Investigating Utopia
Should we aim for a perfect world?
From Tommasso Campanella’s City of the Sun, to modern ‘solarpunk,’ the sun has historically been linked to utopian thought-experiments in fiction.
For the Utopian, a unified and uniform mass of humanity is enabled by the “abolition of war,” which in turn can only be safeguarded by a “supranational agency, ultimately a world government.”
Liberals like to claim that their political worldview is not even ideological, but simply what happens when kindness and common sense are allowed to prevail over dogmatism, tyranny, and impractical forms of political romance. But is liberalism, the ruling philosophy of our modern world, really so immune from the utopian temptation?
Conservatives, of course, are aware of the urgent need to reduce the bureaucratic machine to a minimum. But in the quest to devolve governance to the local level, we must not forget the existential dignity of the penniless castaways generated by the oligarchic system.