Building Utopia

“So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.”

Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (2012)

 

I expect that, at some point during the last couple of weeks, you, O Technologically Savvy Reader (or technologically savvy enough to find this blog post, anyway), have encountered some form of media informing you about the seventeen Global Goals for Sustainable Development to which world leaders have committed, with 2030 as the deadline. If not, the Global Goals #TellEveryone campaign has clearly not been as effective as its devisors hoped.¹

I use this rather lovely image with the kind permission of the Global Goals website, under the terms listed here: http://www.globalgoals.org/asset-licence/.

The video ‘‘We the People’ for the Global Goals’² features individuals of varying levels of celebrity status making statements about the world the Global Goals intend to create. We will live in a world, they say, where nobody anywhere lives in extreme poverty, where no child has to die of diseases we know how to cure, where everyone goes to school, where there is sustainable energy for everyone, where economies prosper, where we replace what we consume – to pick just a few examples.

It’s a startlingly optimistic picture. I say ‘startlingly’ because it seems to me that, for the most part, when it comes to imagining the future of the human race, we have a perhaps disturbing propensity to fill such a future with environmental chaos, pandemic, oppressive regimes, and technology that does more harm than good. Yes, I’m talking about dystopian science fiction.

Authors have dreamt up any number of miserable scenarios for the human race to find itself in. In The Declaration by Gemma Malley, the development of a drug capable of indefinitely extending the human lifetime means having children is illegal, and the Surplus are effectively enslaved. In Bumped by Megan McCafferty, the vast majority of people become infertile soon after turning eighteen, meaning young teenagers are employed to have children on behalf of older couples. In Starters by Lissa Price, the only survivors of a deadly plague are children and old people, who were the first to be vaccinated, and children without elderly sponsors are, again, effectively enslaved, or live rough on the streets. In the TimeRiders series by Alex Scarrow, humanity plunges increasingly into war, poverty, and climactic disaster until it is near enough wiped out by an out-of-control biochemical weapon. In Ready Player One by Ernest Clines, the source of my opening quote and a book I would thoroughly recommend, life in the real world has become so unpleasant that many people live their lives almost entirely in a virtual reality called the OASIS. These examples are all just off the top of my head, and I haven’t even mentioned The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Legend by Marie Lu, Blood Red Road by Moira Young, The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer – not to mention countless others I’ve come across but never actually read, because … well, all this dystopia really starts to get you down after a while.³

Dystopian fiction has its purposes, of course. For a start, it’s usually more interesting to read about characters who lead thrillingly perilous lives in a world full of threats, than characters whose lives are no more eventful than one’s own. Dystopia also offers excellent possibilities for commenting on the world as it currently is: it might urge a particular course of action to prevent the future it describes, or draw attention to existing issues by framing them differently in a dystopian scenario. Nevertheless, I do wonder at the sheer volume of dystopian fiction that has been produced in recent years: why is humanity so obsessed with its own downfall? Why are we so eager to depict the future so bleakly? If there is any such thing as utopian science fiction, if anyone has ever managed to get published by imagining a better world, I don’t think I have ever come across it.

‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ is Goal 11. If I were to write a utopian science fiction novel, it would definitely involve a beautiful city full of trees.

And so it was not only refreshing, but uplifting, to discover the Global Goals this week. Coming as I do from what is, in global terms, an extremely privileged background, it frequently saddens me that the vast majority of my fellow humans are not so fortunate, and the idea that the world could work together to create a better future for everybody holds a quite irresistible appeal. It may, therefore, surprise you to know that, as I explored the Global Goals website further, my heart slowly started to sink – not because I disapprove of the goals, but because I don’t believe we’re ever going to achieve them.

That’s not just pessimism on my part; it’s theological principle. We are fallen people in a fallen world. We are greedy and selfish and prone to lashing out in violence when we’re scared. Creation will never be rid of inequality, irresponsibility and conflict as long as we’re in it. If we could build utopia all by ourselves, if our sin was no hindrance to that, God would surely not have bothered intervening in human history so dramatically and at such great cost to himself, in order to rescue us from it.⁴

So what should we do with the Global Goals? Give them up as a lost cause, shrug at the injustice that surrounds us as a mere inevitability, and never lift a sinful finger to try to change it? Somehow that doesn’t seem like a very Christlike response.

We might be fallen people in a fallen world, but we proclaim a coming kingdom as its ambassadors, and so are supposed to reflect the nature of that kingdom. If God is just, and will one day do away with all injustice, then so should we, with his help, work against injustice.⁵ If God feeds the hungry, and will one day satisfy them totally, then so should we, with his help, feed the hungry.⁶ Yes, the world aspired to by the Global Goals is out of our reach, but the goals themselves seem like a pretty good framework to be on board with, and certainly I will support them. Besides, our hope isn’t in the Global Goals’ world, but in the perfect world to come.

I’m not persuaded by the vision of the future presented by dystopian fiction, or that presented by the Global Goals: they both imply that humanity’s fate ultimately lies solely in its own hands. One day God will make all things new, and, by his power, utopia – that is to say, the perfect place – will be a reality.⁷ Until then, as exiles on this earth, we are called to live as if we know our real citizenship is that of the kingdom of heaven.

¹ You can find out all about the Global Goals here, http://www.globalgoals.org/, although it’s such an obvious domain name that I expect you could have figured that out for yourself.

² It features prominently on the home page of the Global Goals website given above, but if your computer, like mine, starts throwing a tantrum about an unresponsive script when you try to access it, try it on YouTube instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=41&v=RpqVmvMCmp0.

³ You might have noticed that all the novels listed are (or at least could plausibly be) of the ‘young adult’ genre. Dystopian fiction does seem particularly prevalent within this subcategory at the moment, a situation probably due at least in part to the success of The Hunger Games, in the same way that that of the Twilight series gave birth to a flood of ‘dark romance’ written for a young adult audience. Nevertheless, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t tend to head straight for the young adult section every time I enter a library.

⁴ Romans 5: 6 is probably as decent a summary verse as any: “For while we were still weak [i.e. too weak to overcome our sin and build the perfect world], at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” I think I mentioned how much I love Romans 5 last time, but if you didn’t manage to read it then, why not do so now? https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+5&version=ESVUK.

⁵ The Bible is absolutely stuffed to the seams with declarations of God’s justice, and exhortations to pursue justice: Deuteronomy 6:20, Psalm 33:5, and Isaiah 1:17 are just a few random examples.

⁶ Similarly, God’s pretty big on feeding the hungry: try Psalm 146:7, Proverbs 25:21, and Matthew 25:35 – again, random examples.

⁷ The probably-fairly-familiar quote, “Behold, I am making all things new,” is from Revelation 21:5. The last couple of chapters of Revelation are just incredible and so worth a read; they might also have something to do with why I love the idea of a beautiful city full of trees so much: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=revelation+21&version=ESVUK.