Presentation

In 2016, it was 500 years since the publication of Utopia, by Tomás Moro, published in 1516, in Leuven, Flanders, originally written in Latin, and translated into English in 1551. It is, without a doubt, the fundamental work of its author, not only because it constitutes a harsh critique against the social situation of its epoch . but also because with it Thomas More would give definitive name to every human hope of perfection on earth, imposing at the same time an influential model for those who, from now on, undertake the task of imagining and formulating evolved worlds.

A year earlier, between March and June 2015, I had the good fortune and honor to establish contact and share the interest for this occasion with two of the most interested and busy academics in the subject: sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, of the University of Leeds, England, and Esteban Krotz, professor-researcher at the Autonomous University of Yucatan, Mexico.

The spontaneous reaction and kind response of both professors certified the mood for the celebration and gave rise to the possibility of commemorating the fifth centenary of Utopia from a different perspective to that of the literary genre, As Professor Krotz would later warn, this is currently his most well-known manifestation, analyzed and debated.

Thanks to the academic, sociological and philosophical profile of Zygmunt Bauman and Esteban Krotz, the new optics resulted in the project Analyzing the Morean vision of human society as a form of knowledge, We agree that with Utopia Tomás Moro would have established a fundamental link between the critical gaze of reality, the transformative impulse of that reality and the consequent evolution of the environment. In short, and paraphrasing Professor Krotz once again, the idea was not to reduce Utopia to a simple dreaming without consequences for the social order.

From the beginning, Professor Bauman was cordial and sincere; he warned me that any format for the commemoration (whether colloquium, conference or publication) it was possible as long as we took into account the time available and their precarious state of health. In June 2015, Professor Bauman chose to write a paper for the occasion, which, once completed, he would send and approve for publication. Finally, in March 2016, Professor Bauman delivered the final version of his paper “Utopian Lights”, and with the simple phrase “I hereby give you my consent”, on July 6 of the same year he granted his consent to the publication of this document.

Professor Esteban Krotz, who like no other researcher in Mexico today has devoted himself to the study of Moro’s work in particular and the idea of utopia in general, joined this initiative in July 2015, also with great enthusiasm and solicitude. He agreed to give a lecture on the importance of Utopia in the social sciences and humanities in November 2016 at El Colegio de San Luis. At the end of that meeting, Professor Krotz accepted the proposal to convert his lecture into a written document and sent the final version a couple of months later, in early 2017.

The texts presented here are a product of the coincidence with Zygmunt Bauman and Esteban Krotz to commemorate the 500 years of Utopia. Both works faithfully reflect the style and knowledge of their authors and in them, no doubt, Bauman and Krotz found an opportunity to express themselves on one of the subjects of their most sincere interest: the place of the utopian tradition set in motion (500 years ago) by Thomas More in the set of efforts to understand and promote the social desires of our time.

On January 9, 2017, Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most famous and influential sociologists of the twentieth century, whose ideas were respected and admired around the world, died at the age of 91, in Leeds, England, so your document on the 500 years of Thomas More’s Utopia is an honor, and an occasion to celebrate your work and share with you this spontaneous fruit of your legacy.

He embellishes Professor Bauman’s contribution to the Journal of The College of St Louis with a wonderful prologue by Mark Davis, founder and director of the Bauman Institute of Sociology and Social Theory, opened in 2010 at the University of Leeds, England. In brief but grounded words, Mark Davis explains to us why the way in which Zygmunt Bauman used the concept of utopia is so important to understand the totality of his work and the reasons why his thinking in the matter is worthy of consideration.

Francisco Rangel

Foreword to Utopian lights ¹

Caught in the light of utopia, glances are turned toward visions of an alternative society. It is, rather, that the glances are turned to the relatively safe and comfortable niches one is expected, and hoping to dig up for herself/himself and his/her near and dear fencing it off from the hopelessly, incurably messy and inhospitable “society”

Z. Bauman, Utopian Lights, extract

I

Even his most avid readers around the world, when pressed by others to offer the single idea that might best encapsulate his work and provide testimony to its appeal, would still reach for the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ whenever the name Zygmunt Bauman is mentioned. The world around us, Bauman encouraged us to see, is most accurately described as ‘liquid’ because it is most often experienced as if it were so: like all liquids, our world appears to be in constant flux, unable to stand still or to keep its shape for long (^{Bauman, 2000}). Everything within it seems to change - the fashions we follow, the events that catch our attention, the things we dream of and the things we fear, as those aspects of our world that we once believed to be immutable, universal and holding true for all time now also start to show troubling signs of melting: democracy, justice, progress?

Bauman declined to profess any concrete solution to this, our common plight. His famous analysis of the Holocaust gave us a stark warning of the genocidal possibilities latent within every modern bureaucratic society that would choose to pay the expensive of human cost of sacrificing morality, responsibility and care for the other precisely in order to privilege process, order and efficiency in pursuit of that concrete solution. Instead of clear-yet-misleading answers and simple-yet-false routes forward, Bauman preferred to occupy a more complicated position that was forever counter-cultural. As Neal ^{Lawson reminded us in the days immediately following Bauman’s death on 9th January 2017}, he was a sociologist who believed that a truly ‘good society’ was one that could never be satisfied that it was ‘good enough’ (^{Lawson, 2017}). As soon as the status of being ‘good enough’ was declared to have been reached, so ebbed away the quality of it being so. Onwards, forever striving to be better and to improve still further the conditions of life for all of societies members was considered by Bauman to be the very least a society considered ‘good enough’ ought to adopt as its modus operandi.

Today, we might suggest, such counter-cultural instincts appear to be as important as ever. As the processes described by Bauman as being ‘liquid modern’ continue to dissolve collective ideas of citizenship and leave individuals increasingly with only the market to manage their individualized concerns as consumers, hoping to find solutions to their private troubles by the next carnival of shopping, we lose our ability to translate apparently private troubles into more commonly shared public issues. In Bauman’s own words, “can notions of equality, democracy and self-determination survive if society is seen less and less as a product of shared labour and common values and far more as a mere container of goods and services to be grabbed by competing individual hands?” (^{Bauman, 2010}). He feared not.

The primary way of being counter-cultural, and so of being true also to the above mission, is to judge what exists around us in the present, material world against that which could be at some point in the future. And this is how Bauman weaponised the apparently fanciful and romantic concept of utopia. Throughout the little treasure that follows -‘Utopian Lights’, penned by Bauman himself- the reader will encounter allusions to several wider themes from across his seven decades of writing: individualization to gardening states; Albert Camus to Bill Hicks. In the little space I have left here, and by way of a more helpful prelude to Bauman’s text, I take it upon myself now to try to orientate the reader just a little in terms of his wider thinking on utopia, why Bauman’s use of the concept is so important to understanding his work as whole, and why his few pages that follow are worthy of your consideration.

II

Unlike the often whimsical claims of astrologers, whose visions and prophecies we are free to trust or not at our own pleasure, Bauman claimed that sensible sociologists know perfectly well that they are not blessed with the skills required to predict the future. As a consequence, and referred to in ‘Utopian Lights’, Bauman deliberately devised the concept of the ‘active utopia’ to be clearly intended as a utopia that is defined by its immediacy. An ‘active utopia’ is focused firmly upon the here and now; not gazing longingly at some distant horizon. Bauman’s ‘active utopia’ is thus future-oriented only in the sense that it serves to remind each of us that that future could be otherwise, that it could be better. Fearful of modern blueprints for achieving concrete solutions, as we have seen, Bauman preferred to remain focused upon disturbing the apparent ease of our comfortable acquiescence to the all those existing injustices and inequalities manifest in the world right now. His intention was to safeguard all of us against the trap of ceasing to challenge and to question the world around us by accepting the conceit of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss such that we too might begin to believe we must already reside in the ‘best of all possible worlds’ (^{Davis, 2008}). It is in this spirit that Bauman, encapsulating the animating spirit of his entire work, once remarked: ‘I happen to believe that questions are hardly ever wrong; it is the answers that might be so. I also believe, though, that refraining from questioning is the worst answer of all’ (^{Bauman, 1999}).

Bauman’s sense of an ‘active utopia’ requires us to be constantly critical of the present world, especially in pointing to the enduring plights and predicaments that plague the lives of the world’s marginalized and the excluded peoples (^{Bauman, 2004}). This is what Bauman means by being counter-cultural, inspired by the great Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci who alerted Bauman to the possibility that a world which can in part be seen as an affront to human dignity, does not have to be like this (^{Gramsci, 1971}). Rather, human beings can themselves re-make the human world that they themselves have made.

Now, Bauman was perfectly aware of the awesome scale of this task and that, in the habitual lives of individual persons going about the frantic business of their increasingly hurried lives, wider social, political and economic processes can often appear to be ossified and unalterable. Why think on utopias when nothing can be changed anyway? As a response to this seemingly eternal question, Bauman’s understanding of the ‘active utopia’ is presented to us via four key principles (^{Bauman, 1976}). First, utopias serve to relativize the present by pointing both to historical contingencies and to future possibilities; the world has been different before and is constantly changing, so it is our task to shape it for the better. Second, utopias are aspects of culture in which possible extrapolations of the present in relation to future possibilities can be explored, driven by a sense of hope that human creativity and imagination can make the world different and so better. Third, utopias pluralize by generating competing visions of both present problems and future solutions, giving rise to alternate images of the ‘good society’ that engage individuals and communities in questioning the direction of society through an active critique of the present reality. Fourth, and as a result, Bauman sees utopias as exercising an activating presence on the course of historical events, resulting in concrete influence on the actual direction of human societies. This is what gives ‘active utopias’ their practical dimension and ensures that the very idea of utopia cannot be hastily dismissed as being lit only by the stars of sophistry guiding us with romantic notions towards forever distant shores.

III

As sharp as ever in the years just before his death, Bauman analysed the growing refugee crisis in Europe and the rise of right-wing populism across that continent and in the United States as a ‘crisis of humanity’ (^{Bauman, 2017a}). A key feature of Bauman’s analysis of ‘liquid modernity’, after all, was the apparent divorce of power from politics, leading to the evacuation of trust from political leaders from all parties. With that loss of trust -in both individual politicians and political institutions, lest we forget- would also come a loss a faith in the entire liberal-democratic system and so a demand from the people, in the absence of responsible leaders and reliable organisations, to ‘take back control’. As someone who lived through two forms of totalitarianism, both its fascist and communist variants, Bauman’s warning was that - despite all our protestations that we must (surely?) have learned valuable lessons from the twentieth-century and would never truly go back to those more inhuman times - the change demanded would be both authoritarian in character and worryingly swift to manifest.

As the extract that opens this Foreword suggests, when confronted with the task of holding the present reality to account through engaging with the principles of ‘active utopias’, it is an all-too-human response to shy away from that responsibility and instead seek individualized and privatised utopias in which we protect only ourselves from the multiplying dangers in the world ‘out there’. Since society is an inhospitable mess, so their story goes, why not place your trust in us who now promise to clean it up for you by removing the more troublesome and troubling elements of your our once glorious community? As the anxieties and insecurities of ‘liquid life’ lead many to give up on the hope of building a better future through an ‘active utopia’, instead there emerges an impulse to close ourselves off into tribes and to erect barriers and walls to keep out those ‘strangers’ in our midst who are a source of such fear.

In what proved to be his final book, Bauman revisited the concept of utopia precisely in these terms: instead of holding the present to account in the hope of a better future, today we run the risk of damning the present as an abominable deviation from the hopes of a better past (^{Bauman, 2017b}). Retrotopia - the desire not to look forward, but to ‘spring back’ to a time when the world seemed safer, happier, and filled more with people who were ‘just like us’ - is the animating spirit of right-wing populism especially in the new century. As the future is associated only as stasis or regression, rather than collective betterment, it is anticipated only as a doom-laden space of social degradation and impending social, economic, environmental catastrophe. Hence the past becomes a space of collective memory in which people take refuge against the anxieties and uncertainties of ‘liquid modernity’. The past, now distant and fading, can be remodelled at will with nostalgic and just partial recollections of the happiness of so many imagined communities.

In the face of this ‘retrotopic’ challenge, here at the end I suggest that Bauman’s unique understanding of the ‘active utopia’ has seldom been more vitally important or necessary for humanity. As the present appears evermore clouded by a creeping moral blindness in the face of multiple crises -and as the instinct is to close ourselves off from the world and seek personal shelter in locked private homes- we need to hold fast to those four key principles outlined above and, qua Gramsci, remember that the world we inhabit has been made by human hands and so it can be remade by them too. Bauman wrote in such quantity and with such quality throughout his long life because he believed in the possibility that we could -and should- face that awesome challenge together.

Mark Davis

University of Leeds, 25 April 2019.

Utopian lights². Zygmunt Bauman

Utopian lights: When utopian dreams light up the horizon, a horizon of expectations and collective or individual hopes, they shed new light on the social landscape… Utopian representations arrange and lay out black and white, opaque and transparent. visible and invisible differently. Modifying the lightings also changes the way people see, causing the possible and impossible, the past and the future, the real and the desired to be seen differently. Caught in the light of utopia, glances are turned toward visions of an alternative society…

Bronisław Baczko³

What has been suggested by Bronisław Baczko in the above quote from his classic study of (thus far) five-centuries-long history of utopias, was what Thomas More probably (consciously or subconsciously) hoped for, sending in 1515 to printers his “truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic’s best state and of the new island Utopia”. As I myself had proposed forty years ago (in ^{Bauman, 1976}), looking back at the long story of utopian writings, utopias “linger in the public mind as guides for social action, as criteria marking off the good from the evil, and as obstinate reminders of the never-plugged up between the promise and the reality, too slow to catch up with its own constitutive ideas”. To possess the qualities of utopia”, I added then and must need repeat today, “it must be ascertained that it will not come to pass unless fostered by a deliberate collective action. Gramsci’s well-known view of organized action as the only available way of ‘verifying’ social predictions fits this attribute of utopia very well” (^{Bauman, 1976, p. 17}).

The presence of utopia in public mind is an activating factor. To quote François ^{Bloch-Lainé (1965, p. 420}), the starting point of utopian thought “is the idea that we can determine a voluntary future, a future that is ‘never inevitable’, provided that we place ourselves resolutely in a future-oriented framework to influence the present, rather than remain overly impressed by the past”.

To cut the long story short: utopia are challenges to “historical necessity”; or, rather, its emphatic denials. Of that necessity, William Pitt Jr. had the following to say in the House of Commons on 18 November 1783: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves”. Challenging the idea of human ways and means having been determined by “historical necessity”, utopia writers -by design or by default- try to strip the tyrants of their argument; and liberate the slaves from the creed that enslaves them.

This feature of utopia complements its another, crucial, indeed defining trait, gleaning from the Novum Organum, published three quarters of a century after More’s Utopia and a century and a half before Pitt’s speech. Having pitied the sorry “condition of mankind” blighted by “so great a dearth and barrenness of arts and inventions”, Bacon declared “men thinking things impossible” to be “by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the new undertakings of new tasks” (^{Bacon, Novum Organum, book I, 92}). “No” to necessity, and “No” to impossibility, were twin war-cries of utopia writers. Those twins forebode the arrival, and assisted at the birth of the modern mindset, stance and history; opening up the closure implied by the Rennaissance ideal of “perfection” to replacing it with the ideal of “perfectibility”: disposing with the idea of a finishing line in favor of a continuous, presumably infinite process.

And, finally, another defining feature of utopian (and, more inclusively, modern) world-view and attitude, stretching the twin precepts to triplets: the “ancien regime” - a kind of social order buttressed on, and monotonously reproduced by habit and custom, falling apart at seams, “any order which might eventually come to replace it must be an artificial creation of planners… From being a part and parcel of natural world, the human order moved to the region of techne” (^{Bauman, 1976, p. 30}). “Techne”: commonly unpacked as craft, art, making or doing, as opposed to disinterested understanding (^{Wikipedia, n/d}). Writers of utopias, in tune with the mood prevailing in modern mindset and stance, took it for granted that it was in human power as well as in human vocation to melt the extant realities, however solid they might be believed (or even have been -allegedly- conclusively proven) in order to recast them in moulds better designed under human reason’s supervision, than they used to be when let to the vagaries of numb and dumb, and above all indifferent to human needs and cravings, nature. It is up to us, humans, to match, and go on matching human world to the demands of our humanity. We, the humans, can do so - and so we, the humans, shall and will.

The three assumptions/intentions briefly discussed above have been for the last five hundred years constant, ineffaceable and inseparable hallmarks -indeed the defining traits- of utopian thought; while the permanence of the utopian thought’s presence in that period was what prompted describing the modern mode of human being-in-the world as living “towards the future”, inspiring Max Weber to characterize rationality, the defining mark of modernity, as selecting best means to the attainment of chosen values - while leaving the choice of values to the cloudy and muddy orb of irrationality: “It is of course entirely correct, and a fact conformed by all historical experience, that what is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible” (^{Weber, 1994, p. 369}).⁴ Or, for that matter, the same “spirit of time” propelled Gabriel Tarde to confess that “it seems to me neither more nor less conceivable, that the future which is not yet, should influence the present than that the past, which is no more, should do so” (as quoted from W. H. G. ^{Armytage, 1968, p. 3}).

There was however yet one more -the fourth- factor without which the era of utopian thought would be inconceivable to start, let alone engrave such deep marks on modern way mode of life. That fourth factor, though, was a phenomenon akin to “non-contractual conditions of contracts” -neither articulated explicitly nor written down in the documents spelling out the points of a specific agreement- albeit (and because having been) tacitly presumed as self-evidently obligatory, sine qua non requirements -axiomatically, apodictically met before the negotiation started-. Dreams of overhauling societal status-quo by re-moulding its extant institutions would be hardly dreamed, and if they did would hardly inflame human imagination and galvanised human practical undertakings, where it not for the widespread and seldom questioned conviction of the presence of agencies powerful enough to be capable of making dreams real. Writing of utopias took off together, or immediately after the principle of unlimited territorial sovereignty of the rulers, concisely expressed in the Westphalian formula “cuius regio, eius religio”, started to be recast earnestly into the governing practice of absolute monarchies of the time; and it came into full flowering in the era of modern nation-and-state building, claiming the exclusive and absolute legislating prerogatives of rulers on the state’s sovereign territory, as well as an unquestioned monopoly of the state on the means of coercion to make laws fully and truly binding. Means to implement the design of an alternative social order were therefore deemed to be at hand, leaving to utopia writers the task of composing and delivering the designs to the prospective “enlightened despots”; their designs would however lie idly on the drawing boards were not already the despots to enlighten absolute sovereigns (absolutely sovereign despots); or at least doing what was needed to match that model.

Utopian minds needed absolute despots to enlighten because what they were after was an operation performed on the society as a whole -and it was the sovereign ruler who was believed to hold all strings allowing to set total society in motion or hold it steady- or at least be capable of grasping them (the very name given by Thomas More to his image of “good society” refers to “topos” -a place, a location- laying bare the underlying presumption of the territorial nature of sovereignty). Utopias were first and foremost descriptions of alternatively structured and managed territorial states; descriptions, if any, of alternative individual lives were only perfunctory: secondary and derivative. Those “individuals”, whether singly or collectively, were anyway not counted among the introducers, promoters or guardians of intended alternative; they were cast on the receiving side of prescriptions and proscriptions drafted by wise men and imposed and inculcated through agencies of enforcement under “enlightened despot’s” supervision. “Individuals”, and using the learned language of the time hoi polloi, commoners or “masses”, were expected to do what they have been told and taught by their coaches and supervisors, and what their location in the designed scheme of things simultaneously enabled them, prompted and impelled to do.⁵

The metaphor I find useful to deploy to characterize the stance behind utopian thought is the gardener’s posture: in opposition to foresters, rangers or gamekeepers, whose function is to preserve in its present form the “natural” condition of the plot of land entrusted to their wardenship, protecting it from (by definition undesirable) outside interference - gardeners are concerned with imposing a pre-conceived vision of their own upon a plot of land presently “wild”: unruly, chaotic, exposed to the caprices and vagaries of (by definition undesirable) natural elements. The function of the gardener is to conjure up order out of chaos, harmony out of cacophony; to reform the extant order in case of a change in vision or priorities, as well as keep it in the attained shape otherwise. If rangers and gamekeepers tend to think of themselves as servants of nature, gardeners strive to become and remain its masters; they assume responsibility of securing the rule of order over chaos, its antinomy and the only conceivable alternative.

The “garden” of the utopia writers -the sector of nature to be tamed and brought in order- is human society; and so it is members of that society that they attempt to segregate into useful plants and weeds -each of the first having been allocated each its best-fitting flower bed or border, whereas the second being targeted for uprooting and exile or extermination. Those allowed the status of insiders and issued permanent residence permission have their place and role assigned; and there is place and role for each. Gardener’s utopias exude the flavour of infinite duration -more to the point, stagnation- as they are deemed to be perfect, once for all, solutions to the quandaries of togetherness; in a state of perfection, each change could be only a change to the worse. Utopia would not be complete as long as measures fail to be provided to keep the arranged pattern in a steady state - while fighting off and suppressing, and best of all preventing, dissidence, resistance and rebellion.

Gardener’s design is a vision of a perfect garden; utopias are visions of perfect society. In recent decades, writing obituaries of utopias came to be a pastime rising in popularity, greated variously with alarm or relish. Whether the reports of the death of utopia have been premature or timely, remains a moot, indeed a starkly contentious question. There are however good reasons to suppose that what the writers of obituaries took for the “death of utopia” was in fact the drastic shift in the trajectory which the search for perfection -for happier, more comfortable and gratifying life- tends to be recommended to be followed and follow does. While that search remains as dedicated, impassioned and indeed obsessive to this day as ever before, it veered or has been maneuvered onto different track, leading to a different destination, demanding different vehicles and driving routines, as well as imposing different measures to assess the remaining distance from the target (if there is a set and fixed target).

To put the whole matter in the nutshell: utopian mentality is alive, well and -so be it- vigorously kicking, but utopias it generates have been individualized and privatised. Focused before on the totality of the lived world called “society”, it is now self-referential. And the job it recommends perform to reach it is of the DIY type. If you command Google to find “utopia” on the web, you can bet that the great number -perhaps a majority- of supplied addresses will send you to pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies, travel and holiday agencies, and guide books and counselling firms advising how to acquire self-confidence, fitness, good health as well as the dexterity in self-asserting and the adroitness in getting on top - whatever kind of “top” you might have chosen to desire and pursue. Utopia of today is privatized; its carriers and followers are self-referential. Utopia of today is a “myself” free to pursue my own desires and whatever I assume to be my own well-being inside a non-interfering and so inobtrusive, indulgent, docile and pliable world. The “topos” in such utopia is confined to one’s own body and its extensions: one’s immediate material or electronic surroundings; a sole subject on the island richly supplied with the present and potential objects of his/her desires. As Jonathan Franzen suggested in his famed commencement speech at Kenyon College (quoted after ^{New York Times, 28 May 2011}), the “ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne” “is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes -a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance- with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self”. A world of objects “that correspond to our fantasy ideal of erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all-powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer”.

When it comes to society -the part of the world populated with humans- the flipside of that “fantasy ideal” of submissive and pliant, easily managed and easily disposable objects, is the fading, dwindling and crumbling of interhuman bonds. To earn the status of “beloved object” society needs to “ask for nothing and give everything”, making us thereby feel all-powerful - and being all-powerful means first and foremost having one’s hands and feet untied. Called/expected to tie subjects each guided by similarly privatized, self-referential utopia, those bonds tend to be burdened with demands that cannot be simultaneously met; hence their endemic frailty, exacerbated by both sides’ apprehension of all fixity, long term obligations (and above all unconditional commitments, lacking in “exit” options) - and binding oaths of loyalty. In the world of privatized utopias the catchword is “flexibility”: grasp the opportunities as they come - but beware jeopardizing the opportunities yet to come by sticking to the already caught too tightly and for too long; the main point -the fundamental principle of right and proper life strategy- is to be always ready, it implies, to change tack and track, embrace the new and the fresh and get rid of the antiquated: outdated and outmoded. Bonds are right and proper as long -and not a moment longer- as they continue to deliver satisfaction and as no yet greater -more promising satisfaction- winks elsewhere. Bared to the bones, “flexibility” stands for spinelessness.

But it means as well indifference to the impact made by our (flexible) choices on the rest of society. The culture of “flexibility” insinuates that it is by my own gain, not the gains and losses of others around me, that propriety of my actions I am allowed to -and ought- measure. The world-view it proposes and commends is one of “every man (and woman) for himself (or herself), and devil takes the hindmost”.

Culture of flexibility promotes the kind of utopia closest to the mindset and values syndrome of hunters. Utopia of the hunter is a hunting bag overflowing with hit ‘n shot game. It has no room for the worry about the impact which the successful hunting escapade might make on the future of the woodland and its fauna -indeed on the future of hunting as such.

To conclude: it is, to say the least, doubtful whether the privatized version of utopia, utopia hunter’s style, presently well-nigh universal (at any rate aided and abetted to universalize by the most might among the powers that be), does what the original utopias did according to the findings of Baczko quoted as our motto: “Caught in the light of utopia, glances are turned toward visions of an alternative society”. It is, rather, that the glances are turned to the relatively safe and comfortable niches one is expected, and hoping to dig up for herself/himself and his/her near and dear fencing it off from the hopelessly, incurably messy and inhospitable “society”. That kind of utopia is not about good society; instead, it is about a shelter from society: a cosy cubby-hole inside a mayhem -for myself and presumably for some other performers as daring, cunning and canny as I am or as I dream and try to become.

Is this, however, the sole utopia conceivable in our increasingly fragmented and individualized, competitive, conflict-ridden society? Such a conclusion would be no less premature and misleading as were the obituaries of utopian thought. More or less comprehensive and more or less sketchy portrayals of alternative societies in fact abound; the big question, though, is the chance of their being listened too, accepted, and followed; the chance of their raising to the role of active utopias -guides to social action.

In Will Stanton’s recent concise yet comprehensive summation of our present condition:⁶

We are now living in a critical time in human evolution. A great shift is taking place. The wheels of change are in motion. People are not falling for the same lies, the same broken promises, the same fake smiles and the same deception. We are starting to realise the game is being played against us. We see how wars are fought for oil and profit. We see that the media do not represent our best interests. We see that we are manipulated by a system that is supposed to serve us. Now, more than ever, we need to stand strong as one human family (^{Stanton, 2015, p. 170}).

Stanton is far from being alone to raise an alarm of this kind and seek, desperately, to avert the impending disaster. To support his call, Stanton quotes the American social critic Bill Hicks, insisting that the way we live at present and its sequel are only a matter of choice between fear and love: “The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off… the eyes of love instead see all of us as one” (^{Stanton, 2015, p. 171}). “He is right”, Stanton comments: “It is a choice. We can transcend the paradigm of fear anytime we want. It is up to us to choose love instead” (^{2015, p. 171}). Stanton proceeds to develop the alternative set of principles on which our togetherness could rest with much greater than now benefit to us and the world we inhabit (which, as the Native American folk wisdom suggest, we don’t inherit from our parents, but borrow from our children). He takes a leaf from “Ubuntu Contributionism”, creation of Michael Tellinger, “a South African man with a dream of for a world of unity and abundance”, a world without money, barter and trade, in which “everybody contributes their natural talents or acquired skills for the greater benefit of all in their community”, and “all contributions have equal value for the community” (^{Stanton, 2015, pp. 179-180}). Extreme, perhaps excessive demands; couldn’t be settled for less in the still waiting to be composed utopia fit to match the complexity of human predicament and full depth of its sources? Stanton must have expected this sort of bewildered demur, as he points out to stave it off:

Hypothetically, let us say that we abolished interest, took the power of money creation way from the banks and gave it to our governments, establishing an honest monetary system. Let’s also say that somehow we were able to wipe the debt clock in and hold the bankers accountable for the scam they have been running on the people, thus freeing the global community from debt. To many, this would be a sufficient outcome for the world. To me, it would be a step in the right direction. However, the distribution of wealth would not change, and neither would most of the world’s problems. The world would still be a business that puts profit before prosperity. Human suffering would continue. The destruction of our environment would continue...and we would continue to be at war with our own species (^{Stanton, 2015, pp. 177-178}).

“Ubuntu” Stanton translates (as he admits, “more or less”) into English as “I am because we are”. I can’t help guessing that such an idea stand a chance of acquiring its full acting power only when (if) it is preceded by Albert Camus’ idea: “I rebel, therefore we exist”.