Crash Course: Political Theory

Before EPCOT was a Florida theme park that packs in ten million sweaty tourists a year, Walt Disney imagined it a little differently.

His Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow would be a new city built from the ground up with its twenty-thousand residents in mind.

There would be no cars and no unemployment.

Oh, and the whole thing would be under a climate-controlled dome, so Floridas heat and humidity couldnt encroach on anyones bliss.

But when Walt Disney died, his utopian dream died with him.

EPCOT became this instead.

[carnival music] And this story got me wondering: how good is too good to be true?

Is political utopia justtoo utopian?

Hi!

I'm Ellie Anderson and this is Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] So, okay, obviously EPCOT wasnt the first time someone had dreamed of a better world and fallen short.

But the deeper I dug, the more I realized how radically different our visions of utopia can be.

And boy do they reveal interesting things about who we are.

I started in the beginning, with Platos Republic, the OG work of western political theory, which is also a utopian blueprint for how good things could be if only. When Plato was just a young buck philosophizing about politics, he witnessed thirty leaders turn out to be thirty tyrants.

So he entertained a thought that countless others have thought after him: Government sucks, and we can do better. Plato thought this sucky situation was curable by putting philosophers in power.

He made his case: philosophers love wisdom, they hate lies, theyre pleasant, theyre brave, they learn fast, they have a good memory.

He forgot to say we have impeccable fashion sense, but don't worry, I added that in my copy.

Anyway, yes, rule by lie-haters sounds better than rule by tyrants. But then I read the fine print.

To create this ideal government, Plato says, wed need to train a generation of philosophers.

And to do that, itd be best to just start from scratch.

Kick out everybody over the age of ten,.

and get rid of all the artists and poets while were at it, because theyre, quote, imitators [...] thrice removed from the truth. Then let the philosophers decide what everybodys jobs should be.

Something tells me there wont be a YouTuber track.

I wonder what would happen to Mr.

Beast?

Well never know, because Platos utopia never became reality.

Actually, it turns out the word utopia didnt even exist yet!

Not until 1516, when English statesman Thomas More coined it and wrote a book by that name.

The novel reads like a conversation between More and a world-traveler named Raphael, who also entertained the thought that government sucks and we can do better. Especially the government of Tudor England, a quote conspiracy of the rich that seized peoples land, squandered resources on gold and armies, and create[d] thieves, and then punish[ed] them for stealing. But there is one good government, the book claims, on a distant island called Utopia.

Lets go to the tape.

[TV static] Picture yourself here: a perfect society with no standing army.

No private property.

No lawyers.

Theres great work/life balanceplenty of time to read, exercise, and go to public lectures.

A place where paradise is real.

And its normal to see your betrothed naked before you marry them.

Also, people dont covet gold and silver; they make chamber pots with it.

Hm.

Alright.

This message has been sponsored by the Utopia Board of Tourism.

[TV static] Sounds pretty groovy.

And a little like the communes I heard about growing up in California.

But then I read the fine print again.

In Utopia, enslavement is fine.

Yikes.

Sure, theres golden chamber pots, but no mention of that in the commercial.

Theres also no beer, no tolerance for time-wasters, and quote, they do not so much as know dice, or any such foolish and mischievous games. Well, there goes my friends Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

Oh, and that word Utopia?

It sounds like the Greek eu-topos, meaning a good place, but its derived from the similar-sounding ou-topos, meaning no place. The good place literally is no place.

Thomas More, you tricky badger.

Feels like youre trying to teach us something here.

[frightening strings] And maybe thats why too utopian has become such a political burn, synonymous with impractical. A government thats too good is just a fantasy.

Ive definitely heard this criticism thrown at Marxism, a political theory that envisions a future society after the collapse of capitalism.

Marx is often called out for having concocted some grand utopian vision without offering a road map for how things should unfold after the revolution.

But he was much more interested in critiquing capitalism than he was in writing a guidebook to utopia, so thats less of a burn and more like a shrug emoji.

As for me, I love a good plan as much as the next gal.

But Im also a philosopher, so Im not above insisting that thinking is a worthwhile endeavor all on its own.

Theres a good case to be made for dreaming.

And Im not alone in that.

My guy, Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, argued that imagining a different future is not only worthwhile but necessary to understand our present, messy world.

He expressed this idea as the ontology of the unfinished, ontology being grad-school-speak for the study of how things are. And to Bloch?

How things are is open-ended.

But its hard to examine the not-yet in the right-now.

So utopias give us something concrete to discuss and explore, and help us remember that our present reality isnt a finished draft.

Whoa, okay.

When I read that, it felt both obvious and deepwe dont know what the future will be.

We need ways of visualizing it.

And that got me thinking: maybe utopias shouldnt be written off as an idealistic waste of time.

Like any bold plan, should we poke them, prod them, consider if theyre practical?

Yeah.

Should we read the fine print?

Absolutely.

There could be an artless city of ten-year-olds in there.

Or an island of gold toilets but no board games.

And all this poking and prodding of our utopian visions can also reveal more about what we valuein our cultures, governments, and day-to-day lives.

So I started thinking about utopias differently: as a sandbox for testing political futures.

Which made me wonder, What do thinkers across the political spectrum think the future should be? On one end, a utopia might be what scholar Robert Nozick describes in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. He argues that governments, like M&Ms, are best when mini a libertarian view that prioritizes individual freedom above all else, and takes any meddling from the state as a threat to those freedoms.

Nozicks utopia doesnt interfere with peoples private property or private liveslike, by redistributing income or legislating whats moral. Its there just enough to protect peoples freedom to live how they wantwithout presuming what the right way to live might be.

To him, the perfect government is minimalist.

Very clean-girl aesthetic of him.

At the same time, Nozick thought it was naive to imagine we could ever achieve a perfect society that suits everybody.

He writes, "It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. I mean, yeah, it sounds silly when you put it like that!

For the record, Id love to know what Grog, Zurg, and Durgs ideas were.

On the more progressive side, I found that utopian thought is often a vehicle for critiquing how things are and imagining what could be.

Like, scholar bell hooks doesnt explicitly talk about utopia in her writing.

But she imagines alternatives to current systems that hold everyone back, ways we could make life better for as many people as possible.

In her book Feminism is for Everybody, she clarifies that feminism isnt about crafting a pro-women, anti-men future.

Its about challenging the problem of sexism, which were all socialized to accept in our thoughts and actions from the time were born.

She invites us to imagine: what would society be like if we changed our own sexist thoughts and actions?

How could the world transform for the better, if we transformed ourselves first?

Similarly, scholar Jos Muoz invites the LGBTQ+ community to embrace utopian thinking as a source of hope and joy.

In his book Cruising Utopia he argues that queer literature, art, and drag shows offer a kind of utopian map, a way of dreaming up other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness challenges how things are, and models something different and better.

So by the end of all this, Im thinking that it doesnt make sense to rush into any good place thats dreamed up.

I mean, it could end up being a bad place.

But it also doesnt make sense to turn away from good ideas just because they seem too utopian. One of the perspectives I click with the most comes from feminist scholar Lucy Sargisson, who challenges the idea of utopia as a perfect blueprint that we follow to a T. She advocates instead for a more slippery, dynamic vision of the future that values the process over the endgame.

So, maybe the point of utopias isnt perfection.

Maybe the real utopias are the friends we make I mean, the paradigms we shift along the way.

If were not happy with what istheres power in imagining what could be.