Fundamentos de la enseñanza de la historia en la práctica de mariana

I. Introduction

The emergence of the category of a "critical dystopia" following on the de-velopment of the category of the "critical Utopia" made me aware of a label I have used with increasing frequency in my bibliography British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, particularly in the unpublished post-1985 supplement.¹ That label is the flawed Utopia and refers to works that present what appears to be a good society until the reader learns of some flaw that raises questions about the basis for its claim to be a good so-ciety. The flawed Utopia tends to invade territory already occupied by the dystopia, the anti-utopia, and the critical Utopia and dystopia. The flawed Utopia is a subtype that can exist within any of these subgenres. Thus, I make no pretence of having discovered a new subgenre.2

I have always argued that Utopias are not descriptions of perfect places.³ And J. C. Davis has argued in his Utopia and the Ideal Society that the Utopia reflects "the collective problem: the reconciliation of limited satis-factions and unlimited desires within a social context" (36). While I have disagreements with Davis, here he catches the problem nicely. This might lead one to conclude that even such classic eutopias as Thomas More's Utopia and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward are necessarily "flawed."

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But this conclusion misses the point that while neither "perfect" people nor a "perfect" society designed for imperfect people is the norm in Utopian literature, the norm is certainly not a society presented as good but deeply flawed. Rather, it is a good or significantly better society that provides a generally satisfactory and fulfilling life for most of its inhabi-tants. The range of mechanisms for achieving that goal is immense, but the label "flawed Utopia" is inappropriate for all of them.

That label fits two categories of works. The first is more numerous and shows the ultimately dystopian nature of apparent perfection. Within this subset, a common trope is to demonstrate that the reason/perfection of computers/machines is anti-human. The other category, which is the focus of this essay, poses the fundamental dilemma of what cost we are willing to pay or require others to pay to achieve a good life. If someone must suffer to achieve that good life, is the cost worth paying?

There is a strong tradition in the literature on Utopias, one that is at the root of much anti-utopianism, which insists that the cost is inevitably too high.4 The anti-utopian argument is that there is a fatal flaw in the makeup of the human being, a failure of nerve perhaps, or too much nerve. Accord-ing to this argument, Utopians behave as follows: First, they develop a plan, a blueprint for the future. Second, they attempt to put the plan into opera-tion and find it does not work because other people are unwilling to accept it, it is too rational for human nature, or it is out of touch with current re-alities. Third, knowing they are right, the Utopians do not reject the plan, but reject reality. They attempt to adapt people to the plan rather than the plan to people. Fourth, such action inevitably leads to violence, to the movement from an attempt to encourage people to adapt the plan to forc-ing them to change to fit the plan. Fifth, in the end, the plan or Utopia fails, and a new one is tried. Utopia is thus the ultimate tragedy of human exis-tence, constantly holding out the hope of a good life and repeatedly failing to achieve it. Against this, I have argued that while the anti-utopian posi-tion identifies a serious problem (people who are willing to impose their Utopia on others), this is not a problem with utopianism per se.5 But the flawed Utopia is not generally about these authoritarian figures; it is about the rest of us.

In this essay, I reflect on the issues raised by the "flawed Utopia" and suggest that those issues are both common and important in utopianism. I also argue that understanding them gives us a more nuanced understanding of the sig-nificance of utopianism as a way of looking at contemporary social problems.

II. The Costs of Eutopia Are Too High

Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" typifies the flawed Utopia that asks questions of us, since the existence of the story's

The Problem of the "Flawed Utopia" • 227 Utopian society depends on the sacrifice of one child. Those who leave Omelas say no; those who stay apparently say yes.6 The subtitle of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is "(Variations on a Theme by William James)" and in the note to the story in her The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), Le Guin quotes two passages from James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life":

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept per-manently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture [Le Guin changes this word to "torment"] ,7 what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing it would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? (144, qtd. in Le Guin 224)

Although this statement plays only a peripheral role in the essay, James is arguing that we must calculate the costs and benefits of our actions to pro-duce the greater good. Thus, it is fair to conclude that James might argue that the child's suffering in Le Guin's story is justified by the creation of eu-topia for everyone else. In this case, since it is impossible to meet all human needs and desires, some of them must be ignored. How better to calculate what can be ignored than by weighing the happiness of the multitude against the suffering of one?

Le Guin also indicates that she had forgotten about a similar theme in The Brothers Karamazov.i She labels the issue as concerning the problem of the "scapegoat," and clearly the problem of the scapegoat was a central issue in the twentieth century in the form, "Who is to blame?" For German National Socialists, Jews were the primary reason that Germany was not as great as it deserved to be. In the United States, blame has been placed vari-ously on Jews, African Americans, immigrants, bankers, the United Na-tions, and communists, among others, by various groups at various times to explain/excuse one problem or another. Each of these examples is cur-rently used as a scapegoat by some group in the United States.9

But Le Guin puts a different twist on this familiar theme and, in doing so, turns it into a much more interesting issue in which the word "scape-goat" seems misplaced. Rather than blaming someone for current prob-lems or failures, she and James ask the crucial question, Would and should we be willing to punish someone or allow someone to suffer if to do so we would produce a good life for everyone else?

Dostoevsky has Ivan Karamazov assert that neither truth nor harmony (read eutopia) is worth the suffering of a child. He says, "I absolutely re-nounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one

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tormented child," and he goes on, "if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole truth is not worth such a price" (245).

Le Guin, James, and Dostoevsky are raising questions about our behav-ior because in modernity people suffer so that others can live in the mater-ial eutopia of the world's developed countries. The sufferers include virtually everyone in the Third World but, of course, more specifically those who, from economic necessity, must work in sweatshop or worse conditions to produce the goods we purchase. They also include all those who must breathe polluted air and drink polluted water so that the prices we pay do not have to be raised to cover a clean environment in producing countries, or even consuming countries. And they include the children who are sold into prostitution to satisfy the sexual tourist. And in many de-veloped countries, like the United States, racial and ethnic minorities suf-fer from unwillingness to provide the resources needed to improve their condition because doing so might reduce the standard of living of the rest of us.

Most people today seem to be happy to stay in Omelas. When asked if they would be willing to lower their standard of living so that people in the Third World could raise theirs, most Americans say "No." In fact, many take the position that the Third World should restrict its development so as not to further negatively affect the environment in the developed world.

Thus, the choice is made that others should pay the costs of material eu-topia. One could argue that by rejecting the Kyoto Agreement, the Bush administration made this official U.S. policy.

Of course, most people do not believe that children should be sold into prostitution for use by sexual tourists and support laws to punish the tourist in the hope that as a result the practice will go away. It will not, but solving the problem of Third World poverty that leads to child prostitution (which also exists in the developed world for similar reasons) is seen as too complex, too difficult, or even impossible.

But we must remember that there are eutopians who address all the problems outlined above and conclude that those who now benefit should pay the costs of eutopia rather than the suffering child. Perhaps these are the people who walk away from Omelas so as not to benefit from the suf-fering of the child. And perhaps there are a revolutionary few who choose to stay in Omelas to convince the others living there that all their lives will actually be better if the suffering of the child is eliminated. To me this is the force of the second passage from James that Le Guin quotes: "All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the

The Problem of the "Flawed Utopia" 229 lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend" (144, qtd. in Le Guin 224). It is possible to change; it is possible to behave in new and better ways. It is even possible that Ivan Karamazov is right.

Yet, there are still others who require us to think carefully about the cal-culation of cost. In Walden Two, B. R Skinner sees a benefit where I and other readers see a cost.10 Skinner clearly saw Walden Two as a eutopia, but many readers have seen it as a dystopia because the inhabitants of the com-munity are manipulated by its leaders without their knowledge, let alone consent. Skinner contends that in order to achieve happiness we must give up the fiction that we are free.11 Only then, and with the correct applica-tion of behavioral engineering, will it be possible to lead a good life.

Another example poses a greater problem for me personally because I find the eutopia immensely appealing. In Island by Aldous Huxley, chil-dren who are identified as having certain physical/psychological charac-teristics that might produce "Little Hitlers" and "Little Stalins" are given training designed to offset these characteristics and channel their energies and talents into socially useful rather than socially destructive directions.

To me this raises the possibility of someone giving in to the temptations of power and using these techniques to manipulate people for personal rather than social benefit. Of course, the process is supposed to make this impossible.

Huxley was well aware of the potential problem and Pala, the eutopia in Island-, is full of devices designed to allow people to cope with or eliminate the temptation. Because we are all flawed, eutopia must be designed to allow us to correct those flaws, but that process itself produces a flawed Utopia.

III. Utopia and/as Tragedy

In one of the fundamental elements of Greek tragedy, each individual is born into a specific role {moira or allotted portion) in a well-structured so-ciety. But through hubris or pride, individuals break through the bound-aries containing them. These are the heroes and heroines, larger-than life figures who are unwilling to be limited to the normal, the acceptable, who challenge the given, the "way things are." Because of who they are and what they do, they are fated to meet their nemesis and are punished for their ef-frontery, their challenge to the established order. Utopians and the Utopias they create, on paper and in practice, are like these heroes and heroines.

They challenge the normal and proclaim that people do not have to live lives of "quiet desperation." They say that life can be richly fulfilling, if only enough people insist that poverty, disease, and degradation are not the portion allotted to human beings.

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Utopians say that challenging the gods or the power structures is essen-tial. In Genesis 2:9, Eve sets the human race free from the animal-like exis-tence that God had prepared for her and Adam by recognizing that "the knowledge of good and evil" is essential to being human. Eve is the first rebel and the first creator of a flawed Utopia. God clearly overreacts and harshly punishes Adam, Eve, and the serpent for the heinous crime of dis-obedience, thus setting the stage for all the eutopias to come. God con-demns women to pain in childbirth and subservience to their husbands and men to labor and death (Genesis 3:16-19). Clearly, many Utopias are concerned with overcoming the curse of the Fall and hark back to the Gar-den of EGar-den. Others insist that eutopia can be created within the bound-aries set by God's punishment or contend that some aspect of the punishment, such as subservience to men, can be overcome.

We must commit eutopia knowing that it is not perfect and that, like the ideal polls in Plato's Republic, it contains within it the seeds of its own de-struction. We must commit eutopia again and again because each time we do we have the opportunity, as Oscar Wilde put it, of landing there and then setting off after another. Wilde concludes that "progress is the realiza-tion of Utopias" (27), and while we believe in progress much less than in Wilde's day, not believing in the possibility of betterment, however flawed, condemns us to live in someone else's vision of a better life, perhaps one forced on us. As a result, denying eutopia ensures that we live in dystopia.

Notes

I.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

9.

10.

11.

On critical dystopia, see Baccolini, Moylan, Scraps; on critical Utopia, see Moylan, Demand.

For my definitions of the standard types of Utopia, see Sargent, "Three Faces" 9. See also Sargent, "Eutopias and Dystopias."

See, for example, Sargent, "A Note on the Other Side" and "Three Faces."

See, for example, Popper.

See Sargent "Authority and Utopia" and "Three Faces."

On "Omelas," see the essays in the special issue of Utopian Studies 2.1-2 (1991).

In a letter to the author of 30 January 2001 Le Guin wrote that the change was uninten-tional and that she did not know if it came from a corrupt text, her typing error, or a type-setting error.

On Le Guin and Dostoevsky, see Knapp and Tschachler.

See Sargent, Extremism in America.

See, for example, Stillman.

On fictions of this sort, see Bentham.

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Bentham, Jeremy. "The Theory of Fictions." Bentham's Theory of Fictions. Ed. C. K. Ogden. Pater-son: Littleneld, 1959.

The Problem of the "Flawed Utopia" 231

Davis, J. C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700. Cam-bridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

New York: Vintage, 1990.

Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: Harper, 1962.

James, William. "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." The Works of William James. Vol. 6.

Ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979. 141-62.

Knapp, Shoshona." 'The Morality of Creation.' Dostoevsky and William James in Le Guin's 'Ome-las.'" journal of Narrative Technique 15.1 (1985): 75-81.

Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a Theme by William James)." The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper, 1975.

Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London:

Methuen, 1986.

. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder: Westview, 2000.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 4th ed. rev. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. "Authority and Utopia: Utopianism in Political Thought." Polity 14.4 (1982): 565-84.

. British and American Utopian Literature, 1516—1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliog-raphy. New York: Garland, 1988.

. "Eutopias and Dystopias in Science Fiction: 1950-75." America as Utopia. Ed. Kenneth M.

Roemer. New York: Burt Franklin, 1981. 347-66.

—. "A Note on the Other Side of Human Nature in the Utopian Novel." Political Theory 3.1(1975): 88-97.

."The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian Studies 5 A (1994): 1-37.

, ed. Extremism in America: A Reader. New York: New York UP, 1995.

ill 1948 , ed. Extremi

Skinner, B. F. Walden Two. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Stillman, Peter. "The Limits to Behaviorism: A Critique of B. F. Skinner's Social and Political Thought." American Political Science Review, 69.1 (1975): 202-13.

Tschachler, Heinz. "Forgetting Dostoevsky; or, The Political Unconscious of Ursula K. Le Guin."

Utopian Studies2.l-2 (1991): 63-76.

Wilde, Oscar. The Soul of Man under Socialism. 1891. Boston: Luce, 1910.

CONCLUSION