The Utopian Prospect

WIE: Reflecting back on the twentieth century, humanity chose catastrophic and ruinous directions. The Holocaust is a prime example. Hitler’s popularity, it seems, was due to the fact that he appealed to the utopian impulse in Germans to create an ideal society of the Master Race. Would you consider Nazism to be a utopian vision?

MANUEL: It wasn’t a utopia because it was based only on destruction. The same is true with Fascism. It was a question of cleaning up the old society by killing off a whole lot of people. I did at one point read Mein Kampf, but I didn’t learn anything from it, and I don’t consider Hitler a thinker. He talked about some of the German philosophers such as Schlegel, but I don’t think they were meaningful to him. He was just grasping at something. I don’t think he was utopian in his thinking at all, because he was not interested in building a new society.

WIE: These days you hear a lot about “dystopia” rather than utopia.

MANUEL: Immediately after World War II, dystopian novels sold more copies than any literary utopian works in memory. Dystopia portrays the future as a living hell. You have apocalyptic visions of human beings overpopulating the earth and clawing one another for survival, of nuclear disaster, of escaped pathogenic bodies heedlessly being created by experimental scientists. Yet out of these visions, the utopian propensity shows signs of stirring again, because at the heart of a dystopia has to be a utopia. You say, “This is awful. This is terrible. We’re going in the wrong direction.” But you’re saying that because you think there’s the possibility that it can change. If you didn’t think there was that possibility, you wouldn’t bother. Aldous Huxley, author of the ironic dystopian Brave New World, lived to write the utopian Island. The impulse behind a dystopia is really utopian.

WIE: You have written that utopians are actually the true realists.

MANUEL: Yes. For one thing, they know what would be good for the world. And they know that you have to have an ideal before you can move toward it. So they’re realists in that sense. Those who merely accept what is are really the nonrealists because they’re denying that the world is going to change, that the world moves. But what direction the world moves in is another story. And if you have no goal toward which you hope it will move, no goal you’re pushing toward, then you’re accepting everything that’s bad and you don’t need to. The utopian thinkers of the past were often far in advance of their societies, and it’s good to know about them. Of course, sometimes the societies that were founded on their ideas didn’t work out that well. That’s certainly true of Marx, for example. But that, too, gets corrected in time.

WIE: By new utopias?

MANUEL: By new utopias. Because if you’re alive and you’re a thinking person, then you have to hope for something, even if you’re not very optimistic that it will be achieved. You still want to work for it. You want to better this world, and you have the feeling not only that it needs to be bettered but that it can be—that its evolutionary fate is ultimately to be better. Therefore you have to align yourself with those who think similarly and not with those who either have given up or think that the world begins and ends with them. I’m sure there are millions of people who feel as I do. Or is that just part of my utopian thinking? I don’t know.

I do have days when I’m pessimistic. I have days when I want to pick up the New York Times and throw it across the room. But basically I think the same way that I always have—with skepticism about our capacity to change the world for the better, but not with pessimism. I have the feeling that there’s something you can do to prod the forces that will lead to change. Deep down that remains. I think I’m still a utopian.

WIE: What’s next for utopia? What is the future of utopia in the twenty-first century?

MANUEL: Life today is different, and the province of the utopians is changing. They’re not worried about sexual freedom anymore. Economic ideals still move utopians, but they are moving other people too. Issues that were once utopian have become common objectives; they’ve been gobbled up by the Democrats, who are no longer called utopian! So utopians are really hard-put today, don’t you think? For instance, would you call the ideal of world peace utopian thinking? I don’t think so. This has almost become a world ideal, whether you think it’s possible or not. What was once specific to utopians has now spread to entire populations, linking what used to be utopian with the life of humanity.

You don’t need a vast number of people to destroy the planet anymore, and that puts utopians in a different position altogether. There’s talk of the end of humankind. In the nineteenth century, that would have been considered crazy. But people who think in those terms are not considered wild dreamers anymore. Utopian thinking now has to do with the preservation of the human race. Utopians in the twenty-first century are those who think we can preserve the world. And it’s not one class or society; it’s all of humanity. So utopians are no longer simply isolated in little enclaves of their own. Without the whole world to back them, their ideals can’t move into a practical phase. We all have to become utopian because we all have to believe we can preserve the world. And if we don’t, we should give up right now and go into a cave, or pray, or just think, or spend our time knitting. The alternative is the end. That sounds gloomy.

WIE: No, surprisingly it doesn’t. It sounds as if you’re actually being a utopian—a realist. And it also speaks to the deepest part of our humanity.

MANUEL: Yes, it really does, doesn’t it? The whole world has been turned around in an odd sort of way, and so has utopianism. I don’t think anything cosmic is going to happen during my lifetime, but I don’t know what’s going to happen during yours. I’ll have to see you in the other world to find out. Can you have life after death if the world is destroyed?

WIE: I can’t even imagine the world being destroyed. It’s too horrendous.

MANUEL: I can’t imagine it either, just as I can’t imagine what existed before the universe was born. How do you conceive of a non-future? I can’t, really.

WIE: That’s the utopian propensity itself, isn’t it?

MANUEL: Yes. It is!