BUT IT'S SO WELL-REASONED...:

Back to utopia: Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction? (Joshua Glenn, November 20, 2005, Boston Globe)

[D]uring the Cold War - thanks to Stalinism and the success of such dystopian fables as Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World" and George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four" - all radical programs promising social transformation became suspect. Speaking for his fellow chastened liberals at a Partisan Review symposium in 1952, for example, the theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed what he called the utopianism of the 1930s as ''an adolescent embarrassment."

Niebuhr and other influential anti-utopians of mid-century - Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper - had a point. From Plato's ''Republic" to Thomas More's 1517 traveler's tale ''Utopia" (the title of which became a generic term), to the idealistic communism of Rousseau and other pre- and post-French Revolution thinkers, to Bellamy's ''Looking Backward" itself, utopian narratives have often shared a naive and unseemly eagerness to force square pegs into round holes via thought control and coercion. By the end of the 20th century, most utopian projects did look proto-totalitarian.

In recent years, however, certain eminent contrarians - most notably Fredric Jameson, author of the seminal ''Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (1991) and Russell Jacoby, author most recently of ''The End of Utopia" (1999) and ''Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age" (2005)-have lamented the wholesale abandonment of such utopian ideas of the left as the abolition of property, the triumph of solidarity, and the end of racism and sexism.

The question, for thinkers like these, is how to revive the spirit of utopia - the current enfeeblement of which, Jameson claims, ''saps our political options and tends to leave us all in the helpless position of passive accomplices and impotent handwringers" - without repeating the errors of what Jacoby has dubbed ''blueprint utopianism," that is, a tendency to map out utopian society in minute detail. How to avoid, as Jameson puts it, effectively ''colonizing the future"?

Onlyt the Fall is guarantee against utopianism, because only it correctly asssses human nature.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 20, 2005 4:20 PM