This Is Why I Should Never Talk About Religion Ever

On Wednesday, MJ was spending an afternoon having lunch with the new Pope. He was significantly nicer than the old Pope, but just as unwilling to listen to MJ's concerns about the church's influence. She also thought it particularly odd that he didn't want the Devil or her personal Angel at this lunch. This was significantly better than MJ's experience with the last Pope, of course, who greeted the Devil (then appearing as Anakin Skywalker) like an old friend.

"So explain to me again what your concerns are," the Pope said.

"It was something I said in class," MJ replied. "We were discussing controlling the masses with utopia."

"All right," the Pope said. His ice cream arrived. Rocky Road. MJ found this worrisome, but she was happy to see her cookie arrived. Ice cream was gross.

"Isn't that exactly what you lot do?" MJ asked.

"I beg your pardon?" the Pope asked.

"Control the masses with utopia," MJ replied. "Or, at least, the promise of Utopia."

"I don't understand."

MJ sighed. "Heaven. It's basically a utopia, isn't it? I mean, it's where everything is great and wonderful and you get to have head-explody."

The Pope looked at MJ with a confused expression on his face.

"Sorry, that was a comic book reference."

"Please continue," the Pope said.

"Okay," MJ replied. "So, basically, you do good works, you get into Utopia. That's what we were talking about. Isn't that heaven? You do good works on Earth, you get into heaven. That's the whole basis of your religion."

"I think there's a good deal more to our religion than you understand, my child," the Pope said.

"Is there?" MJ inquired, taking a bite of her cookie. "I mean, really?"

What Has Been Keeping MJ From Updating; Also: Isolation

So, that old saying "Bit off more than you can chew" really applies here, to my blog posting. I had made the awesome decision to do all of my blog posts in story format, and ended up slipping into a Socrates-like story where I'm saying all of the things I'd normally say only to somebody. Which, I guess, worked out for me. For, like, three posts.

I got freaked out about my little stories sounding bad, or becoming repetitive. In the end, I became that student, the one who needs to post something like ten blog posts before the end of the week or else her grade will be really poor.

So, we're doing a new thing. If I've got the story pre-written, I'm gonna post it as is. Otherwise, I'm going to take my big file of half-written blog posts and put them together in a standard format. And you will love it. I promise you.

So, let's talk Bioshock.

I'm playing Bioshock again for work on my last paper for this class. Among the things I'm discussing within the Utopian setting of Rapture is the isolation involved in Rapture's underwater world. For those of you who haven't played Bioshock, here's a trailer for the game.

Rapture is an isolated fallen Utopia (not a dystopia, per se, but a world that had been a Utopia at one point but had fallen to ruin.) The world was created in the mindset of Andrew Ryan (the narrator of the trailer), who wanted a Libertarian-esque world where no outside forces could come in and screw things up.

This sense of isolation is something I've noticed before in other works. In Herland, the female world is set aside from the rest of the population, the same with More's Utopia, and our recent viewing of The Island. Other Utopian stories we've discussed, such as 1984, Minority Report, Gattaca, and Brave New World have the whole world changed rather than just an isolated segment. For places like Twin Oaks in Virginia, isolation makes this system work, but I still see the "whole world change" as significantly more realistic. A slow, gradual change over the world can change everything just a little bit at a time, rather than isolating and completely altering everything at once.

What do you guys think?

Looking Forward: The City on a Hill Revisited

      So this is it. We've reached the end of the semester, and aside from feeling totally burnt out, I think I've learned quite a bit about utopias over the past fifteen-odd weeks. We've seen shining republics (with pastries), spiritual cities, theocracies, classical utopias, weird martian utopias, modern dystopias, and lots of explosions in an utopian/dystopian(?) Michael Bay film.

Leftovers again?!

      At the beginning of the semester, most of us agreed that an utopia is not a perfect place; rather, it is better than the one we currently occupy. Similarly, we will probably never be able to achieve a perfect world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

      I think I may have realized something this semester. What if the definition of utopia is wrong? What if, in our real-world sense, the closest we ever get to an utopia is by helping each other and trying to make the world a better place?

      In that case, our “City on a Hill” is already here. When we help others, we come the closest to an utopia that we ever will. As the saying goes, “It's not the end result of the quest that matters; it's the getting there that counts.”

      What if an utopia is the process by which we try to make the world a better place?

(Michael Bay meme taken from www.joblo.com. Comparative photo of The Island and Transformers 3 taken from www.reddit.com. Image of the City on a Hill taken from insidetheshrink-dailygrace.blogspot.com.)

Anti-utopia: why put the sword through someone else’s social dreaming?

Why would a writer or filmmaker go to the trouble of putting a sword through someone else’s social dreaming? This sure had me beat for the longest time. After all, those who imagined utopias were trying to imagine the world as a better place. I decided to do some digging around to find out some ways social dreaming has manifested itself in history since the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, in the decades before Huxley wrote Brave New World (1932) and Gattaca was released in 1997. I discovered that these social dreams could be considered to have sinister aspects and Huxley, along with filmmaker Andrew Niccol have serious reasons to be anti-utopian, or critical of some people’s social dreaming (Sargent).

Since the late nineteenth century, heredity, biological characteristics, and genetics have been inherent in social dreaming. I’ll begin the journey with phrenology. According to this theory, inherited external characteristics demonstrated that criminals were biologically inferior to law abiding people. It was thought that different faculties or departments of the brain each controlled a unique form of behaviour; enlarged or unusually undersized brain sections produced bumps or depressions in the skull. As a result, a physical examination by any 'doctor' could analyse someone's skull to find reasons for problematic behaviour (Greek). This theory ignores any social influence on a person’s behaviour and discriminates unfairly against those with lumpy heads!

Closely related to phrenology was the study of eugenics (Greek). Yale alum Irving Fisher, one of America’s greatest economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was an advocate of eugenics, or carefully controlled breeding with the aim of improving human populations. That actually meant “white Northern European population...discourag[ing] all others.” Eugenics was promoted in popular culture in terms of the positive benefits of careful breeding as society would become more productive save money. How? The poor, prostitutes, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, and the criminal would be bred out of existence. Eugenics had all the prestige of Fisher and his associates on the Yale faculty behind it. Many aspects of its philosophy found its way into U.S. state law and influenced political movements internationally, such as Hitler and his National Socialism (Conniff).

http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3456#comments

One such example of these state laws that recently came to light in Virginia is that of E. Lewis Reynolds. As a boy, Reynolds was hit in the head with a rock by a cousin. The incident nearly killed him and it triggered epileptic-like convulsions that lingered for some years. This did not prevent Reynolds from enlisting in the Marine Corp and serving his country during a 30-year military career that included tours in Korea and Vietnam. However, it was enough to classify the teenaged Reynolds as a “defective person” and he was compulsorily sterilized under a 1924 Virginia law that served as a model for other states and “even in Nazi Germany.” This gives us some indication of the way this philosophy came to be enforced on “mostly poor, uneducated men and women” (Kunkle).

This brings us to modern genetics. Incredibly, blood can be drawn from a pregnant woman to analyze the DNA of her unborn child (Kolata). The benefits of this, such as women being able to learn about their fetus and act on the information, of course, come with unintended consequences. These consequences include what Paul (in “Evolution”), writing in 1995, calls “subtle pressures to make the ‘right’ choice” when confronted with information about a genetically imperfect fetus. Paul (in “Evolution”)writes that “Some women may feel they have no realistic alternatives to the decision to be tested or to abort a genetically imperfect fetus.” This may be due to doctors’ fear of being sued if the child is born with a genetic disorder, “by anxiety of potential loss of health or life insurance, or by their inability to bear the enormous financial costs of caring for a severely disabled child.” This is what people generally have in mind when they characterize genetic medicine as a form of eugenics (Paul in “Evolution”).

This leads us to the human genome project. Completed in 2003, this map of the human genome has given scientists a greater understanding of cancer and rare genetic diseases (Kolata). This undeniably useful research is also tempered by the potential for this information to be abused. Employers and health insurance companies could use genetic information collected for a beneficial purpose to refuse employment or coverage of individuals. To prevent this, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which took effect in 2009, was implemented (Nuzzo).

The events and research pertaining to eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century form the backdrop against which Huxley developed his ideas and wrote Brave New World. Subsequent research in genetics through to the end of the twentieth century influenced Niccol and the ideas in his film Gattaca. Developments in the early twenty first century seem to justify their concern and I think Huxley and Niccol were right to put the sword through this kind of social dreaming.  Their work serves as a warning to us, as members of society, about how things could be applied to advantage the elite and tread on the disadvantaged; put down individualism and remove opportunities for those who have few.

To conclude:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/etc/3739965753.html

Works cited:

Conniff, Richard. "God and white men at Yale." Yale Alumni Magazine. Yale Alumni Mag. May/June 2012. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

"Evolution: Humans: Babies by Design." PBS. WGBH Educational Foundation and Clear Blue Sky Productions, Inc. 2001. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Gattaca. Dir. Andrew Niccol. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Gore Vidal. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1997. Film

Greek, Cecil E. Criminological Theory. The Florida State University, 2005. Web. April 19 2013.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Kolata, Gina. "Human Genome, Then and Now." New York Times 15 Apr. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Kunkle, Frederick. "Va. eugenics victims would receive compensation for sterilization under bill." The Washington Post Jan 30 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Nuzzo, Regina. "Genetic Profiling." CR. CR Mag. 3.5 (Fall 2008). Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited." Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Web.

Serving One Another Over Ourselves

For many reasons and for many people socialism is an ugly or scary word. Especially for those of us who have grown up in the United States of “It’s mine and it’s the biggest and best,” we find it difficult to conceive of letting go of our control over purchase power and in a sense the liberty to make our own decisions. People believe that if the government has too much control and if they support us to much that we will lose the ability or the right to make our own choices. For me and my own exposure to utopian literature it seems that the “better place” always has some connection to a socialistic structure or another form of nationalism or communism that is similar. Why then does a “better place” rely on such foundations? In order for improvement there must be an elimination of many injustices that exist in our own society today. 

Many proponents of these forms of government believe that all citizens have a right to health care, education, food, and shelter. Many people would argue that these are the basic necessities of life and that no one should be in a position where these aren’t granted. In most utopian works the founder or author goes a step further and ensures that all people are employed, thus there are no poor, and that because of their contribution to society they deserve access to serve their basic needs. In Looking Backward, Bellamy describes a place where “government has extended” and “the social system no longer offers a premium on dishonesty” (33).  In large contrast to how we run things today, Bellamy explains that “when the nation assumed the responsibilities of capitol those difficulties vanished” (33).  

 In this fictitious place there are no political parties or politicians, every decision and framework is made to serve the good of the people. The elimination of politics has also eliminated corruption. It’s very interesting to step back and really analyze which parts of this proposed place make us feel uncomfortable. Or are we all on board with Bellamy’s view of utopia? And if so, why are we? Is it that everyone is taken care of and that for the most part everyone makes an “equal” effort to contribute? 

I find it interesting to compare the issues that we vote on today during elections to the issues that were written about as a proposed utopia years in our past. How far have we really come in creating a better world and what are we willing to give up to make that world a reality? Dr. Leete replies to the narrator that their “people value humanity over self-service.” How many of us can say that we truly practice that today? And if we made a conscious effort to try do you think that we would create our own small part of a better world? 

Image # 1:  http://rockrivertimes.com/wpapp/wp-content/uploads/socialism_elephant-W.jpg

Image #2:  http://www.fastcodesign.com/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/960/article_feature/pinocchio.jpeg

Image #3:http://thoughtsofaindianteenager.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/no-corruption.jpg

Image #4: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH9kk8KY1dfI74jGv4uBQp-pzJR9n1a0qPQP7JwfXO1WpUiyl1Vh7GLkIxYABE-8fF3k0mBTn7aL67_9YhuSmvplT7n3YmpujDTzkn5SP8qSox48yjwRopDHAoayGqn1p3biFPqf6p1gnR/s1600/a.aaa-Just-a-little-humanity.jpg

Plotting Utopia

It's pretty challenging to try and compare one utopia to another, because they all seem to have such different values, priorities, customs, etc. But when we trace all of these texts back to Plato, we can in fact connect most utopian thinking to two key concepts: happiness and justice.

But what do we mean when we use these terms? And how do these two measures of happiness and justice work together?

To explain this in a visual way, my husband came up with this awesome tool and I am excited to share it with you. (click on the pic to enlarge.)

We sat down and started thinking about where different Utopian texts, communities, and experiments fell and plotted many of them out on these two axes. I've included four on the graph above. I'll briefly explain one of my choices that you may not be familiar with:

Dave Bruno is the man behind the "100 Thing Challenge." You can check out his blog, or read this piece from Time Magazine to learn about his quest to own only 100 items. This strikes me as a highly individual sense of happiness (his quest does not include reducing the possessions of even his immediate family, just himself), but also a highly rule-driven one. So he goes in the top-left corner of my graph.

The two axes represent what I see as the two basic ways to quantify a utopia. Sure, the goal of utopia is happiness (represented on the x-axis), but is it an individual's happiness that is at stake, or are we concerned with the happiness of a larger society? 

And if happiness is to be achieved through justice (represented on the y-axis), how do we define that term? Can each person define her or his own ideas of justice? Or is justice codified in laws for the larger community?

So, what do you think about where I have placed Dave and the other three items on my graph? Would you place them elsewhere? Notice that I have purposefully tried to give you what I see as the four extremes; I have other items that I see as falling in between these four endpoints.

I'd love to see (in class, or here) your own versions of this graph. I think it will be quite helpful for you as you move into your SWOT Analysis and Research Essay writing over the next month. So, you can download your own version of this graph and try it out yourself.

Here is a version optimized for the web.

Here's the printer-friendly version.

Happy plotting!

Self-Governance = Utopia?

I have a friend who works at Grinnell College in Iowa, and she recently shared an article on FB about Grinnell's policy of self-governance within the student body.

You can read the story here. It's a quick and easy read, and I'd like for you to check it out when you have a minute.

Self-Governance...and muffins!

The reporter asks, "What in the name of social utopia is in the water over at Grinnell?"

My question for you guys is whether Grinnell's policy should truly be considered utopian - or do we as a society just overuse the idea of utopia to mean anything that is socially commendable?