Utopia, Dystopia

Utopian Thought in the Age of Globalization

These new forms of thinking about the world reflect the idea of utopia for three key reasons. First, utopian theories present a fictional or ideological plan for epochal change which would result in a complete break between the present, which is necessarily imperfect, and the future, which would represent a perfect social, political, economic, or cultural system by comparison. Second, and related to the first point concerning the idea of perfection, the new globalized utopian theories tend to include notions of macroscopic or global social, political, economic, and cultural change and microscopic individual lifestyle transformations, whether this refers to changes in community engagement, religious obedience, self-determination in the market, moderation of consumption patterns, or the adoption of sustainable or ethical living practices. This second point, which shows how new globalized utopian thinking closely parallels the epistemological structure of utopian modes of thought in the ancient world that conceived of man in relation to the wider cosmos, links to the third key point relating the idea of utopia to globalization, which concerns the ways in which the temporal and spatial conditions of utopia have been more or less enabled by process of globalization. As such, the third key point shows that the significance of the notion of utopia to the process of globalization relates to ideas of a new global space and a new global time, or the concept of a new global space-time, signifying the oneness, connectedness, unity, or sameness of the world's social, political, economic, and culture formations. The imagination of this new global space-time enables or leads the new utopian ideologies to become both utopian and ideological, in the sense that they tend toward a totalistic vision of time and space, taking in the radical nature of the change suggested, and the breadth and depth of that conception of change in terms of its macroscopic and microscopic reach, and the theoretical oneness of the mode of utopian thought itself, which makes it largely inflexible in relation to other views, opinions, perspectives, or ideologies.

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