People are apt, these days, to consider modern life rubbish and that we’re living in a quasi-dystopian society run by fools and cowards and spiralling towards disaster. Fair enough; it would be pollyannish of me to disabuse them of that notion, given the realities of the world, but let me quickly provide a crumb of comfort by pointing out that at least we’re still able to enjoy life’s little pleasures like this blog. And we can at least dream of how it might have been, how we might have been led by philosopher-kings in a just and ideal society enjoying a golden age. A utopia, if you will…
I don’t know if there ever has been a real-life utopia, but it’s perhaps unlikely, given that there have been so many imaginings of one, dating back to 370BC when Plato described the attributes of a perfect state in The Republic (and from where we get the term and idea of the “philosopher-king”). I suppose bright sparks have been lecturing their comrades on how things should be done for as long as humans have lived together, but the written form – utopian literature – gets properly kicked off with Sir Thomas More’s word-coining book Utopia published in 1516.
Thomas More (1478-1535) was the noted Renaissance humanist who was at various times lawyer, judge, statesman, philosopher, author, and Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. Quite the achiever, and he is even a saint now, since being canonised in 1935 as a martyr (having been executed as a result of failing to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church of England).
“Utopia” is derived from the Greek prefix ou-, meaning “not”, and topos, “place” – so, “no place” or “nowhere”. Interestingly, More had initially toyed with naming his fictional state by the Latin equivalent of “no place” – Nusquama – so we might today have been talking about Orwell’s 1984, for example, as a dysnusquamian novel!
In any event, More’s vision inspired many others to describe their own versions of an ideal utopian society, including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) (see what he did there?), H G Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), and Aldous Huxley’s utopian counterpart to his decidedly dystopian Brave New World, namely Island (1962). Well, we can keep imagining…
