The month in which Islamic terrorists inspired by a utopian vision of a pan-Islamic Sultanate blew up 50 Turks and Britons in Istanbul might seem a strange one in which to argue for the importance of the utopian dimension in politics.

But decidedly pragmatic and nonutopian militants are also killing Iraqis and Americans in Baghdad as part of a well-financed resistance to American "liberation." People oppress and murder for lots of reasons, and only rarely because they are inspired by a utopian vision.

More often, from medieval peasant revolts to Martin Luther King, utopian visions of a freer, more equal and more united future have helped people mobilize against the crushing pragmatic acceptance of day-to-day tyranny and exploitation.

Nonetheless, modern conservatives argue that all utopianism leads inexorably to totalitarianism and death camps since utopianism equals Communism, and democratic capitalism was supposedly just the victory of common sense. According to conservative anti-utopians the American revolutionaries were never inspired by a vision of a radically better future while every jackbooted thug of the Nazi and Communist terrors woke each morning burning with a vision of a better world.

The only way to safeguard liberty and democracy, the anti-utopians argue, is to eschew all fantasies that things could be radically improved, and resign ourselves to a future of incremental change or, better yet, to no change at all. On these grounds even those who imagine a more radically free future are actually Khmer Rouge in disguise.

But is utopianism really so bad?

Transhumanist visions

The charge of "utopianism," both dismissive and suggestive of crypto-Stalinism, is deployed today not only against the mildest of progressive reforms, but also against transhumanism.

Francis Fukuyama, for instance, has explained that the struggle against utopianism is the link between his book The End of History, which argued that all ideologies had been superceded by the victory of democratic capitalism, and his book Our Posthuman Future, which sees utopian, and therefore totalitarian, possibilities in biotechnology. Democrats have to beat back bioutopians just as they did 20th century utopians.

Similarly, eco activist J.P. Harpignies writes: "Despite the twentieth century's catastrophic experience with utopian ideologies, we seem not to have learned our lesson. A naïve techno-utopianism now so permeates our worldview that we seem to be stumbling toward a version of Brave New World or Gattaca without even a serious society-wide debate. Artificial life enthusiasts such as Ray Kurtzweil, and Hans Moravec and Max More's 'Extropians,' gleefully announce the inevitable arrival of machines superior to us and the end of the Human Era."

Yuval Levin, an employee of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama on the President's Council on Bioethics and editor of the conservative bio-Luddite journal New Atlantis, expresses similar sentiments in a Tech Central Station article. "Today, in some limited but prominent libertarian circles, utopianism is back," says Levin. "In its extreme form, the desire for this liberation has been expressed as a genuine wish to escape our human bonds—in transhumanism and extropianism."

Levin and the rest are right, of course. Transhumanism is, in part, a utopian movement, and there is nothing wrong and lots quite right about this. Utopianism is an inescapable psychosocial drive, and when advocates of liberty remain mired in anti-utopian pragmatism and economism they cede the field to the authoritarians.

Failure of libertopianism

What I find ironic about the left-right condemnation of libertarian transhumanism's utopianism is that I don't consider most of the thinkers they cite to be utopians at all.

Most libertarian transhumanists take for granted the persistence of unequal power and wealth, and as Harpignies notes, foresee apocalypse. For some transhumanists the bright future will benefit only the very few who reach posthumanity, while the vast majority of humans will, at best, receive charity from the posthumans.

Unable to embrace a society with equality and strong democracy as attractive, the libertarians extrapolate only a more extreme version of our current Babylon, but one in which we get to live indefinitely. "The most imaginative futurists foresee a utopia with war, money, violence and inequality," writes Russell Jacoby in his book The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. "Their future looks very much like the affluent enclaves of today, only more pleasant and commodious. They paint a picture not very different from contemporary luxury suburbs, grassy subdivisions with homes and computer and work stations set off from a larger terrain of violence and injustice. The futurists are utopians in an anti-utopian age."

No doubt, as we re-embrace utopian vision in our post-anti-utopian age we should set aside the attenuated libertopian fantasies of the 17-year-old male imagining life on his own asteroid, with no parents to tell him to clean his room, for the more inspiring and robust vision of a society that maximizes liberty, equality and the fullest potential of each person, where a transparent, participatory democracy provides public goods that give us more "freedom to" in exchange for a little of our "freedom from."

Realizing progress

It is ironic that the conservatives condemn Marx as a utopian, when in fact Marx and Engels dismissed the utopians. While Fourier described how champagne would pour from every faucet, Marx and Engels refused to sketch in what a classless society would look like or how it would be run. Our post-Revolutionary descendents would figure it out for themselves.

The key text of Marx and Engels' critique of utopianism is "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in which they argue that the material conditions for utopian ideals had never been present until the industrial era. Utopian aspirations for more freedom and equality were admirable, but only now can we actually cure disease and hunger, achieve general equality and prosperity and eliminate labor through automation. Only today can technology permit us to return to the ease of a preagricultural lifestyle with postindustrial well-being, doing "one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, herdsman or critic."

It is this insight—that new technology makes utopian aspirations practical policy options—that has conservatives such as Fukuyama so agitated. Just when it appeared that the utopian projects to create a cooperative, nonviolent, compassionate New Socialist Citizen had been broken against the shoals of intractable human nature, the gene engineers show up with dynamite. The converging technologies of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science will not only turn every social and economic institution upside down, but they can, in the words of the US National Science Foundation's NBIC convergence report, "become the framework for human convergence—the twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment."

In particular, these technologies could allow us to edit and augment our desires, to eliminate our vices and enhance our virtues. So far, few transhumanists have directly addressed the prospect of engineering desire and virtue, since it cuts too close to the illusion of autarkic self-determination that is a premise of their libertarianism. But transhumanist philosopher Mark Walker strides where others have feared to tread in his new essay "Genetic Virtue." Walker's proposed "Genetic Virtue Program," a program of genetic enhancement of our propensity towards compassionate behavior, gives an answer to both conservatives gloating over the impracticality of utopian hopes, and to the chastened leftists such as Peter Singer who wrote in A Darwinian Left that the Left must accept dominance hierarchies and greed as part of human nature.

The prospect and threat of a more moral society doesn't just arise from genetics, however. Fukuyama frets about the supposed taming of boys with Ritalin, and perhaps he is on to something. Imagine how much better the world would be if we systematically exposed male fetuses' brains to estrogen in the critical window when their tendency towards violence, sloppiness and conversation hogging was getting wired. Once we have pervasive nano-neural computing supplementing our cognition and expert systems monitoring our behavior, we will be able to set up electronic superegos, administering unpleasant sensations when we covet fattening food and rewarding us for paying our taxes.

The challenge, of course, with any program of virtue engineering is how we can make full use of the benefits of technologies this dangerous, allowing us to become more egalitarian and cooperative, without running the risk of technologically-facilitated totalitarianism. What would a society of free, equal and united posthumans look like? Perhaps, contra Marx, we need to imagine the options now.

Imagining the options

One of the few places we find suggestions for how to structure a radically different future is in speculative fiction. Indeed, speculative fiction has been a too rarely acknowledged engine behind many political movements. Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward inspired hundreds of socialist clubs to spring up around the US in the late 19th century, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the US Socialist Party. Ayn Rand's vision in Atlas Shrugged, of heroic anarcho-capitalists resigning from a world of creeping socialism to found a utopian enclave, similarly inspired generations of contemporary libertarians.

Fortunately we have a new crop of authors depicting attractive and yet complex societies that take transhuman technologies for granted. Two outstanding examples are the Golden Age trilogy from John C. Wright and the Culture novels of Iain Banks, both depicting a society in which immortal, affluent posthumans and superintelligent machines peacefully coexist. The questions of how life might feel in such societies is wonderfully handled, with both imagining a minimal state and a high level of normative control.

Another neo-utopian author is Kim Stanley Robinson, who depicted a politically diverse but left-leaning Martian society in his Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars trilogy. Brian Stableford looked at the gradual evolution of a utopian society with an unlimited lifespan in his Emortality series. Ken MacLeod depicts our evolution from capitalist chaos and war to a democratic socialist solar federation in his first trilogy. Stableford, MacLeod and Robinson are all the sort of advanced utopians we need, describing not static utopian models, but steps we can take from our world to one with radical life extension, dramatically new powers and the elimination of war, poverty and inequality.

When SF Weekly asked Iain Banks if the abundant utopian society he depicts in the Culture novels wasn't beyond our capacity, he retorted: "As for being beyond our capacity: this is just defeatism. With any luck at all the future will make the Culture look tawdry, bland and unexciting. Anyway, the point is that the Culture is saying the future might be a great place to live, without exploitation of people or AIs, with fabulous abundance, without capitalism and with the acknowledgement that we might create something—actually, lots of somethings—greater and wiser than ourselves, and so ourselves grow morally in the process."

We need to boldly put forth our vision, a vision not only of better toys, longer lives and better health, but of a radically transformed society in which war, hunger, disease and oppression have been defeated. We don't just owe it to our 23rd century descendents, but with any luck to ourselves.