I'm not as enthusiastic about perfect worlds as I once was.  Oh, sure, I'd be as happy to get along without joint pains and the common cold as the next person.  But for now I'm pretty much content to hobble along the best I can, facing emotional and physical problems with as much dignity as I can muster.

It was Sir Thomas More, you recall, who wrote the book entitled Utopia in the first generation of the sixteenth century.  There had been examples of this kind of thinking in the ancient world, but More launched the writing of utopias in the early modern era.

For those who need a little memory jog, the word “utopia” means “no place.”  More's idea was to describe a society where everything was wonderful.  His neatest trick, it seems to me, was to start his book by describing real people in his contemporary world.  The reader has every reason to think he or she is reading a non-fiction book.  Then a traveler shows up and tells about being shipwrecked on a distant island.  As the traveler describes the unusual customs, the enthralled reader continues to turn the pages that describe that exotic island and its people. 

It doesn't take a genius to recognize another advantage of More's utopian work. The cruelty and injustice he observed in his world could be criticized without doing so directly.  If anyone ever accused him of being disloyal to monarchy, or the stratified social order, or the profits made by merchants, he could raise his hands and proclaim his innocence.  “Moi?  I said nothing about England and our good King Henry.  I am just entertaining, writing about an imaginary place.” 

The fact remains that he got off some pretty telling protests against the institutions and unjust practices of his time.

That was one of the primary attractions that made this genre, the utopian novel, a permanent feature of western literature.  Combining social criticism with imagination, a long series of writers from Thomas More to the present produced fictional utopias in increasing numbers.  The bibliography on utopian literature is now enormous.

Political Utopias

One of the things that give me pause is the recognition that a utopian mentality has motivated people like Marx and Lenin.  An important history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the 1980s (by Heller and Nekrich) is entitled Utopia in Power .  From the October revolution onward, noble goals combined with bloody means, including deliberately engineered famines, mass executions, and cruel imprisonment in the Gulag Archipelago, the network of concentration and labor camps. 

It was not something most of us would choose as our ideal of justice and fulfillment. Yet through control of the press, textbooks, and public demonstrations, and the willing cooperation of some western journalists, the Soviets created the impression of a happy, healthy society.

It all came crashing down.  As the true story has been told, we discover that for most people the supposed utopia was in fact a long nightmare.  The Black Book of Communism , a quantitative analysis by an international team of scholars, reminds one of the gigantic human costs in Communist regimes throughout the world. 

Promote your utopian scheme to me.  Tell me how everyone will be much better off after the revolution.  But if you tell me that the man in charge has the name of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein, I will not wish to sign on.

The trouble with utopia is human nature.  Selfishness continues to canker the soul.  Envy produces a desire for revenge. Power brokers utilize so-called social engineering, treating others as pawns. Murder, imprisonment, and torture are justified.  Sadism seems never completely to disappear. 

I recognize that the term “human nature” has been used with a variety of meanings.  But certain human traits have proved so resistant to change that it seems impossible to eradicate them completely.  My thinking here is not medical or psychological but historical.  Where in the long history of human existence do we find a body of people capable of maintaining an ideal society? 

No, I don't accept noble savages as examples.  Not only were their lives nasty, brutish, and short (thank you, Tom Hobbes), but their manner of existence holds no attraction for me.

Relgious Utopias

What about Christians?  What about Latter-day Saints?  There is a description in Acts 2:44-47 that sounds as though some the early Christian converts were creating an ideal society.  But that didn't last long. 

Before the end of the first century, indeed as soon as Paul began writing his epistles, there was ample evidence of perverse human nature in the Christian congregations.  Paul, Peter, James, and John all write against misdeeds, but clearly it was a losing battle.  In the early church, Christian utopia (to employ language they would not have used) was perhaps a hope but not a reality.

The people in the western hemisphere who were visited by the resurrected Savior were more successful.  Perhaps the miraculous appearance was so overwhelming that they were more profoundly impacted than their distant brethren in Palestine.  A period of peace and harmony was introduced.  “Surely,” we read, “there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God” (4 Nephi 1:16).

Even while they lasted, however, this happy, righteous people did not constitute the entire population of the Western hemisphere.  They were one relatively small group.  And even among the Nephites the beautiful oneness of heart and mind could be maintained for only about two centuries. 

Then pride reasserted itself. Wealth and class divisions once again produced contention, iniquity, crime.  While some may have experienced the mighty change of a transformed nature, others — lots of others — remained carnal, sensual, and devilish.  Human nature had burst forth with a vengeance. 

With the restoration of the gospel in the nineteenth century, once again the lofty ideal was enunciated.  If people would only abandon their selfishness, if they would love one another and never dissemble, a society of “equals” would be established.  No one would think himself better than another.  That was the hope.  Then the early Law of Consecration collapsed.  The poverty of many new converts and the unwillingness or inability of everyone to work productively combined with persecution from outside to end the effort.

After the Latter-day Saints migrated to the Great Basin, they made repeated attempts to implement an ideal society.  United Orders were organized at St. George, Richfield, Kanab, and other places.  The most celebrated, perhaps, was the small community of Orderville.

I didn't know Feramorz Fox, but Leonard Arrington and Dean May were both friends of mine.  One of the important but little-read books about our history is Arrington, Fox, and May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons.   If you want to stimulate your thinking about what dedicated Latter-day Saints can and cannot do toward establishing ideal communities on a small scale, read this book.

In 1884, a program that was enjoying some success, Zion's Board of Trade, had to be abandoned because of the Edmunds Act.  External pressures combined with internal stresses and strains and personality differences to vanquish the well-intentioned programs.  Always adding to the difficulties were competition and enticements from the surrounding society.  Individual personalities played their roles, positive and negative.  In situation after situation, good old human nature — or bad old human nature — raised its head. 

Such experiences remind us of how difficult it is for human beings, even under divine guidance, to establish a utopian society.  In the generations since, aims have been more modest.  The Welfare Plan as established in 1936 has its own history of frustrations and reorganizations but also accomplishments.  Available from Church Distribution is a fine book, Pure Religion: The Story of Church Welfare Since 1930 , by Glen L. Rudd.

Practicing the Principles

We can be grateful that mechanisms are in place — Fast Offering, the Humanitarian Fund, the Perpetual Education Fund, and others — that allow us to help those in need.  As we know, service to others on whatever level goes far toward improving one's own equilibrium and outlook on the world.  Some Latter-day Saints have figured out ways to deal with specific problems on the ground level in different parts of the world.  We can only applaud such valiant souls.

In so proceeding, we may bring about improvements, but we do not expect to see the perfect society, whatever that means.  Human beings have a hard time agreeing on such things.  To judge from previous experience, we still have ample reason to be wary of utopian proposals on a large scale.

Of the many utopian novels I have read (and some dystopias, descriptions of a hellish future society), one of the most interesting was a young adult novel by Lois Lowry, The Giver (1993), winner of the Newberry Medal.  With all its apparent placidity, the society described in this novel was based on “sameness,” which became boring.  Mercy killing of the handicapped and elderly obviated many problems but also shaped a certain kind of unfeeling personality. 

At the end, Jonas, the twelve-year-old hero, gets on his bicycle and, rescuing a baby scheduled for extermination, flees to the outside world of Elsewhere — a world of color and music and love and choice and challenge, pain, and adversity.

I couldn't help but think of the exultant shouts as the premortal sons and daughters of God agreed to enter a world of trial and probation.  A non-utopian world.