ABlog

What would it feel like to live in a world that was on the bumpy two-lane highway of repair, not the expressway to destruction?

I often wonder about this, precisely because it’s so hard to imagine. I’m conscious of having an inner map of the world (something like the famous old New Yorker cover that depicts a Manhattanite’s highly schematic outlook on the rest of the world) and it’s all about damage, injustice, unnecessary cruelty, impending catastrophe—I mean that these are the controlling images, never mind the fact that what of course interests me is the response: the resistance, the refusal, the spark of an alternative. I can start from the other direction and map the things I love—but my “favorite things” are all under threat from the negative forces that are in the driver’s seat.

So I what I want to know right now is not: what would it feel like to live in a perfect world? How will human beings perfect ourselves after the revolution?—but: what would it feel like to live in a world where a large amount of many people’s creative energies would, as a matter of course, be directed to addressing the basic, planet-threatening problems of ghastly economic inequalities, unchecked state violence, and a trashed environment? (Perhaps these can all be boiled down to one: the fact that so many of earth’s inhabitants have been tacitly designated un-persons—“untermenschen,” to use the word famously employed by a member of the British contingent of occupying forces in Iraq to describe the Americans’ contemptuous attitude toward the natives.)

It doesn’t seem like so much to ask for, does it?

What would it feel like to have that reassurance, that rock bottom sense of security?—not “the right people are in charge,” not “Good has triumphed over Evil,” but “we are working together, doing the best we can—if there is a way out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, together we will find it.”

What would it feel like to believe that one’s own small effort, added together with many others, could amount to something? Not to anticipate, almost as a matter of course, that the garden one tends this year is inevitably going to be plowed under for the construction of luxury condos next year, or spoiled by an invasion of genetically modified plants, or scorched by the vicious summers of global warming, or stripped by desperate populations on the prowl for scraps of food and firewood.

By describing my own internal world-map and the one I wish I could replace it with, I realize I’ve given a sense of my own personal imaginary that doesn’t necessarily say much about other people’s internal maps. I tend to assume everybody has them; I wish I could see what some others are like. Maybe there are a lot of other people out there whose maps resemble my ideal one, i.e. they believe we are in the process of building a better world. I would guess that a lot of those people are religious, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that they believe God is in the process of building a better world—there’s comfort, I suppose, in relinquishing “our” responsibility for what happens.

And then there are the true believers on the political front, including Bushies and members of Thomas Friedman’s Flat Earth Society. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, John Gray reviews Friedman’s The World Is Flat (“The World Is Round,” NYRB, August 11, 2005), observing: “[Friedman] never connects the growth of [a] netherworld of the relatively poor with the advance of globalization. At times his failure to connect is almost comic. Recalling his visit to the Infosys headquarters in Bangalore, Friedman writes: The Infosys campus is reached by a pockmarked road, with sacred cows, horse-drawn carts, and motorized rickshaws all jostling alongside our vans. Once you enter the gates of Infosys, though, you are in a different world. A massive resort-size swimming pool nests amid boulders and manicured lawns, adjacent to a huge putting green. There are multiple restaurants and a fabulous health club. Friedman notes in passing that the Infosys campus has its own power supply. He does not ask why this is necessary, or comment on the widening difference in standards of life in the region that it represents.” (p. 14)

Gray seems to be faulting Friedman for ignoring the fact that globalization offers no insurance against the continued destitution of millions; he might have gone further to consider in what ways the same forces that are behind this plastic paradise are actually generating new forms of poverty. (I can’t resist adding that the unconscious self-revelation in the Friedman quote—he practically seems to drool over the yuppie amenities he observes—puts me in mind of a similarly revealing comment by New School President Bob Kerrey, an early Iraq war advocate; attempting to justify his stance to skeptical students and faculty, he reminded his audience that force had worked out well in another case, namely the bombing of Bosnia, which had been so successful that now, a short while later, one could actually go shopping there!)

But I don’t really believe most people (let’s just say most North Americans, to narrow the vast generalizations down a bit) feel that kind of collective optimism. And yet I don’t think most people are totally resigned to the values of a dog-eat-dog, “free market” world, either. I think that many people cope by narrowing the scope of their cooperative, constructive activity to “private life,” especially “the family.” We are all encouraged to think that, because the larger arena is hopeless, we can at least carve out a haven, a shelter, a sphere of influence, a backyard—a scrap of private emotional property where we may hope to cultivate the garden long enough to see the trees bear fruit.

In some sense, it is the possibility of even aspiring to, let alone demanding, the radical democracy implied in my notion of large numbers of people coming together to wrestle with the planet’s most basic problems that has come to seem far-fetched, utopian. This is the mindset that political economists on the Left refer to as TINA—There Is No Alternative. In order for capitalism to install its projected Thousand Year Reich, it need not demonstrate its advantages over any other system—only inculcate the dogma of TINA, in the name of which any atrocity can be made to seem routine.

The July-August issue of Monthly Review has an interesting piece by Bertell Ollman, “The Utopian Vision of the Future (Then and Now): A Marxist Critique.” Ollman appreciates the role of utopian thinking in mobilizing the imagination to get people out of the mindset that says what currently exists is inevitable; at the same time, he warns that projecting a utopian scheme unconnected to the present—in other words, positing an ahistorical Never-Never Land—risks creating an imaginary disconnect between what exists and what one would like to exist, such that the impossibility of getting from here to there is only underscored.

Ollman’s piece leads me to wonder about the status of the utopian novel today. Can one imagine any utopian novel having the success of Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Backward (published in 1890)? Ollman notes cannily that the most influential 20th century “utopias” were satires of the planned society: Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. He doesn’t, however, take on the more ambiguous utopian-edged fictions of the 1960’s and 1970’s, such as Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres and Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, which remind us that utopia is often closely paired with apocalypse (going all the way back to the millennial thinking of European Christians in the Middle Ages).

It seems to me that the age of naïve utopias—the ones that assumed an “ideal” society could be brought into being simply because it had been described--has definitively passed. (I could be wrong, though—a mere quarter century ago, Sally Miller Gearhart published her popular feminist utopia The Wanderground, which with its sentimental assumptions about the inherent goodness of people with vaginas is about as naïvely disconnected from any possible actual future as one could hope to get.) We’ve seen too many fine blueprints that came to naught and read too many “utopian” satires. Perhaps that touch of apocalypse is what we require to redeem utopia, rather like the way in which the sentimentality of a movie like Million Dollar Baby is supposed to be redeemed by its hero’s hard-boiled persona.

I wonder what might be the third term linking outright utopian fiction (to put it baldly, let’s say fiction that poses an alternative world order, i.e. an alternative to capitalism) and fiction that merely exposes the intolerable nature of what exists. Perhaps that middle term is the key to mobilizing the imagination’s appetite for something new while heeding Ollman’s caution that the new has to be grounded in existing reality.

I have almost completed a novel in which a “revolution” is fomented by characters who cannot believe in the possibility of replacing What Is with something good, and therefore opt instead for “sort of a guided crash landing.” They argue that simply halting the madness, “crashing the Construct,” is all we can hope for; it will then be up to future generations to make something positive out of the hard-won fact of bare human survival on the planet. I might call this an apocalyptic novel touched with utopianism; however it gets labeled, I find it deeply disturbing that its scenario is, to me, almost overly optimistic. I am in total agreement with what I understand of the Marxist critique of capitalism, the inevitable engine of destruction for untold millions of lives. I view Rosa Luxemburg’s formula “Socialism or Barbarism” as an accurate description of the future we face. I just can’t envision a practical route out of barbarism. I can’t imagine how we can get there from here.

Thus it is that a story about people figuring out how to sabotage the world order, like Sampson pulling the building down around his ears, has become my venture into utopia—my most optimistic answer to the purveyors of TINA.

Running Tab

8/23/05: Has anybody yet compared what Cindy Sheehan started in Crawford, TX to the efforts of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (the Argentinian mothers who protested the “disappearing” of their children under a right-wing junta)? Much needs to be said about maternal symbolism and the effects of gender throughout this remarkable protest. I find it fascinating that the effort seems to be open to everyone, yet women and the special status of motherhood are so clearly key. (What if Casey’s father had been the one to camp out in Crawford? How would the coverage and resonance have been different?) Kudos to Cindy Sheehan for effectively evoking the imagery of a pieta without (at least in statements I’ve encountered) resorting to obnoxious claims about the natural moral superiority and peace-loving nature of people with wombs.