Janie B. Cheaney: Living the dream

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, July 23rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Here’s WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney on utopian fantasies.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: A Quillette article by Ewan Morrison called “The Problem with Utopias” caught my attention and stirred my latent late-sixties hippie. The yearning to “get ourselves back to the garden,” as Joni Mitchell put it, is as old as time. But with the discovery of a New World in 1492, fictional idealism exploded, from Sir Thomas More’s speculative Utopia to Edward Bellamy’s 1892 novel Looking Backward. Some of these were best-sellers, but as literature, they’re all duds.

In his article Morrison asks why we can’t make utopia work even in fiction. Simple answer: no plot. What storyline there is follows an outsider finding his way to some hidden region whose inhabitants live in harmony with nature and each other. There’s no war, no crime, no exploitation, and, in the case of Charlotte Gilman’s Herland, no men. For pages and pages, the protagonist interrogates a wise and patient guide. At the end he must decide whether to stay or return to his own evil time with news of a better world.

In a word, boring. Morrison writes, “Utopian fiction fails because it is fundamentally at odds with human psychology and the human condition.” Fundamentally, we all know it.

But that doesn’t keep dreamers from dreaming of pure equality in an unpolluted, war-free world. We hear echoes of it during every general-election campaign season. Robert Owen, who founded the (short-lived) New Harmony commune on the Wabash River in 1824, wrote that the only thing holding humanity in its miserable state was a failure of imagination. Protestors and stump speakers of today insist it’s a failure of political will. Four thousand years of human history tells us otherwise: if fictional utopias are boring, political ones are both boring and deadly.

Enlightenment idealism led to the French Reign of Terror. Racial idealism fueled the Third Reich. Communist idealism spurred Stalin’s gulag and Mao’s purges. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” is a proverb dating from Enlightenment times, to which anyone at any time could ask, “Where’s the omelet?”

Human sin explains a lot but leaves open the question of why God allowed us to fall in the first place. It’s a question Elwin Ransom, the protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, ponders while witnessing another potential fall in another world. Why open a door to the tragedy of human history and go to such lengths to redeem it all?

What if humanity’s naïve infancy in the garden and our tortuous adolescence ever since are part of a utopian tale, never boring or stale, that only full-grown adults can enjoy? We’re living the true story of real consequences in a complex, gripping plot. Once we reach the happy ending, we’ll want to read it again and again. To God, the story is worth the pain. By that time, we’ll agree with him.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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