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Patrick Sharpe

Professor Moss

Contemporary Civilization

15 May 2019

Final Paper: Option One

(Pipe?) Dream

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
—George Santayana, philosopher
To dream of an ideal society is to lament the shortcomings of our own. The very concept

of an “ideal society” or “utopia” implies that our own society must not be ideal—or such

fantasies would hold no attraction for us. In order to imagine an ideal society, then, we must

identify those aspects of our society that are less than ideal, and fix them. We must find the

mistakes of the past, so that we will not be condemned to repeat them.

All of this sounds easy in theory. But identifying what is wrong with your own society is

harder than it looks. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in

2005, he told a story:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish

swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at

the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

His point is that when you are completely surrounded by something, you become so used to it

that you might not even notice that it’s there. The more common something is, the less likely

you are to be aware of its existence.

Because of this, pinpointing what’s wrong with our own society is a difficult—maybe
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even impossible—task. It’s easy to come up with grievances about our society, but finding the

root cause of these problems is much harder. An obvious example in modern American society

is gun violence. With a new mass shooting every week, we can all agree that there is a problem.

But figuring out what is causing the problem is much more difficult.

Is the underlying cause lack of gun control? Perhaps. But lack of gun control is, in turn,

caused by gun culture in general. And yet isn’t gun culture deeply rooted in American values of

freedom, self-defense, and heroism? Or maybe, as some suggest, the problem isn’t guns, but

mental health. But then what is the underlying cause—on a societal level—of this mental health

crisis? Perhaps it is the product of the isolation we all face in advanced societies. And yet this

isolation seems to be an inevitable byproduct of the material comfort and high quality of life to

which we have become so attached.

In short, analyzing our own society is a difficult task because, like the fish in David

Foster Wallace’s story, we have never known anything else. Sometimes aspects of our society

that we take for granted, or even enjoy, are really the symptoms of a deeply rooted problem. In

his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger writes:

Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make

very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many

children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European

societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with

stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near

them.

Even stuffed animals, harmless and lovable in and of themselves, seem to be a manifestation of

our children’s loneliness. But since they are a normal part of our everyday lives, they are just
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“water” to us.

To create an ideal society, then, the most powerful tool would be a questioning spirit—an

intellect that could actually make out the “water” that surrounded it. If I had to pick authors

from this semester to co-found an ideal society, Sebastian Junger would be the first one picked

because he seems to question our society on the deepest level. In his book Tribe, he tries to find

the underlying causes of some of society’s biggest problems, from unhappiness, to mental health

issues, to economic recessions. Junger would be valuable in creating a new society because he

does not settle for simple answers. In the first chapter of his book, he discusses the economic

recession of 2008. It would be tempting to say that the recession was caused by unscrupulous

banking practices and to leave it at that. And that wouldn’t be inaccurate. But Junger digs far

deeper. “Dishonest bankers” provides an answer, but it also poses a question: why were they

dishonest? Ultimately, Junger traces their lack of scruples all the way back to the loss of

community in modern society.

This degree of questioning would be indispensable in creating an ideal society. If we

settle for the simple answers, we are left with a million disconnected problems. Trying to solve

them all separately becomes a haphazard game of whack-a-mole. But if we could start fresh

with a new society, finding the underlying causes of our problems (not just their external

manifestations), as Junger does, would be crucial.

All of Junger’s questioning lead’s him back to one thing: tribe. He blames a great many

of our biggest problems on our lack of tribe, or community. The citizens of the world’s most

advanced societies all seem to suffer from intense isolation. Junger believes this is because as

our quality of life increases, we become less dependent on others for our daily needs. With this

lack of dependence comes a lack of community, which hurts us all because humans never
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evolved to live alone. In modern American society, we are actually more dependent on others

than ever: we don’t build our own shelters, make our own clothes, or produce our own food.

Most of us don’t even have a clue how the technology we rely so heavily on works. And yet, on

the day-to-day, our society allows us to operate in complete isolation.

Because wealth and technology enable us to be so isolated, it would be very important to

instill the value of community into the first generations of a new civilization, so that tightly-knit

communities would become the norm.

I believe that material wealth and a strong sense of community are not fundamentally

incompatible. But one of the things that prevents us from creating community is inequality. As I

see it, there are two main types of inequality: there is inequality within a group (income

inequality, class inequality) and there is inequality between groups (discrimination, racism). The

first of these two categories of inequality would be mitigated by a stronger sense of community.

Junger writes that in tribal societies, one person would never be permitted to claim more than

their fair share “because it would represent a serious threat to group cohesion and survival.”

To combat the second type of inequality—inequality between groups—I would enlist the

help of James Baldwin. Baldwin’s writing is so powerful because it conveys to the reader the

horror of experiencing racism on a personal level, but it also teaches the reader about the

workings of racism on the societal level. In “Letter from a Region in My Mind” he writes:

Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations,

and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim

guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people

This passage perfectly illustrates the self-perpetuating nature of discrimination. The black

servants felt justified in stealing from their white masters because it seemed like nothing in
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comparison to the injustices they faced at the hands of the white world. But this theft, although

morally justifiable, only aggravated their plight by reinforcing the white world’s prejudices

against them.

Baldwin stresses the self-fulfilling prophecy of racism in another of his essays, “Notes of

a Native Son.” He recounts how, when a white waitress timidly denied him service at a

restaurant, he became enraged not because she refused to serve him, but because she seemed so

afraid of him. “I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright

worthwhile,” he recalls.

Because racism is so self-perpetuating, it is all but impossible to completely eradicate

once it has spread. To create an ideal society, you would have to protect against discrimination

at the ground level. But how to go about this? For a solution, I would turn to a third author:

Leslie Marmon Silko.

Across her work, Silko emphasizes the importance of storytelling. In the Pueblo Indian

culture that Silko grew up in, stories were everything. “The stories are always bringing us

together, keeping this whole together, keeping this family together, keeping this clan together,”

she writes. The Pueblo people understand that stories have the power to shape us. Laws might

constrain people, but stories can change people.

Silko writes that, in Pueblo culture, “Because the Creator is female, there is no stigma on

being female.” To members of a patriarchal society engaged in a tedious struggle for gender

equality, this statement is astonishing in its simplicity. And yet it makes sense: if people believe

that the universe was created by a woman, how can they possibly see women as inferior?

Compare this to James Baldwin describing a “religious crisis” he went through the summer he

was fourteen: “And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God’s love alone is left.
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But God—and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly—is

white.”

This contrast shows just how powerful storytelling can be. The stories being told to a

young Pueblo girl taught her that she was she was as strong as any man. The stories being told

to a young black boy in a white society taught him that even God wasn’t on his side.

Now imagine a society where storytelling is used to destroy racism. Where a white child

can grow up hearing stories about black heroes, and idolizing the black men he sees in the

movies. Where a boy can be told a story about a woman without having to hear how pretty she

was. Surely in such a society, a white man would not grow up to hate black men, and men

would not grow up to objectify women?

Dreaming of an ideal society in such detail might seem pointless. After all, we will never

have the opportunity to play at God and create our own perfect world from scratch. But as I

write this paper, I am realizing that perhaps it does have some value: if we do not know what our

ideal society is, how can we strive to improve our current society? Having an ideal, however

unattainable, gives us something to work toward, a direction to move in.

At the beginning of the paper, I wrote that in order to imagine an ideal society, we must

identify those aspects of our own society that are less than ideal, and fix them. But the reciprocal

is true as well: in order to fix the problems in our society, we must first imagine an ideal society

that is free of those problems. If we can dream, we have a hope to cling to. But without a

dream, we have nothing.