Utopia — Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 27, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia
Greetings to Artaxia from exotic Earth! Your esteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that wide varieties of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited and lived here for several thousand years compiling the indispensible “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order your copy today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped to Earth.)
Whatever their faults, humans generally aren’t stupid. Even the dullest specimen eventually notices that “life as we know it” can be very unpleasant. The poor certainly have a rough time, yet even the rich find ingenious ways to suffer.
And it all comes wrapped in a universe that does its best to appear indifferent and unfair, with countless cruel tricks to punish the innocent and reward the villain. All Earth’s religions promise escape from this suffering one way or another, often involving death and passage to a rumored afterlife where conditions will be better.
Early humans accepted this like good sheep, but, especially after civilization was invented about 10,000 years ago, troublemakers became numerous and noisy: conditions should be made better now. The quieter types were called reformers. The noisiest were labeled “utopians.” Exactly when do you graduate from reformer to utopian? It’s impossible to mark the exact Jekyll-to-Hyde mutation point, simply because there isn’t one.
On Earth, as elsewhere, progress seems to run in a continuous (if staggering) line that always starts at the same place: the common sense desire to improve one’s situation. Every civilization in the Federated System began with the same wish. And they continue in it. Many FS worlds today, viewed from Earth, would pass for utopias (even if we citizens know better). On Earth itself, though you may not believe it, the divide between rich and poor nations is so vast that the poorest condition in a wealthy state is judged utopian by millions dwelling in poor countries, right down to “streets paved with gold.”
Earth’s early troublemakers asked, if we can build cities and grow food and get animals to work for us, why can’t we get clean water? Similar questions abound today, often using humanity’s recent visit to its moon for leverage. Americans especially, who first made the trip, routinely complain, “If we can go to the Moon, why can’t we …”
In the realm of technological progress, it’s hard to count the advances that moved from “impossible” to “ho-hum” almost overnight. Manned flight and personal computing are examples both of ancient dreams come true and the modern surprise, like TV or traffic that challenges humanity’s basic assumptions. Nuclear weapons and terrorism are examples of ancient nightmares come true, leading Earth to the far more difficult realm of moral progress for any hope of survival. As the great Einstein remarked with the advent of the Bomb, “Everything has changed but the way we think.”
Unfortunately, changing “the way we think” is no overnight proposition. Unlike technological change, which seems to accelerate it, moral progress takes time. Further, moral progress is typically accompanied by upsets ranging from annoying debates to open warfare. Nevertheless, it happens.
Just two hundred years ago any suggestion that Earth’s largest slaveholding economy would soon abolish slavery would have been scorned as wildly utopian. It took a dreadful civil war, one whose outcome still reverberates, but abolition occurred within a single generation.
Such successive, idealistic changes all seem to imply some sort of ideal destination, but what? “Utopia!” Flat-out utopias like Plato’s “Republic,” St. Augustine’s “The City of God,” Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon,” and Aldous Huxley’s “Island” are examples of the utopian urge in a neat bundle, complete, perfect and, thankfully, untried, given some of the crazier details.
Unlike the general utopian impulse, specific utopias via novels, essays, movies, or political manifestos have proved far more useful in the realm of art than on the street. As art they provide stimulating sources for ideas. As blueprints for some cosmic makeover, each utopia that got an actual trial, from tiny Transcendentalist communes to monstrous communist empires, all failed – some horribly. The failures have even spawned a popular sub-genre, the “dystopia.” Dystopias like “1984” show what goes wrong when a society is seduced and held captive by this or that grand plan.
A Prussian General once said that “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Likewise, no utopia survives first contact with the Earth, whose history demonstrates that wearing ideological straitjackets despite a reality veto makes for a “cure worse than the disease.”
British author Chris Coates has written “Utopia Britannica – British Utopian Experiments 1325 – 1945” and comments in his introduction, “the sheer scale of wave after wave of utopian experiments looks less a catalogue of broken dreams & more like a guidebook for the journey to that other place, a better place – the better place that is no-place – utopia.” “Utopia” was first used in English by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book of the same name and indeed comes from the Greek for “no place,” as in “no place could be this good.” More wrote about the place anyway.
He probably did so knowing that impossible dreams are the most valuable. If Earth ever crosses the Self-Extinction Divide, it will be because the persistent utopian urge finally planted enough good ideas to resolve humanity’s technology vs. nature conflict and perhaps even design a global civilization where children don’t perish dreaming of “streets paved with gold.” With the same efforts, even some of nature’s dirty tricks can be eased: diseases cured, earthquakes anticipated, asteroids diverted, etc.
Utopian thinkers here are usually ridiculed as naïve believers in the perfectibility of humans, who so often see themselves as fallen moral cripples for whom “imperfect” is flattery (Aazort 13 – Religion). I find this attitude odd in a species that struggles for perfection in every facet of experience: they strive for the perfect grade point average, the perfect job, the perfect baseball game. If seeking a mate, no human female is looking for “Mr. OK.” Males want a “10,” not a “6.” There must be a few seeking perfect consciousness, even if “perfect” gets redefined along the way.
And, of course, we can look beyond any such purposeful growth. Just factor in blind chance. As noted above, yesterday’s “wildly utopian” idea is again and again made abruptly practical thanks to the unforeseen arrival of some new technological capacity. Serendipitous gifts like penicillin and the internet can, and have, changed worlds.
Once the pattern is set demanding improvement upon improvement over thousands of years, does any generation, on any world, just stop at some point and say, “OK. That’s enough progress. We’ve run out of problems.”? Ridiculous. Unless, of course, they have achieved utopia.
Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video
As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.
Very Good: Delirious (2006) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412637/ This movie digs into that “plague of celebrity” I referred to recently. “Toby,” played by Michael Pitt, is a kid from Philly sleeping on the subways of New York awaiting his chance to be an actor. He runs into the multi-headed “Les Galantine” who is not a paparazzi but a “licensed professional.” (His fellow paparazzi just roll their eyes.) Toby persuades a reluctant Les to take him on as “assistant,” sleeping in one of Les’s closets in lieu of payment.
Steve Buscemi as Les is at his sleazoid, grease-ball best careening through pathos, vanity, egomania, paranoia, and homicidal envy – while, to his growing fury, his newly-adopted protégé effortlessly floats to the top. Toby’s good looks and friendly manner are irresistible to all. And he manages a frothy romantic connection via “love at first sight” with “K’Harma,” a recently-jilted pop singer, played by Alison Lohman. This relationship is as insubstantial as all the other pursuits here, which sum up to: “I wanna be famous!” (Or, if already famous, “I wanna stay famous!”)
Wonderful jabs are made at the fame machine. As the newly-ascendant Toby waits in his limo for a long-sought reunion with K’Harma simultaneously ensconced in her limo nearby, their respective publicists argue via cell phone over who must get out of which limo first for maximum exposure based on esoteric inside-baseball “fame points,” recent magazine covers, box office receipts, etc.
The relationship between Toby and Les anchors this exploration of what passes for conflict in show biz. Despite operating without a clue, Toby’s inherent sweetness and likeability only aggravate the neuroses of the scheming and often funny Les – whose favorite wisdoms invariably begin, “The first thing is …” After ten or 12 “first-things” this mantra devolves into a nervous tic. Les doesn’t know the first thing from the fifth or 59th. (Les is crushed when his hyper-crotchety parents deride his latest prize, an ambush-photo of a celeb leaving plastic surgery after getting some work done on his penis.)
There’s no neat wrap to this slice of what passes for life on the fringes of fame. Toby and K’Harma eventually do escape their limos for a paparazzi-perfect kiss and a walk into the magic bright lights on the other side of the velvet rope. Les gets a photo-op and a handshake from the ill-treated but sweet-to-the-end Toby, and is left staring longingly at those bright lights. What Joni Mitchell once called “the star-making machinery” grinds on.
Excellent: Trumbo (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0889671/ This is a brilliantly-produced and written documentary about the great American screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Film and history fans will recall Trumbo as one of the most prominent writers blacklisted by Hollywood thanks to the House Un-American Activities Committee. An unapologetic former communist, Trumbo was convicted in 1950 of contempt of Congress and spent 11 months in a federal penitentiary. In the film, Trumbo happily admits guilt, saying that he was indeed in contempt of HUAC and all it stood for.
Once out of prison, Trumbo was forced to use either a pseudonym or “a front” to continue writing (see Woody Allen’s “The Front”). He won a best screenwriter Academy Award for 1953’s “Roman Holiday” using the writer Ian McClellan Hunter as a front. He won again for “The Brave One” in 1957 as “Robert Rich.” During the awards ceremony there was, of course, no such person to pick up the statue. It wasn’t until 1975, the year before Trumbo died, that the Academy at last recognized “Mr. Rich.” Trumbo was able to dispense with a lot of nonsense in 1960 when Kirk Douglas (for “Spartacus”) and Otto Preminger (for “Exodus”) both insisted on giving him proper credits.
Against this backdrop of thought control, persecution and betrayal, director Peter Askin and Trumbo’s son, writer Christopher Trumbo use filmed material of the screenwriter as well as letter readings and characterizations by an all-star cast that includes Nathan Lane, Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Josh Lucas, Paul Giamatti, Peter Hanson, Victor Navasky, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson and many others.
Apart from political and historical import, “Trumbo” gives us lots of Trumbo – an irrepressible, eloquent and very funny man (his letter to his son sanctioning masturbation is classic). He was often criticized by his colleagues on the blacklist for saying that those who “named names” for HUAC, stayed at work and out of jail, were nothing but fellow victims of the Red Scare, a hysteria which – despite all the lessons on display in this film and elsewhere – seems regularly to recur depending on the boogie man of the moment.
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Utopia-Everything Earth Addendum 27, vol. 35
April 10, 2011Utopia — Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 27, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia
Greetings to Artaxia from exotic Earth! Your esteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that wide varieties of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited and lived here for several thousand years compiling the indispensible “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order your copy today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped to Earth.)
Whatever their faults, humans generally aren’t stupid. Even the dullest specimen eventually notices that “life as we know it” can be very unpleasant. The poor certainly have a rough time, yet even the rich find ingenious ways to suffer.
And it all comes wrapped in a universe that does its best to appear indifferent and unfair, with countless cruel tricks to punish the innocent and reward the villain. All Earth’s religions promise escape from this suffering one way or another, often involving death and passage to a rumored afterlife where conditions will be better.
Early humans accepted this like good sheep, but, especially after civilization was invented about 10,000 years ago, troublemakers became numerous and noisy: conditions should be made better now. The quieter types were called reformers. The noisiest were labeled “utopians.” Exactly when do you graduate from reformer to utopian? It’s impossible to mark the exact Jekyll-to-Hyde mutation point, simply because there isn’t one.
On Earth, as elsewhere, progress seems to run in a continuous (if staggering) line that always starts at the same place: the common sense desire to improve one’s situation. Every civilization in the Federated System began with the same wish. And they continue in it. Many FS worlds today, viewed from Earth, would pass for utopias (even if we citizens know better). On Earth itself, though you may not believe it, the divide between rich and poor nations is so vast that the poorest condition in a wealthy state is judged utopian by millions dwelling in poor countries, right down to “streets paved with gold.”
Earth’s early troublemakers asked, if we can build cities and grow food and get animals to work for us, why can’t we get clean water? Similar questions abound today, often using humanity’s recent visit to its moon for leverage. Americans especially, who first made the trip, routinely complain, “If we can go to the Moon, why can’t we …”
In the realm of technological progress, it’s hard to count the advances that moved from “impossible” to “ho-hum” almost overnight. Manned flight and personal computing are examples both of ancient dreams come true and the modern surprise, like TV or traffic that challenges humanity’s basic assumptions. Nuclear weapons and terrorism are examples of ancient nightmares come true, leading Earth to the far more difficult realm of moral progress for any hope of survival. As the great Einstein remarked with the advent of the Bomb, “Everything has changed but the way we think.”
Unfortunately, changing “the way we think” is no overnight proposition. Unlike technological change, which seems to accelerate it, moral progress takes time. Further, moral progress is typically accompanied by upsets ranging from annoying debates to open warfare. Nevertheless, it happens.
Just two hundred years ago any suggestion that Earth’s largest slaveholding economy would soon abolish slavery would have been scorned as wildly utopian. It took a dreadful civil war, one whose outcome still reverberates, but abolition occurred within a single generation.
Such successive, idealistic changes all seem to imply some sort of ideal destination, but what? “Utopia!” Flat-out utopias like Plato’s “Republic,” St. Augustine’s “The City of God,” Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon,” and Aldous Huxley’s “Island” are examples of the utopian urge in a neat bundle, complete, perfect and, thankfully, untried, given some of the crazier details.
Unlike the general utopian impulse, specific utopias via novels, essays, movies, or political manifestos have proved far more useful in the realm of art than on the street. As art they provide stimulating sources for ideas. As blueprints for some cosmic makeover, each utopia that got an actual trial, from tiny Transcendentalist communes to monstrous communist empires, all failed – some horribly. The failures have even spawned a popular sub-genre, the “dystopia.” Dystopias like “1984” show what goes wrong when a society is seduced and held captive by this or that grand plan.
A Prussian General once said that “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Likewise, no utopia survives first contact with the Earth, whose history demonstrates that wearing ideological straitjackets despite a reality veto makes for a “cure worse than the disease.”
British author Chris Coates has written “Utopia Britannica – British Utopian Experiments 1325 – 1945” and comments in his introduction, “the sheer scale of wave after wave of utopian experiments looks less a catalogue of broken dreams & more like a guidebook for the journey to that other place, a better place – the better place that is no-place – utopia.” “Utopia” was first used in English by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book of the same name and indeed comes from the Greek for “no place,” as in “no place could be this good.” More wrote about the place anyway.
He probably did so knowing that impossible dreams are the most valuable. If Earth ever crosses the Self-Extinction Divide, it will be because the persistent utopian urge finally planted enough good ideas to resolve humanity’s technology vs. nature conflict and perhaps even design a global civilization where children don’t perish dreaming of “streets paved with gold.” With the same efforts, even some of nature’s dirty tricks can be eased: diseases cured, earthquakes anticipated, asteroids diverted, etc.
Utopian thinkers here are usually ridiculed as naïve believers in the perfectibility of humans, who so often see themselves as fallen moral cripples for whom “imperfect” is flattery (Aazort 13 – Religion). I find this attitude odd in a species that struggles for perfection in every facet of experience: they strive for the perfect grade point average, the perfect job, the perfect baseball game. If seeking a mate, no human female is looking for “Mr. OK.” Males want a “10,” not a “6.” There must be a few seeking perfect consciousness, even if “perfect” gets redefined along the way.
And, of course, we can look beyond any such purposeful growth. Just factor in blind chance. As noted above, yesterday’s “wildly utopian” idea is again and again made abruptly practical thanks to the unforeseen arrival of some new technological capacity. Serendipitous gifts like penicillin and the internet can, and have, changed worlds.
Once the pattern is set demanding improvement upon improvement over thousands of years, does any generation, on any world, just stop at some point and say, “OK. That’s enough progress. We’ve run out of problems.”? Ridiculous. Unless, of course, they have achieved utopia.
Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video
As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.
Very Good: Delirious (2006) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412637/ This movie digs into that “plague of celebrity” I referred to recently. “Toby,” played by Michael Pitt, is a kid from Philly sleeping on the subways of New York awaiting his chance to be an actor. He runs into the multi-headed “Les Galantine” who is not a paparazzi but a “licensed professional.” (His fellow paparazzi just roll their eyes.) Toby persuades a reluctant Les to take him on as “assistant,” sleeping in one of Les’s closets in lieu of payment.
Steve Buscemi as Les is at his sleazoid, grease-ball best careening through pathos, vanity, egomania, paranoia, and homicidal envy – while, to his growing fury, his newly-adopted protégé effortlessly floats to the top. Toby’s good looks and friendly manner are irresistible to all. And he manages a frothy romantic connection via “love at first sight” with “K’Harma,” a recently-jilted pop singer, played by Alison Lohman. This relationship is as insubstantial as all the other pursuits here, which sum up to: “I wanna be famous!” (Or, if already famous, “I wanna stay famous!”)
Wonderful jabs are made at the fame machine. As the newly-ascendant Toby waits in his limo for a long-sought reunion with K’Harma simultaneously ensconced in her limo nearby, their respective publicists argue via cell phone over who must get out of which limo first for maximum exposure based on esoteric inside-baseball “fame points,” recent magazine covers, box office receipts, etc.
The relationship between Toby and Les anchors this exploration of what passes for conflict in show biz. Despite operating without a clue, Toby’s inherent sweetness and likeability only aggravate the neuroses of the scheming and often funny Les – whose favorite wisdoms invariably begin, “The first thing is …” After ten or 12 “first-things” this mantra devolves into a nervous tic. Les doesn’t know the first thing from the fifth or 59th. (Les is crushed when his hyper-crotchety parents deride his latest prize, an ambush-photo of a celeb leaving plastic surgery after getting some work done on his penis.)
There’s no neat wrap to this slice of what passes for life on the fringes of fame. Toby and K’Harma eventually do escape their limos for a paparazzi-perfect kiss and a walk into the magic bright lights on the other side of the velvet rope. Les gets a photo-op and a handshake from the ill-treated but sweet-to-the-end Toby, and is left staring longingly at those bright lights. What Joni Mitchell once called “the star-making machinery” grinds on.
Excellent: Trumbo (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0889671/ This is a brilliantly-produced and written documentary about the great American screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Film and history fans will recall Trumbo as one of the most prominent writers blacklisted by Hollywood thanks to the House Un-American Activities Committee. An unapologetic former communist, Trumbo was convicted in 1950 of contempt of Congress and spent 11 months in a federal penitentiary. In the film, Trumbo happily admits guilt, saying that he was indeed in contempt of HUAC and all it stood for.
Once out of prison, Trumbo was forced to use either a pseudonym or “a front” to continue writing (see Woody Allen’s “The Front”). He won a best screenwriter Academy Award for 1953’s “Roman Holiday” using the writer Ian McClellan Hunter as a front. He won again for “The Brave One” in 1957 as “Robert Rich.” During the awards ceremony there was, of course, no such person to pick up the statue. It wasn’t until 1975, the year before Trumbo died, that the Academy at last recognized “Mr. Rich.” Trumbo was able to dispense with a lot of nonsense in 1960 when Kirk Douglas (for “Spartacus”) and Otto Preminger (for “Exodus”) both insisted on giving him proper credits.
Against this backdrop of thought control, persecution and betrayal, director Peter Askin and Trumbo’s son, writer Christopher Trumbo use filmed material of the screenwriter as well as letter readings and characterizations by an all-star cast that includes Nathan Lane, Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Josh Lucas, Paul Giamatti, Peter Hanson, Victor Navasky, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson and many others.
Apart from political and historical import, “Trumbo” gives us lots of Trumbo – an irrepressible, eloquent and very funny man (his letter to his son sanctioning masturbation is classic). He was often criticized by his colleagues on the blacklist for saying that those who “named names” for HUAC, stayed at work and out of jail, were nothing but fellow victims of the Red Scare, a hysteria which – despite all the lessons on display in this film and elsewhere – seems regularly to recur depending on the boogie man of the moment.
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