A Frenchman once wrote: ‘There are no ideas without utopia'. But utopian thinking seemed to perish in the ruins of the 20th century: in Pol Pot's killing fields and the Soviet gulag. The resulting understandable disillusionment with utopianism had two unfortunate consequences: an obsession with pragmatism and an inability to recognise new forms of dangerous utopianism hiding beneath a veneer of common sense. In both cases the result has been devastating for our political culture.
To be labeled a ‘utopian' in contemporary politics is to be dismissed as irrelevant. A politician's primary virtue is ‘pragmatism'. This has led to an unhealthy scepticism towards people with ideas or vision. We are now cursed with a political system based on the inertia of pragmatism when we desperately need new ideas to deal with challenges that call into question all our long-cherished ways of doing things and of seeing the world. The most important single explanation of the failure — on a global scale — to do anything meaningful so far about the threat posed by climate change is a lack of vision of how our world could be better.
The stubborn adherence to modern consumer capitalism — despite the growing evidence of its economic and environmental failures — is clear evidence of an inability to envisage something better. Of course this has something to do with the failure of the great communist experiment of the 20th century. But to think that there could only be two options — industrial capitalism or Soviet-style communism — is a failure of vision in itself.
There is, of course, a difference between utopian thinking and unrealistic thinking, although in popular parlance they are often confused. ‘Utopian' is often used dismissively or insultingly to describe someone with views that seem unrealistic or impractical. But claims about utopianism are always ideological and political and seldom based on a true assessment of practicality. For instance, those arguing for social and economic equality have often been dismissed as utopians whose ideas allegedly founder on the reality of ‘human nature'.
On the other hand, our entire economic system is based on the clearly impractical and unrealistic belief that never-ending growth is possible, despite the physical limits of a closed system. Yet adherents of this view — most mainstream politicians, economists and nearly everyone else — are considered to be ‘pragmatic' and realistic. This can only be the case because the meaning of