The word “utopia” has become shorthand for any kind of idealistic realm or impulse, though its origins are more ambiguous. Coined by Thomas More, the great humanist, in a 1516 book of the same name, it’s derived from an amalgamation of Greek terms meaning “no place” and “good place.” More is famous for his ritualistic suffering, which included wearing a hair shirt throughout his life and being beheaded by King Henry VIII after refusing to acknowledge the despot as the leader of the Church of England. But he was also pretty funny. The lengthy subtitle of “Utopia,” translated from the Latin, includes the line “A truly golden little book, no less beneficial than entertaining, of a republic’s best state.” All of which is to say: The very concept of some remotely possible paragon originated as satire. In More’s vision, the people are far more advanced than we currently are, taking “care that they may rather be deliberate than sudden in their speech.” And they have a six-hour workday.
As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, few Americans, no matter their political disposition, would say that we’re living in utopian times. “Dystopia,” which originated in the 18th century to describe More’s antithesis (the word is Greek for “bad place”), has become the more popular term of late — deployed to describe everything from the dysfunction of the federal government to the red carpet at the Met Gala, which this year was cosponsored by a man whose net worth in dollars equals roughly the number of known stars in the Milky Way, and who has heavily invested in contingency plans for the apocalypse.
Yet even in dystopian times, artists tend to cling to the utopian philosophy more than anyone: Shaker designers in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, who expressed their devotion to God through handmade, functional designs, or Afrofuturists in the 1970s — musicians and authors who envisioned the members of the African diaspora creating happier lives for themselves, either here on Earth or on some distant planet. Perhaps there’s something inherently utopian about creative work, about people who devote their lives to willing something out of nothing. And in truth, there’s never a better time to think about utopia than when it feels especially far-fetched: There’s no better time than the present to wonder, “Is this the bad place?” That we still ask such a question means there’s hope for the future.
Of all the artists who spent their careers searching for a utopian ideal, my favorite is Thomas Cole, who grew up in northern England during the Industrial Revolution and witnessed the land of his childhood slowly fill with strangers and smog. He discovered what must have seemed like a prelapsarian paradise in upstate New York in the 1820s, which he painted admiringly for the rest of his life. His works are pleasing and formally impressive — Cole has a way with light and shadow. But what makes him such a great artist of quixotic visions is the sad certainty, apparent in each of them, that any Shangri-La is destined to suffocate beneath the weight of its own progress.
This point of view is never more explicit than in his five-panel masterpiece “The Course of Empire” (1833-36), which depicts, in dramatic, wide-view perspective, the rise and fall of some powerful civilization much like our own. Cole cited the following lines, written by Lord Byron decades earlier, as inspiration for the paintings: “There is the moral of all human tales; / ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past; / First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last.” First is an almost feral vision of hunters and gatherers in the midst of an arduous struggle with an untamed wilderness. Next is Arcadia, an orderly and harmonious coexistence with nature that looks almost cloyingly biblical, all farmers and shepherds happily working among lush trees and rocky cliffs. Then comes an opulent, bloated city, crammed with people and columned buildings and gold trim, followed by the city in flames, bodies lying in blood-soaked streets. In the final panel, the only work in the series that doesn’t contain human figures, what’s left is a ruin.
That might seem like a rather hopeless ending. But no matter how many times I look at the painting, my eyes can’t help but shift from the last panel back to Cole’s first. In a utopia, all endings, however cataclysmic, mark the possibility for a new beginning.
