The rise and fall of utopianism

From Edward Bellamy to Nick Bostrom, a brief history of modern utopian thought

Utopianism flourished in Western thought in the nineteenth century. After millennia of little or no improvements in average human welfare, the industrial revolution had transformed ideas about what could be achieved. Imagine the optimism at the turn of the century and before the world wars: post-Darwin, entering the golden age of physics, slavery abolished and arguments on universal suffrage being won, economies booming, quality of life leaping forwards. In 1800, at least a third of British children were dying in childhood; by 1920, almost nine out of ten were surviving. On The Origin of Species had revolutionised our understanding of humanity, and germ theory caused a step change in our ability to fight disease; with advances in science and medicine we were taking control of our biology and our future.

Alongside the groundbreaking scientific developments, this period saw the publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Visions of a more just and equal world were really coming into focus. In 1887, Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, a best-selling sci-fi novel about the year 2000. In the book, technology and social revolution have brought about a communist utopia. People work less, and work is less menial due to increased automation. Citizens get some kind of universal basic income and pay for goods using debit cards instead of cash. Music is available in every home via telephone cables. The high living standards have obviated economic motives for crime, and criminality is now treated as a mental health issue. 

Intentional communities were founded across the US, probably the most famous being the Oneida Community. Oneida was started in 1848 by a preacher called John Humphrey Noyes. Communism and Darwinism were major influences on their philosophy, as well as the Christian perfectionist doctrine that humans can live free from sin. Property was communal, and so was sex; Noyes probably coined the term “free love”. Sex was not sinful, but spiritual, with an emphasis on female pleasure and mutual consent. Reproduction was not simply a by-product of sex, but a carefully managed project for the good of society: parents were chosen by the community for their desirable traits and children were raised collectively. Men had to practise “sexual continence” (avoid ejaculation) to avoid accidental pregnancy. This proto-eugenic experiment was referred to as “stirpiculture”.

Although Oneida-style free love was pretty controversial, an increasingly scientific approach to sexuality and reproduction was gaining widespread traction. Following German and French thinkers, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis popularised the idea that homosexuality was an innate disposition and not a pathology. His own wife, Edith Lees, was a lesbian who had multiple relationships with women, her marriage to Ellis more of a “comradeship”. Ellis was also very enthusiastic about the potential for the new science of eugenics to improve the world. Pushing back against those who argued for state-mandated sterilisations, he was convinced that we could realise the benefits of Darwin’s revolutionary discovery without any coercive measures but through giving people greater control over their own reproduction, as he lays out in his book The Task of Social Hygiene:

Domestic animals may be highly bred from outside, compulsorily. Man can only be bred upwards from within through the medium of his intelligence and will, working together under the control of a high sense of responsibility.

In 1900 Ellis published a book called The Nineteenth Century: A Dialogue in Utopia. In it, he imagines a dialogue happening in a utopian future of an unspecified date, looking back at the 19th century and examining the roots of progress laid in that time. One speaker asks the other how he can talk about it as a time of civilisation and advancement, when there was still so much ignorance, inequality and suffering. His conversational partner replies:

What are disease and misery and death to him who soars on imaginary wings to a vast invisible goal? That was the spirit in which the men of those days lived; it was the secret of their insane activities, their colossal conceptions, their gigantic ambitions, even some of their most practical and prosaic inventions, the whole of the picturesque and fantastic confusion in which they lived.

After such high hopes, it’s not hard to see how the spirit of utopian thinking dwindled in the twentieth century. So many of the exciting advances of the previous decades - universal suffrage, Darwinism, technological progress, socialism - not only failed to bring about utopia, but arguably made the world worse. The Nazis rose to power as a democratically elected party, unspeakable horrors were committed in the name of eugenics, communism placed millions at the mercy of ruthless despots, and the spectre of nuclear war made human extinction a serious prospect.

Bertrand Russell wrote his utopian flavoured essay In Praise of Idleness in 1932, arguing that “modern technic” meant that a four hour working day would be more than enough to allow everyone to live in comfort. He suggested that this would eliminate unemployment, reduce inequality, increase leisure time and that subsequently "taste for war will die out”. Approximately twenty years later, after the Second World War, he wrote The Future of Mankind. This essay shows the turn in mood:

Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realised. These three are: —

1. The end of human life, perhaps of all life on our planet.

2. A reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population of the globe.

3. A unification of the world under a single government, possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war.

If utopianism was the spirit of the nineteenth century, doomerism was the spirit of the twentieth. The atomic bomb was a dominant concern, but it wasn’t the only one - by the sixties, environmentalists were raising various alarms. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, predicting catastrophic consequences of population growth. And by the eighties, the dangers of man-made climate change were widely accepted. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Nick Bostrom published his paper Existential Risks: Analysing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards, arguing that humanity could be entering a particularly risky time due to rapid technological progress.

While existential risk became a pressing concern, pockets of utopian thought persisted through the 1900s. In the sixties, Martin Luther King popularised the mid-nineteenth century idea that the “arc of the moral universe… bends towards justice”. Feminist groups engaged in political consciousness raising activities and psychedelic drug enthusiasts thought they could “turn on” the world with LSD. In his book Tripping on Utopia, Benjamin Breen situates the psychonauts as part of the broader movement to raise global consciousness using both science and culture. He centres this history around anthropologist Margaret Mead, a closeted bisexual whose work tried to normalise the variety of human behaviour, especially sexual behaviour. Mead was an active member of the Macy group in the ‘40s and ‘50s, a collective of scientists hoping to improve the world through a new interdisciplinary understanding of consciousness. By the end of the ‘60s though, psychedelics seemed to be a dead end, with high profile proponents like Timothy Leary and John Lilly turning out to be little more than hucksters.

Right now, like many people, I find myself in a mood of pessimism about the future. I doubt whether the moral arc of the universe must bend towards justice. I worry that we are living in a vulnerable world, in which our technological capacity outstrips our ability to wield it safely. On the other hand, those of us with the enormous privilege of living in the West today have seen some incredibly utopian ideas come to pass. Bellamy might be surprised to find that capitalism, not communism, has delivered many aspects of the future he imagined: we’ve dramatically improved life expectancy and driven down child mortality; menial work is increasingly automated, and very few people have to do work that is actually dangerous; the internet means we do have music in every home, and far more besides. Mead, who lived her whole life in fear of her sexuality being public knowledge, would find that all kinds of human diversity are not only accepted today but positively celebrated. And Ellis would be amazed to see the advances in genetic medicine and the level of control we have over our reproductive lives.

Who are our contemporary utopians? Advances in artificial intelligence are now a prominent theme of both utopian and doomerist thinking. Nick Bostrom, one of the foremost voices warning about AI risks, has just published Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World. The book explores meaning in a post-AI world, where human nature is fully malleable and human labour obsolete. Bostrom is the latest in a very long line to predict “technological unemployment”, which has been viewed as both a promise (as in Russell’s essay referenced above) and a threat (by Marx and others), depending on the scope and context of the unemployment. So far, predictions of mass unemployment have failed to materialise, but it would be flawed inductive reasoning to suppose they never will. Lots of jobs have been made obsolete by technology, it’s just that we’ve found continuing ways for humans to add value. If we really build machines that can do all the things our bodies and brains can do, more cheaply than us, then we might finally enter what Bostrom calls a post-instrumental age. Whether or not that will be a utopia is far from clear. Indeed, is utopia even a philosophically coherent idea? Deep Utopia is a careful exploration of these questions.

Havelock Ellis implied that naivety was essential for utopian thinking, saying that “ignorance possesses a magnificent audacity”. In a similar vein, Bostrom suggests that some past successes might have been the product of a reckless but lucky civilisation that vaulted “prudential barriers” without an appreciation of the risks. Optimistically, perhaps we are a little less ignorant today, a little less naive about the ways that political and technological projects can go terribly wrong, and with better epistemic standards than ever before. But our models of the world need to keep pace with the changes we’re making to it. Hopefully, in the 21st century, while we make sense of the challenges we’re facing, we can keep our eyes on the prize of a radically better world.