Societies of the Future, Utopia, Dystopia or Sparta

Science Fiction is often an expression of humanity's attempt to peer into the future, to foresee what is to come and imagine what the world, and also to better understand our own society and culture by looking both toward the heights and nadirs of human existence. The utopias and the dystopias.

Utopias are the dreams we look for. Dystopias are the nightmares we try to escape. But even the nightmares have a powerful appeal for us, in no small part because nightmares can often seem truer and more plausible than dreams. While dreams may be out of sight and demand more of us, we have learned since children that the world is filled with pitfalls that may easily become the stuff of nightmares.

The classical utopia was simply a perfect society that often served as a philosophical illustration of the steps humanity needed to take to reach this perfect state. Often this meant abolishing conflict, war, private property, jealousy and greed. The message was that for humanity's lot to improve, humanity had to improve as well.

Few of the early utopias were Science Fiction, but concentrated primarily on the virtues of a simple lifestyle, often agrarian or mountain retreats, concerned themselves with proper governance, spiritual growth and human limitation and harmony. From Plato to Sir Thomas More to Edward Bellamy, they followed a relatively similar path, envisioning human society as it should be.

But the line between utopia and dystopia, between dream and nightmare, can be pretty thin. One man's utopia can be another man's dystopia because underneath the surface, utopias are the ultimate tyranny, one man's or woman's way of imagining society as it should be, with no other options or alternatives.

The Behaviorist B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two" was meant to be a utopia, but to many more independent minded readers quickly appears to be a dystopia. A totalitarian behaviorist society. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and the more contemporary movie, "Equilibrium" depict cultures which take a purely biological perspective of humanity, drugging them and training to control behavior while suppressing their emotions.

By contrast Star Trek has traditionally displayed Vulcan, whose inhabitants control their emotions, as wise and enlightened, though lacking in some human qualities. Star Trek Enterprise however has portrayed them as narrow-minded, manipulative and intolerant. The difference is in perspective. A society where people are rigidly controlled or control themselves is one obvious pathway to a utopia, but to those who believe that a core purpose of human society is self-expression and the pursuit of happiness, such a society quickly becomes a dystopia.

The film "Metropolis" by Fritz Lang portrays a dystopian society with stark divisions between the thinkers and the workers. This gap between privileged and working classes frequently recurs in Dystopian literature highlighting the concern over the treatment of workers and lower classes in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such societies , as in Star Trek's Cloud Minders, are typically depicted as near to collapse and easily toppled by a worker's rebellion.

Some dystopias envision stratification based on genetic engineering. The movie "Gattaca" depicts a society of genetic stratification, where those not genetically enhanced are discriminated against. By contrast "Star Trek Deep Space Nine" depicted a society where those who are genetically enhanced are the ones being discriminated against. Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergson" satirically portrayed a society so determined to uphold a median norm, that is suppresses, imprisons and cripples anyone who is above adequate physically or mentally. Mike Judge's "Idiocracy": follows a similar path arguing that genetically, idiots are more likely to outbreed more intelligent people, leading to a future world misruled by idiots. This is itself a takeoff of "The Marching Morons", a Science Fiction short story by Cyril Kornbluth.

Of course such an extreme is itself an endorsement of eugenics. Believers in eugenics, which in the 19th and early 20th century included much of the intellectual elite of the nation, both liberal and conservative, ranging from Theodore Roosevelt to Margaret Sanger, attempted to create a real life utopia or dystopia, by preventing the breeding of 'subnormals' which could and often did include criminals, the poor, the mentally ill and racial minorities. Taken to the extreme eugenics helped justify the Nazi extermination of the mentally ill and unfit babies, as well as giving scientific credence to their genocide of the Jews. The Germans were attempting to create their own vision of utopia, but it was a horrific nightmarish vision that was a nightmare to most of the rest of the world.

Marxism and Communism were also attempts to create life utopias, that ultimately ended in dystopias. George Orwell's two famous books, "Animal Farm" and "1984" both examine the failure of the Soviet experiment, as the ideals of Communism achieve their logical totalitarian conclusion. George Orwell who had gone to Spain to fight for the Republican cause, personally witnessed the way in which the ideals of the struggle became bogged down in petty conflicts and the Soviet desire to ruthlessly exterminate their own ideological allies for minor differences in doctrine. "Homage to Catalonia" was Orwell's real life vision of a promised utopia becoming a dystopia.

The premise of Communism was the class system. The class system dominated political thought in the 20th centuries, only to be increasingly rendered irrelevant when Western countries achieved general prosperity by relying on more automated and mechanical services, as well as outsourcing the cheaper and dirtier labor overseas.

In Science Fiction, dystopias that attempt to replace the working class with mechanical men or creatures, also commonly meet the same fate, as in Karel Capek's "R.U.R." (which coined the term Robot) and "The War Against the Newts." The premise of a mechanical uprising is present in contemporary movies like "I. Robot" and "A.I." and include "Frankenstein" as well as various golem creatures of flesh, crafted to serve mankind.

"The Matrix" presents one of the more striking fables of a machine ruled dystopia. The "Terminator" saga gives us a machine overthrow of humanity leading to humanity becoming a hunted species. In these mechanical revolts, the consequence of allowing ourselves to become dependent on machines is that we become weakened and eventually ripe for overthrow.

A libertarian utopia is an idea that has been pursued in the Science Fiction works of Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. However these utopias are by their very nature often lawless and chaotic, subject to lynch law. Such utopias are premised on a radical interpretation of Patrick Henry, denying any legitimacy for allowing security to take precedence over liberty. Larry Niven's "Anarchy Park" short story however portrays how quickly such societies can degenerate into anarchy and from there into a pre-neolithic state of victims and victimizers without justice or law.

The ultimate libertarian utopia is the survivalist utopia envisioned by Robert A. Heinlein and thousands of Science Fiction writers. The threat of atomic war weighed heavily on the minds of the writers and readers of the Cold War period. The aftermath of such a war was usually envisioned as a horrific scarred landscape piled with the dying and the dead. To the survivalist libertarian utopia, atomic war often represented a means to sweep away the corrupt and rotten bureaucratic and urban culture, replacing it with a more Jeffersonian agrarian state, devoid of law and order, with only the law of the gun. Such narratives are arguably ways to dispose of a multicultural societies and the social and political evolution of the United States, replacing it with a romanticized frontier society of Early America.

In "Thor's Hammer" Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, a band of survivors depart the more urban environments and pursue a rural life, complete with a nuclear reactor, while fighting off a black cannibal army. In Robert Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold" a while family is thrown forward in time to a post-apocalyptic society of black cannibals. Such casual racism is often a common compartment of the survivalist narrative.

These same writers however have also given us the utopia as sparta. Like sparta such societies are often heavily armed and always prepared for battle using ruthless measures. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Oath of Fealty" portrays a mini-society which segregates itself within a section of Los Angeles and views outsiders as aliens and mercilessly kills them. Jerry Pournelle's "Prince of Sparta" and "Go Tell the Spartans" all overflow with admiration for a modeled Spartan society.

The gap between utopia and dystopia is more often a matter of perspective. To the urban dweller, a simple rural life enforced may well be a dystopia, as in Star Trek Deep Space Nine's "Paradise", while to the rural dweller an urban lifestyle may be its own dystopia as well. Nationalist and socialist movements attempt to craft real life utopias for their followers, that quickly become totalitarian dystopias for everyone else. For as long as humanity is imperfect, utopia is beyond us, but dystopia never is.