UTOPIA AND ANTI-UTOPIA

Having seen utopia as synonymous with wishful thinking throughout this section, I cannot blissfully ignore the existence of the antonym, or antipode, in this case anti-utopia. (I prefer this word to dystopia, for better clarity in contraposition. After all, Thomas More created a u-topia, and not a eu-topia, no matter what John Stuart Mill had in mind.) To give a succinct elucidation to what I mean exactly, I only have to say: George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

To set the record straight, the seemingly common impression that the better-known Orwellian novel 1984 is a satirical condemnation of the contemporary Soviet society by the British author is wrong. Orwell was explicit in making it clear that his topos was London, England, and that the anti-utopian futuristic society was his own British society, taken over not by the USSR, like in some prequel version of Red Dawn, but by her own daughter, the United States of America, in a tri-partite division of the world, following an atomic war that must have been a direct consequence of the Cold War. This is not to say, of course, that Soviet society would fare any better in Orwellian fantasy, but it is obvious that he was talking about the bleak future of all humanity, rather than about some imaginary conquest of the West by the Soviet totalitarians.

Ironically, Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1931, was not inspired by a fear of the Soviet Union, but, admittedly, by a fear of Europe’s “Americanization.” To be fair to the United States, the subject ought not to be tied to any particular nation, be that the USSR or the USA. The probable prototype of both these novels, Eugene Zamyatin’s We, a Russian futuristic novel written back in 1919-1921, is also a generalized anti-utopia not specifically related to the early experience of the Bolshevik Revolution, but seeking its rationale (even if perhaps somewhat disingenuously) in the pre-Revolutionary utilitarian social trends, curiously observed in the ostensibly most advanced British society.

There is a good reason why I have not found it necessary (so far) to write a separate entry for each of these important works. Believe it or not, I find all these prophetic books regrettably obsolete in their supposedly shocking prophesy. The reality of our day is much more anti-utopian, and much more dehumanizing than the fiction that these great writers had been able to come up with. In a way, their books have become counterproductive, leading the modern reader along the beaten anti-utopian track, and somehow making him oblivious to the dehumanizing subtleties of the surrounding reality of our own time. In that sense, I’ve been consistently trying to alert the reader to such modern anti-utopian subtleties throughout various sections of this book. It is indeed possible for an illusion of freedom to reign supreme in modern society, whereas the reality indicates that the triumph of the illusion is achieved through the promotion of social permissiveness and general demagoguery at the expense of the real noble thing. A brand-new book ought to be written, to register this far more complex fact, than the relatively crude and simplistic exercises in anti-utopia which we have read so far.