Hi, I'm Stacy, and I graduated from college in 2006. I am not condoning plagarism of any kind, but am putting my essays online to help with general writer's block. Learning by example is one of the most widely recognized methods of self instruction and effective tutoring. Feel free to read one of my essays to help you write your own! Donations are appreciated.

In all societies, there are social and political rules. From these rules, social reality is developed. Social reality is a system of beliefs for a community, whether they are established individually per person or by their surrounding environment (2). This can be easily explained with the nature versus nurture debate. Is it someone’s nature (i.e. just “the way they are” or “they are born that way”) or nurture (i.e. the values distilled by their family and local community) that helps decide their system of beliefs? Social reality can include a person’s political, religious, and sexual choices or views. A good example of social reality is the value of money. Cash or coins in reality are not necessarily worth anything, but it is a social reality, constructed by a state’s government to tell its citizens the worth of its currency. Social reality structures our behaviors, norms, and roles.

In the early 1500s, Thomas More coined the term “utopia” from Greek vocabulary (3). More’s work became popular because he wrote of a perfect place inhabited by ordinary humans, and not just the ruling or elite classes. Whether it is on an island or even the moon, theorists have written about “utopia” –referring to a better or perhaps “perfect” society.

These theorists write about utopia with the bias of how they view their social reality. Utopia shows concern for the future well-being of society, often searching for order and harmony. Utopists, those who theorize about utopias, rarely give the recipe to move from the present to the future. Often the process or creation of a utopia created unforeseen problems; most conceptualizations of utopia have never believed that they would ever be literally applied, because they were meant to be discussion based or used only as a guide (3). Utopists’ ideas, because of their individual social realities, can be seen as a vision linked to the period they were writing in. Their social realities showed specific problems, so utopists would define the problems of their present times to explain what needed to be fixed in the future. Because of this, their ideas were often seen as radical ways to change the world. Plato held radical ideas in the ethics of utopia when he explained that it became the responsibility of an entire community for each individual, because moral authority is embodied in the political authority of the all-knowing. So, although lacking real directions for action or the ability to be realized in real time, utopian ideas nonetheless have made good on their promise of contributing to a better world by providing a philosophical context to challenge their assumptions and promote good dialogue and debate. There are many different utopias. One could go as far as to say that since everyone has a different social reality, people interpret different things as “good” or “bad,” so everyone has a different utopia. No one has ever actually seen a utopia --except in imagination-- and yet they have influenced fate. Let me explain.

Imagine your version of utopia. Perhaps you are imagining a community where people live together in a closely bonded community, where everyone feels responsible for one another, where peace and fairness rule, and where neither people nor the earth are exhausted or exploited; You see order and harmony. Other utopists have envisioned this before: Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx (1). They imagined utopias where people lived together more harmoniously than they do in their current social realities.

Utopias are often seen as self-sufficient, where a community can take care of all the members’ material and social needs by itself (3). Social organization revolved around the family unit, which was an extended family based on kinship (3). Economy was heavily based on agricultural, trade, and manufactured goods. Because of this, and because utopias are made by man, they must be highly disciplined (3). Utopian communities need cultivation, maintenance, and most importantly, organization. To sustain a community, organization is vital. Providing all material, political, and social goods for a society only becomes more strenuous the more populous it becomes.

Discussions of utopia influence fate. Policy makers and politicians often argue their way into our hearts, preaching their vision of utopia. A politician campaigning during an election must appeal to people with different social realities to understand the same version of utopia. A prime example are controversial issues like pro-choice versus pro-life. Two very different sides –either for or against abortion—and a policy appealing to one side would not be appealing to another side. Depending on who we are and how we are raised, social reality structures our behaviors, norms, and roles. This shapes our views of utopia, and utopia is important to human nature because it provides hope to those who wish to better the world they live in.

Sources

Boomen, Marianne van den. Lecture. ICSA Conference, Israel. 7 Aug. 1998. 22 Apr. 2006 http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00000.html.

"Social Reality." Wikipedia. 21 Apr. 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_reality.

Stefanovich, Mark. Lecture. Apperson 306, Corvallis. 13 Apr. 2006.