"The schemes of these utopian Luddites will lead to chaos or even anarchy."

^{(Back to Basics #12)}         

Okay, none of my students ever actually turned in to me the line, "The schemes of these utopian Luddites will lead to chaos or even anarchy!" I made it up for this essay. But it brings together three prime examples of the silencing of arguments by distorting the meaning of words.

         One can argue that utopian schemes always fail, or, if they succeed, they inevitably lead to horrors. Indeed, that is the anti-utopian position and part of the premise of that very great work of anti-utopian literature, Aldous Huxley's 1932 Brave New World.

         But the dangers of utopia are part of an argument to be made, and no arguments get made if dismissing an idea as "utopian" ends the discussion.

         In Utopian Studies, a eutopia is a good place. Not perfect, but good, as, for example in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) — or in Aldous Huxley's Island (1962). That's what the word eutopia means, Good Place: from the Greek "eu" for "good" and "topos" for place.

         Similarly a dystopia is a bad place ("dys": bad); and a utopia … is complicated. Thomas More committed a pun in his name for his imaginary island, one directed at fellow Humanists and a few others who could read his Latin and knew Greek. "Utopia" sounds like "eutopia," but also "outopia," with "ou" meaning "not": Utopia is the Good Place That Is No Place.

         There have been utopias that pushed blueprints for the perfect society — a lot of them in the 19th century; and many utopias from Plato's Republic to More's look to us horrifically totalitarian. And one can argue that utopian projects necessarily lead to tyranny and/or large-scale violence; and such arguments have been made. 

 However, one can also begin an argument with some version of Oscar Wilde's assertion that "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at […]," and insist on the importance of political idealism and/or having some sort of specific goal(s) for social change. Arguably, a weakness of the 1960s New Left was the reluctance to talk about the society we wanted to build "the day after the Revolution."

         Again, my point is that these are points for argument, not to be silenced with a loaded word.

         Matters are worse with "anarchy" and "Luddite," often opposed to "civilization" and "progress."

         Anarchy is social organization without formal government, a society without a state, and it was the human condition on Earth until the rise of civilization at most some 7000 years ago.

         In Leviathan (1651, ch. 13), Thomas Hobbes elegantly and famously said that humans under anarchy, in a "state of nature," lived with "no letters; no society; [… in] continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man [was], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (ch.13).<>. And there are anthropologists who can quote at you solid data indicating that early humans apparently did live with a high risk of getting murdered, and that nonstate societies had shockingly high death rates from primitive warfare.

         Far less famously than Hobbes, Lewis Mumford argued in "Utopia, The City and the Machine" (1965) that for the majority of people the anarchy of Neolithic village life, if conservative and kind of boring, was a pretty good thing — certainly better than the life of most civilized folk under various "archies," often monarchy as the rule of a god-king or divine-right king:

 In the beginning, in the story Mumford accepts, the Neolithic village was […] composed of […] people (in village-size numbers) who lived democratically: with "no ruling class" [no] exploiting others, "no compulsion to work for a surplus the local community" couldn't use, "no taste for idle luxury," no private property, no "exorbitant desire for power," and nothing we would consider warfare: a golden age (Mumford 4), a variety of paradise (18). On the other hand, again in the story Mumford accepts, the common people of a Bronze Age city generally experienced city life in terms of "total submission to a central authority, forced labor, lifetime specialization, inflexible regimentation, one-way communication, and readiness for war." Mumford sums up their condition as that of a population of constantly scared people, "galvanized into corpselike obedience with the constant aid of the mace, the whip, and the truncheon" (17). Mumford's characterization may be […] sensationalized, but [… the] Hebrews in Egypt were ordinarily treated no worse than the native-born Egyptians, and my barely civilized ancestors saw themselves in Egypt as slaves.  {From R. D. Erlich's Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (ch. 10) 

         William Shakespeare in 2 Henry VI in the late 16th c. and John Dryden in the late 17th depicted social disruption if royal power were undermined and "drawn to the dregs of a democracy" ("Absalom and Achitophel," lines 224-27). Things haven't worked out that way. The mildly democratic American Republic has been pretty orderly most of the time — if bellicose — and the firmly democratic Swiss have been downright stodgy and of late very peaceful, though well disciplined and armed to the teeth.

         Similarly, a modern, industrialized communist-anarchy might be peaceful and have as its main problem — as Ursula K. Le Guin suggests inThe Dispossessed (1974) — the tendency to rigidify into a well-concealed elite and overly conservative general population.

         Hobbes sensationalizes uncivilized life and is way too keen on near-absolute monarchy; Mumford romanticizes the Neolithic village. And Le Guin was writing "An Ambiguous Utopia" and science-fiction novel. Anarchy may be a utopian dream — and therefore useful and to be thought with and about, not merely dismissed by using the word as a synonym for "chaos."

         Finally, the Luddites.

         If you question technological progress and refuse to move on to the New!! Improved!!! next generation of whatever — e.g., switch from e-mail ("so 20th-century") to "a fully-apped iPhone," as the daughter of a friend has recommended — there's a fair chance you'll be teased as a "Luddite." If you oppose various kinds of automation and computerization, there's a good chance you'll be attacked in earnest as a Luddite.

         The literal, historical Luddites had a point.

         "The Luddites were a social movement" starting in 1811 of "English textile artisans who protested – often by destroying mechanised looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life."

         The power looms did threaten the independence, artisanal skills, and incomes of the weavers. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution threatened reducing many skilled workers to factory hands — and in many cases, the threat was fulfilled.

         In the long run, the world is a better place for machine production. Humans, however, don't live "in the long run," and the couple centuries of the industrial era produced urban and rural proletariats that were often miserable.

         By the end of the 1990s, the developed world saw the industrialization of a good deal of office work and the movement into a post-industrial era, one of automation and robotics and greatly increased productivity.

         Ours, too, may be a time for "Luddite" questioning. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. contributed to that questioning with his first novel, the automation dystopia Player Piano (1952). In a recent Atlantic article, Bill Davidow asks, "Are Workers Too Productive?" and suggests that "the efficiency boost from technology could make labor super cheap and destroy wages."

         If the first and second industrial revolutions had machines replacing the power of big muscles and the skills of craftsmen like weavers and (later) machinists, what is next? Who will be replaced by the cybernetic/robotic revolution?

         Or, if we're not left "without work," is there a chance of advanced machines — cybernetic devices — "changing" our "way of life" in ways we don't like? Really, and legitimately don't like.

         That's too pressing and important an issue to be dismissed with a cry of "Luddite!"

         Utopians can be dangerous. A large number of the anarchists I've encountered at demonstrations have been pretty obnoxious people, bad for the movement. Jobs that can be done by machines probably should be done by machines.

         Still: utopian thought is necessary for serious political analysis; anarchists like Prince Petr Kropotkin provide a useful critique of government; and some devices (traffic cameras used as "profit centers" come to mind) could well be smashed.