempts to plot routes towards one particular ‘positive place’ future, dystopian thinking has instead remained more broad and wide in its purview. After all, there are many nightmares.

If there is a structural flaw to both modes of art and thinking, it is that in practice they generally extrapolate forward to complete visions, the totalising utopia or dystopia. Rarely if ever do we see depicted the many incremental stages between the world as we know it and the heavenly or nightmare future world depicted.

Where utopian thinkers in particular have addressed the explicit or implicit developments towards utopia or dystopia, they have, to my mind, missed the point somewhat. The terms ‘critical utopia’ and ‘critical dystopia’ emerged some four decades or so ago to describe incomplete elements of depicted utopias and dystopias. Thus these key depictions of complexity, nuance and evolution in such literature and art (and philosophy) were reduced to anomalies which could either be countered (in the case of ‘critical utopias’) or fostered (in the case of ‘critical dystopias.’)

This was an innovative way of looking at things then, but it was always reductive, and ideologically driven, and at this point its limitations are becoming quite obvious. Actual examination of how society develops towards utopia or dystopia tends to be quite thin on the ground, despite examples existing all around us.

The exception if there is one is the regularly bruited risk of a return to 1930s-style fascist governance in current democratic societies. The election of leaders with an authoritarian populist rhetoric, be they Trump, Orban or Meloni, is now routinely accompanied by dire extrapolations (and often incomplete historical parallels) which overtly suggest that a slippery slope to neo-Nazi rule is already well underway.

But dystopia as I said takes a myriad of forms, and each form evolves and devolves in different forms and at different rates in different cultural and historical circumstances. As a dystopia thinker, I try to look for patterns, for trends, which suggest dystopian vectors of society, ways in which society is moving towards a less civilised state of being for most people.

In this way, many instances seem to pass under the radar. In fact, very often when they do occur, they are depicted as the opposite of what they are. They are reported as beacons of hope, anomalies which ‘critical utopias’ habitually accommodate in their positivist post-Enlightenment progress ratcheting ever forwards.

These instances are a little like ‘magic eye’ pictures, which were popular a generation back. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, as they say. I refer to them as examples of dyst-hope-ia, as they are fundamentally dystopian developments, though usually incremental rather than totalising, swathed in a good-news suit of hope to make the bitter pill go down more easily.

In this way, a ratcheting towards a more dystopian society occurs in an almost Huxleyan sense, with the passive acceptance and approval of the population who actually are encouraged to associate such instances with hope rather that its opposite.

This is a little difficult to explain in abstract, so let me offer some concrete examples. Many years ago, I noticed a large building being erected in my district in Dublin. Over many months the grand edifice came together. I didn’t pass it often, so didn’t know what the building was intended to be, until one day in the local newspaper I read that it was due to open the following week. It was a new unemployment welfare office.

The local paper depicted this as a good thing. It was reported as a net good that the unemployed of the area now had a better, bigger dedicated office to deal with them efficiently. But beneath this patina of hope, one swiftly discerns that the expenditure of millions of euro in such a building is a commitment to societal unemployment in the area.

It is in fact an admission of failure – the failure to regenerate the area, or to provide employment for its inhabitants. At the time of its opening I wrote in my journalist’s notebook, “who approved this investment in indolence?” (I used a lot more alliteration in those days.)

Another example comes in today’s news from Britain, which in recent times can be relied upon as a stable and consistent source of examples of dyst-hope-ia. The emergence of a social charitable phenomenon called ‘warm banks’ (though the term is never used) is a classic example of dyst-hope-ia.

What is a ‘warm bank’? Based on the similar concept of food banks, a warm bank is a public charitable space where people who cannot afford to heat their homes may go to stay warm during opening hours. Bloomberg is one of many outlets who report approvingly of the concept here.

The welcoming warm bank, depicted as a jolly public community space – image courtesy of Getty Pictures.

Surely the hopeful depiction is legitimate? After all, the idea of the community rallying around to offer protection and support to the most vulnerable among them is a supremely positive and human thing. This is the hope in dyst-hope-ia, the positive cloak in which the nightmare clothes itself, the sheep’s clothing on the dystopian wolf.

Because, under this surface reaction is the initial action causing the need for such support – the vastly and rapidly escalating food and fuel costs which have left many vulnerable people in Britain with a choice between eating and heating.

And as with food banks before them, warm banks will function not only as a precarious safety net for the vulnerable, but also as a creeping normalisation of a more dystopian society, one in which it is normalised for people not to be able to afford food or heat their homes.

What dystopian thinking teaches me is not to dismiss this patina of hope cynically, nor to be seduced into thinking of the overall scenario as a positive development either. It allows me instead to see through the sheep’s clothing to the wolf beneath.

I suggest always lifting the surface of the good news story to check what might be smuggled into normality underneath. I admire the efforts of each and every person who contributes their time or money to keeping their community warm. But I refuse to allow that kind-heartedness to obscure the fact that the government is attempting to normalise the concept of citizens who cannot heat their own homes.

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The Utopian Heresy

So, I was speedreading HG Wells again in advance of teaching him, in the context of his utopianism, and I ended up wondering about utopia’s relationship to societal scale.

In Wells, dystopia is usually us, by default. By contrast to his Modern Utopia, or The Shape of Things to Come, it is existing society which bears the taint, by default comparison, of dystopia.

But there are hidden hints of dystopia too, in the monstrosity of some of his earlier scientific romances – in the Eloi/Morlock symbiosis or on Moreau’s island, for example.

Anyhow, I began wondering whether a wrong turn we’ve made, in the 10,000 years since we expanded our societal size and complexity far beyond the Dunbar number, is in conceiving of utopia as a mass or universally applicable concept, and concomitantly, of dystopia as the plight of the individual in a negatively charged mass society.

Winston Smith undoubtedly lives in a dystopia. But how much of his dystopian encounter related to his individualism, his isolated rebellion against the monolith of Ingsoc? Would it have ever been possible for Smith, like the citizens of the Soviet Union, to somehow accommodate the totalitarianism? Can we, like Camus with Sisyphus, imagine Winston to be happy?

Anyhow, at the risk of assuming a taint of libertarianism, I wonder maybe we might have got it in reverse. Perhaps if utopia was understood as an individuated pursuit to project wellbeing outwards, whether desired or no, and dystopia as an immersion in a mass societal structure in which one size cannot fit all, nor even many, we might be onto something more fruitful.

Implicit in this idea, of course, is the suggestion of scale as an aspect of the issue, alongside the individuation of the Post-Enlightenment, something which itself has fallen subject to gargantuanism too, leading to the atomisation anomie so many people now experience. Is there a sweet spot somewhere between the individual self, thinking therefore being in a Cartesian moment of solipsism, and the uncountable hordes of contemporary existence? Professor Dunbar, as a good evolutionary biologist, suggests there is, hovering around his tribal size scale of approximately 150 individuals, though of course this does get queried.

No doubt, some of the reaction to the Covid pandemic, people seeking to leave cities for the country life in the first twitch of reversing the urbanisation we’ve seen accelerating throughout recent centuries, relates as much to an intuitive desire to rescale existence closer to the Dunbar number. This does not deny the desire for a lockdown garden, nor any of the other insights the world suddenly and collectively experienced in relation to the dystopic existence of modern city living, of course. They go hand in hand, down the pastoral path.

But if we must continue to operate in terms of didactic absolutes like utopia and dystopia, then maybe it would be more useful to envisage attempts to engineer society en masse as inherently dystopian motivations, even when couched, as they always, always are, in utopian and universal terms.

Equally, if we began to conceive of dystopia as a fundamental malaise experienced by the individual in response to the impossible complexities and incomprehensible scale of globalised society, then paradoxically it restores to us some human agency. Dunbar might essentialise this as something hardwired, inherent to our sapiens software. Without necessarily challenging that, I see it coming from both ends at once, both nature and nurture, the contradiction of Dasein in the megacity.

This still leaves us with the challenges that require scaled reaction of course. How to accommodate human liberty in a pandemic, or engage a global response to the climate crisis, just to iterate two particularly pressing examples of how individuated utopic desire might contradict the need to police the dystopic boundaries of global-scale societal infrastructure.

If I had an easy answer to that mode of contradiction I’d say so, but of course I don’t. Nevertheless, it does seem to me more sensible to start understanding utopic desire as an inherently dystopian practice when predicated on a societal level as it always has been to date. Likewise, there is a utopic emancipation inherent within dystopian structure, awaiting each of us as individuals to unleash it.

This is the paradox of the utopia/dystopia framework and paradigm as I see it. This is my utopian heresy.

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Orwell and the Porn Dolphins

Another post on PtS about Burgess’s invented languages today. (I did say there was 10,000 words of this…)

This one is about George Orwell, multicultural Seventies droogs, whether language shapes thought, and Chinese porno dolphins.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Also some rumination on the linguistics of class warfare and the difficulty of predicting the future in fiction.

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Rewriting Shakespeare in the Sixties and other inventions

The ongoing project to map Anthony Burgess’s OTHER invented languages continues over at Ponying the Slovos.

In the latest segment, we look at Burgess’s often overlooked dystopia, The Wanting Seed, written around the same time as A Clockwork Orange, as well as his superb novel on Shakespeare’s love-life, Nothing Like The Sun, and the second volume of his perennially popular Enderby series, which features a variant of Strine, the lingo of Straya.

If any of that interests you, it can be found here.

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Double Vision Politics

A week on from the US Presidential election of 2020, and with still much controversy and confusion involved, though a consensus among the media and global leaders that Joe Biden of the Democrats is the President-Elect, I think it might be opportune to give my 2c on the matter.

A succinct metaphor which has been suggested from time to time relating in particular to American politics, and its divisive two-party system, is “one screen, two movies.” The metaphor works because it proposes the idea that there is a set of events, what we might call reality, upon which two separate narratives are projected.

We can see this happening in America, and indeed in quite a few other places, if we choose to look. Partly this is a product of binary thinking, our (often false) predeliction arising from having hemispheric brains that there are two things to choose from in any scenario. There is black and white, up and down, left and right. But there is also brown, yellow, blue, green, opaque or transparent. There is sideways. There is in short always perpendicular options to the binary. There is, in short, nuance.

But let us return to ‘one screen, two movies.’ What happens if you try to watch BOTH movies at once, in real time? Or even simply flick back and forth between the two, like a magic eye picture? It’s obviously disorientating. A bigot Nazi righteously thrown out of office becomes an isolated victim of mass electoral fraud. A fifty year career political veteran becomes a senile old coot with a druggie son who’s been compromised by China. And so on. In short, there is such distance between the narratives that they almost cannot be comprehended simultaneously.

Critically, it seems almost impossible to reconcile them. There is no possible Hegelian synthesis here. These perspectives are oil and water, all the more unmixable for being all the more fundamentally rooted in a sense of tribal identities. The wailing despair which greeted Trump’s election four years ago, a gutteral howl from genteel middle-aged women captured on camera, is matched only by the outcry of relief and triumphalism of Biden’s supporters, a cohort who only a few years back were meming about how he was the dumbass idiot foil to a wise and weary Barack Obama.

Once practised a little, it becomes a parlour game of whimsy. Pick any topic and try to guess at the polarised views. Immigration controls are either a racist rejection of non-white humanity, or else a belated attempt to shore up jobs for Americans. Transgender storytime in libraries is an act of education and acceptance or a sign of enforced degeneracy and an attempt to destroy families and identity. And so on. But it goes beyond whimsical games of course. These viewpoints are not reconcilable and no amount of calls for unity will make them so.

The biggest tragedy is that there is no attempt at empathy from either side to the other. Both feel under fundamental attack from friends, neighbours, even family. This is tearing natural human relationships apart, inside and outside America. People don’t want to watch two movies on one screen. They can’t tolerate the cognitive dissonance. Instead, they are forced to demonise those who are watching the other movie.

One wonders therefore how it will end. Half the US electorate will feel inevitably disenfranchised no matter what, as has been the case for Trump’s entire term of office. America is, of course, an empire in slow decline and has been for quite some time. But, not unlike the bankrupcy of Mike in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, empires tend to fail very slowly, then all at once. And the power vacuum a collapsed America would create is highly concerning. No wonder Russia and China look on with interest.

I of course am no expert on the matter, having only a couple of years as a political correspondent for an Irish newspaper, and a lifetime’s passion for the sport of elections, to fuel my speculations. But if journalism taught me anything, it taught me the importance of being able to speak to people you do not agree with, to be able to genuinely listen to them and what they think and why they might think it, no matter how bizarre or repellant or even threatening it may seem. However, I am tiring too of watching two movies. The double vision is not conducive to clarity. For the next while, I will instead focus my attention on just one thing, and as a literary critic and academic scholar…

Dystopia seems like a good choice.