Our present-day utopia

Subject: Our present-day utopia Mon Oct 06, 2014 3:33 am

Visions of utopia tend to address current realities rather than future visions, says author Will Self.

Our present-day utopia _76676195_utopia-sign-alamy

Our present-day utopia _76676195_utopia-sign-alamy

A couple of weeks ago, over several nights on British television, a drama series was aired entitled Utopia. The premise of the drama was that a secret cabal of ruthless and powerful operators had dedicated themselves, over decades, to inoculating 90% of the human race with a drug that would render them infertile. The aim of the would-be utopians was to avert the environmental catastrophe implicit in the population explosion. Of course, the title Utopia has an ironic cast, for - depending on your perspective, and how you view the moral relation between means and ends - this is surely a dystopian as much as a utopian vision.

But then utopias and dystopias, indissolubly linked, both have a long and honourable cultural history in the English-speaking world. We can go back as far as Thomas More's novel of the early 16th Century - which coined the term - and we can come forward to the present day Utopia on television. The future - whatever it may hold in terms of social reality - should contain plenty of fictive utopias and dystopias.

More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28546855

Our present-day utopia

Our present-day utopia

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