"Words are built by putting together these stems," my favorite elementary teacher told us as she handed out a blue sheet of paper. I was astonished at this new idea that words were infused with meaning—built as if by LEGO bricks.
miss = to send, like in missile, missionary
de = down, like in degrade, detoxify
eu = good, like in euphemism, euphoria
It was one of the few things I really took to studying as a child. Language was fascinating and powerful—and I did not yet grasp how powerful and even dangerous it could be.
Later, in my 8th grade English class, my teacher introduced us to the classic book, Utopia, by Thomas More.
"What do you think this word, utopia, means?" She asked the class. For the first time in a long time, I was compelled, Hermione Granger-style, to raise my hand and proudly answer:
"It means good place," I said, having arrived at the conclusion by breaking the word into what I thought was eu-topia. But just as I realized the book she held up for us was misspelled, she affirmed my conclusion and said that while the book was about a good place—a perfect place—its title was not spelled Eutopia. Whether on purpose or on accident, the homophone utopia serves as a reflection of what the novel also explores: is it possible to create the perfect society?
Utopia as my teacher explained, was "not a place." Derived from Greek, ou meaning "not" + topos meaning "place."
Is that because there is no possibility of a perfect place? Or because it just doesn't currently exist?
It surely does not currently exist, and not for lack of effort. We know from literature and history (and current events, unfortunately) that there are a few pitfalls we humans have discovered in that pursuit of eutopia. In fact, it seems like we claim to know it well, but tend to repeat the mistakes or the manipulation so often that I'm even starting to wonder if it's ethical to pursue eutopia. It's an attractive idea: trying to attain a better state and circumstance for everyone, but how do we go about it?
Homogeneity
The trope of sameness and lack of diversity appears in many a dystopian sci-fi show or social critique in literature. Consider Edward Scissorhands, Stepford Wives, 1984, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or The Giver, just to get started.
If I had to design a eutopia—a perfect place—one of the first tools I'd reach for is some kind of unifying goal or vision. However, having the same goal and dogmatically forcing conformity are two different things.
Perhaps at first, we would imagine things were perfect. We'd have a shared vision, like "liberty and justice for all." It's a beautiful ideal that many people can get behind. However, as we've seen in U.S. American history, the vision alone has never been realized. While there has been progress, we have never fully disentangled ourselves from our own invented systems of oppression. Racism has not been eradicated by any stretch of the imagination—in fact, it may have transformed into something more insidious and deceptive than it ever has been (I highly recommend reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander to deep dive into that topic).
Given that the U.S. has been attempting to make the vision a reality for almost 250 years, I have to wonder if it would ever actualize even given infinite time. I believe part of the reason for this is the competing value of homogeneity that our people have expressed consistently over time. The racist ideology that was developed in order to categorize humans with dark skin as an "other" is one such evidence for our love of homogeneity (sameness). White Christian Nationalism has been attempting to further construct sameness by oppressing and erasing other minorities like the LGBTQ+ community.
If you aren't white, straight, and cisgender, then you are an "other," which is a threat in the eyes of someone who relies on sameness as a value. Your eutopia falls apart the second that diversity appears in the group. The irony is that a single person grouped with one other single person will already introduce diversity into that group of two people. We all have differences in thought, experience, and values, no matter how slight.
Homogeneity is a false value, because it cannot even stand at the smallest possible sample size. For large-scale populations, homogeneity is merely manipulation to define one attribute as the grouping standard. Everything else that is compared to that standard must find a way inside or outside, but it is all invented and arbitrary, based on whoever happened to grab the power of influence.
We're back to the question of ethics in our building of eutopia: who are "we" to do decide what everyone else should do or be or think?
Language
Control the language, control the reality.
It is baffling how much language impacts our thoughts and our experiences. You've surely noticed this if you speak more than one language. There rarely is a translation that can be made one word for one word. Instead, there is a matching up of experiences between the languages, and that's the best you can do.
If we want to attempt to build a eutopia for our small, homogenous group of people, we may want to follow the current U.S. president’s lead and force (or restrict) specific kinds of language to cement power and domination over and against the “others” that pose a threat to our utopia:
Across the [U.S.] federal government, agencies have been busy scrubbing photographic and written references about women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community from their websites...
"If you erase the memory, we really forget the people," said Alessio Ponzio, whose research focuses on LGBTQ history and women's studies and is a visiting professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. "It's an act of violence that is very subtle but can really destroy the psychology of people. Basically, 'I'm telling you that I do not recognize you.'" (NPR)
I know well what it's like to be restricted by language. There was no doubt I was queer from my earliest memories. However, I grew up in a culture that was so toxic toward any queer identity, that I didn't even know I actually related to the queer community until my late twenties.
As an example, people growing up in my cultural context are conditioned to use the phrase "I am struggling with same-gender attraction," which not only uses incorrect terms, but also introduces shame into an experience that is not shameful. Nevertheless, the insistence of this language is still emphasized and ultimately as a result, suicidality continues to plague both youth and adults in my faith tradition.
"That's not me," I would tell myself, "They're the bad people. It has nothing to do with lived experience." The absence of the language led me to not only misrepresent myself and others, it also kept me in a perpetual state of stress and confusion. How could I explain or express what I was experiencing, when I'm not allowed to talk about it with my straight, cisgender friends? The restriction took a huge toll on my mental health, and effectively put me in a cage for more than two-thirds of my life.
The moment that I could speak the words—after having discovered the words to speak—the burden of shame I had borne for a lifetime instantly lifted. And it was instantaneous. Pulling the right words out of my brain and into universe was transformative. That's exactly why we can't have people getting educated, reading certain books, asking certain questions, having an open mind, or using certain language in our utopia.
Tumbling Down
There are tools for control. They are time-tested, documented, and effective. It is perhaps the existence of these tools that illustrate the problem of eutopia. If the perfect society can only be constructed by removing the humanity, dignity, and agency of people, then is it even worth the perfection?
If there's one thing I've learned from the queer community, it's that it actually is possible to break from homogeneity and still arrive at a peaceful, collaborative, thoughtful, loving society. Queer people destroyed everything I thought was necessary for a good place. In an attempt to maintain a utopia, I was taught that they were the enemy, that they had an agenda, and that they were destroying families. All of that was wrong. Now my country is trying to use the exact same rhetoric at a much larger scale than my smaller religious culture (mind you, it's not like the U.S. has been free of this before, it's just that we're doubling down on it again).
Homogeneity has been propped up as a value or an identity that grants access to rights and privileges that should be afforded to all. We’ve seen hostility towards ideas like diversity, equity, and inclusion spring up suddenly, when it was rarely spoken about even one year ago, all because of language and rhetoric. For some, this feels like a step toward eutopia. For most, it already is utopia.
Eutopia is very much relative based on who has power and who does not. If a eutopia can only be created by drawing a circle around an arbitrary group and calling those inside it humans, while everyone else becomes monsters, then surely there is no eutopia possible for our species. If unity only comes by defining an enemy among us, we are utopia.
"Divided, we fall."