What would make this world into a Utopia?

Nothing, the concept is flawed and leads ultimately to totalitarianism. Damned by good intentions.

Why?

Dear Ellen, Thank you for the invitation to conjure a Utopia. But this is a difficult question, since utopia has never existed and will never exist and to conjure one is to invite disappointment at best or totalitarianism at worst. Change is the driving force of the natural world and in spite of the grand defense we have constructed and refer to as culture, we are still fully participating in the natural order and are subject to its vicissitudes. Variety, mutability, and instability are agents of change. Entropy, violence and decay are its methods and amorality is its philosophy. This description of natural forces sounds bleak, but in reality, this is the life force from which all the vitality and the beauty of my spring garden in which I am sitting relies. Having evolved into slow, naked things without claws, we try mightily to defend ourselves with delusions of stability, which take the form of utopias like religious visions of heaven or paradise or economic utopias like communism. Utopia for humans is deeply rooted in visions of peace and stasis and fairness and comfort. These states of being are achievable, but not sustainable, since they deny the inevitability of change. To sustain these fine things we would have to enforce universal codes of acceptable behavior which in the end require massive amounts of repression, which is totalitarianism. We are stuck I think in a middle place, where change, whether it arrives as a mad politician, a change in climate, an asteroid or an error in a gene sequence is acknowledged as an inevitable part of the living world. But we do have remarkable resources to adapt to changing circumstances such as reason which provides technology and hope, which keeps us going. For me it’s counterproductive to imagine Utopia; a world free from suffering and inequality; a world in which reliability is institutionalized. Time is better spent learning to adapt and to be flexible in changing circumstances and to share these skills with others to prolong the success of our species.

I once asked the great artist, Nancy Spero, “What is Satisfaction?”, which is a variation on “What is Utopia?” She replied “ There is a discomfort to life and very few moments of satisfaction. I don’t like people who seem too self-satisfied. It’s an assumption that life is so stable.” Michael G.

Utopia Machine: Nothing, Ellen Harvey, 2024. No. 44 of 100 panels. Acrylic on Alubond panel, 16 x 12 in.