Arts and Letters Conference

The spiritual partnership of Russian émigré painter Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (1888–1965), which lasted from 1929 to 1934, provides rich material for a student of social and spiritual utopias. This paper is focused on the most intriguing aspect of their activities: the pursuit of a spiritual and geopolitical utopia that Roerich labeled as the Sacred Union of the East. Sponsored by Henry Wallace, in 1934-1935, Roerich embarked on a botanical expedition to north-eastern China and Inner Mongolia, simultaneously having another agenda: launching in Inner Asia a theocracy based on Buddhist and Theosophical ideas. Supported by the United States, this state was envisioned as both a counterbalance to Japan and a blueprint of ideal social and spiritual living with cooperatives in its economic foundation and with an ideology that was to represent a blend of Theosophy and Buddhism. The paper explores the Roerich-Wallace utopian plan in the context of the interwar history, which was heavily infested with totalitarian projects that advocated ultimate solutions to world’s problems. Looked from such a viewpoint, the botanical expedition with a geopolitical and occult twist does not look as bizarre as it has appeared to other authors.

The Sacred Union of the East: Great Depression, New Deal, and Roerich-Wallace Spiritual Utopia

One of the unique Utopian visions put forth in the 17th century was that of Francis Bacon. His New Atlantis portrays a technological Utopia on the fictional island of Bensalem. Although Bensalem’s laws are just and its people generous, Bacon’s emphasis is on how the society is organized with an eye to technological progress. Today, a Baconian society is often thought to be dystopian. Bacon is criticized for neglecting the fact that technology can be used for evil ends and even take on a life of its own, reshaping our world for the worse. Some also criticize Bacon for sounding a battle cry to conquer nature; it is not unusual for these critics to blame him (however indirectly) for everything from nuclear weapons to climate change. In response to these concerns, this paper examines the relationship between virtue and technology in Bacon’s Utopian vision. My aim is to put Bacon into a dialogue with the modern critics of Bacon’s technological optimism and to consider his replies to three recurring objections: that he naively views technology as a morally neutral tool, that he wrongly assumes that technological progress and ethical progress go hand in hand, and that his ambition to conquer nature fails to place sufficient moral limits on the creation and use of technology. I show that Bacon is concerned with the destructive potential of technology but has systematic ethical and metaethical reasons for believing that we will overcome such problems.

Why Bacon’s Utopia is not a Dystopia: Technological and Ethical Progress in The New Atlantis

Dystopia remains an essential genre in modern and postmodern science fiction because it examines the tensions inherent in using science and technology either to stabilize progress or to create a perfect world. Stephen Toulmin’s account of the modern yearning for a stable, rational order beneath the surface variety of life and Isaiah Berlin’s analysis of the conceptual contradictions of utopian thought show the larger intellectual context of two famous dystopias: Evgeny Zamyatin’s We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We uses a fragmented, first-person narration to show the dissolution of the mind of its mathematician narrator as his revolutionary society fractures due to a revolt of passionate chaos. Brave New World uses a representational, third-person narration to present the alienation of the natural in a consumer society seeking the stable satisfaction of individual preferences by applying scientific principles. Together these two works show the irreconcilable tension between the desire for freedom and the desire for order that are the normal justification for Enlightenment utopias, whether those utopias emphasize revolutionary perfection or consumer satisfaction.

The Role of Dystopia: Isaiah Berlin and the Novels of Huxley and Zamyatin

In this essay I will examine technological utopias, in which scientists and technocratic experts wield the power of knowledge and planning in order to produce a harmonious social order in which conflict has been eliminated (examples are Bacon’s New Atlantis, as well as the various Enlightenment utopias of authors such as Condorcet). I argue that one of the central problems with technological utopias is that they transfer decision-making/organizational authority and power over to experts who implicitly presuppose a monistic and quasi-utilitarian conception of the good. Following Berlin, I contend that the irreconcilable conflict of certain core values inevitably undoes any attempt to definitively resolve social antagonisms using scientific/technological means.

Technocracy and Organization:  Utopia and the Question of Value-Pluralism

Though within the literary genre, arriving at utopia often requires travel, from a perspective internal to the utopia described, the liberty to travel often takes a dubious status. As illustrated by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, once established, the introduction of novel customs and ideas into the classical utopian society, via the traveler, can only threaten the stability and justice already achieved. It is on these grounds that severe restrictions on the travels of strangers and citizens about and beyond Bensalem find their justification. Utopias of the 19th and early 20th centuries may appear more palatable to our modern impulses to the extent that restrictions on travel have been lifted. Citizens of H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia, for instance enjoy the utmost freedom of movement. While Wells couches this liberty of travel in terms of acknowledging a natural liberty, I contend that, first because the modern Utopia is global, travel no longer threatens the stability of the State as it might for a geographically, hence culturally, isolated Utopia. Second, Wells’ global Utopia can allow its citizens license to travel as a luxury because the functions and understanding of travel has shifted from an activity pursued predominately for cognitive and cultural purposes to an activity with pursued predominately for leisure.

Traveling in Utopias: Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia

In her book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks relates meeting “a group composed of female Holocaust survivors. They convened at regular intervals, year after year, to read Jane Austen aloud to one another. When they finished a novel, they’d go on to the next one; when they finished them all, they’d start over. Why Austen? [she] asked one of them. Because, [her] informant said, she represents civilization” (55).
This paper explores how Austen “represents civilization” in Sense and Sensibility by exploring how her characters attempt to create and live in their own utopian worlds—one sister in a world of rationality or “sense” and the other in a world of romanticism or “sensibility.” Austen depicts the danger inherent in pursuing utopian ideals and confusing them with reality. These utopian worlds are set up only to be broken down, and her characters learn that they cannot represent reality with idealization and that individuals who try to live these unrealistic visions will fail.
The novel, however, offers a critique of itself: Austen’s fiction works by careful construction of universality, dependent on few specifics of its physicality. Instead, her prose depends heavily on nominalizations which presuppose a number of indispensable idealized forms. The paradox Austen creates is one that offers generalities that demand the reader to supply the specifics. She universalizes the themes embedded in her plot by insisting on the reader’s personalization of the experience to create a utopian vision of the world. Although fictional, the experience offers a civilization which at once displaces the reader yet at the same time offers refuge in its utopian construction, a tension that invites constant rereading.

Civilization: Rereading Austen’s Constructed Utopia

In this essay I discuss how realism operates to constrain works of creative fantasy. Most of the discussion concerns games, especially role-playing games, that take place in a fantasy milieu. I also discuss the role of realism in utopian political philosophy, however, including in particular John Rawls's conception of political theory as a search for a "realistic utopia". Realism plays a surprisingly similar role limiting and informing the content of fantasies in these apparently unrelated domains; Rawls's understanding of realism as a limit on utopian thought illuminates how realism serves as a constraint on fantasy games. I close by suggesting briefly that this discussion of games and politics also illuminates how realism constrains fantasy in works of literary fiction.

Realism as a Constraint on Fantasy

One of the overlooked aspects of political utopianism is the mechanism which brings about the utopia. What brings about the change from the ordinary politics of the present to the utopian state? For Thomas Paine the change is apocalyptic. Paine’s later writing testifies to the sudden birth of reason in the world and foresees its sweeping effect over individual human minds and human societies. He describes reason as an irresistible revelation, an apocalypse. Evaluating the American and French revolutions, Paine identifies the mechanism of change as the rational apocalypse itself. On the one hand, this mechanism of change shatters the coherence of Paine’s comprehensive thought. On the other, Paine’s utopianism is both thought-provoking and cautionary. To what extent can reason enlighten individuals to their true interests in harmony with others? To what extent do utopian plans for society rely on something miraculous or apocalyptic to change human consciousness? Should political utopianism purport to fix the problems of the world now, or is it primarily a device for imagining a better world which future generations might slowly construct?

Utopia and Progress: The Case of Thomas Paine's Apocalypse

Much of Otto Dix’s (1891-1969) artistic practice reflects the traumatic effects of distinct socio-historical experiences: the brutality and inhumanity of the First World War, the depravities of a decadent Weimar society, the oppressive cultural policies of the Third Reich, the horrors of World War II, and the post-war division of Germany into two states, East and West. This paper explores Dix’s late works, considering his use of allegory following the National Socialists’ rise to power and through the postwar period. In order to surmise the functional significance of allegory, it reads Dix’s paintings in light of Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) influential book, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925). Benjamin theorizes that allegory is not merely an “illustrative technique” but rather “a form of expression”; it is not simply a representational mode of modernism but also a modern sensibility.<a title="">[1]</a> Allegory is both the literal and symbolic representation of subject matter that illustrates the chaotic present and attempts to identify the ideal future by referring to, and appropriating, the past.
Because Benjamin’s text is itself a commentary not only on baroque plays but also “on the state of emergency that marked modern Germany from 1918 onwards,”<a title="">[2]</a> that is, since it blurs the distinction between art and life, it can serve as an effective lens for a social-psychological character study of Dix. Many of the artist’s post-1933 paintings reveal his incongruous emotional state, echoing Benjamin’s dialectical sense of allegory as both a melancholic and redemptive mode. Perhaps they allude to Dix’s dystopian foresight about the devastation of humanity and culture to come, yet they can also be interpreted as his conviction in recovery. While at times doubtful of any transformation of contemporary social and political life, Dix maintained faith in the gradual fulfillment of his utopian vision.
<a title="">[1]</a> Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 1977), 162.
<a title="">[2]</a> Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 17.

Confounding Dystopian/Utopian Vision: Otto Dix, Walter Benjamin, and the Allegorical Mode

Terry Pratchett’s series of novels about Discworld—a flat world held up by four elephants and carried through space on the back of a vast turtle—began with a parody of the conventions of fantasy fiction but developed into a satirical, yet eminently humane, examination of modern social conventions, assumptions, and foibles. Pratchett’s Hogfather explores the longing for order, for a utopia in which all the “messiness” of being human no longer disturbs the calm process of the universe. In this novel, the forces of order are represented by the Auditors of Reality, who hire a human assassin to do away with the Hogfather, the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus. The powers of imagination and belief that accrete around this figure are essential, however, to the continuance of life on the Disc, and so the Auditors’ great adversary, Death (an “anthropomorphic personification,” as he refers to himself), steps in to carry out the Hogfather’s duties. Meanwhile, the Auditors’ hired assassin makes his headquarters in the palace of the Tooth Fairy, an unchanging place cast in the image of the perfect homes imagined in generations of children’s artwork. Utopia—the good place, the desired world—is perceived as a realm where imagination is either tidied into predictable patterns or swept away entirely. Here there would be no Hogfather—and no Death. As this paper will discuss, however, such a place is not in fact a good one for human beings, who must, as Death points out, be free to imagine small things (such as gift-giving holiday characters), so that we can imagine the big things (such as justice, mercy, and duty) that enable us to create ourselves as the locus of true utopia, “the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”