My Opinion on an Opinionated Piece

My opinion on Sargent’s article, “The three faces of Utopianism” was that it was not a very good one. For one thing, it was really good that he included definitions for the different kinds of Utopian concepts, but when he continued to talk about them non- stop it kind of became over whelming. Next, while I was reading this article, I felt like Sargent was afraid to tell his audience how he really felt because there were a couple of instances where he would put in what seemed to be his own opinions and then refute them by telling the reader about the flaws in his ideas (almost in a “don’t quote me on this”) kind of way. Next the whole concept about whether or not one should refer to a Utopian society as perfect really bothered me. As someone stated in class, one of his major defenses against using this word to describe a Utopia was that it would make anti- Utopians back off, and I feel like this is not a valid reason. My other issue with the whole perfect controversy was what’s so wrong with calling a Utopian society perfect. It is a world in which all or most of the problems in the current existing society are resolved. So in comparison, wouldn’t the Utopian society be considered perfect? Another issue that I had when I was reading this was I looked at the last sentence of this article and my reaction to the closing of it was “huh?” My group and I were puzzled by this last sentence because we were unsure as to why he would end this article that way. He says: “Utopians do not believe frustration, poverty and privation to be necessary for creativity”. We all agreed that this statement came out of left field. But for me it was the equivalent of that motor-mouthed voice who rambles off the side effects at the end of a medicine commercial.