We need the toolkit of utopian thinking, now more than ever

Many dismiss utopian ideas. But imagining a better world is a vital political skill for tackling today’s challenges

https://psyche.co/ideas/we-need-the-toolkit-of-utopian-thinking-now-more-than-ever


Utopian horizons via Afrofuturism. Marvel’s Black Panther (2018). Courtesy Marvel Studios/Disney



Imagine your perfect society. I often put this to the people in my life – it’s good dinner-party conversation, a memorable opening with a new acquaintance, and can make time fly on a long train journey. Some have told me they see lush palm trees stretching toward a luminous blue sky, while others envision miles of rolling hills blanketed in thick snow. Uncannily, all respondents below age 10 envision a magical daily delivery of all the chocolate their hearts desire, in contrast with an older woman I know who dreams of exchanging the produce of her imagined backyard farm with her fellow neighbours. Some can think of nothing better than giving up work altogether, and others imagine finally finding fulfilment in a job of passion rather than necessity. What do you see? My question, in short, is: what does utopia mean to you? Coined by Thomas More in 1516, ‘utopia’ described a fictional island of total perfection. To More, utopia was a society free from flaws, untainted by social ills, and harmoniously in balance. Yet, deriving from the Greek ‘ou’ (not) and ‘tópos’ (place), the term can be approximately translated to mean ‘nowhere’. The possibility of reaching utopia was so unlikely to More that, in the very nature of the term itself, he precludes its existence.

When trying to characterise the contemporary moment in politics, utopia isn’t a word that springs to mind. When national politics is becoming increasingly polarised, global conflicts are escalating to new temperatures, and the toll of the climate catastrophe grows deadlier, the mere mention of utopia risks generating side-splitting laughter. In fact, to even speculate whether a utopian world is in our periphery seems so absurd that ‘utopian’ has taken on an altogether different meaning. Consider how some of today’s most searing political suggestions are all too quickly dismissed with the label ‘utopian’. Mass uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 saw well-established political arguments around defunding the police and abolishing prisons enter mainstream political discussions, yet this was quickly labelled ‘too utopian’ a demand. Similarly, as climate discussions veered into the ways in which we might radically rethink our consumption to avoid climate disaster, such visions were cast as ‘utopian’ in their belief that human behaviour could ever be altered in such a fundamental way, no matter the reason. More recently, as cost-of-living crises hit globally, long-running debates about the feasibility of a universal basic income have reinvigorated adamant criticism of its ‘utopian’ implausibility.

Labelling something ‘utopian’ has become shorthand for denoting its lack of realism. To call someone utopian today is to reprimand their head-in-the-clouds, naive, optimist, daydreamer character. ‘Utopian’ has become synonymous with critique, and a utopian idea is now not a vision of a hopeful future but of an impossible one. Such a negative view hasn’t been necessarily conjured from thin air. Utopia has a dark past – some of the most prominent pursuits of utopian societies have been failed attempts, most notably the grand narratives of Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany. Both Stalin and Hitler, though poles apart on many things, had in common the desire to pursue society’s perfectibility, as they saw it. The sheer danger to human life unleashed by their attempts, more than their failures, has left utopia with a rotten taste, stoking a fear that utopian striving tends towards totalitarian, absolutist methods. Utopia has thus come to be seen as a politics of problematic idealism, encouraging the pursuit of the ‘perfect society’, irrespective of the cost it takes to get there.



More than merely a problematic past, utopia has to deal with an equally challenging present. Contemporary politics has little place for utopia. Ironically, dystopia – in many ways utopia’s antonymic sibling – has found a much more comfortable seat in modern political discourse. Following Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 US presidential election, news outlets and social media overflowed with references to Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) to characterise a climate of fear and hopelessness surrounding women’s reproductive freedoms. Similarly, dismay over potentially impending book-banning brought Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) back into headlines just as, ironically, the sale of dystopian fiction began to surge. A glance at today’s political temperament would have us believe it’s time to chuck utopia out of the window altogether. No wonder the question of whether we have arrived at the ‘death of utopia’ has been raised by numerous political theorists. Have we become apathetic about the possibility of things ever being radically different? Are we no longer concerned with the ‘betterment’ of society? Can we even imagine a path to such a society at all?

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