Wow, what an ominous title, huh? What’s the alternative? Ending in a dystopia? But no, it doesn’t end there either. Mostly, it just doesn’t end.
The way people talk about utopia often ends up being a sort of thought-stopping device. If we just do my politics hard enough, eventually we will achieve some sort of everlasting paradise. The end. Maybe this is because even secular notions of utopia borrow heavily from Christian thinking and attendant notions of heaven. (Thomas More, who coined the term utopia, was a devout Catholic.) Or maybe it’s because people don’t like to admit that their pet ideologies contain drawbacks that can eventually lead to their downfall.
Anyway, this view of a one-and-done utopia is highly compatible with how liberals stereotypically view changes in society. They imagine a line moving upwards, with the perfect, utopian society somewhere above where we are now. By contrast, conservatives often imagine a line moving downwards, and the perfect society was fumbled at some point back before the decline started.
I generally don’t want the same things that conservatives want, but I find their view to contain a kernel of truth that’s missing from the progressive view. Namely, it is possible for perfect (or at least very good) conditions to exist and then later go away.
Acknowledging this is important! It can expand where we look for inspiration. It shows us that nice societies take continuous work. And it reminds us that even when things change for the worse, we’ve invented utopia before and we can do it again.
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