Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Sic Est in Republica: Utopian Ideology and the Misreading of Thomas More

Abstract: In a book that ought to be better known, Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, Thomas Molnar comments on the community of all goods among the inhabitants of the imaginary island in St. Thomas More's Utopia: Each family brings to this central market the products of its work, and each household head takes home whatever his family needs for sustenance. He neither pays nor barters, yet he is refused nothing, since nobody in Utopia asks for more than he needs. And, More adds with a disarming, but significantly dangerous naivete, "Why, indeed, would a person, who knows that he will never lack anything, seek to possess more than what is necessary?" (1) Molnar's otherwise acute observation is flawed in one crucial detail: it is not Thomas More who speaks with "significantly dangerous naivete," but rather Raphael Hythlo-daeus, who is a character in More's libellus uere aureus--his "truly golden little book"--entitled Utopia. Molnar has made a familiar error in mistaking a work of literature for a treatise or a tract. Although such a mistake may seem relatively harmless--a concern only of literature professors--utopian ideology, with its associated "terror" and "human cost," may be seen from one perspective as a result of bad literary criticism. In fact, the book Utopia provides the earliest antidote to utopian ideology, which it disparages as an analogue to generic confusion and a fault of decorum, and which it subtly ridicules by the ironic deployment of stylistic variation. St. Thomas More's Utopia is perhaps the first dystopia in the Western literary tradition. (2) To be sure, the most common interpretations of the work over the past four centuries would seem to belie this assertion. In An Apology for Poetry Sir Philip Sidney remarks that Sir Thomas More's "way of patterning a Commonwealth was most absolute, though hee perchaunce hath not so absolutely perfourmed it," (3) with the clear implication that More had set out to describe a perfect commonwealth in the proper manner but had failed in the execution. The Utopian custom of permitting a prospective bride and groom to view one another naked before making a final decision to marry has, not surprisingly, attracted a certain amount of attention. The grave denizens of Sir Francis Bacon's earnestly conceived New Atlantis are said to dislike this custom, "for they think it a scorn to give refusal after so familiar knowledge." They solemnly provide, however, what they regard as a superior alternative: "Adam and Eve's pools, where it is permitted to one of the friends of the man, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them severally bathe naked." (4) Application of this prenuptial practice of New Atlantis might well reveal more about one's friends than about a prospective spouse. In Brief Lives John Aubrey not only takes the Utopian custom literally; he gives it a biographical basis: Sir William Roper. . . came one morning, pretty early, to my lord, with a proposal to marry one of his daughters. My lord's daughters were then both together a bed in a truckle bed in their father's chamber asleep. He carries Sir William into the chamber and takes the sheet by the corner and suddenly whips it off. They lay on their backs, and their smocks up as high as their armpits. This awakened them, and immediately they turned on their bellies. Quoth Roper, 'I have seen both sides', and so gave a pat on the buttock (to the one) he made choice of, saying, 'Thou art mine'. Here was all the trouble of the wooing. This story turns out to be, literally, an old wives' tale, since Aubrey "had [it] from my honoured friend old Mrs. Tyndale." (5) During the past two centuries, attempts to treat the Utopia as a blueprint for an ideal communist society have generally been less amusing, but hardly less absurd. In the late nineteenth century, Karl Kautsky, sometime secretary to Friedrich Engels and editor of the last, posthumous volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, expounded Utopia as a precursor of modern socialism in Thomas More and His Utopia (1888; trans. …

The Future in the Classroom Today.

Abstract: If only half the predictions for 1984 come true, what do we have to look forward to? That question is the focus of our first day's discussion in Alternative Societies, a ten-week senior English course Answers vary from nilhistic ("We're all going to be blown up, so what does it matter?") to simplistic ("I'm going to get married and live in the same way my folks do"), to optimistic ("If we work together, the world can be in peace with resources for all") No matter what the answers, students agree we all have the future in common, and that bond carries us though out study of utopian and dystopian novels, as we try to discover what we want, what we can change, what we must fight, and what we must endure to be ready for the future The dystopias are the most compelling reading, not only for their horrible views of the future but because the main characters are always cultural deviates, fighting for their beliefs against a repressive government Montag (Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451), Equality 521 (Rand's Anthem), John Savage (Huxley's Brave New World), Winston Smith (Orwell's 1984), and Chip (Levin's This Perfect Day) begin alone, against overwhelming odds, to try to understand their individual longings in a hostile environment These novels all provide exciting and scary reading We also do Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, perhaps the most frightening because the nuclear war described could happen

Freedom of Expression and the Golden Mean

Abstract: Corey Brettschneider’s splendid new book, When the State Speaks, What Should it Say?,1 is a refreshing and magnificent reinterpretation of the application of First Amendment principles to speech by the government and to hate speech more generally. Professor Brettschneider’s book addresses an extremely difficult and important problem: How should a liberal society approach the topic of hate speech? Professor Brettschneider posits two dystopias that we need to avoid.2 The first is the dystopia of the Invasive State, which is so eager to militantly protect democracy that it regularly invades people’s rights.3 The second is the dystopia of the Hateful Society, which is so tolerant that it will not even intervene to defend its core norm of tolerance.4 Professor Brettschneider describes the harms inherent to each before proposing a new solution designed to occupy the ideological middle ground that protects both expression and the rights of citizens to be free and equal members of society. Both of the dystopias Professor Brettschneider describes have existed in major constitutional democracies during the last century. The United States, for example, was an Invasive State during the red scares of World War I and during the Senator Joe McCarthy period, which followed World War II and continued in some form throughout the 1950s. The U.S. Supreme Court ratified the dystopia of the Invasive State in cases like the