Thread:Forum:Literature/George Orwell on utopia/reply

Heck, and I didn't think I was going to jump in on these kinds of forum discussions -- but someone had to make Orwell the first post. I was halfway responsible for this, after all.

Orwell is spot on about the creation of utopia. Most writers, when they create fictional utopias, they tend to turn into dystopias pretty fast, through things like Values Dissonance or Fridge Horrors. It's a natural extension of Most Writers Are Human, as perfection means different things to different people. The idea of utopia itself is a kind of philospher's stone then -- an ultimate level of perfection that can never be created in reality.

The same is true about political philosophies as well. I think one of my favorite insights from Orwell is simply the message of Animal Farm: Communism is so bad, it's almost as bad as capitalism. Neither the communist utopia (The Great Politics Mess-Up) or the capitalist utopia (Bioshock) could ever come to pass. The modernist or fundamentalist utopias aren't gonna happen either. The romantic utopia already happened in the past, but we screwed it up, and the realist utopia -- no such thing.

So we're left trying to craft a postmodernist utopia. Well, then, this seems a bit more doable. We're not trying to come up with a grand theory of that explains everything; instead we're going to try to steal from a huge jumble of theories that make society act perfect. Maybe even pretend to be perfect. But it can never be truly ideal, as the underlying humans that make up the society aren't perfect.

Just a small smattering of the issues that come up:
 * Are gender roles good or bad?
 * How much should ambition be limited?
 * You're gonna have criminals. Should they be punished or reformed?
 * How do you balance rewarding initiative and creativity against the needs of the poor?

You could solve the last one with a "post-scarcity" economy. But the others necessarily imply some sort of balance. There are all sorts of choices in the world today, but we're certainly not at equillibrium. The concept of gender roles, in particular, is in an era of rapid change.

The problem is that the more perfect the setting, the easier it is to write more boring stories. Sometimes the Moe genre manages to do it well by simply ignoring the worst parts of human culture and concentrate on the eternal conflicts: growing up and romance. But sometimes the stories just miss and you're left with attractive people sitting on chairs.

Not sure I know where I'm going with this. But seriously, check out Mars in A Miracle of Science as a technological utopia, of a sorts. Of course, they change what it means to be human just a little bit, but it might be a path forward for you to think about this.