Utopia Doesn’t Exist
There’s a scene in Donnie Darko where Donnie, the protagonist, though you could say he’s an antagonist in some sense, says that “destruction is a form of creation.” If you haven’t seen the film — which you aren’t missing out on — it’s a convoluted story that follows Donnie after he’s warned that the world will end. The rest is a sort of time-travelling tale about teenage angst and the end of the world, filled with anecdotes about the meaning of life that only unhappy teenagers would say.
When I was a teenager — one with angst but not unhappy — I thought Donnie Darko was pretty cool. I was a fan of Donnie’s sort of destructive, rebellious, and defiant reaction to this mysterious existence that I could hardly make sense of. His line about creation as a form of destruction seemed to have a truth to it, too.
We do know that when we change aspects of ourselves it feels like a part of us dies. And as we move through the world, reflecting on who we were in years past, seems to mean we’re staring back at versions of ourselves that are strangers. In that sense destruction is creation.
John 15:2 says, “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” That cutting off of ourselves to bring forth better is exactly the creation in destruction.
But as always, this isn’t the whole picture. It’s more nuanced than that. And when I talk about the lack of nuance, I speak specifically of the radical left in American politics. This left should be separated from liberals and progressives in the traditional sense, especially those that have inherited what’s closer to the classical liberalism that influenced the founding of this country.
The radical left, rather, chooses to view history through the lens of all atrocities (real or imagined), and victimization that has occurred or supposedly exists. It denies that in the western world there has never been a more prosperous time with as much access to technology and resources. Instead, it uses the backdrop of a Utopian ideal that is how the world should be, telling us that what we have is shabby.
To their credit, radical leftists are in some ways not much different than the radical right or Donald Trump. To be clear, I’m not calling Trump a member of the radical right. But he run on a populist agenda to “Make America Great Again,” and that platform in some ways also assumes a sort of narrative of a Utopian world that we should live in, one greater than what we have. In his instance it’s instead a call to a previous greatness, though his campaign slogan is also one that Ronald Reagan used. (Probably through Roger Stone, the political strategist that worked for both Presidents.)
The important point is that both of these ideas of Utopia are unattainable. Utopia doesn’t exist. The point of religion, in one sense, is to remind people that there is not and will never be heaven on earth. Man and women are not meant to try to build a heaven here. And the idea behind our system of government is that our constitution is strong and can be amended so we can adjust our society when needed. For this reason, in a rational world, progressives and conservatives work as allies to find the right solutions to the problems we face.
But to the Utopian there’s a one-size fits all solution. It’s their undefined Utopia. As Roger Scruton writes, “part of the appeal of Utopia is that Utopias can never be realized.” These Utopias end up functioning as a sort of hamster wheel for whoever is running themselves into eternity to reach them. It’s always in the distance, but always elusive and gone.
As Scruton reminds us, “The solution to human conflicts is discovered case by case, and embodied thereafter in precedents, customs and laws. The solution does not exist as a plan, a scheme or a Utopia. It is the residue of a myriad agreements and negotiations, preserved in custom and law. Solutions are rarely envisaged in advance, but steadily accumulate through dialog and negotiation.”
But the Utopian doesn’t have time for these things. They want the one-size fits all glove and they want it now. For that reason, “an unachievable goal chosen for its abstract purity, in which differences are reconciled, conflict overcome and mankind soldered together in a metaphysical unity, can never be questioned, since in the nature of the case it can never be put to the proof.”
And here’s one of the more damning things Scruton says about Utopias. “For the person who entrusts all problem-solving to the single final solution, reality is without hope and without solutions.” That’s why people on the far left are so angered by your disagreement of their proposed Utopia as opposed to incremental societal and government change. They are full of resentment that the world of tomorrow won’t be wrought with extreme social changes that will bring heaven on earth. How dare you not obey their commands to solve the world’s problems yesterday.
I’m not sure how the fight against this sort of thinking is won. It seems to be some sort of foregone conclusion in the mainstream, and even the moderate and rational thinkers of the once respectable liberal and progressive wings of the United States are catering to the radicals on their side.
Remember, the reason Donnie had his maxim is because, with the exception of the moral purity that’s being asked of us in the Bible, destruction is easier than creation. To create a complicated set of precedents that work to govern people across a long-stretch of time is much more difficult than pointing out faults with no solutions. Even a child can find the wrong in things.
As Scruton says, “To be against things you just have to point out their faults and then say we want the alternative. You don’t have to define the alternative. Whereas if you’re actually defending existing things you’re in a much more difficult position.”
Because I have a respect for authorities, hierarchies, and the wise older people that have been through enough of history to recognize the faults when they reappear, I’ll leave with more Scruton on why the left is so combative and ready to call anyone that questions them evil.
He says, “There is a sense of the weakness of their position underneath all this. That they are never able to define exactly what that great society that they’re going to produce will be like. And in order to prevent discussion of this, they concentrate only on the present evil. And they do see things in moral terms. The person they’re attacking is not someone who disagrees with them, he’s someone who is evil and doesn’t have the right even to disagree. And that means that there are other emotions being animated than purely the dispassionate rational emotions.”
For more from Scruton on this, the quotes have been pulled from his Why The Left Hate on YouTube and “The Utopian Fallacy” section of his book The Uses of Pessimism.
