WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT: What is the nature and significance of what you call the “utopian propensity”?

FRITZIE MANUEL: It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without people who dream, who have a vision of what they would like to see. I can’t think of anyone who would say, “We’ve arrived at a perfect existence, so let’s retain it.” There are always things that are distressing and that we think could be bettered, so we imagine improvements. That impulse has not died out, and if it ever does, I don’t think we’ll have human beings on earth any longer. We’ll have some other form of life, which I can’t imagine.

The utopian propensity is a universal impulse. It’s like thinking or breathing. If we lost our minds and totally stopped thinking, then we would stop dreaming. But as long as we’re conscious, we think, and as long as we think, we’re not totally swallowed up by what’s happening in our everyday lives. We have to think ahead. We have to think of tomorrow. And we not only think about things we hope for ourselves but we also think in terms of society. If we think at all, we think that way. Sometimes we go through periods of discouragement where we don’t see the possibility of evolving to a better society. But those are very black moods and they are not sustained for long. Inevitably, we dream again.

WIE: Where did the term “utopia” come from, and what does it mean?

MANUEL: Utopia is a curious word. It’s elastic; it’s not fixed, and you can use it in any way you like. It’s a shifting-sand name. It means something different today than it did two hundred years ago. And what it meant two hundred years ago is different from what Thomas More meant when he coined the term in the sixteenth century as the title for his famous work Utopia, a literary fantasy about an island paradise. The meaning of utopia changes as we change. You can’t define utopian thinking because it’s transitory. As society changes, people begin to think in different terms.

It’s likely that utopian thinking enters so early on in our evolution that human beings never existed without it. The minute Homo erectus stepped out of the cave, perhaps he was thinking about how nice it would be if there was a cave lady nearby and he didn’t have to go hunt the mammoth down the road. He may have had his paradise ready at his first emergence. He may have had a dream. But it was a different world then, and dreams take on a different quality and a different character as the world goes along. They evolve over time.

In all cases, dreams have to emerge from the way we’re living; they have to have some basis in reality. They can be strange and colorful and exotic, but they still have to link to what exists. We can’t dream the way an ape would dream, if an ape dreams at all. That’s obvious. If you were an Early American colonist, you wouldn’t dream about the same heaven on earth that a Native American, whose life was very different from yours, would imagine. Your utopian image is tethered to what you have lived. It doesn’t really take flight completely, even though it might involve a flight to the moon! But even that arises out of being able to see the moon, which is something you know exists. And the life that you imagine there will have some linkage to what you know on earth. I imagine that the utopian dream of a youngster today would be technologically mad and wild and would take off from what he knows. I’m sure that utopian dreams today are very different from those of my own generation because things are changing so quickly.

Visions of Paradise

WIE: Utopian visions must provide a fascinating window into the nature of human thought and its evolution over time. What did the first recorded utopias depict?

MANUEL: The earliest mythological visions are of a paradise that does not exist on earth. It’s a paradise after death. And they don’t just depict a single person. It’s a vision of a whole lot of people wandering through this beautiful garden and talking to one another. It’s not a solitary paradise; it’s a community. But there’s no connection to reality—immortality was a given, for example. These visions are ethereal. The early utopian thinkers were not social revolutionaries or social activists; they were pure dreamers.

WIE: So the otherworldly quality of these visions suggests that humans are compelled to imagine something other than their actual existence.

MANUEL: Yes, from the very beginning, people thought in terms of realities other than those of everyday life. And that’s apparent in the evolving nature of paradisiacal utopias over time. You have the Garden of Eden, with the earth’s “earliest inhabitants,” Adam and Eve, and there is a sharp difference between the paradise of Eden and what happens after the serpent enters the garden. Then you have the future paradise, the days when the Messiah arrives. There is the “world to come” as compared with the world as it is.

The visions of paradise found in the paintings of fifteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni di Paolo were of literate people—nuns, priests, monks—who were meeting and talking together in a beautiful garden. There was natural beauty, but there was also lofty discourse. You then have the Age of Exploration. What vision of paradise pushed Columbus, for example, to venture out to the New World, and did he think he had come upon it when he reached South America? Because whole new lands and new societies opened up, as compared with the old lands of Europe. What pushes us? Fame? Money? We cannot create any generalities about notions of paradise. But one thing remains: There is a division or a distinction between paradise and what people are facing in everyday living.

WIE: Particularly for our earliest ancestors who were struggling with the hardships of existence, visions of paradise must have provided comfort, relief, and security in a very uncertain world.

MANUEL: I don’t think that’s unique to the early period—paradisiacal myths are meaningful for people today. People can put up with extraordinary miseries if they’re thinking about the rewards they’ll have in the future. You could say that that kind of relationship to paradise is, in a way, anti-utopian or counter-utopian, because it can lead to a very lethargic state, a state so lethargic that you don’t even think about what could constitute a better world here and now. You’re totally involved in dreaming of another world.