Why are utopias important for human mankind? | Gregory Claeys | TEDxLinz

[Music] hello and welcome i'm ben historian as you've just heard amongst other things of the future which seems slightly paradoxical considering we usually think history is the past but in fact of course human beings have always had an image of where they're going often an ideal as well as an image of where they came from sometimes an ideal and sometimes not that ideal often serves particularly when it becomes future-oriented as a kind of map a guidebook a sense of destination a way which gives us in particular a peculiar advantage over our everyday lives the bubbles we live in the four year economic cycles the five year political cycles whatever they are utopia gives us the possibility of examining the distant future and we do so via a kind of map taking us from the present towards a destination which we hope will be very considerably better than the place we're at at the moment a problem at the outset of course is no one draws this map in quite the same way we all all have our own peculiar ideas but yet utopia is also an intensely social concept that's one of the main themes I wanted try to clarify this morning I will give you some sense of how I drew my own map and then what I think the relevance of the many years I spent studying the subject is for thinking about our future in the 21st century so a little bit of background I was born in Paris in France I was an only child my parents divorced when I was quite young and my mother took me and sent me away to boarding school she had no other way of working and taking care of me at the same time I hated the experience I have to say I was bullied I had a foreign accent we know what little children can be like with foreigners and outsiders and I became rather lonely perhaps estranged from my environment I built up a certain kind of resentment I think perhaps made me a bit of a rebel no bad thing either but there was real difficulty with making friends in that kind of miliar so to compound this my mother remarried but into a family which involved a great deal of movement so over 10 years I lived in about eight different places many different countries as well this was highly advantageous insofar as it allowed me to see something of the world but again it reinforced my lack of the ability to make connections with people so the first episode in my road to utopia occurs at about the age of 10 and I think serves as a kind of compensation for this process as it was developing I invented my own country I drew it out on a large piece of paper with colored pencils it had looked something like Austria actually it had high mountains and sparkling blue lakes and there was a capital city and I designed the stamps and the coins because I collected these things as a child the country was called Gregoria and the currency was the Gregorian and it was ruled over by you guessed it Good King Gregory so a childish fantasy of power perhaps it's definitely a utopia isn't it an ideal Society but an ideal society in which the will of one person my evident a inability to come to grips with my own personal situation the will of one person is imposed upon an entire society this I think planted the seeds in my mind for thinking about ideal societies so if we fast forward now a little bit I had the great good fortune in this summer of 1967 to be living south of San Francisco this is the so called Summer of Love of course the first explosive moment where the counter cultural revolt against middle-class Marez against styles of dress styles of eating against the war in Vietnam which was going on then a whole host of factors came together to create a new social movement hostile to basically the whole way in which not only North American but large parts of European society had developed since the Second World War I thought this was a splendid idea I thought that the ideals of the counterculture the sense of fraternity the sense of love the antagonism to war were splendid and to an impressive degree I think I still really even in a much more advanced age stand by many of those ideals today there was a strong sense of bonding we should recall about the counterculture so it gave me a sense of community a sense of friendship we differentiated ourselves by the music that we listen to by the clothes that we wore by the language we used it was us versus them but for the first time really for me I was part of an us and that was a deeply emotional period of my life so at the end of this long cycle which involved a course to often quite contradictory trends on the other hand on the one hand a political trend the student revolts in Paris and Berlin and so on on the other hand a deeply introspective almost spiritual trend I was more influenced initially by the latter than the former but I think we were all aware as the sixties ended that these two aspects of the counterculture were in a very uneasy relationship with one another at the end of this period I even ended up going to India in search of enlightenment I found it but not quite where you'd think it was I found it in the encyclopedia under II when I got home because I began to study again and I realized that a lot of what I'd been thinking in the last few years was well idealistic yes in the good sense but also perhaps overly fanciful in a lot of ways I started to study the Scottish and the British enlightenment when I went back to university and I began to get a sense that there was a historical narrative that I needed to understand so now for about a five-year period internal struggle took place in my mind on the one hand I had reached a kind of spiritual destination from sixty-seven onwards which epitome was epitomized to me in Buddhism an atheistic religion of course but a life denying religion at the same time Buddhism can bring I meditated of course a great deal of internal peace and harmony a strong sense of the value of the individual but at the end of the day it's a life denying philosophy the aims to get off the wheel of karma to end suffering running parallel with this was an increasing politicization as I began to appreciate the other trends of 67-68 so I began to read Marx the other Socialist writers and for about five years these two strands the one life denying the other markedly life-affirming moved parallel but in contradiction and tension in my mind so I was there with the Buddha saying oh mani padme hum looking for my own internal cohesion and peace and on the other hand another voice in the other ear was saying but comrade what about the class struggle so this tension had to be resolved I took much longer than I should have my supervisor gave me enough rope to hang myself I spent three years on my Master's dissertation three hundred pages trying to reconcile Marxism and Buddhism well don't allow ma students to try to solve the essential questions of the meaning of life it is not a good idea but I worked it out of my system in a way at the end of this period then I began my PhD and I began to work on early socialism socialism in Britain in particular in the period before Marx between about 1800 and about 1850 or so Robert Owen and his followers of the ring of the name rings any Bell to any of you so I was very lucky I found a lot of material I was extremely enthusiastic about this subject and I began to realize that going beyond Marx certainly the socialist cause in general was about Brotherhood it was about a sense of community it was about the close bonds between human beings and intensifying and building upon those bonds wherever possible in the midst of a society of course which constantly pits people against each other as competitors and encourages each to think that they should raise a head and elbow aside all of those who are in the way of the pursuit of their goals in life and it came to be fairly clear to me that this idea of sociability was something that I had been interested in for a very long time without it being entirely clear what I was precisely pursuing so by the middle of the 1980s I was beginning to move from the study of socialism as such towards the larger broader subject of utopianism 1984 with a lot of other scholars in the field of course we had to reconsider George Orwell's contribution the most famous of the dystopian texts and that also set me thinking of course about the negative sides now I've never come to the view that utopia leads you inevitably to dystopian I wouldn't be standing on this stage today but it's quite clear that some forms of the pursuit of an extreme and perfectionist kind of utopia can do so so in the course of the 1980s I was moving and in particular after in 1989 to 91 I mean if this I became a historian of socialism and then socialism collapsed at the end of this decade the timing didn't seem very fortunate from my point of view but it was a good opportunity to move into the literature so I went back to Thomas Moore this is one of the most famous images of the island of utopia and I began for about 15 years or so to delve into the literary traditions before more back to Plato back to sparta under Lycurgus and one of the most important models for the utopian tradition and to try to investigate what the entire spectrum of utopian possibility looked like it was already clear to me that it had been clear really from the outset when I began studying Marx if you take the 1844 manuscripts of Marx this is a humanist critique of Stalinism as much as it is capitalism and what Marxism Leninism Stalinism and so on had degenerated into I was very aware was not utopia at all was no kind of ideal it was a kind of caricature a false and forced sociability of party consciousness and so on but not the kind of ideal that most of us certainly coming out of the experience of the 1960s would want to affiliate ourselves with so as I moved in this period now I was beginning to move also again in parallel in to an interest in dystopian writing about which I thought much less have been written as well as the literary utopia so I published a number of volumes of these sisters the days before the internet where we still read books in the library and I thought it was very important to get these texts out there in order for people to read them a lot of material was relatively obscure but it turned out that the spectrum of utopian possibility from people living in caves on their own the Robinson Crusoe kind of motif right through voluntary or intentional communities of hundreds sometimes thousands or in aggregate tens and even hundreds of thousands of people these kinds of movements demonstrated that people could move away from the mainstream increasingly individualist ideas and embrace a stronger form of community the problem was always that we didn't in making these moves want to sacrifice the individualism which had appeared for the last five hundred years or so had been one of the great evolutionary movements in world culture so by the beginning of this century then I began a lengthy study of dystopian mostly for the reason in the first instance that this hadn't been done before and it needed to be done methodically and over a long period of time but also because the temper of the times was changing fairly dramatically I remembered Rachel Carson's Silent Spring the first book to warn about the impact of pesticides upon agriculture I remember chanyeol who I wasn't living very far from here in fact at that time the consciousness that came out of 68 was in part a green consciousness and this was always a kind of side interest of mine and the utopian tradition it seemed to me offered a number of very strong messages for those who were starting to think environmentally and ecologically utopian communities one thinks here for example of that portrayed in William Morris's famous from nowhere of 1890 one of the best-known British nineteenth-century tanks utopian texts were often aware of the relationship between human beings in nature Morris in particular spells out very clearly the need to get rid of the pollution of the waters and so on to allow the salmon to swim in the Thames in London which is unthinkable in that period so this ran as a minor theme the turn of the 21st century of course began to be the period when the warning lights were beginning to flash the world's population was getting as it seems now overly large the destructive impact through our patterns of consumption on the environment was becoming increasingly rapid and a discourse of course emerged of climate change and of global warming I don't like this language today I prefer to call the scenario before us catastrophic environmental destruction a reason for this of course is that those of you as many of you no doubt have who followed the narratives of this forum in the last five six years but even intensely in the last six months know that the scenarios which originated with Kyoto through the Paris agreement of first two degrees Celsius maximum camp and global warming than 1.5 degrees now seemed overwhelmingly over optimistic in the last year it's become increasingly clear that this is potentially the last century of humanity temperatures will rise they are rising now co2 emissions are continuing to rise there's a lot of hot air from politicians but there hasn't been any action which brings me to my second slide this is of course great Greta Greta tune berg one of the most impressive of all of the actors on the world stage at the moment the environmental activist who has almost single-handedly orchestrated a worldwide movement of resistance using civil disobedience to make aware to the general public the degree of severity of the threat of environmental destruction the moment has come when we have to be extraordinarily alarmed this is not a time for hope but yet and toon burg herself has said she doesn't want hope she wants people to be frightened and I think she's absolutely right about this this gives us I think the opportunity to witness the fact that we can make a difference our selves we can only do so however by acting extremely quickly and that's the message which I think we can be left with today thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 21,935

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Sciences, Future

Id: ouDdiJ0ey00

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019