Utopias and dystopias: the twain shall meet
Recently I was thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and that led me to the following video. A relatively short portion of it discusses the more general topic of utopian literature versus dystopian literature, and the speaker points out that those visions share collectivist characteristics and that therefore utopias and dystopias are two sides of the same coin, and that efforts at creating utopias lead inevitably to dystopic nightmares.
Here’s the excerpt
I once attended a philosophy class of my son’s that consisted of a discussion of Candide’s Dr. Pangloss’ insistence that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” That statement seems absurd on the face of it – how could it be? But by the end of the class it seemed quite plausible that in fact, this is the best of all possible worlds – accent on the word possible.
NOTE: I wrote about Brave New World in this 2024 post.
Speaking of Utopias and Dystopias, Eugene Lyons wrote two books on the topics.
Assignment in Utopia
The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America
Assignment in Utopia deals with his 6 years as a reporter in the USSR. Among other things, he interviewed Stalin—in Russian, no less. He discusses NYT reporter Walter Duranty’s “reporting” on the Ukraine famine—fraudulent reporting for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Lyons went to the USSR as a supporter of the Bolshivek “experiment,” but his six years there changed his mind.
What about Galt’s Gulch? The oath of which was:
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I swear by my life and my love of it I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
— Ayn Rand,”Atlas Shrugs”
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Or does having such a strong shared core belief make the Gulch collectivist?
huxley:
Is Galt’s Gulch actually promoted as a utopia? I don’t think Rand was into utopian thinking. But I’ve never read the full book.
neo:
I doubt Rand promoted GG as a utopia. She might have refused to categorize it that way because almost all utopias, as you point out, are collectivist. The same may likely be true of her followers
However, there is no shortage of writers and critics who refer to Galt’s Gulch as Rand’s utopia. For example:
https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/utopian-studies/article-abstract/23/1/238/289913/Galt-s-Gulch-Ayn-Rand-s-Utopian-Delusion
I read “Atlas Shrugged” about the same time I took a college course on Utopian literature. GG sure seemed like a utopia to me.
FWIW, “Atlas Shrugged” is a very long, mostly conventional novel with lots of plots and character arcs.
However, it dances around a mystery — the creative, productive people are disappearing. Turns out — to a hidden valley named Galt’s Gulch after its founder John Galt. IOW Atlas shrugs and moves to Galt’s Gulch.
Dagney Taggart, the heroine, happens to crash land in the Gulch and meets Galt. She returns to America. Galt follows her, hacks into the radio system and gives a three-hour speech explaining Rand’s philosophy. As I recall that’s about 100 pages of the book. I kid you not.
That lengthy exposition defintiely puts “Atlas Shrugged” into the utiopian category along with Huxley’s “Island.”
Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” was a political satire, I believe.
One of my chief complaints about the ignorant young, GenZ and young Millennials— is they have been taught and wasted so much energy on many lies about the evils of capitalism that history easily dispels. Their ignorance about the latter leads to their naive embrace of Utopian socialism.
as the answer!
History remedies this.
For example, at CU-Boulder 25 years ago, a young scholar named Steve [Jewish Name] taught an economic history lecture course on Cpcapitalism. His Harvard mentor in economic history was David Landes.
Landes wrote the last long and comprehensive history (650p) of world capitalism, circa 1998, “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Nations Are Rich and So Many Poor”.
Anyway, Prof Steve moved on to the University of Kansas for a tenured post. But the fruits of sitting in on his classes and dipping into Landes, stayed with me.
Landes counters material determinism by showing us comprehensively, how culture well explains what made the West uniquely rich and successful.
Landes helfulness is in fleshing out the claims of the Austrian School about capitalism over time. For example, European political competition demanded that rulers concern themselves to look after their peoples well being in order to maintain their rule.
This competition among Euro proto-states oversaw imitation of business success, and abandoning of failure.And a uniquely Western compulsive curiosity drove this fray. Gears and wheels were developed to gain tools for mashing, thrashing and grinding foods, and innovations metal manipulation followed. Gunpowder led to guns and cannons.
Clocks, and later mechanical printing invention arose during and after the Middle Ages. By contrast, the Muslim world rejected this great tool for spreading knowledge, fearing that it would spread heresy! And Chinese rulers feared it would spread dissent, undermining their control.
But because European Rulers by were fragmented and authority diverse and conflicting, curiosity reigned by exploiting the gaps of control. Mean while the world like China closed itself off completely to foreign trade and its destabilizing influence.
In short, the West experimented with the many exceptional institutions that began to define capitalism before Adam Smith: money, banking, letters of credit for distant trade. Contact law, double entry-bookkeeping, insurance of trade, the joint stock company, and the Dutch invention of stock market for raising dispersed capital investment!
The West evolved the tools of capitalism long before Marx gave it its name. And this evolution and adaptive experimentation gives it a flexibility that no Utopianism nor planners can ever achieve.
It’s like Cartesian Rationalists never gained a bit of wisdom or humility from Charles Darwin.
On YouTube, Brad Harris gives us a quick and helpful 30m gloss on Landes’ learned thesis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpfqYGHzwjs
Hugely complementing and completing Landes’ cultural dynamics thesis is the socio-psychological and cross-cultural economics book, Joseph Heinrich’s 2020 engaging and delightful “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” As I’ve mentioned here, before. Deep historical sociological rethinking.
But back to Utopias and dystopia’s, the experimental vigor that developed in the West produced our best of all possible worlds and developed — or even birthed the gift to the world — capitalist institutions that the world has spent the past nearly century in abolishing literacy, developing cities, and lifting all but one billion (or half?) from abject poverty, which is our natural state of being.
Cue up the Factfullness talk and dynamic charts presented by the late Hans Rossling proving this point in rich graphics over time.
To have the best possible human society, no one should initiate force against another or deceive them so that they do something they would not otherwise do.
The proper role of government is preventing force and fraud. Beyond that government itself becomes the problem.
huxley teal. “ I doubt Rand promoted GG as a utopia.” EXACTLY.
It’s more like a conservative, Chestertonian philosophy of keeping the remnant alive, hoping for its renaissance. And that’s what her “Galt’s Gultch” in “Atlas Shrugged” shows.
To early movement conservatives and Christians of the 1950s, it was a theft and an offense. And that’s in large part why Whitaker Chambers fumed volcanically against it in his famous denouncing review in National Review.
TJ:
David Landes is the father of Richard Landes, the man who exposed the al-Durah hoax and coined the term “Pallywood.”
All this wisdom is right out there for the taking. Yet our children insist on assimilating folly, proven folly.
I just for the first time read today about “the Curley Effect,” where intentionally incompetent governing is used to drive out the sensible voters in order to perpetuate power. And, no, we are both wrong—it is not named for Curley Howard, but for James Michael Curley, “a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor.” Sounds like a few American cities I could name.
Jim Melcher, Mayor Curley was the inspiration for the main character in the bestselling novel , The Last Hurrah. It was also made into a movie. Which was better, the novel or the movie? I leave that to persons wiser than I.
And yes, it seems as though the Curley effect is in effect today. Where decades of decline get voted in by 20+ point majorities, election after election.
@neo: …the speaker points out that those visions share collectivist characteristics and that therefore utopias and dystopias are two sides of the same coin, and that efforts at creating utopias lead inevitably to dystopic nightmares.
Yes, I reject that reasoning. I don’t think it’s that simple and Ayn Rand’s Galt Gulch is a sufficient counter-example.
To me it’s a classic Goldilocks maneuver where the speaker claims the far-right and far-left are the same, while, happily, the speaker claims the centrist higher ground for himself.
Huxley’s “Island,” in terms of literature, was his Last Will and Testament. It was his counter-utopia to the dystopia of “Brave New World.” Even more persuasive than Galt’s Gulch.
“Island” was somewhat collectivized, as any current society must be IMO, but Huxley intended it as a remedy to dystopia, not a few stops before it. People had plenty of freedom to lead creative, fulfilling lives and that was the plan.
Anyway. I suspect vlogger, Benjamin McEvoy, isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. But I’m not going to listen to a two-hour segment of his expounding.
I have watched McEvoy’s YouTubes before. He hosts “Hardcore Literature Book Club” which is essentially dedicated to his version of the Great Books.
–“Hardcore Literature Book Club with Benjamin McEvoy”
https://www.patreon.com/hardcoreliterature
More power to him. I still don’t have to take his word for anything. Which I believe he would allow.
,
— neo
The Gulch itself is not presented as utopian. But the Randian philosophy itself is absolutely utopian, in the ultimate sense of ‘no place’. It requires a fantasy-vision of human nature to work, ultimately no different in essence (though opposite in polarity) to New Soviet Man or the Pure Aryan.
Rand would probably be offended at being called a Romantic. She was a Romantic, even so. Her idealized capitalists have little to do with real people, and her fictional situations bear little resemblance to real economics or the real world generally. Her protagonists would fit rather neatly into small-r romance novels, though, as male leads.
This would be harmless enough, except that too many Right-wingers have mistaken Rand’s Objectivism for a real-world-compatible philosophy. There are seeds of truth in what Rand is saying, but the funhouse-mirror world and characters she paints makes her work a liability to those trying to defend real world free markets or real-world capitalism.
Before Huxley and Orwell came Yevgeny Zamyatin who wrote “We” – the firstgreat dystopian novel. He had witnessed The Communism Revolution in Russia and saw where it was heading.
I read it as part of my History of the USSR course years ago. The prof was a Commie and I still wonder if he is devastated by the collapse of his “Workers Paradise.”
Similarly, Rand wrote “We The Living” in 1936 before her other books. They made it into a movie in Italy showing the bad guys as Communists. Mussolini banned it once he figured out that he was no different, which was her point. It starred Alida Vali, my favorite actress of all time.
TJ,
That was a great comment!!!!
Thank you
>>”Her idealized capitalists have little to do with real people, and her fictional situations bear little resemblance to real economics or the real world generally.”
In Rand’s two big popular novels, Atlas Shrugged & the earlier The Fountainhead, this unrealistic critique seems kinda true about the capitalists.
But her description of the mediocrities & hypocrites who oppose those heroes seem very true to life, and are readily recognized in such semi-competents as Claudine Gay or the self-murderer Jason Arday.
Most successful business leaders are not idealist capitalists, but hard-scrabbling pragmatics who just want their personal business to be successful. Including bribing govt officials, cheating a bit, or a lot, on taxes, standards, or other rules. Tho demonstrably effective at producing what their customers will buy.
I think there are many semi-utopias in Sci-Fi. For Libertarians, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (Heinlein) is great.
The Diamond Age (Stephenson https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6563914-the-diamond-age) is semi-dystopian, with freedom aspects.
“… Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” This important sub-plot is a utopian idea of ai-tutor educational tablet/book. Interactive and helpful in real life.
@HC68: Rand would probably be offended at being called a Romantic. She was a Romantic, even so.
I recall seeing Rand’s “The Romantic Manifesto” (1969) on the paperback rack stands of my youth. Also anyone who loves the music of Rachmaninoff must have at least one romantic bone somewhere in their body.
Turns out Rand considered herself a romantic realist, a term that hits my ear as an oxymoron. The wiki entry added to my confusion. However, Rand herself is quoted:
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The method of romantic realism is to make life more beautiful and interesting than it actually is, yet give it all the reality, and even a more convincing reality than that of our everyday existence.
–Ayn Rand
@Tom Grey: But her description of the mediocrities & hypocrites who oppose those heroes seem very true to life, and are readily recognized in such semi-competents as Claudine Gay or the self-murderer Jason Arday.
For years I considered Rand’s villains as flaws in her books. Too caricatured.
Then along came Obama and his circus, which continues to this day.
I think the fundamental issue with both is the unreasonable malleability of human nature they assume. Utopias show it more clearly with the way all the characters simply do what is needed to keep society going. Dystopias tend to have undue ability to tyrannize, such as a surveillance state that actually spots every deviation instead of (as in reality) keeping people in fear because they know that any given deviation could be caught.
Tom Grey, HC68, huxley,
I won’t bore you with a long, critique of “Atlas Shrugged” however a quick, succinct summation of my opinion: I think those who pan it don’t take it seriously enough as a literary work and those who praise it give it too much credit as a literary work. I’ve had quite a few people ask me about it once they learn I’ve read it and my advice is always, “It’s worth a read.” As far as I know, no one has taken my advice.
Unfortunately, I don’t find her villains unrealistic. Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, AOC, Fauci, Keith Ellison, Letitia James, George Soros, Jack Smith… all very much life like and their equivalents are all in the novel.
And her protagonists? Dagny, Francisco, John, Hank and Ragnar seem more down to earth and believable than Musk, Zuckerburg, Thiel, Jobs and Bezos. Did Danneskjöld own a ship as large as Bezos’ yacht? Or Paul Allen’s submarine?
“… her fictional situations bear little resemblance to real economics or the real world generally.”
Did you miss the Saudis toppling the World Trade Towers? Soros breaking the Bank of England? FBI bureau director Mark Felt feeding info to 2 Washington Post reporters to topple a Presidency? The “Russian” dossier and collusion scandal? No gain of function at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
— Rufus T. Firefly
But the reasons for those events are rather different than the reasons Rand imagined for the disasters in her fiction.