Our strange attraction to utopias

 Arnold J. Toynbee is out of fashion as a historian, but he pointed out interesting features in the vast forces that shape civilizations.

For example, where do utopias come from? Why do people start daydreaming about perfect states, perfect societies? We get the model from Thomas More’s Utopia, but people were dreaming about ideal societies and states when Plato wrote The Republic. Thinkers as different as Karl Marx and St. Augustine have had versions of the ideal place.

Toynbee had a couple of interesting observations:

• When people start writing utopias, their civilization has stopped developing. The consideration of the ideal starts when people sense that the society is no longer on the way up. The rise has stopped. They are anxious about the fall.

• Almost all utopias see the ideal as a place where everything is in such perfect balance that everything is static. There’s no change. As Toynbee put it, “an invincibly stable equilibrium is the supreme social aim.” (Toynbee thought More’s ideal was the exception.)

I think the second point is especially interesting today — and it’s not every day that Congress conducts hearings on a former president’s attempt to overturn an election to stay in power. We don’t fear social change when we think the country and culture are on the way up. We fear change when we think everything’s on the way down.

• Source: Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. My aunt and uncle had all 12 volumes. I’ve read parts.