Problems with Utopia: The Worst of Times

Utopias, like all so-called revolutions, have to react against something. 

Often, what they react against is "The Worst of Times." The present day is presented as wholly horrific--it must be escaped. And often (though not always) the answer to that horror is a retreat to the past. 

The problem for the utopia builders is that the past was not idyllic. People dealt with it as best they could, the same way as anyone else. 

In pre-written-history, a single skirmish led to the elimination of an entire clan. The child mortality rate was incredibly high. For most of history, healthcare, for all people, was more or less a crapshoot--though people were trying. Medical conditions, ones that appall us now--such as dying from rabies, dysentery, and blood poisoning--were commonplace. Plagues/pandemics didn't just shut down businesses for a year. They wiped out 2/3rds of the population and changed the economic and often the political landscape forever (such changes are, to an extent, still true: that is, disease and volcanoes do more than theory to alter social orders). 

Few people, men, women, minorities, non-minorities, had rights. Most people worked on farms/the land, which doesn't mean they didn't have individual ideas and romances and dreams. But we don't know because most of them didn't write stuff down. They couldn't write. For most of history, most people couldn't write and most of them couldn't read, and that statement includes royalty. 

Children worked and the ones who didn't were treated like pawns to be moved around a chessboard. Conscription was a regular occurrence. Debtors' prisons were a reality. Slavery existed on every continent--and for most of history, it included most populations. It varied in practice. It was still a given.

The variety of food in our current culture simply didn't exist. People ate so they wouldn't die, not for the sake of a "balanced" diet. Many leaders deliberately starved members of their countries up to and beyond Stalin's Russia. Destroying a country's agriculture--salting the earth--in battle was considered a norm.

Death by hanging was commonplace and issued for multiple infractions, most of which we would consider minor. Death by guillotine was considered a kind form of capital punishment. Torture was considered a legitimate investigatory device, not something to be debated or prevented.

There was no such thing as a free press. The left and right's use of "news" for political ends was commonplace. The world was Twitter--only slightly slower on the dissemination end. Sex in office, fraud in office was business-as-usual.

And I could keep going... 

Despite all the negativity, in all time periods, people have...well, okay, yes, a lot of people thought they were living at the end of everything. But they weren't. And most of them simply kept going. Moreover, they defined the world about them in terms of THEIR standards, not in terms of ours (just as we do, as a matter of fact).  

And yet, many utopias maintain that nothing has ever been as awful as it is now and/or nobody recognized the awfulness of the world until now. We need to get back to...

Other people's awfulness, I suppose.