These Thirteen

     Essentially, all utopian narratives are a special kind of allegory—like romance, myth, or fable.  Political visions of utopia, common to the current climate, are not excluded from these fictional characterizations.  An analysis of the political rhetoric of utopia prevalent on the Left would reveal the mixing of these various genres of allegory.  The Left draws for us the image of a harmoniously ordered society where government can slow “the rise of the oceans” and heal the planet, eliminate sickness and joblessness, and provide equality for all through the ideal of “social justice.”  They would have us believe that such is their quest, and that they are just the super-humans to accomplish the impossible.  They would have us get caught in the rising narrative, relinquising any skepticism as to their motives and abilities.  The swirling, soaring rhetoric might overwhelm us, but it figures a certain tension, confusion, or even crisis to the listener / reader.  We pause, hesitate, and then stumble to eventually catch ourselves.  We have heard such promises and claims before of Great Societies–we keep our distance and doubts intact.  What separates these false prophets from us is our groundedness and the transparency of their truer objectives of control and power.  Everywhere they can only lie, and they are poor authors of their lies.

     The utopian desire hides and masks the crisis in its rhetoric; the crisis that ultimately leads to failure.  This crisis is a crisis of boundaries, and it occurs at all levels of rhetorical production.  As a crisis of boundaries, politically utopian visions want to obliterate the boundary or border between the people and the government, between natural law and the tyranny of the few.  This boundary is nothing but the line of distinction eloquently demarcated in America by the Constitution.  As Nietzsche has reminded us, the state, and certainly the utopian state is no exception, is not a people but “the death of peoples.”  We might recognize crisis, then, in its unintended consequences of disruption and displacement, even dismemberment, and the figure, par excellence, that it engenders, as Nietzsche forewarns, is Death.  They would separate us from the laws that preserve and protect our liberty.  The narrative the Left writes might be seen as an allegory of Death: we note that all utopias are literally “no place”; they do not exist in reality, in the locale of geography and history.  Rather,  they exist in a “particular place” that is not historical or geographical—it is marvelously constituted of the imaginative, “ignorant of all artificial boundary.”  It is a “mental space.”[1]

     We can draw an analogy between the utopian state and the over-reaching Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.[2]   The state pushes upon us a modern myth of creation and thereby allegorizes all previous such myths, but especially the creation account in Genesis, and the myth of Prometheus—it plays God and wants to be the arbiter of life. Frankenstein is an allegorical work and carries in the ambitions of the title character certain utopian visions.  They originate in the ideal of the perfected human—man overstepping his boundaries, God, and even himself to perfect for what natural law does not allow.   This is Victor Frankenstein’s dream, but the result is a perversion, as is the dream and what appears the result of those dreams of the Left.  Whether through genetic or social engineering—politely phrased with a twisted ethics as “social justice”—the Left pushes unwittingly for perfection, but can only deliver a perversion of the vision.  They play creator like Victor Frankenstein, but unlike him they fail to see the monster they create, or would create.  Instead, they find imperfection and monstrosity in what is naturally ordained—only of course by their own definitions—and construct their utopia around, for example, what would be the abortion and death of a child, ultimately, naturally born.  Their work thus originates in and advances from the point of a crisis, the crisis of the monstrosity they cannot see and the beauty they would make into monstrosity.  The utopian vision seeks a better “state.”  But, it can never find this state, only leave death and destruction in its wake, its own kind of monstrosity—the figure and vision of the monster that Victor Frankenstein creates: “his limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.  Beautiful!—Great God!  His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips . . .  I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created” (52-3).  Is there even proportion in their perversion when the state treads on the individual?  Perhaps, when they have destroyed the society and the people they seek to perfect, then they will see the perversion in their vision.  Perhaps they will see that such utopian dreams that disrupt the boundaries established by the Constitution, between life and death, between liberty and tyranny, are like Victor’s monster: life seemingly, but actually, Death, thinly-skinned.

[2] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text, ed. James Reiger (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1982).