Hope and U-hope

Utopia used to be a thing.    Thomas More coined the word, which  was a Greek neologism -- "u" meaning "no" and "topos" indicating a place.    Though More's work seems more like an entertaining thought experiment than anything else, like Gulliver's Travels and other such fictional commentaries, a small genre of works in the 19th century summed up Western civilization's secular optimism that the human race was greatly gifted and that they would be able to progress to a state of earthly happiness.  

When did the first dystopias start appearing?  Though some consider Mary Shelley's The Last Man to be the original one, and others HG Wells' The Time Machine, it looks like Zamyatin's We might be the progenitor of dystopian novels as such; it was a Russian work first published in English shortly after the Communist Revolution.   

It seems to me that the Church's documents in the 1950's and on through the early 80's were the last gasp of the belief that a kind of "secular city" could work in parallel with Christendom.   It's not by any means a systematic doctrine -- but you see it crop up here and there, in John XXIII's Pacem in Terris, in Gaudium et Spes, in much of the sillier literature written during and after Vatican II.

 

A certain kind of Christian optimism, better defined as Christian hope and faith, seems entirely fitting.   The strife is over, the battle won, in eschatalogical terms.   But the hope that a pluralistic, tolerant civil society could work alongside of the faith seems like a passing daydream to most of us now, I think.  

The disillusion goes both ways.    Secular Western civilization was deeply informed by Christian faith, so deeply that it did not realize its indebtedness.    A book called The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I read a few years ago, seems to evoke the secular optimism that humans can progress morally and technologically and that religion, if anything, is a threat to this progress.     Ironically though, many of the tenets of non-violence, tolerance, care for the weak, and so on are irreducibly tied to the Christian faith.   

This is what NS Lyons points out in Dark Enchantment, which is a review of a recently published book called Pagan America.     Lyons writes:

Even as adherence to orthodox Christian belief waned and a secular liberal culture became the default mode of life in the West, religious moral assumptions long continued to be considered axiomatic. Some even regarded them as universally inherent to humanity, a framework on which a progressively more atheistic culture would construct an ever more peaceful, just, and enlightened society. But this is not what happened. Instead, like Wile E. Coyote, we made it past the edge of the cliff only to witness the return of moral gravity. 

It's not just morality that seems suddenly suspended in mid-air waiting for gravity to enact its inexorable laws.  It's rationality itself.   In fact, the two are tied together more closely than modern thinkers would have supposed, and they don't spontaneously generate themselves.  

Turns out -- who would have thought it? -- that the things that make us human cannot operate in a vacuum.    Reason, virtue, law, freedom need grounding outside of themselves.   Truth, goodness, beauty aren't closed loops.    They become deception, evil, ugliness when left to spin on their own. 

Humans sense this intuitively, though slowly and with many thought errors, so you can read the history of modern nations as a long failed experiment in utopianism, leading to its reverse.   

It's possible, indeed probable, that the optimism we see in some of the Council documents, that seems a bit sad and dated now, was meant as an appeal.   The Council Fathers grew up in the age of world wars, totalitarianism, genocide.    The darkness was already surrounding them.   It's not an illusion to believe that the human race is capable under the New Covenant of a wholesale conversion.    Think of Nineveh, and the dying empire of Rome.