Problems with Utopias: Fear of Art

All utopias fear art. 

Plato wanted to ban plays. Religious utopias waffle over holidays, maypoles, and the theater. Political utopias put comedy under fire.

Gentleman of Moscow by Amor Towles does an exceptional job painting the moral and artistic annihilations of the Soviet Union. (The protagonist's idealistic friend, who joined the new government, is eventually sent to Siberia for daring to assert in a memoir-type piece that Berlin bread--produced through the art of baking--is better than Russian bread.) 

As I argue in my thesis, a deep abiding fear of language--especially fiction--runs through all social orders. Every village, city, and state includes people who are sure that nobody else gets "the joke":  irony, satire, puns, riddles, tall tales, gags, farce, punchlines, knock-knock jokes. Such people tend to be rather humorless anyway--and they often substitute "teasing" for true humor--which makes one wonder if they don't get the joke. 

They will never admit it. Everyone else is completely helpless in the face of exaggeration, nuance, context, non-lecturing literature, flights of fancy, dreams. Everyone else must be protected against such dangerous stuff.

I wish I could argue that all these folks come out of the "special knowledge" Ivory Tower left, a bunch of academics divorced from reality shaking their fingers at all those people bamboozled by the companies and studios that the academics don't approve of. And these academics exist!

The truth is, however, that anyone in any field is capable of feeling that other people have missed the point and must be harried until they are "fixed" of their bad thoughts--inoculated against so-called bad opinions, attitudes, art--at which point the penitent will be allowed to return to the fold. 

In my experience, the harriers or sermonizers are practicing a kind of transference. They are quite susceptible themselves to trends and fads. As the C.S. Lewis quote indicates, they are terrified of appearing "uncool"--not unlike teenagers who group together for protection against anything that differs from the group. It takes time and moral growth to do what they love, not what is "approved."

In Chapter 12 of His in Herland, Alim and Celis continue their conversation referenced in an earlier post. Celis argues that the mentors want to produce "goodness" at the expense of creativity. (My Celis is rather hard-headed and practical. Here, she is observing, not necessarily starting a revolution.)

I [Alim] protested. People innovated. They improved machinery. They came up with new educational methods.

“Not outrageously,” Celis said. “Why do you think the old stories are never told in Troas’s theaters? The ones with unkind parents, brutal kings, devouring monsters? Wars. Famine. Fallen cities. The mentors draw lines. There’s an edge to the world. If we fall off it, we’re lost.”

“People tell the stories anyway.”

“Sure. But the fear is always there. Nobody, not even your Terry, believes someone can explore an idea and not become it.”

“Maybe they do become it. I met Terry and now—” Now I know what I don’t have. Now, I'm considering what else might be possible. 

Celis said, “You can’t be the hero and the villain and the monster and the deviant all at once. Not in reality.”

Unless people are heroes and villains and monsters and deviants all in one.

The fact is, fiction troubles utopians because it is inherently uncontrollable. It is supposed to lie, enchant, bamboozle, astonish. Its prevalence also suggests that incompatible internal and inherent human desires precede the supposed ideals of human religious, scientific, economic and political systems. If human desires come first, seamless order will never be entirely possible, no matter what leaders force onto people. Compromise is the only solution. A utopia will always fracture and dissolve.

One of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest, contains one of my favorite scenes: Tim Allen's character has to explain to the alien commander that his show (a take-off of Star Trek) is a lie ("Explain it to him in words a child could understand"). The character is deeply apologetic.

Yet, at the end of the movie, Galaxy Quest: The Television Show has been revived. The dangers of fiction are weighed against its joys and found less important, not because the dangers may not exist but because a world without fiction is dull and empty and robotic and non-human. It is a world run by lecturing woke academics and offended humorless moral leaders--that is, well-meaning members of any field or group who feel the need to "enlighten" everyone else and manage their intake. (Literary Weight Watchers.) 

Woe to that generation that replaces our superficial, tacky, sometimes downright stupid television programming with high-minded dramas addressing issues of class, race, orientation, and gender alongside accompanying disclosures of said dramas' underlying ideologies as well as their purposes and applications. A curse upon your heads! (I wrote parts of this post several years ago. Rereading it, I felt positively prophetic!)

When it comes to fiction, the important questions are: Do we viewers/readers believe? Does the story work? Do the characters live for us? Do we care about them? Are we carried away by the story? Are we satisfied?

Leave the "I'm SO appalled" attitude to the sermonizers. Leave the fun of the thing to the rest of us. 

Chapter 12

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding