Problems with Utopias: The Best of Times

In a previous post, I comment on the chronocentric belief that only OUR time has bad stuff in it. A "Golden Age" existed right at some point just beyond society's ability at accurate recall (about 30 years earlier). 

The other side to this type of chronocentrism is the belief that nothing until none could have been any good. All life has led up to now and what WE know.  

Progress does exist. Medicine. Education. "Givens" regarding rights. The early years of the Common Era produced fresh ideas about the individual and God, ideas which filtered across cultures and greatly improved conditions for individuals. As Rodney Stark points out, the Dark Ages are only dark because of how little we know. In general, life got better when the Common Era hit.

The problem with "nothing has ever been as good as now" is that the "good" is so defined not as better medicine or cheaper provision but as "good ways of thinking." 

Utopias often come to rest on the good ways of thinking of...no surprise, the people who are advertising the utopia.  

In Mr. B Sues to Get His Wife Back, my satire of academic theorizing, the CLF (Committee for Literary Fairness) keep insisting that Pamela cannot disagree with their insistence that her marriage is a bad one. The CLF is armed with theories and labels and "correct" ways of dealing with the universe. Any disagreement must be the result of mental damage, not personality and choice. If she disagrees with us, it is because she was "got at."  

This smugness, weirdly enough, can be accompanied by tolerance of the past--but that tolerance falls short when it might be made real (so I had a student "allow" that Shakespeare was a product of his time--but not J.K. Rowling). 

Overall, the smug contempt sounds something like this: 

"Those primitive ancestors of ours didn't know any better when it comes to science and religion and the social order. We do. We are moving forward, beyond their silly thoughts and clearly shallow thinking based on our advanced theories and our talent for maintaining those advanced theories! We don't even have to refute those idiots of the past. We just have to roll our eyes over them like high schoolers at the prom. Har har har. Let us contemplate our magnificence!" 

Herland rests on the above thinking--to an extent. Gilman's perspective is rooted in nineteenth-century Progressivism/Victorianism. The mindset--we have progressed beyond our backwards ancestors--shows up in Victorianism before Darwin. (Evolution as progression wasn't his precise argument, but what people thought he was saying fit well with the ethos of the time.) It continued until two World Wars turned it into a nonsense. It is now back in a slightly different guise. 

This we're-so-much-more-thoughtful-and-cultured-and-insightful insistence shows up in every area of life (not just politically-focused social media, though it flourishes there). A few years ago, I encountered an article by a woman proclaiming how far she has risen above the backwards theological assumptions of her church: In this day and age, sin and guilt are such déclassé concepts! So tacky! I'm beyond all that!

Okay, was my thought. What do you have to offer?

What she had to offer were ponderings from her naval; big thoughts about the nature of the universe based on..."MYSELF." (I'm not kidding.)

Not exactly Thomas Aquinas.

Gilman goes down the road of the aforementioned me-myself-and-I writer. In fairness, Gilman argues that just as the current generation of Herland's citizens is building on the ancestresses' achievements, shall the next generation build on the current leaders' achievements. She acknowledges that their ideas (Gilman's ideas) might prove to be lacking--which is good, cause they were.

And she argues against infant damnation, which is a positive.

Unfortunately, she doesn't argue against infant damnation using logic, faith, or, simply, a better idea--as plenty of people did, including Joseph Smith. She argues against it by having Ellador break down in tears (again, I'm not kidding). 

In sum, Herland's religion has nothing to offer in the place of Presbyterianism, not even anything as witty as Twain's quote. It offers a kind of generalized "we're better" self-label, a kind of "in" group culture filled with rules, cultural appropriateness, and "good thoughts." It's entirely substanceless, in part because it rests on the premise that it doesn't have to justify itself. The quality of being advanced is supposedly enough.

The end result of such smug self-satisfaction (I'm upset about the right things! I curse the right things! I hate the right people! I cry at the right times! I embrace appropriately worthy people and ideas! I use the acceptable verbiage to do all this!) is a remarkable lack of critical thought. That is, the pretense or performance or presentation--Look at our wonderfulness!--is more important than thinking about...anything, really. 

My personal theory is that Utopians are actually hunting for safety. I'm not sure they are aware that under all of the boasts of advanced thinking and edgy ideas, they are in fact--

Intensely reactionary, the kind of reactionary that belongs in countries run by dictators and religious oligarchs. It is less about holding the course (conservatism) or respecting the individual (classical liberalism) and more about retreating to something almost entirely imaginary based on an almost entirely constructed imaginary past which an entirely contrived group of current people truly understands.

Take the current so-called "revolution" on gender. The end result is not a broadening of gender or understanding of human self-perception and sexuality but, rather, "girls must like pink stuff and dolls" while "boys must like trucks and sports." In the meantime, schools that push pronouns on little kids create psychological havoc. Kids are fully capable of liking multiple things at once. Being forced to parse dinosaurs, sports, and unicorns is, to them, weird. 

They are right. It is weird.

My generation asked questions like, "Is it okay for men to cry?" and "Hey, what about women astronauts?!" Simplistic maybe, but we were headed in the right direction. Expand, not retract. The current narrowing is more reminiscent of Victorianism than anything in the last fifty years. 

Gilman does the same. To be honest, I've never fully understood her take here, since she suffered post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter and wasn't really an Earth Mother type. Yet Herland is entirely devoted to a gender imperative. The purpose of women is Motherhood, and yes, the "m" is capitalized in the book. 

Perhaps Gilman felt guilty about her own lack of motherliness. She may have embraced the idea of Utah polygamy whereby a woman could go to college while other women watched her kids. Or perhaps Gilman wanted to make her utopia palatable to her audience. Or perhaps she truly embraced the idea of improving future generations: bringing up children should be done right. (Her daughter and she had a strained relationship, which isn't made more understandable by recent scholars wanting the daughter to have had a different attitude towards her "great" parent than she actually did or cared to have or thought about.)

To Gilman's credit, she pairs Motherhood with Fatherhood. 

But the labels (capitalized in the book) are where many utopias reveal their hands. However, revolutionary the catechism, utopias really like the idea that people have been properly pigeonholed.  

In reality, revolutions are often far less forward-thinking than they like to pretend: the "new/evolved" best ways of thinking are often...not terribly new at all.