The Village Against the World

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For as long as human beings have dreamed, they have dreamed of creating a better world. The year 2016 will mark the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, his short book describing the fictional island of Utopia, a regimented but model community, whose name in Greek means ‘no place’. In the contemporary imagination, utopia has usually meant exactly this – no place real at any rate; nowhere actually existing. A utopia is a projection of our disappointment with the real world around us, a photo-negative of its manifold injustices, and our weaknesses as a species. We are always disappointed, so we dream of better.

We are used to the idea of utopia as an imagined place. It’s often a community located in an alternative, fictional reality; on earth, or in another universe. A made-up world, where the plot twist is often that although this place seems like paradise, it is really built on lies and horror. The stories we tell ourselves are full of cautionary tales that not only is building paradise an impossibility – even attempting to build it is dangerous and hubristic. Aim high, and you will fall further.

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