Utopia Continued

 Exploring Utopias in grade school and junior high school is obviously not necessarily meant to be applied to real life settings. Rather, they seem to function more as exercises in understanding the kinds of values that matter the most in one's life. Bacon's New Atlantis is an example of a "Utopia" which envisions a just society that is based on the freedom to experiment given shared resources and property. Bacon expounds the many ways that leaders can encourage the free expansion of knowledge by allowing everyone equal share to resources as well as free rein of ideas. Could such a Utopia ever be realized? It may certainly not, but the free range of imagination can allow people to "try on" the kinds of worlds they  think they might want to have.
   While I say this, however, I am somewhat haunted by my previous blog entry, where I talked about the downside of Utopias. I recall in high school reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and being assigned a group project where we are put into groups to design a perfect "island society" based on our different skills and interests. We later had to determine who gets to "stay" on our island and who gets to "leave", faced with shrinking resources . As a seventeen year old at time, I had so much confidence in what  had to offer the world, so it never occurred to me that I would be the "one" to be booted off the island. I wasn't this time, and it turned out later that the outcasts formed their own society which invaded the others.
    Utopias are fraught with the tension between desire and control. I desire a perfected "free" world that represents all the finest that I can imagine. But in order to sustain such an imagination, I need to control or dampen something else. This kind of tension is what always makes Utopia one step away from the worst hell imaginable.
   Perhaps one take home for students when exploring these strange worlds is to recognize that there is a difference between the "perfection" of one's mind and the lived interaction of many minds. It also reminds people that there is a disparity between thinking and living which no Utopian vision quite surmounts. The hard labor that supports the life of the mind is always shrinking in the distance, receding and never quite integrated into the Utopian vision.