Islands of Hope

Utopia, Thomas More’s celebrated book, was published in 1516, a year before Martin Luther tacked his ninety-five theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. More, who was English, wrote of a perfect world, far, far away from England, where crime, poverty, political corruption, and religious intolerance were nonexistent. In Utopia everyone lived in harmony with each other and nature.

In More’s real world common people struggled for survival, war ravaged countries, and disease and famine wiped out large segments of the population on a regular basis. Not many years after More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes would write in Leviathan, arguably his most famous work, that humankind lives in “continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Thomas More experienced that brutish world first-hand but dreamed of a better place, a place where no person feared his neighbor. More, unfortunately, never experienced his Utopia. In 1535 King Henry VIII ordered More’s beheading for refusing to sign off on the king’s divorce to Catherine of Aragon.

While there was a negative side to More’s Utopia (he believed in authoritarian rule and communism, among other not so savory things), most people, then and now, long for an idyllic place free from the worrisome burdens of life as it is on earth. We think nostalgically back to the Garden of Eden or dream of living in a kind of Shangri-La, where life is free of the daily stresses that weigh heavily upon us, where we are free to achieve our potential as human beings.

Garden of Eden

If you search for the country of Utopia on a map, you won’t be able to find it. In fact, Utopia is so far away from England or anywhere else, it ends up being “nowhere,” which is what the word “utopia” literally means in the Greek. Utopia is a place that doesn’t exist. In other words, to be in Utopia means to be “nowhere.”  

Utopia is a fairy-tale land that only exists in our imagination. The problem is, we can’t live in our imagination. We live in the real world, a world that knows little peace but a great deal of injustice, suffering and death. If Thomas More longed for a place of harmony and peace, he lived in a dystopian world, where heartbreak and broken dreams described his everyday reality.

Little has changed in the past 500 years. The daily news is filled with one depressing story after another. Corruption in politics, violence and wars, racism and homophobic slurs, and obscene greed by large corporations litter the nightly news. These gloomy events are not just problems in America but seem to be pervasive everywhere. We sometimes dread turning on the TV or looking at our cellphones or reading the newspaper for fear that more bad news awaits us. Utopia is what we dream of (maybe not More’s Utopia but a place of goodwill toward others), but our reality, the places where we live, reveals a dystopian world.

The problems of our world are so daunting that sometimes I find myself reminiscing about the “Good Old Days,” days when the pace of life was slower and less threatening, when there was more harmony and goodwill among people. But if I think that utopia existed somewhere in the past, I am just as misguided as those who pine away their life envisioning some utopia in the future. The truth of the matter is, utopia is “no place,” neither in the past nor the future. It didn’t exist during the days of Jesus or the Middle Ages or during Thomas More’s lifetime. It didn’t exist when my father flew over Germany in a bomber during World War II or in the 60s when so many of my friends went to Vietnam, and it still doesn’t exist today. The “Good Old Days,” like Utopia, exist only in our imaginations.

American B-17 flying fortresses bombs Ludwigshafen chemical and synthetic oil works, Germany. World War II, Sept. 29, 1944.

So, are we stuck in this dystopian world? Well, yes and no. Yes because we live in the world and the world is a messy place. It always has been and always will be. We may long for the “Good Old Days,” but those days exist only in our selective memories. My grandmother, who struggled to feed her children during the Great Depression and often relied on the Salvation Army for food, was fond of saying, “Yes, the Good Old days were certainly old but they weren’t very good.” While we may long for life in simpler times, every period of history has faced challenges that were as problematic for them as today’s challenges are for us.

On the other hand, we are not destined to be forever condemned to a dystopian world. We have a choice. We can create islands of hope, perhaps not a Utopia, but real places where all people are treated with respect and dignity, little pockets of resistance to the prevailing ethos. These islands of hope can emerge in places of business, on the construction site, in houses of worship, in neighborhoods, schools, wherever people gather. Hope begins by simply treating other people the way we want to be treated, a way of life often referred to as the Golden Rule—golden because all the world’s great religions embrace this tenet of life.

That may not seem like a big deal, but it is. Think if politicians practiced the Golden Rule when they gave their campaign speeches, or nations in their dealings with other sovereign states kept this principle at the forefront. What if businesses, when designing their marketing strategies, were guided by this belief, or neighbors in their daily interactions were mindful of this precept. What a blessing it would be if religious communities in their behavior toward different faith groups practiced this credo. Following the Golden Rule would reduce dishonesty, vitriol, power plays, and religious intolerance. 

One thing I’m pretty sure of, if we’re to create these islands of hope, they won’t start from the top then work their way down. They’ll begin in families, between husbands and wives, in neighborhoods, between people who live across the street from one another, in coffee shops, between estranged friends. They’ll take place between people of different races who recognize that human beings can’t be judged by the color of their skin but only by the goodness of their heart. They’ll begin when our longing for peace is greater than our lust for power.

These islands of hope are not Utopia. They are not imaginary places. They are real places, places where people live and work, pray and worship, eat and drink. We don’t have to just dream of a better world; we can begin building one today, one relationship at a time.