Utopian Metapatterns NADINE STODOLKA New York University (NYU)

Abstract In this essay, I analyze the appearances of metapatterns in utopian societies. My purpose in applying metapatterns to the study of utopias is three fold: first, I use metapatterns to create a more comprehensive picture of utopias that and that goes beyond the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary; second, I examine the binary of utopia and dystopia and examine the flaws in the utopias I have discussed; third, I introduce my idea of a global utopian scheme which includes the introduction of a new metapattern: The Achilles Heel. In order to do this successfully, I review fictional and real-life utopias through the lens of Tyler Volk’s metapatterns, conceptual building blocks which can be applied to everything from cultural phenomena to the hard sciences. My conclusion is that it may be difficult or even impossible to create a global utopia but that the concept of “utopian metapatterns” is useful for helping us make societal improvements which tend towards utopia.

Introduction Medieval European villagers' vision of utopia called Cockaigne, revolved around absolute debauchery in a land where rivers ran with wine and no one could get the plague (Grundhauser, 2016). In Icelandic singer Bjork's song Utopia, the listener is treated to the haunting sound of bird calls and jungle ambience over whispered chants (Bjork, 2017). Lykke Li, in her song by the same name, imagines utopia as a space created by her and her lover (Li, 2018). Clearly the concept of utopia is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. There’s even an entire podcast called “Utopia to You?” where comedian Chris Locke dedicates himself to tracking down interesting people and getting each of those people to explain their utopian fantasies which range from living inside of fruit (like Bosch’s painting) to eating magical potato chips (Stitcher, 2019). When you read the word “utopia,” you too probably imagine being cocooned in some dream vacation spot, with your favorite people, and with an endless supply of your favorite disposable goods. I picture myself in a drafty old house, wrapped in a quilted blanket talking to my eleven cats. There are shelves stuffed with books and candles (it is my Utopia, so this is not a fire hazard), and an oven that automatically refills with tater tots. Your Utopia might be (probably is) different than mine but whether you are imagining yourself in a minimalist Manhattan high rise or on the beach of a tropical island, politics and philosophy are probably the last things on your mind. However, many of the early ideas of utopia revolved completely around those subjects. Early philosophers including Sir Thomas More, Tao Yuanming, and Abu Nasr Al-Farabi all had visions of perfect societies which they attempted to recreate in their writings. These stories likely paved the way for entire modes of political thought and allowed the genres of

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utopian and dystopian to flourish from ancient times until the present. It seems that, no matter (or perhaps because of) how imperfect society is, our obsession with utopia remains. Sometimes the obsession is in the form of the silly fantasies I talked about above but other times our fixation is more serious. Cults, communes, and entire cities have tried their hand at creating the perfect society (Holloway, 1966) yet so far, it seems that no utopian method has been robust enough to take over the world and envelope us in peace and prosperity. In order to fully understand why we can easily imagine utopia but have trouble creating the infrastructure that would make our imaginings into our reality, I plan to look back at the history (both real and fictional) of utopia through the lens of metapatterns. The term metapatterns, which was coined by Gregory Bateson in 1979 when he published his book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, was expanded upon later in the paper “Toward a science of metapatterns: building upon Bateson’s foundation” (Volk and Bloom, 2007). Metapatterns are essentially conceptual building blocks that can be applied to everything from cultural phenomena to the hard sciences. Applying certain metapatterns from Volk’s 1995 book Metapatterns to utopia will allow me to dissect the concept of a perfect world and answer some important questions. Are metapatterns present in utopian societies? If so, what makes them different than the metapatterns which occur in ‘regular’ societies? And, finally, how can utopian metapatterns help build a better framework for restructuring society?

Breaks: A break is more than the sound of glass shattering on a tile floor or the white of an ulna poking through skin after a bad fall. Like the “Death” card in Tarot, breaks not only symbolize a physical end or separation, they can be the beginning of a transformation or a new era. Volk (1995) writes that “in a third manifestation of the breaks metapattern, a system breaks within a constant environment, because the system itself reaches a threshold that is internally determined.” Here, he is referring to physical/biological events such as supernovas or senescence, but it is not hard to imagine that societies could have a similar sort of internal timer. Apply enough pressure to a downtrodden group of people and you will get a coup, a revolution, a rebellion just as surely as you will get a butterfly from a chrysalis. Though often it is less of a rebellion and more of a gentle retreat from society at large, all utopias begin with a break. Thomas More’s book Utopia is based on the story of an island (also called Utopia), which is created by literally breaking a chunk of land off the South American continent (See Figure 1). The general Utopus conquers Utopia’s “rude and uncivilized inhabitants” who apparently become so devoted to their new leader that they put up no fight and immediately get to work making As this story is being relayed from the colonizer’s paternalistic point of view, this easy sort of break seems like a gross misrepresentation of what would actually happen. In real life,

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when an outside force attempts to make a utopia by disrupting an existing society, the result is much messier. Many other stories of utopia manage their break without conquering or displacing other populations. In the 10th century philosopher Al-Farabi’s text On the Perfect State, he describes the break away from imperfect society not as some sort of conquering force but as a reformation (See Figure 2). According to the journal article “The Virtuous City: The Iranian and Islamic Heritage of Utopianism,” Al-Farabi believed in “‘education through philosophy,’” and “he does not believe in reformation by political uprisings and rejects every form of violence” (Bakhsh 2013). This would mean a more gradual break that involves convincing detractors through argument and pedagogy to conform to a more utopian state. On the other hand, the Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian tale written in the 4th century AD describes a utopia which is just as isolated as More’s but born from a different kind of break (See Figure 3). The journal article “On Through to the Beyond: The Peach Blossom Spring as Paradise,” states that “the ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ describes a hidden valley where a peaceful community established by a group of refugees from warfare and oppression under the First Ch'in Emperor (r. 221-206 b. c.) had lived in total seclusion through the centuries down to the poet's own time” (Nelson 1986). This seems like the most idealistic sort of utopian break: one that is founded on escape from oppression and results in a peaceful oasis for world-weary travelers. More recent utopian novels feature utopias which begin with breaks. Scientist B.F. Skinner’s book Walden Two follows a similar pattern to More’s Utopia in that the reader is informed of the perfect state by getting a front row seat to the political debate between an expert character and his skeptical counterparts (Skinner 1948). The expert takes his skeptics on a journey to Walden Two (named after Henry David Thoreau’s original Walden), which is composed of around a thousand people who have broken away to the countryside in order to conduct their society based on rigorous behavioral science experiments. The novel Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin is written as a time travel ethnography in which the utopia is separated from “normal” society by a break in time and history (Le Guin, 1985). In his book Ecotopia Ernest Callenbach (1975) writes about a fictional country of the same name which begins its break by seceding from the United States. Aldous Huxley continued the trend of island utopias with his aptly titled book Island which describes a society built on goals like self- actualization (Huxley 1962). The manga Aria, created by Kozue Amano features a break that is similar to leaving for an island but instead of staying on Earth, the utopian idealists take their ideas to a terraformed Mars (Amano, 2002). The real life attempts at utopia that have cropped up over the last century seem to mirror the same break pattern as fiction in that they are made up of small coalitions of people who break from society in order to pursue a lifestyle based on an agreed upon philosophy. One utopian society located in Fairfield, Iowa is based on transcendental meditation began with

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Figure 1: My conceptual map of Thomas More’s Utopia showing the landscaped end of the peninsula that was broken to form an island. The end where the river lets out is where the break occurred.

Figure 2: A conceptual map of Al-Farabi’s Virtuous city. This reflects Al-Farabi’s idea of an ideological, nested city structure meant to spread throughout the world, breaking at the point where each Virtuous City reaches the ideal size and then starting again.

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Figure 3: Conceptual map of Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring. This illustrates the idea that the break the refugees made was both harsh in its urgency and finality (the jagged chasm) but soft and gentle in its purpose (the river along the bottom which allows passage through the chasm to a select few travelers). 5

founder Maharishi Mahesh building the Maharishi International University (Lowe, 2010). At first this university attracted a modest number of enrollees but as the Mahesh began to spread the word, waves of devotees broke away from their normal lives and moved to Fairfield to enlighten themselves. Some residents of the town who were not interested in transcendental meditation helped with the break by distancing themselves socially. “The local community soon christened the newcomers “Roos” (alternately “Rus”), a derisive shorthand for “Gurus.” This poorly chosen pejorative neatly illustrates the divide separating the Fairfield community from its new neighbors” (Lowe, 2010). The students at Maharishi International University did not need to hide themselves away as the escapees in “Peach Blossom Spring” did because the derision of outsiders makes the clean break for them. Another example of a group of people carving out a space for themselves to practice their ideology in the middle of “normal” society is the Danish settlement of Christiania. The town was founded in the early 70s by a group of hippies who wrote the following charter:

The aim of Christiania is to create a self-governing society in which each individual may flourish while giving due regard to the interest of the community at large. The society in question must be financially independent. Furthermore, the common quest of the community must at all times be to show that physical and psychological pollution can be avoided. (Midtgaard, 2007).

Their goal was to break entirely from Danish law and social norms so that they could fully realize their vision of utopia. This break was made complete by their clear doctrines which set them apart from the regular goings on of Danish society and by the legal precedent which they established. When the founders of Christiania first began pursuing their goal, they were essentially squatting on government property. However, since no efforts were made by the government to stop this activity, by the time the movement grew large enough for people to start taking notice, they were able to negotiate with the ministry of defense for permanent residence (Midtgaard, 2007). It appears that a break is the official first step in a utopia, fictional or otherwise. I cannot say for certain why this is, but I have a few theories. If someone were tasked with creating a utopia without a large break at the beginning, how would it work? It seems like they would have to work in a series of small breaks which would consist of turning one person at a time. If that did not work, they would probably just have to wait. For authors, trying to write a story about a society which smoothly transitions into a utopia without any major disruptions would present a significant challenge. First off, inventing the process through which this could possibly occur and making it believable would be difficult. Second, if there was no break, who would translate the world for the reader? Of course, it is possible to write speculative fiction/science fiction that does not provide a connection between the strange world the reader

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finds themselves immersed in and the world the reader experiences on a daily basis. However, the point of most speculative fiction is to explore deep questions about technology, philosophy and the human condition by comparing a strange paradigm to a familiar one. This is why one of the characters in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is a poet with memories of Old Earth (our Earth) before its destruction which he relays to the other characters (Simmons, 1989). This is also why Doctor Who has a human companion. If all human society reaches utopia through small, gradual transitions, who will be left at the pinnacle to discuss the transition and compare the present society to the old one? Of course time travelers and historians (which are, I suppose, time travelers in a way) are options—and Leguin employs a time traveler in her novel— but there seems to be something more electric about the discourse that occurs between someone who hails from “normal” society and a utopian who has made a firm and intentional break from this “normal” society to live by completely different values. Even Leguin’s utopia, despite its time travel element, features utopian citizens who can clearly articulate the break they have made and why they have made it (1985). For real life utopias, the need for the break makes even more sense and needs less explanation. Humans don’t live forever so I know that if I had a brilliant idea for restructuring society, my daddy’s money, and a sprinkling of cult-leader mentality, I wouldn’t wait around to achieve world domination or just sow the seeds of my idea in the peer-reviewed literature and hope that sometime after I am dead society will manage to get there without me. No, I would immediately buy a tract of land in the middle of nowhere and begin putting up posters. I suppose that once you know what kind of society you want to spend your life in, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible which means hacking through the peninsula instead of waiting for it to turn into an island on its own.

Borders The next step for building a utopia seems to utilize the borders metapattern. While the break serves to separate the utopia and give it the independence it needs to begin construction, borders both around and within the utopia solidify its structure. As Volk writes, “borders function as bulwarks against forces of disruption” (Volk, 1995). When utopia is a pinnacle of perfection just waiting to be torn apart by entropy, it is understandable that defending against disruption would be a priority. However, that is not a border’s only purpose. Volk also describes borders saying that “no border is absolutely impenetrable. Otherwise how would one eat, breathe, or read? In fact, the liveliest borders are far from perfect bulwarks” (Volk, 1995). Utopias must do what they can to keep their delicate social structure in place, but they must also leave space for well meaning outsiders or would-be converts to enter. Like regular countries, utopias may need to engage in trade or in war to ensure that their state remains safe and healthy.

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Once again, More’s foundational work serves as an excellent example for the way that borders function in a utopia. When More’s self-insert character of the same name meets the traveler Raphael Hythloday, Hythloday tells him about the way that Utopia defends itself saying, “the channel is known only to the natives so that if any stranger should enter into the bay, without one of their pilots, he would run great danger of shipwreck” (More, 1516). Essentially, though the islanders are welcoming to the people like Hythloday who come in peace, the entire island has been designed to prevent intruders from threatening their carefully constructed way of life. In Al Farabi’s idea of the virtuous city is much less concerned with this kind of defense, instead the borders of his philosophy are constructed to be porous. The way that Farabi describes utopia does not involve a small group of people retreating from society and defending their sanctuary from outsiders at all costs. Instead,

In Farabi's classification, there are not only “city-states” but also “nation-states” and a world state. The virtuous state need not be limited to the size of a small city, as Plato and Aristotle had proposed. The hierarchic order of different associations or, as Farabi calls them, “unions” from the greatest to the smallest is the world state, the nation-state, the city-state, the village, the quarter, the street, and the house. (Bakhsh, 2013).

Al Farabi’s vision is meant to encompass the whole world but that does not mean it is borderless. As opposed to trying to claim one small space, Al Farabi imagines a collection of small spaces (cities) grouped into slightly larger spaces (nations). All these spaces contain borders but instead of being meant to keep people out, the borders serve to measure the unit of society that they contain. Borders also play an important role in modern utopian experiments. In Mahesh’s transcendental society, there was no hard border made of walls. Instead, he employed a soft border made of rules and cultural institutions. As the movement grew, he instituted rules which dictated who would be allowed in the group meditations that he led in the golden domes of his university. Most of these rules involved not meditating with other groups and when the rules were violated, the outcasts usually went on to form their own transcendental meditation groups. While unfortunate, these further breaks and the new borders they created could be seen as an organic version of Al-Farabi’s ideals of the Virtuous City; these meditators are simply rearranging themselves into social units of the correct size to form a perfect union. Together, all these variations of Mahesh's utopian vision cultivated the porous border between themselves and the average Fairfield citizen by installing vegetarian restaurants, vegan cafes, and metaphysical bookstores. These institutions marked the territory of the meditators while allowing the people not involved in the lifestyle to briefly crossover into transcendental territory (Lowe, 2010).

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Christiania’s borders are slightly harder than those surrounding Maharishi University but still similar. They have extremely strict and somewhat nebulous (at least to those outside of the commune) criteria for who they will allow into their utopian community and their physical borders consist of buildings, walls, signs, and even an arched entrance which clearly delineate where Christiania begins and Copenhagen ends (Midtgaard, 2007). Arcosanti—a utopian settlement developed in the early 1970s by a brilliant architect and thinker named Paulo Soleri— was dedicated to making the border between his buildings and the environment as soft as possible while the border between his arcological (a combination between “architectural” and “ecological”) and the rest of Arizona (where it is located). These borders are enforced by physical distance which allows the compound to experience the localized impacts of their reduced emissions (Luke 1997). However, the borders are permeable in the sense that they allow newcomers and reporters through their walls in order to help their environmentally friendly ideas to leak out into the world (Vigne, 2014). All these borders, both fictional, ideological, and constructed serve common purposes for the utopias to which they belong. On one front, the borders guard against outsiders who might threaten the balance of their utopian ideals. On another, the borders facilitate the careful exchange of knowledge between themselves and the rest of the world. In this sense, utopian borders function very much like the borders controlling countries. The utopian borders, however, seem to have ideological based rather than nationality based criteria for allowing newcomers to enter and they seem less protective of their ideas and way of life. Of course, there are always exceptions but in general, utopian borders operate almost like academic journals. They want their ideas to reach as many interested parties (other academics) as possible and anyone is free to walk through a tour of their ideas (read the journal) but if you want to be admitted (have your paper published), the process involves a thorough analysis (peer review) of your dedication to their way of life (knowledge of the topic).

Centers Centers are important, and not just for building a utopia. Your center of gravity (whatever that even means) is where your balance and strength come from. In objects, having a low center of gravity keeps them from falling over. When your list of to dos and obligations is so long you feel like pulling your hair out, what do you do? That is right, you take a moment to center yourself. The word “center” has been expanded to encompass far more than the mathematical definition which describes a point inside of a shape which is equidistant from all sides. If you went to a university, there was likely a center for student life which sat nowhere near the mathematical center of your campus. As a metapattern, centers take on powerful meanings relating to leadership and societal structure. In Metapatterns, Volk describes the ways in which biological centers (brains with nervous systems as extensions) began to form in

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individual organisms through evolution. He then goes on to explain how this process is analogous to the formation of societal centers saying, “we see centers in insect societies of bees, termites, and ants …. Like other centers, the queen insect is woven from special fabric” (Volk, 1995). Later he explains how this idea of one powerful organism being the center of that species’ societal activities extends to the entire animal kingdom (though, in some cases, the center organism is determined by factors other than a predisposition for physical advantages)— even humans. Sometimes there are disputes about what (or who) is the true center of a society, other times there are multiple centers. In Metapatterns, Volk details some of the pitfalls present in humanity’s ongoing struggle to appoint human centers and asks the questions, “Which … loci is the center of society—the alpha organism, the ruling group, or the source of law? Or should all be considered together, as parts of the governing center?” (1995). He leaves these questions unanswered which I think is prudent considering that there is no empirical way to determine where the center of society is and that we cannot even determine which metaphor for center (brain or heart? DNA or helper proteins?) works best. However, it is undeniable that people find centers important enough to go looking for them everywhere. Even in utopian societies (real and imagined), humans cannot seem to stop themselves from seeking out or building centers—especially centers made up of government officials, laws, and law enforcement organs. More’s island Utopia has a city center located in the most central point of the island for easy access. As for the human center, the government operations are controlled by a democratically elected leader and casual talk of politics is forbidden (perhaps to allow everyone to develop their own political opinions without undue influence from their peers) under threat of death (More 1551). As Al Farabi’s Virtuous City is more of a conceptual framework than a concrete place the way More’s Utopia is made out to be, there is little talk of geographic/architectural centers. However, his idea of who is the center of the Virtuous City fits well with Volk’s discussion of human and animal centers in large groups being required to adapt to certain roles, perhaps embodying some “metaphysical substance [which] makes up the network of dominance and cooperation” (Volk, 1995). Bakhsh’s analysis of the Virtuous City describes the leader (Imam) of Al-Farabi’s utopian city saying that the leader embodies twelve virtuous qualities, and that “the twelfth and the last quality, without which the other qualities are not worthy, recognizes the virtuous ruler as a courageous, brave, and decided person” (Bakhsh 2013). Tao Yuanming’s tale of the Peach Blossom Spring is too short to include a detailed investigation into the leadership structure of the town but the citizens still tend towards a center of sorts which is hinted at by the mention of “imposing buildings” which stand among the fields and the description of the citizens’ strong connection to “forefathers, fleeing from the troubles of the age of Ch’in” (Yuanming 421 CE). This centering of centers so to speak also occurs in the modern utopian experiments. According to the book Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture, Paolo

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Soleri meant to build Arcosanti in the exact opposite image of other desert cities. This is the dismal image of Phoenix and Los Angeles that the book presents as Paolo Soleri’s architectural antithesis: Spreading out from the ground zero of downtown government centers or central business districts, which lack any authentic "downtown" or "uptown" urban vitality, these urbanized conglomerations are thin accretions of impermanent structures operating under the menacing shadows of intense thermonuclear explosions. Lacking any civic center holding them together, such places have gained their social identity mainly in and from televisual images. (Luke, 1997)

That description alone is enough to make anyone eschew living in a city with no concrete center but Soleri takes it a step further by building himself and his potential followers an alternative. His ideal city is compact with a concentration of necessary goods and services at the geographic center which helps eliminate the need for cars (he sees automobiles as the main culprit for issues like urban sprawl). He also envisions art as the conceptual center of Arcosanti, the thing towards which both architecture and nature can converge (Luke 1997). The Arcosanti website boasts a leadership center made up of a CEO and a board of directors who attempt to facilitate activity on the compound in the spirit of Paolo Soleri’s arcological ideals (Cosanti Foundation 2017). Christiania is another case of a utopia constructing their own style of leadership and geographic center based on their unique philosophy. Like Paolo Soleri, Christiania’s founders wanted their community to be free of cars, so they built an easily accessible center. Christiania held whole-community meetings daily and used their collective agreements to build daycares, radio stations and other community centers. Not only did Christiania cultivate centers within its own borders but its internal efforts allowed it to become a center itself so that now, “Christiania’s culture is radical and it has become ‘a central node in international networks of activism and counterculture’, especially significant within the European squatting movement” (Awan et al 2013). Mahesh's transcendental utopia in Iowa also rotates around a center of gravity made up of architecture and centralized community leadership, in this case, Maharishi and his university. Just like Christiania, the whole of Mahesh's empire from the great golden domes of the university in the middle to the vegetarian restaurants and metaphysical bookstores on the empire’s fringes, the small Iowa town has become a center in its own right, attracting like-minded people from all over the world (Lowe 2010). Whether these utopias exist between the pages of a book or on a carefully plotted tract of land, all of them rely on strong notions of center. They put their capitals and gathering places purposefully in the center of whatever tract of land they occupy for easy access and they are very careful about choosing a human center to sit in their physical center. However, it seems that while they work to solidify the center of the whole, utopias do not want smaller groups of

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people to have centers. In More’s utopia, small centers are disrupted by forcing people to switch homes, keeping architecture uniform, and not allowing private property or any political groupings smaller than a town. In Al-Farabi’s Virtuous city as well, any groupings including family units, city blocks, and small neighborhoods that are smaller than the size of a city are considered imperfect on their own. Christiania’s citizens avoid smaller centers by making all their decisions collectively. Arcosanti also puts a strong emphasis on communal living and decision making. Mahesh is strict about not allowing his constituents to seek out different centers in other spiritual leaders. This does end up mutating into Al-Farabi’s idea of multi-city solution as I discussed earlier, however, I think these breaks are due to size and not any failing of the center as an idea. These different centers seem to suggest that a large facet of utopian city planning involves having as few centers as possible up until the point where sheer size necessitates the addition of another center . This could be a positive strategy to make sure that citizens of the utopia are less prone to acting on their individualistic desires and more motivated to live with the common good in mind. It could also be necessary because there are certain utopian efforts (such as action on climate change) that will not work if there are an infinite number of small centers haggling over solutions.

The Binary of Utopia and Dystopia There is one metapattern that I have purposefully overlooked until now: the binary. This metapattern needs the least explanation because it is the most visceral. Our brain automatically sorts things into pairs. I write the word “ketchup” and you probably think of mustard. Volk describes the importance of binaries saying, “binary is the minimal system, the simplest complexity. There is no newness without twoness” (Volk, 1995). Whatever qualms you may have about the perhaps unjustifiably strong hold binaries have over our society (I have them as well) it is hard to disagree that binaries are the easiest way for us to begin making sense of the chaos that swirls around us. The nature of binaries is how I know that, though I have not mentioned the word once (until this paragraph), from the moment you began reading about metapatterns and utopia, dystopia has been on your mind. (See Figure 4). So far, all the scenarios—real and imagined—that I have worked through are earnest utopias. The characters in the written utopias believe just as firmly in the efficacy of the society in which they live as the authors do and detractors are represented as misguided heathens. It is the same story with the real-life attempts at utopia—everyone involved believes wholeheartedly in their mission and there have been no great outcries or revolutions against them. If they fail, the failure is the fault of some accidental spillover of the evil forces that plague “normal society.” Usually, these utopias are small, separate from the rest of the world and home to a population of citizens dedicated to their perfect society. This is all well and good until one considers that the discovery of these new forms of government and public life don’t

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seem to prompt the rest of the world to either rush to emigrate or immediately begin the work of revamping their home country to conform to this higher order they have discovered. In contrast to the “mythical island” status of many literary utopias, fictional dystopias usually encompass the entire world (or at least the entire world of the protagonist). Some break has happened and, instead of the ruling elite retreating into their bunkers and living separately from the huddled masses, they decide that blanketing the earth in oppression from horizon to horizon is a better solution. Of course, in these dystopian stories, there are always characters who are in love with the status quo. In 1984, the woman who the main character (problematically) spends the entire book lusting over enthusiastically participates in the social conventions the government requires for its female citizens. In Parable of the Sower there are people who choose to sign government work contracts even though they know it is tantamount to signing away their freedom. In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist’s wife remains stoically attached to her virtual wall and her anti-book doctrine even though it makes her suicidal. Maybe it is the case that a utopia will always become a dystopia if it tries to extend its reach beyond those who have already dedicated themselves to it. What if the people who believe themselves to be residing in a utopia only believe that because—like the prisoners in Plato’s cave—they have never known anything else? Maybe the popular saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” could just as easily have been “one man’s dystopia is another man’s utopia.” If it is the case, are all the utopias I have mentioned so far really utopias? (See Figure 4),

The Problems with Utopia While analyzing the utopias above in terms of their metapatterns, I kept mostly to their best, most utopian traits. However, none of them (with perhaps the exception of “Peach Blossom Spring,”) are entirely free of dystopian elements. Utopia is full of rules and regulations that, while they might be amenable to its citizens, do not entice me to join the ranks of those citizens. I would not want to live on an island where casual talk of politics is punishable by death, where no one has real property, where jobs are purposefully segregated by gender, and where war prisoners are kept as slaves (More, 1516). Even Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City is not above reproach. The journal article “Discrimination and Violence in Al-Farabi’s Virtuous City: A Response to Alireza Omid Bakhsh” states that,

In actuality, Al-Farabi’s view of justice entails that the virtuous society should be hierarchically organized according to the inherent worth of individuals and the tasks they perform. Al-Farabi also allows some leeway for offensive wars to enforce happiness. In addition, he advises the virtuous ruler to use coercion against rebellious

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individuals he calls “weeds” and to enslave or execute feral human beings who roam the wild (L’Arrivee, 2014).

This is clearly another instance of “utopian” activity that I would not want to be a part of. Fictional utopias are not the only ones with issues. In fact, the issues that occur in the real-life attempts at utopia are even more profound because they have the power to affect real people and reveal the real problems that arise from trying to build utopias. Maharishi University, Arcosanti, and Christiania have all failed in their own ways and to varying degrees. Out of all three, Maharishi University is perhaps the most successful because it bundled itself into a University system which may have given it special dispensation to be experimental and focus on alternative living styles. However, there is still the matter of how people who no longer go to university or who cannot afford the program can fit into the community. For Arcosanti, the main issue now is that its creator, Paolo Soleri, has passed away and the compound has turned more into a tourist destination than a genuine utopian community (though the place still does interesting and valuable work). Christiania has also slipped away from its original ideals as the community suffers from increased economic pressure, gentrification due to tourism, and raids from Danish police. For imaginary utopias, it seems hard for creators to completely escape their own philosophical biases (or maybe it’s just hard for readers like me to conform to those philosophical biases) and it seems that even the most well intentioned utopian experiments can’t escape the entropic pressures of capitalism and the pessimistic outside world.

The Closest to Utopia We Can Get So, if all utopias are doomed to fail to some extent, what exactly can we do? Should we just trash the idea of utopia entirely or is it still useful? I think that, while it may not be possible to achieve a perfect utopia in which everyone is floating on clouds of euphoria 100% of the time the concept of utopia can be a useful philosophical tool for trying to improve society. What stands out to me as one of the most useful assertions about utopia and dystopia is from the book European Perspectives for Public Administration: The Way Forward: ”In most cases, the dystopian nightmare is about “mass utopia” with dictatorships and loss of personal freedoms, in East and West” (Bouckaert, 2020). What this indicates to me is that constructed utopias turn into dystopias when they are expanded and forced on the entire world without a unanimous agreement. This means that for us to live in a utopian world, we need to emphasize human choice and freedom to prevent society from becoming dystopian. Based on what I have read so far, I think that the best way of doing this would be to create a bunch of micro societies (See Figure 5) which are all run on different philosophies. Like the borders of many of the utopias described above (especially the ideological, real-life utopias), the borders of these societies would be porous, making movement easy and

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Figure 4: My conceptual drawing of utopia and the potential dystopia lurking beneath

Figure 5: My visual representation of the splitting and growth of micro societies with centers that connect to the world center

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completely voluntary no matter what the circumstances of the origin and/or destination society that the migrant is departing from/to. The centers of the society would incorporate the ideas from many of the utopias which dictate that one center cannot be responsible for too many or too few people. Instead of having a dictatorial center the way that Utopia or many of the other literary examples I have used do, these societies would need to form a geographic and ideological center the way that Christiania did in its original form. A unanimous form of government would ensure that there were no issues with tyranny of the majority/minority. This governance would also facilitate the mechanism by which citizens can recognize the moment when they have had an ideological break with the society, they currently are a member of. If a person finds that they cannot reach a unanimous decision with their fellow citizens, it may be time for them to move on to another society/create their own. In order to accommodate these ideological breaks, the societies would shrink and expand to fit the amount of people occupying them and new societies would form, as new ideas are incorporated, or as existing centers become overburdened. Though each society would be run differently in order to provide a variety of choices, they would all have a couple of things in common. The most important thing is that every society would choose its own fatal flaw/Achilles heel. Often people talk about this idea that when you choose to marry someone, you are choosing the problems that you want to live with for the rest of your life. I think it would be the same thing with forming these utopian societies. As I discussed above, many utopian societies can become dystopias or have dystopian elements just by virtue of the way they were constructed. The idea of the fatal flaw is that each society would consciously internalize utopia/dystopia binary. The reason for this is that there is no way to escape societal flaws, partially because entropy makes them inevitable and partially because humans need something to strive for or we would all be bored and directionless. In order to make sure that the dystopian fatal flaw does not erode the societal structure, it would be incorporated into the society’s ideological structure as one of the central causes taken up the society’s citizens. In the way that a couple in a marriage might understand that one of their biggest problems is their tendency to lash out at each other when they are stressed or anxious. It is likely that this couple will never eliminate this issue from their marriage but if they are properly aware of it, they can take the precautions necessary to avoid letting it destroy the marriage. Alternatively, continued, mindful encounters with this fatal relationship flaw can help the people in the marriage gain a better understanding of each other and strengthen their marriage overall. In a society, this internalization and awareness of the fatal flaw would give the citizens something to constantly strive for while also keeping the dystopian/utopian binary unbalanced in favor of utopia. (Ignoring the part of the myth where Achilles dies) the Achilles heel worked because he had a small part of him which was incredibly vulnerable, but the depth of that vulnerability allowed him to be invincible everywhere else. However, in order to make sure that ability was useful, he had to constantly be aware of and defend his vulnerability.

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(Again, pretending that Achilles was actually successful at protecting himself), this is what each micro society would need to do to be successful. As a more specific example, I will try to describe the specific micro society that I would like to live in given that this utopian scheme was possible. Recently, there has been a surge in a speculative fiction genre called Solarpunk. Out of all the science fiction on the market, this genre is the most hopeful about the future of humanity (Hamilton 2017). Solarpunk stories imagine a world run almost completely on solar power. Visuals include elegantly curved high- rises covered with verdant sideways gardens, solar arrays snuck into every facet of architecture, wind turbines whirring quietly in the background, and clothes made from plant fibers (Springett 2017). In this world, humanity has achieved a healthy equilibrium with nature (much like what Soleri’s Arcosanti attempts) and fossil fuels are just a memory. In the most ideal solarpunk world, I would imagine that there are universal healthcare and social service benefits to rival those of the most successful socialist country. However, as I have mentioned above, things cannot be completely perfect. Even the most idealistic solarpunk stories need a key ingredient: conflict. If there is no conflict, nothing for the characters in the story to strive for, there would be no reason for anyone to care about the story. I think that the same thing is true of real life. Of course, we do not want bad things to happen to us but if everything were perfect all of the time, we wouldn’t have anything to strive for and there would be no excitement. This is where the Achilles heel would come in. For my solarpunk society, I think that the Achilles heel would be the issues caused by running a society mostly on solar power and wind such as: intermittent energy access, reduced ability to do powerful technological work, and photovoltaic cell recycling/wind turbine repair. None of these issues are insurmountable, but they make up the weakest part of the solarpunk utopia. This Achilles heel would be the thing that gives the citizens of the solar punk society a future to work towards that is even better than the nearly perfect society they already have. If this goal doesn’t serve them, they can move next door to the cyberpunk society where the Achilles heel is over-reliance on virtual technology and lack of real human connection or they could move to one of the hundreds of other societies with hundreds of different Achilles heels. To put it another way: Pick your poison.

Conclusion I think that the biggest struggle with the utopia that I’ve described above is that there are certain things—like climate change, world peace, etc.—that every single person (or at least the majority) of people on the planet have to agree on in order for everyone to survive. There is no way for half the planet to go and make a society where they make war and pollute without it affecting the society that does not want that. There is also the problem of people who might want to form insular societies for nefarious purposes, and it may be hard to ensure that

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movement between borders is truly free for everyone. Additionally, this utopian model does not include the best framework for cross-utopia relationships or for the governance of children who might have different utopian goals than their parents. I also think that, the ideological, unanimous-center-framework would have to break down at the global level for each utopian society to have a say in the global issues. Unanimous decision-making would not be possible here (unless humans start to colonize other planets) because there is no where for societies that cannot come to a unanimous decision can go. The analysis I have done and the ideas I have proposed here are not meant as a panacea for all the planet’s societal ills or as a political playbook for world leaders. For anything resembling this sort of global remodeling of borders and centers to take place, there would need to be multiple breaks all of the world on local levels that mirror those of Christiania’s, Arcosanti’s, and Maharishi University’s and they would need to be informed by the metapatterns I have discussed here. Each break would also have to come from an ideology which is genuinely invested in the well being of all people on earth, even those who are unaware of the utopian movement or who do not agree with the ideology of the society being created in the break. I think that the biggest challenge with catalyzing a movement like this would be figuring out a way to support as many of the freedoms of the individual societies as possible while also making the process unavailable to hate groups, or other types of reprehensible societal conglomerations that might exist already or arise as a result of this opportunity. I think that, in reality, there is no simple way to make up rules that will result in a perfect global societal structure. Political scientists, historians, philosophers, and activists have been trying for centuries to answer the difficult questions about lines between personal freedom and harms to others, about, human rights, and about the best form of government. I will not pretend that I know more than—or even as much as—people who have spent their entire lives studying these issues. However, I do think that the concept of utopian metapatterns is a worthy addition to the portfolio of topics that people bring up when they discuss politics and philosophy. Recognizing that breaks, borders, and centers are the most important parts of utopian structure could help with comparisons between societies that might be fall on different points of the gradient between the binary of dystopia and utopia. For example, specific questions about how a more dystopian society was formed (breaks) versus a more utopian one could lead to conclusions about how to better facilitate transitions of power or the creation of new states in order to achieve a more utopian result. My hope is that utopian metapatterns will become just another important piece of equipment in the toolbox that everyone, even if they are not directly invested in politics, uses to analyze the societal structures and relationships around them to improve their lives.

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About the Author Nadine Stodolka is a rising senior at New York University where she is majoring in Environmental Studies and hopes to go to graduate school for Environmental Management. Her interest in Environmental Studies stems from her desire to understand what is wrong with the way the world works so that she can fix it. She chose to apply metapatterns to the concept of utopia because utopian studies focus heavily on analyzing societal problems and coming up with solutions. She hopes that the research she has done for this paper will allow her to develop a more holistic approach to solving climate adaptation and mitigation. This summer, she will be continuing her mission to unearth corruption by conducting research on scientific denial in the golf industry. In her free time, she enjoys sparring with her karate club, reading science fiction novels, and writing short stories.

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Utopian Metapatterns

NADINE STODOLKA New York University (NYU)

Citation information: CitationStodolka, information: Nadine. 2020. Stodolka, Utopian Nadine Metapatterns.. 2020. Utopi TheThean NYUNYU Metapatterns StudentStudent JournalJournal. The NYUofof Metapatterns,Metapatterns, Student Journalvolume of2, Metapatternspaper 2. Available, volume at: https://metapatterns.wikidot.com/nyusjm2:nstodolka 2, paper 2. Available at: http://metapatterns.wikidot.com/nyusjm2