What happened to utopias?
We dreamed about utopias and created utopian communities in the 19th Century. Why’d we stop?
What was the magic in the 1800s, that many somehow internalised the belief that a few people could come together and figure out the perfect society? Enough that day convinced their followers to move across the known world to try and build something from scratch. An entire economic ideology, political ideology, way of life.
This is the type of ambition that we don’t see anymore. Even the undercurrent of the possibility of the belief is clouded in questions about feasibility and desirability and minimum viable product. In skeptical questions and rational inquiry that nevertheless stubs out the little flames of spirit.
Why is that? Why is it that there was a time in our history not so long ago when smart intelligent people legitimately thought that they had the ability to recreate paradise, and then moved heaven and earth to make it so.
This doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Our culture is not suffused by people thinking they can make humans better, or that they can create a utopian society. We seem stuck in incrementalist thinking, or sometimes believing in technology to help save us when we’re not busy blaming technology for having created a world that we need saving from.