The following was written by a friend of mine, Ariana Jacob, and was entered into the publication I produced for Utopia – A Science Fiction Marathon. Thank you Ariana.

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Utopia literally means no place. Knowing that reminds me that it is not somewhere where I want to live. I want to live in a place where I belong and feel at home, and that means being very much in relationship with the actual place where I live.(1)

The motivation for utopian projects is the wonderful and enlivening stance that we are an active part of creating the world, that our actions can shape our life according to our most precious beliefs. But somehow following the path of creating utopia doesn’t work out the way people envision. Why have people’s attempts to make the world over in the image of their ideals not produced ideal places to live?

The outline of the utopian story is a group of people trying to make a better world by breaking away from the ordinary world where they grew up. That story has been lived out over and over again. The classic American utopian experiments are the original puritan settlements and the Back-to-the-Land movement of the 1960s and ’70s. I was born into my parent’s Back-to the Land project.

Utopian projects begin with rejecting where you actually are and trying to start over to make a better place. But the ideals people want their new better world to embody come out of the same culture that those people want to leave.

Everything about who we are is a product of the culture we come from – how we see and feel and understand. Our vision of how the world could be different and better is actually a part of the world we see as faulted and want to separate ourselves from. The good and the bad parts of our culture are intricately linked with each other. Our ideals grew out of humanity’s complicated messy history and they cannot be pulled free of that history. They drag the whole dirty tangle along with them. We cannot peel off the parts of our culture and our history that we want and leave the rest.

Utopian projects don’t turn out the way they were planned because we can’t start a totally new way of life since we carry within us the structures of the old way. But we also cannot start over because there is no place in the world that is free of history. Designs for a new place have to include the reality of what has come before them or they will be forced to change when faced with a real place. An idea always has to change when it comes into contact with physical reality. Utopias are first perfectly built from ideas and then people try to recreate them somewhere in the real world by imposing them on an actual place that already has other stuff going on. Utopian projects run into trouble by not acknowledging what was there before them.

The long history of utopian world reinvention shows us that we can not leave the old world behind, so we should pay a lot of attention to how we are related to it, even the parts we know are wrong. We are more than our intentions. We are implicated in and accountable to the whole history that came before us and created us as who we are, not just who we wish to be.

We want so strongly to live lives that embody our ideals. We want to make the world a good place for us and for others to live. Utopias as ideas of place that don’t really exist anywhere can help us to reflect on how we live in our real lives. But the work of making the world a good place to live involves less designed perfection and more getting in deep with what is already here, around us and in us.

Ariana Jacob
Portland, Oregon

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(1) In order to belong somewhere there has to be a relationship between two real things, a person and a specific place. I am implying that through acts of relating to a place it becomes somewhere good to live, instead of a place having to be “Good” by design.