Grant Tyler
Chid 110
AG9
Dec. 1998
utopia critique

"It is only when individuals can not create visions of something better that a truly utopian society can exist." This quote comes from the response paper I wrote for the first week of this Chid 110 class. Now, a little over two months later, I still feel that this is true. Using Webster’s to help me along I will explain why I feel this way. Utopia; definition. "a place of ideal perfection, especially in laws, government and social conditions." Therefore, a utopian society can only exist when every component is perfect. Perfect; definition. "being without fault or defect." I think we all would concede that, to use a cliché, "nothing is perfect." To develop a place without fault or defect could simply not be accomplished. However, to allude to the quote from my initial response paper, the allusion of this place or society could be created, but only by man’s shortsightedness. So it is from this singular premise that I can state both the greatest strengths of our attempt at a utopia, as well as it’s weaknesses.

I will start with our strengths. Initially we addressed the impossibility of creating a utopia by definition. To do so we decided to somewhat redefine our conception of utopia to fit into a more attainable goal. Thus, we determined, that for the purpose of our project, utopia would be defined as a society that works towards consistent mutual betterment. From this, we felt we had something to work with. I felt that this was an important step in dealing with one of the most troubling aspects of the assignment.

However, we were to find out that even after redefining utopia, we still found ourselves struggling with what structures and philosophies would best serve us in attaining our goals. This finally lead us to a decision. Within this decision lies the strongest point of our utopia. We recognized the inevitability of change, and the importance of equipping the citizens of our utopia with the proper tools to adapt in accordance with that change.

We realized that even though we could decide on what systems, structures, etc. would work the best initially, we could not predict what would happen in the future. We also recognized that we wouldn’t be there to guide and restructure our utopia as these changes took place. So we decided to compensate for that. We figured that if we educated our citizens in critical thinking, the same skills we were using to build this utopia, they would be able to restructure the utopia for themselves to best adapt to their changing times and environment. At this point we simply needed to build enough flexibility into the system to allow the future citizens to make changes with out having to completely start from scratch. With this structure we allowed for our citizens to constantly be improving their society in pursuit of this ideal of utopia.

But even with all of this forethought I feel that we had many weaknesses as well. I want to return once more to the quote from my earlier paper. "It is only when individuals can not create visions of something better that a truly utopian society can exist." Even though we tried to counteract this idea in the design of our utopia, it still proved itself true and is the potential downfall of our utopia as a solid concept. Even though we were no longer attempting to create a perfect society, we were attempting to formulate the best possible design to aide in accomplishing our goal; and it seemed that almost instantly upon completion, there were already things in this design of our utopia that I felt could be bettered. Along with these items, there were other things that went completely unaddressed.

To be fair, I will start with problems I found in my own section, education. In re-reading the education section in the final copy of our paper I felt that it would have been beneficial to give some concrete examples of how to teach critical thinking in our society, and more importantly how to ensure that critical thinking is applied. I feel that I dealt with these issues from a broader perspective, but I could have given more specific examples in these areas.

In general I really liked Justin’s conceptions of government, however my worries lie in the real-life practicality of a few segments. For instance, he addresses the factor of convenience in relation to high voter turn out. I feel that it is very convenient to vote today, yet we still have low turnout. Could other ways to ensure high turnout be practiced in our society? Also his section on the reconciliation of crime, while I really liked the basic ideas he presented, seemed to be cut somewhat short. It did not, in my opinion adequately address how the actual citizen that committed the crime would be discouraged from repeating the offense. Both of these concerns would be difficult to address, however, I did feel that they were areas in which our design could have been improved.

In contrast to Justin’s very conceptual representation of government, Sabrina’s economic section was incredibly detailed and very encompassing. In fact, we removed a section on the economics of health care because we simply felt the presentation as a whole was too unbalanced due to the emphasis on economics. This really was the beginning of my concerns with the economical section of the paper. I simply felt that it was so detailed that it distracted the reader from the greater ideas behind our utopia. It also disrupted our flow. We were linking each concrete aspect of our utopia together in text form with our conceptions of human nature, specifically those that were addressed by our society. These linkages, I felt, were lost in the lengthiness and details of the economics.

Beyond that problem, I also had some fundamental concerns with our final economic structure. The basic ideas were in line with what we had conceptualized as a group, but many of the detailed systems either strayed from those conceptions or addressed areas we had not discussed. For example, although we had discussed attempting to eliminate money as a trading tool in our economy, the way it came out in the end was very restricting on the lives of our citizens. In my opinion this restriction contradicts one of our major underlying ideas. That idea being one of allowing free will with in our society due to the educated status of our population. The modular housing applies the same sort of restrictions. In my mind, the citizens of our utopia, would through critical thinking, recognize an issue such as land constraints on housing, and under their own free will decide how to handle these constraints. My final concern with the economic structure of our utopia was the actual feasibility of such a system surviving. I realize that of the four of us involved in this project, none are economic majors, therefore this is something that is hard to address. With that consideration, I would have preferred to stick to broader conceptual ideas, rather than details, when addressing an economic structure.

Having expressed my concerns with economics, I would like to say that I did very much like the idea of "utilizing a potlach-like paradigm…focused more on giving and sharing, rather than…acquiring." I felt this is a very positive section of our economic structure. I also felt the discussion on why we decided to mix a greater market economy with a socialist system was also well done.

Throughout are designs strengths and weaknesses, I feel it must be acknowledged that there were some issues entirely left out. For example, I feel that media is an area of society that is very influential and should have been addressed. Many argue that today, media is the most influential aspect of our culture, more influential than religion or government. So, what role would media play in our utopia. Would it be controlled? This question gets into a nasty debate about censorship and marketplace of ideas, somewhat along the lines of Milton’s Aeropagetica. I personally feel that we would not want to chose to control the media, especially given our focus on critical thinking, which is very conducive to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ concept. So, given that we are not going to control media, what effects to we anticipate in having on society? These questions would have been very tough to address, especially while remaining within the size constraint of this paper. Other issues that could have been addressed include religion and the arts.

Overall, I hope this paper does not present a negative view of our utopia. That is not its purpose, it purpose is, as it is titled, to critique our design. I feel that I have illustrated my point. Perfection is a very difficult thing to achieve, and man will continually find ways to improve himself and his society. I can only hope that in creating our vision of a utopia we brought to light some ideas that can lead to bigger and better concepts in the future.