Recently Nathan J. Robinson interviewed Kristin Ghodsee about her most recent book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, a panoramic survey of utopian thinking through the human ages. He notes that many people are suspicious of utopias, and of what she calls a “persistent and profound suspicion of political imagination”. She explains why “utopian” should not be a bad word. Some pull quotes from the interview:
"In so many other aspects of our society, we tend to laud those who think outside the box, those who engage in what is sometimes called blue sky thinking. Like the old Apple computer ads in the 1990s—”Think different”—it’s the people who imagine the world differently who are the ones who are going to change it. In the boardrooms in corporations, and in academia and science, we really celebrate people who think different and outside the box, with no bounds to their imagination, but the minute we try to apply that thinking to our personal lives, or to our social problems, then it’s a terrible idea. It’s scary. It’s unrealistic."
"...It’s so important to realize that when we think about sort of ordinary things that we take for granted today, like no-fault divorce, or daycare centers—childcare where you drop your kids off and a bunch of other adults look after your kids while you’re at work—is those were initially utopian demands that were realized by a bunch of people working together and putting pressure on society and reorganizing their lives in such a way and made those things a reality."
"We need to decentralize and claim utopia for ourselves, understanding at the same time that utopia is always a horizon. It’s not a place that you actually ever really get to. It’s a place that you orient yourselves toward, and it’s in the orientation towards utopia that you make forward progress."
And she's just getting started.
Interview: Why We Need Utopias
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