What now strikes me about utopian idealists is how pitifully little they want!
Consider some of the early socialists and communists. Supposing Marx had got absolutely everything he desired - the fully communist atheist society of common ownership, even to the degree that the state withered-away and New Men did all the right things because that is what they desired... What a pathetic life! Merely a brief animal existence of farmyard contentment, followed by a meaningless death and annihilation.
Or William Morris, with his (to me, far more appealing) vision of a medieval-style, rural and beautiful, utopia of farmers, craftsmen and artists. But again, a world without transcendence, without eternity - hence without purpose, hence without any meaning except the pleasurable distractions of hand-labour, crafts, song and poetry. Then disease, decline and death; and then Nothing - forever.
Or the modern transhumanists; who seek to abolish disease, ageing, death and suffering. If they somehow got everything what they wanted - what would it amount-to? A world without suffering, a world of continuous (or continuously modulating and varying) pleasure... forever! It takes a peculiar lack of imagination to suppose that even all this impossibly-unlikely transformation would make life worthwhile.
This-worldly utopians think of themselves, and like to present themselves, as untrammeled by the 'possible' or even the plausible - as sweeping dreamers who dreams will create-themselves, by sheer force of untrammeled desire and will... And yet how pathetically restricted are those dreams!
But, it might be asked - what about Christians? What about our goal of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - how could this be made... not just bearable, but profoundly and eternally fulfilling?
I know of nobody who gave this matter deeper and more sustained consideration than William Arkle - most directly in his booklet Equations of Being. In this he allows himself to imagine what would be the necessary characteristics of a genuinely idealistic utopia - actual Heaven.
What combination of change in ourselves and of an ideal environment, would we personally find fulfilling, motivating and joyous - forever.
And then; can we conceive of how God - our loving Father and the Creator - might have made such a thing possible: made it happen?
If we can conceive of it; we finally need to ask whether it is true, and accessible to us; and how?
Suppose that we are personally motivated to perform such a feat of sustained imagination about Heavenly life, what then?
Well, that may then be a solid basis for Christian life in this very different, and temporary, mortal life and world.
The contrast with any-and-all worldly and material 'utopias' shall then become very evident; and we may recognize that that kind of idealism is profoundly, tragically, misplaced.
