Utopias arise out of a desire for perfection, and have often led to destruction and savagery. Why does enthusiasm for a transfigured community propel itself so rapidly into violence and evil? What unfathomable process causes the dream to transform itself into such a nightmare? Why do we bring on ourselves the evil that we abhor?

In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:

1. 1. Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.

2. 2. That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.

3. 3. That hope/desire has often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.

4. 4. When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.

5. 5. That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.

6. 6. Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture.

Among the reasons for what might be called the ‘utopian crisis’ in post-modern culture, where the very idea of a utopia is the subject of suspicion and where its claim to perfection is held to blame for every fanatical ideology, may well be found the close, perhaps excessively close link that the utopian idea has always maintained with metaphysics. I am referring here to the notion of metaphysics as elaborated by Heidegger. Many defenders of metaphysics still refuse Heidegger's critique, but it remains nevertheless the case that the definition of metaphysics as disregarding being-itself (das Sein) in favour of process-of-being (das Seiende), or of an objective ground of being that reason could grasp and to which it should adhere when interacting with knowledge and praxis, constitutes at least a generally accepted point of departure for discussion.

As the title of this paper might suggest, I am going to argue that utopic projects are endemic to the essence of humanity. I will first delineate the ways in which human beings collectively and individually are directed toward utopia through their constant interaction with their own changing lifeworlds and the lifeworlds of others. I will be most particularly concerned with the way in which ideas from alien or strange communities become transformed as they intertwine with the schemata of a ‘home’ community or, to state this another way, I will examine a process I have come to call mundialization, by which ideas, customs and even attitudes are transformed as they make connections with other cultures. In this light, I will examine Paul Ricœur's insightful hermeneutical exploration of ideology and utopia and their changing phenomenological landscapes. Lastly, I will identify certain concepts which, though only sporadically developed through the ages, are now, in this age of accelerated globalization and mundialization, making their way into a transformative, utopic realm.

In the recurrent and monothematic discourse of anti-globalization, focused almost exclusively on its economic and financial aspects, there has been an increasing tendency to overlook important distinctions linked to the historical process of cultural globalization and its civilizing effects, as it has evolved in the modern age. In that vast and sweeping process, numerous ‘isms’ have converged over the centuries, resulting in a kind of crossroads between the universalist aspirations of the Christian religion and western civilization; the internationalism exemplified by the Socialist International; and the political, humanistic ‘worldism’ that led to the universal recognition of human rights and the creation of international organisms, nongovernmental organizations and solidarity networks, all of which were based on a set of universal values and principles.

In about a decade, its indefatigable stream of commentators will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia or On the Best State of a Republic (1516). That's a long time to be a focus of attention. The quantity of ink this text has generated suggests that, like a Rorschach blot, it enables us to project outwards our obsessions, our fantasies, our day-dreams, our hopes of a return to an irretrievable past golden age or our yearning for an unrealizable future paradise.

It is worth remembering that Utopian thought in the modern era, at least in the sense of the Renaissance, was born out of Europe's encounter with the Americas. Then America seemed to have all the features needed to host the construction of a new world that might match the requirements of art and reason: a world whose towns would be planned in accordance with a geometrical and social order that would leave nothing to chance. The story of European utopian thought and the ideal city whose aim was to ensure happiness for all moved away from communitarian ideas and clearly favoured individual values. Those values included respect for nature, promotion of pragmatic experience, confidence in human knowledge, but they were above all dedicated to building great cities, taking account of the needs of community life and all the questions that raises in a context where the individual takes precedence over the collective.

The figure of Don Vasco de Quiroga, together with the work he completed in New Spain, has for some time been the focus of historians’, philosophers’ and jurists’ attention. Since the pioneering research by Juan José Moreno and Nicolás León, followed by Silvio Zavala, Justino Fernández, Edmundo O'Gorman and more recently excellent studies by J. B. Warren, Carlos Herrejón and Alberto Carrillo, Don Vasco has been the subject of a prolific bibliography, which is still being added to. Fifty years ago Alfonso Trueba remarked on the number of works of quality on Vasco de Quiroga, pointing out that ‘adding one more to those already published without offering anything new would be a pointless task’. Nonetheless he himself took the risk of publishing a little biographical essay ‘imagining that it would be not only useful but necessary to introduce the history of such an eminent personage in our cultural landscape’. I in my turn am daring to present a few thoughts on this illustrious first bishop of Michoacán, following the advice of Alberto Carrillo, for whom ‘retrieving a more authentic image of the person and work of that great founder of the new Michoacán and the Indian church in the province may be a step forward in the duty to consolidate the national collective memory and reconstruct our spiritual history’.

What are we doing with utopia? The ideas I am going to share with you relate to what urban designers have done with utopia, which is based on the historical relationship that grew up between utopian thinking and the intent to organize and control the arrangement of space and thus manage society in order to ensure its development.

Amongst the many works of the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1830) the one I have found most relevant to the subject of this article is a later work - Universal Harmony and the Phalanstery published in 1848.

In October 1854, around 150 years ago therefore, François Cantagrel, a disciple of the well-known utopian visionary Charles Fourier, set sail for the New World. He was leader of the first group of French Fourierist settlers emigrating to North America, where they planned to emulate their American co-disciples in establishing new ‘phalansteries’ there and hence to lay the foundations for the ‘phalanx of harmony’ to come. The instigator of the expedition was Victor Considérant, a great propagandist for Fourier's doctrine, under whose mandate Cantagrel was sent out. The region chosen for the founding of the utopian colony was Texas, at that time in the midst of a great surge of settlement. Cantagrel bought a block of land in Houston, then a mere straggling frontier town on the edge of a bayou infested with alligators and mosquitoes, to serve as a staging post. Of more significance was land purchased close to Dallas, then but a village of 400 souls, for it was here in the next few years that a Fourier colony, ‘La Réunion’, was established. It came to number more settlers than the village of Dallas itself. But it resulted in a total disaster.

The utopia we are dealing with here could have been called ‘the mother of all utopias’ since it is in fact humanity's greatest, most primal dream, indeed the one that defines us as human. This great utopia, from which are woven our representations of paradise, for example, is immortality, the theme of René Barjavel's novel entitled The Immortals (1973).

This essay came about as the result of my suspicion that, in our societies of written traditions, the way we write and the thoughts we generate are intimately linked to the way we read. The practice of reading, in its many forms, is more than just a simple technique that allows us to familiarize ourselves with what other people think and thought: just as there exists a close relationship between the content and the form of a given text, the practice of reading has an effect on the reception of what has been written. But even before any text was written, reading had had a critical effect on the form in which it would exist, informed by so many previous experiences of reading.

‘Seven Arguments in Defence of Poetry: Resisting the Madding Noise’ could easily have been titled ‘Seven Arguments in Defence of Utopia: Resisting so Many Platitudes’. In both cases, the ‘arguments’ are situations and attitudes, as well. The question of silence, of origin, of timelessness, of purification, of pause, of whimsy, of mirth. There is a mutual dependence between these elements, and I believe that they serve to define both the coordinates of the poetic fact and the intimation of a kind of rebellion or resistance.

Written in the 5th century by the Chinese poet Tao Qian (365-427), Peach Blossom Spring is the most celebrated depiction of utopia in Chinese literature. It has so enchanted the Chinese imagination that its name has become virtually synonymous with utopia itself. The work consists of two parts: a prose preface and a poem, both telling the story of the discovery and disappearance of Peach Blossom Spring. But the prose version, perhaps owing to its more tangible dramatic power, is what comes more readily to mind when a Chinese thinks of utopia.

The problem of the real is that we think we understand it very well, whereas in fact it is not very well understood at all. The past, our past, which seems absolutely clear to us, in fact is not so. If we reflect upon the 20th century which, all things considered, is our past, we come to realize that not only communism but also nazism - the major phenomena which marked it - owed very little to systematic thought. The Soviet version of Marxism, to which the label ‘communist’ was given, was, in the literal sense of the word, a utopia: meaning something whose location is nowhere. The word ‘communism’ served to mask a reality which was radically different from its ideology. A reality so difficult to analyse, comprehend and know that François Furet, an author who had been a communist during the hard-line period, has been able to write about the passions of the Revolution, in for example Le passé d'une illusion [The Passing of an Illusion], without for all that making obvious the fundamentally religious properties of this communism, which saw its mission as bringing about salvation on earth, so constituting a mighty source of hope. As with all great religions, communism created its own martyrs, its heroes, its executioners and its persecutors. It was not just another religion, though, but a veritable phenomenon which ravaged and transformed its century.

There are several ways to approach utopia and to appraise the range of vital sustenance and broken promises that it conveys. As a starting interpretative strategy, one might consider utopia as a canonized idea: utopia is nothing if not a construct of Paradise on Earth. That is the form under which it prospered from the Renaissance on, spinning into a vote of confidence for the New World.