Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism

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This blog post is based on book, Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, 2022) and first appeared at the LSE EUROPP blog. So my book proposes that the history and concepts associated with the utopian tradition can be extremely helpful in the transition to sustainability. The utopian tradition has long relied on the idea that both individual and social happiness rests on substantial social equality, and that such equality in turn rests upon a contempt for vanity and the obsessive consumption of luxury goods. This we glean both from the theory of works like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), but equally from large numbers of practical utopian communal experiments, mostly from the 16th century onwards, in which the price of social harmony has often been calculated in terms of a willingness to place needs above wants, and to discourage excessive consumption. This is a large book on a monumental topic. In recent decades, Gregory Claeys has established himself as one of the leading scholars of the utopian tradition. Across numerous works, from articles and monographs to edited collections and anthologies of primary texts, he has helped to map the complex history of utopianism in European political thought from the early modern world into our own age. This book is a milestone in his career-long quest to make sense of utopianism, its past and its future, its dangers and its possibilities.

These are attainable goals. They are not, by and large, shared by our political leaders. But we can now act to ensure their introduction, and our survival. We must wake them up. The alternative is too terrifying to contemplate. And so we must act now, or forever regret our inaction. See you on the streets.What would your utopian society look like? You argue that the content of utopianism has historically been associated with sociability, equality, and sustainability. But is this contingent or necessary to utopianism? To what extent do you think that utopia–in its various forms–belongs to the left? It seems as though we don’t see many right-wing utopias, even though dystopia is utilized by both sides. Je klik- en zoekgedrag. Als je dit aan of uit zet, doe je dat alleen voor het apparaat waar je dan op zit. Je kan het dus bijvoorbeeld aanzetten op je smartphone en uitzetten op je laptop. Utopia is often wrongly identified with “perfection”, although we find crime, war, slavery and divorce in More’s paradigmatic text. To my mind “perfection” is a concept inherited from theology which ought not to be identified with utopianism, though we do occasionally encounter it in Christian utopianism. (Think of John Humphrey Noyes “Perfectionism” or “Bible Communism” and the Oneida community.) There are some secular equivalents: Condorcet writes of “true perfection of mankind” being achieved when all humanity had achieved a high level of civilisation. But utopias typically take human fallibility into account, and attempt to regulate behaviour without expecting that anyone can ever be “perfect”. They may be “perfectibilist” in the sense of striving for much better societies. But they never end in “perfection”. The psychology of the small group is central here to regulating behaviour without requiring stringent policing and physical punishment. We consent voluntarily to join groups and maintain their norms where we see benefit in so doing. We do not seek to evade the rules or become free riders where we accept that when everyone keeps to the rules the society functions much better. At the same time, our education systems must attempt to foster more co-operative behaviour. Competition has its place, but we must have a much stronger sense of communal ethos if we are to make the sacrifices necessary to creating a sustainable planet.

Everyone interested in the past, present, and future of utopianism will find something of value in this book, as well as things to argue against. Here I want to focus on one point where I diverge from Claeys. Throughout Utopianism for a Dying Planet, and in his others writings on the utopian tradition, Claeys is adamant that it is necessary to draw a distinction between utopianism and science fiction. They are different genres, with different aims and ambitions. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet he makes the point in several places. Science fiction, he writes, is “generally excluded” from his analysis (18n38); elsewhere, he contends that utopian fiction “is a form of fantasy fiction but is closer to the realistic or realizable end of the spectrum, compared with the more extreme fantasy of science fiction” (27). This move follows, in part, from his commitment to the enhanced sociability model of utopianism; he wants to exclude science fiction narratives because, on his account, they do not engage extensively with this topic. As such, they are not serious instances of utopianism. I am not persuaded by this boundary-work.The destruction all around us at a warming rate of 1.2°C will bring us to this end if we remain on our current course. It indicates that the entire global warming narrative of a “sustainable” increase of 1.5-2°C has been false, and misleading. So, we need to achieve warming of below 1°C. And this means more dramatic interventions than any previously mooted. Utopianism Reducing consumerism requires at least twelve strategies. Firstly, we need to end planned obsolescence, or the deliberate design of goods to have the shortest viable shelf-life. Our attitude must be, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley, that mending is better than ending. [ Brave New World (Penguin Books, 1955), p. 49.] Original, punctiliously researched, and erudite, Utopianism for a Dying Planet suggests a possible and potentially effective way of responding to what is increasingly and universally seen as the gravest crisis ever faced by humanity.”—Artur Blaim, University of Gdańsk In what way is utopianism distinct from the broader categories of hope, wishful thinking and the imagination?

There can now be no viable political theory which does not centrally offer an analysis of humanity’s long-term future. And all forms of existing social and political theory which rely on ideas of an indefinite expansion of production, consumption, and population growth, which include most forms of both liberalism and Marxism, are no longer relevant and must be superseded. So we are at a real turning-point in history. What do you believe is the connection between utopia and action? Does utopia help motivate and mobilize in ways that other kinds of messaging do not? Should we, with Marx, be worried that utopia can be counter-revolutionary?Christian Høgsbjerglaunched his new publication for the Socialist History Society on March 27th at 7pm However, energy supply is not the only issue confronting us. Resource depletion, and carbon and other harmful emissions, are crucially the result of the consumption habits of the wealthiest 10% or so of the globe’s inhabitants. Globally the richest 10% generate 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the richest 1%, 80% of that total. Without curtailing this waste we stand no chance of survival. The destruction all around us at a warming rate of 1.2°C will bring us to this end if we remain on our current course. It indicates that the entire global warming narrative of a “sustainable” increase of 1.5-2°C has been false, and misleading. So, we need to achieve warming of below 1°C. And this means more dramatic interventions than any previously mooted. A society defined by belongingness cannot be conjured out of nothing, but must rely on precedents of viable human behaviour. For most of us, by contrast to past utopianism, which has often urged a “return to nature” on the land, city life defines our basic existence. But cities are often unliveable, and created or developed largely for profit rather than for human life. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, August 2022) I conjecture that group theory indicates that neighbourhood identity can provide a vital form of belongingness in large modern cities, to counter the sense of alienation which living in large masses often produces. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades. They will have to become much greener, with many more parks, outdoor plazas, and public meeting places, free of most automobile traffic, and easier to move around in, by free public transportation. Festivals and subsidised communal activities will need to provide many more opportunities to meet and enjoy the company of others – I term this a neo-Fourierist approach, after the famous French socialist Charles Fourier. The future utopia must be made as “attractive” (one of Fourier’s favourite terms) as possible. These features will allow us to compensate for a decline in attachment to luxuries and unsustainable consumption, and the many attendant difficulties and frugality which transition to a sustainable society will entail, by ensuring greater means of self-expression and forms of communal pleasure.

In Part One of the book, I outline a theory which permits the use of the concept of utopia to designate a real or existing state of affairs, in which prominence is given to equality, sustainability, and providing a sense of well-being which I orient around the idea of belongingness. Part Two then surveys the history of the tradition to identify problems of the wider strategy of promoting sustainability by looking at which variants of the tradition have been most successful in promoting a reduction of wants without entailing personal misery on their populations. The psychology of consumerism, and a brief history of its development from the late 18th century, along with the debate on luxury, are also considered. For four reasons I have chosen to portray this response in terms of the long tradition known as utopianism, which dates from the publication of Thomas More’s famous Utopia (1516), but stretches through to early socialism and Karl Marx to the early environmentalist writers and the deeper green thinkers of the 1980s and later. Introducing a world defined by these qualities is of course vastly different from merely imagining their presence. The transition to sustainability will involve many sacrifices, not least by the wealthy who will have to fund most of it. I have in mind a world where the cities where most of us live are made vastly more pleasant places; where a universal basic income ensures the means of life; where public pleasures provide the means of greater sociability; where free public transport alleviates the pain of temporary loss of some long-distance travel; where local communities and local identity become the means of overcoming that creeping alienation which has done so much to define modernity; and where an overwhelming sense of having averted catastrophe unites us as never before. Many of the controversies in this field result from the bewildering variety of definitions attached to “utopia” and “utopianism”, and in particular a reluctance to separate out the three main components of the latter, literary utopias, intentional communities, and utopian ideas or ideologies.Few observers of the ongoing process of environmental degradation will have failed to note that the past summer seems to have been a turning point in our consciousness of the crisis we face. Extreme temperatures throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world, the worst drought in history in China, widespread water shortages, and spiralling energy costs and shortfalls in food supply now offer a grim picture of the likely future to come. Those who follow scientific narratives will have seen the widespread abandonment of any likelihood of keeping to 1.5°C warming, even within this decade. To those minded to join up the dots, forest fires, melting glaciers and icecaps, record temperatures in the Arctic and elsewhere, spell out one narrative: we have reached a turning point in our battle against nature, and we are staring at imminent defeat.