Daring to Dream of a Better World
Last evening we spoke with someone about an essay we’d both just read in a magazine called Current Affairs. This publication, which is edited by someone young enough to be our son, is absolutely bursting with interesting ideas and excellent writing, much of it penned by the editor himself, Nathan Robinson (age 30).
Robinson is learned and literate, and perhaps because he’s so young, he’s also optimistic. He dares to dream. He hasn’t lost hope.
The person I was speaking with reminded me that Current Affairs has published numerous pieces of/about utopian writing, which used to be a big thing in the 19th century but which has fallen out of fashion in the 21st – we seem to have replaced it with “dystopian” writing.
So we pulled up a utopian piece Robinson wrote in 2018 and read it.
[Note: it’s worth visiting the full article, which has delightful illustrations, including one of Robinson’s “utopian city,” complete with a slide. Well, why not?]
Here’s his “perfect moment”:
“I was sitting on a balcony in the quiet part of the French Quarter, eating a pistachio muffin and sipping an iced coffee. I was with an old friend, and we were talking excitedly about things we had read. There was a breeze, and we could see boats going by on the Mississippi River. In the distance, we heard the sound of a trumpeter playing on a street corner. I was wearing a comfortable shirt, it was spring, and there were flowers around. Music, food, sunshine, friendship, plants, old architecture, proximity to a body of water, and intelligent but unpretentious conversation: To me, these are all the elements needed for total peace and satisfaction.”
As Robinson notes, for most of us the “perfect moment” isn’t composed of big stuff; small pleasures provide the sweetest moments, but far too many are deprived even of these.
The author knows this. The people he interacts with daily in Louisiana are poor; the state has the highest percentage of incarcerated persons in the U.S., which as a country has the highest percentage of incarcerated persons in the world: “What looks like a city of charm and luxury is actually a city of drastic racial and economic inequality, built by slaves and sustained by injustice.”
He goes on to remind us of some of the most popular 19th-century fiction, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, about which he says:
“As a novel, there’s not much to it: A Bostonian falls asleep and awakens in the year 2000, where he is shown around a future socialist society. But Bellamy goes into detail about the operations of future-Boston, presenting a world in which labor is minimal, goods are distributed equally among all, crime is treated as a medical issue, and everyone retires at age 45.”
Robinson suggests we “look backward,” like Bellamy did
“… by looking at our own time, figuring out what could be better, and using our creative capacities to make people not just affirm intellectually, but truly feel, that the vision is sensible and plausible rather than insane. Why shouldn’t there be a communal Lego-pile? Why shouldn’t there be Medicare for All? Does the world lack in resources? Of course it doesn’t. What it lacks is confidence and imagination.”
This is good advice, and we plan to start taking – and applying – it on a regular basis.
Let’s consider the topics we covered yesterday, and what a very basic utopian “vision” of how things could be might look like.
1) First, we considered the Oregon corrections officer who traveled to Norway for professional development – what would we like to see in this area of Justice?
Vision: an American prison system focused – like those of numerous countries in northern Europe and Scandinavia – on rehabilitation, not punishment.
2) Second was Carter County, Tennessee, where children as young as six are being taught to use Narcan spray inhalers to save their parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters, friends …
Vision: an America where Narcan isn’t needed at all; failing that, an America where first-graders are taught these things in the public schools.
3) Third, a Christian mother explained her decision to send her daughter to a public school.
Vision: Public schools, well-funded, integrated and equal, everywhere in America.
{Note: it’s the law, after all…]
4) Banned books in prison libraries
Vision: Schools – high school and college programs – in every prison, a staff to inmate ration of 1:1 (like Norway’s), and a recidivism rate below 5%.
5) Environmental injustice in Little Village and Waukegan, Illinois
Vision: An EPA with the money, manpower, and clout to clean up every one of the country’s 1300+ Superfund sites in a decade.
None of these is impossible – in fact, they’re all within our means (some have even been legislated and/or adjudicated). They scarcely qualify as “utopian” at all.
They’re just not the way things are today.
Why?
Answering that question is what we’re all about at Deedspeakout.
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