Abstract Utopia

Back to utopias, this is my favourite Anne Coulter interview because it starts with a basic question that she just can't answer, what would America look like if she had her way.

Yes, she gave an answer to the question. It would look like New York in the Republican Democratic Convention, everyone would be Christian, Republican and would support America. But she never said what the economy would be like, how society would be ordered, etc.

This to me is the most basic kind of Utopia: society would be better if everyone belonged to Group A, and the agenda and activities of group A is seem as less important than the sheer fact of it's existence.

The problem in all ideal societies is what to do with outsiders. Some people seem to believe that society would be better without dissenting voices. This to me is insufficient, because it is impossile, and so often, the plan to fix society seems to end at removing the opposition.

My plan for perfecting society is of the slightly more developed model where difference is made into the essence of the society. This is good because such a society could harness its whole power and potential.

Let's say we have a society like The Culture in Iain M Banks' novels. There is no want, no sufferring, people live as long as they want, there's no hierarchy and if a group wants to go off and do its own thing, it can. All action is therefore helpful to The Culture: even groups that try to leave the Culture can't fully reject their background and contactswith wider society and end up just spreading Culture society further in their attempt to escape.

This is good in that it means the category of the outsider disappears while the outsider as a person remains. But if society is complete in such a way, then the activity of individuals can no longer be put towards building a better society. If human activity is no longer to be understood as socially constructive then I would argue that humans lose their way of understanding themselves as a part of society. Similarly, in a society with no taboos and no possibility of shame it becomes impossible for people to make themselves vulnerable to other people.

Emotional vulnerability is, ironically, a necessary characteristic of communication between humans. We always feel closest to people when we've been through bad times together than show us something of our nature.

Banks' answer to this is that his Culture engages in massive expenditure for romantic reasons. For instance its "war over principles" with the Idirans that put its very nature at risk. But where the perfect society finds the negativity in what is external to itself it creates a possibility that its citizens will align themselves with the negative rather than the positive. As the very essence of humanity is found in what is outside of society, those who have never been able to work towards a goal will be drawn to it.

The perfect society therefore starts to fall into violence in the moment it is created. Something more is needed to properly perfect society.