Utopia/Dystopia
and Radicalism
Utopia and
dystopia are basic categories that a western mind uses to organize
experience. Most Christians in America have
adopted or are aware of a religious concept of utopia, Heaven, and dystopia,
Hell. But what happens when one’s view
of dystopia comes to resemble not a place far removed from the here and now in
time and space, but rather the current situation? I will argue through the case studies of John
Brown’s radical abolition and several cases of radical environmentalism that
radicalism occurs when utopia is articulately idealized against a dystopia that
is seen as already present or is eminent.
Further, I will show that both radical abolitionism and radical environmentalism
in American society stemmed from the same source, radical Protestantism in the
form of Puritanism.
The radical
abolitionist John Brown, minutes before his execution, handed this statement to
a prison guard:
I John Brown am
now quite certain that the crimes of
this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself
that without verry much bloodshed: it
might be done. (Ruchames 167)
The
making of a radical in John Brown can be said to have begun in Puritanism, sometimes
located in the millenarian tradition, but always in a devout Calvinist
tradition. In The Black Hearts of Men, John Stauffer, speaking of Brown and
fellow radicals, Frederick Douglas, Gerrit Smith, and James McCune, explains “They
became The Radical Political Abolitionists and viewed their government as
sacred and the appropriate means for pursuing their millennium.” (Stauffer
2) Stauffer contends that the party was
also influenced by utopian experiments at Brookefarm, Hopedale, and New Harmony
and particularly, William Miller’s predictions of the end of the world
(Stauffer 116). Still more, these
experiments were occurring during a time of an escalation of extreme opinions
on slavery, a temperance movement beginning to bring righteous anger on a
population where the average male consumed eight ounces of hard liquor a day,
and a financial depression that found even Gerrit Smith, a wealthy landowner,
in dire straits (Stauffer 116). It was a
time where it was not difficult to believe that something momentous would
occur.
Even
more privately, John Brown himself was extremely religious. In Fire
from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown, Louis A. DeCaro
writes of Brown, “he was converted in youth and grew up in a theologically
conservative, evangelical, and Calvinist home.”
Browns parents were opposed to slavery and John Brown himself, early in
his education had intended to become a member of the clergy (DeCaro 4). Brown would have been familiar with several
Christian conceptions of utopia: The Garden of Eden, Heaven, and the thousand
year reign of Christ. The thousand year
reign of Christ preceded by the ‘tribulation’ and Apocalypse was the flavor of
the times when Brown’s radical actions came to a climax with the raid on
Harpers Ferry in 1859 to capture a federal arsenal and arm slaves for a revolt
(Stauffer 116). Each of these
conceptions of utopia is a common reference for the western mind. They are also very important in an unlikely
dialectic, that of contemporary radical environmentalists.
On the other side of
the binary is dystopia. In the Calvinist
tradition, Hell is http://www.westga.edu/~perben/Engl%204384-Fall08/Engl%206110/Final%20Projects/Daryl%20Seldon-utopia%20and%20radicalism-Final%20Paper.doc
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