Utopia or Dystopia in an Age of Confusion

UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA IN AN AGE OF CONFUSION* JOHN H. KNOWLES, M.D.f The language of the apocalypse sharpens as we approach the year 2000. The millennium is, after all, less than 30 years away and chiliastic hopes have begun to mount. Given our present condition, it is also natural, however unpleasant, that we hear the language of despair and melancholy; view the art of distortion, psychedelism, and "abstract expressionism"; experience the feelings of alienation and apathy. Utopian thought has been replaced by dystopian nightmares. Every age sees its own as one of crisis and the past as the Golden Age. The events between 1930 and 1950 gave many, particularly intellectuals , ample cause for despair. The rise of fascism and racial imperialism in Germany and Japan; global economic depression; worldwide war at a level of destructiveness never imagined; the savage inhumanity of the mass murder of millions in concentration camps and death chambers—all spelled the end of chiliastic hopes, to millenarianism , and to apocalyptic thought [I]. Utopian thought no longer appealed to intellectuals: the possibilities for engineering social harmony were exhausted. The 1960s gave little cause for renewed hope as the world teetered on the brink of disaster. The hopeless exhaustion of the intellectuals was termed "the end of ideology." The great ideas which fueled the engines of Western development seemed to be in serious jeopardy—to the extent that many intellectuals claimed that ideology was dead. Daniel Bell notes that the intellectual is to ideology what the priest is to religion. Ideology provides the engine for social movements and change. Social movements gather force among the people when three conditions exist: (1) ideas are simply conceptualized, easily understood, and fit the needs of the times; (2) a valid claim to truth is established; and (3) fusion of the simple idea and truth leads to sustained action. Ideology provides * Presented at the dedication of the Laboratory of Human Reproduction and Reproductive Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, May 8, 1972. t President, Rockefeller Foundation, New York, New York 10020. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1973 | 199 the social levers which channel emotional energy and transform ideas into action. The development of an ideology is the intellectuals' way of "discovering the truth" and supplants the use of faith and authority , the methods encouraged, respectively, by church and state. The renewed celebration of the threadbare conservative ideology (a conservatism that had forgotten its antecedent British caveat: "reform if you would preserve") in the Era of Tranquillity—the decade between 1950 and 1960—was replaced by the old liberal ideology of the New Frontier and the Great Society in the America of the 1960s. But, once again, social decay outstripped social melioration what with inflation and economic depression; the grotesque horror of Vietnam ; domestic violence; the relatively sudden mass recognition of the twin dangers of overpopulation and pollution; and moral and ethical degeneration in public and private lives. The ideology is blurred: there are no simple ideas which can establish a claim to the truth, there can be no easily understood fusion of idea and truth which will lead to action. The dystopias of Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's 1984 anticipated the current era and ring true. Utopian thought which had flourished since the time of Sir Thomas More took an abrupt turn to the dark side of the moon at the turn of this century. Spengler's Decline of the West appeared in 1918, calling attention to the possibilities of another fall of civilization similar to that of Rome, and to the simple fact that technology could lead to disaster as easily as it could to progress. Orwell's 1984 showed how many aspects of our culture could be perverted into a dehumanized nightmare—science, technology, and language included. The great motive force of nineteenth-century America—the idea of freedom, equality, and upward mobility, the idea of progress, fueled by a belief in laissez faire, social Darwinism, science and technology, and supported by the Protestant Ethic—was leavened in the twentieth century by the ideology of "new" liberalism, initiated by the populists , shaped by the Progressive Era under Roosevelt and Wilson, and...