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!