Utopia in the age of the pandemic
Utopia. Now there’s a piece of television. And I’m not talking about the Hollywood rehash, I haven’t gone there (why would I?) and have no plan to; I read Gone Girl and it’s a first-class thriller, but with Utopia,Flynn took on something that could not be improved. And maybe improvement was not the goal of the reworking, but I’m nevertheless reassured (and even pleased) to hear of the inferior cut of Flynn’s rewrite. The original stands as some of the best television to ever come out of Britain (I’d rank it up there with This is England and Black Mirror) and to chance a remake was perhaps an act of questionable hubris.
Of course, it’s not true that the remake never bests the original. The American take on The Office is widely regarded as having outstripped its British predecessor, and I’d say the US Shameless did a similar job (the first three series notwithstanding). But there are some things that should not be fucked with. Utopia is one.
I rewatched it recently, and was no less enthralled by it than I was when I first saw it six or seven years ago. The writing, the cinematography, the score – come now, when have you ever heard a score that so perfectly accompanied and encapsulated a series? Flawless work, and I’ve been enamoured of Cristobal Tapia de Veer ever since (The White Lotus? Superb). Characters, beautifully depicted in all their flawed, vulnerable and comic glory. Plot. Dialogue. Dennis Kelly really nailed that script. (I watched The Third Day last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t quite have the raw ferocity that Utopia has.)
But enough gushing. I’m a fan, and I’m still waiting, hoping expectantly (like thousands of others) that one day we may get to revisit Mr. Rabbit.
It’s an interesting watch, in the world of today. I’m not here to peddle any out-there theories about government conspiracies to poison us all and render us sterile, and commit mass genocide and worldwide depopulation, but watching the series in our modern climate cannot fail to raise a few questions.
I do believe that, worldwide, we were all subjected during the pandemic to one of the most potent, widespread and disproportionate media campaigns of all time, one that far outstrips the efforts to sell us the Iraq War. I remember that campaign, too – endless stories in the press about the unforgiveable opulence that Saddam Hussein lived in while all around him his people suffered (as if those selling us the war were not pontificating from their own mansions), and the pure evil cruelty of his sons. Stories peddled in generally ‘respectable’ news outlets, stories that we can look back on now and say, Yeah, this is an out-and-out hit piece. Not that he wasn’t a bastard, but you shouldn’t get to pick and choose your bastards, cosying up to them when they do your bidding and turning on them when they don’t. We had endless such pieces on evil Saddam and his regime, all with the purpose of selling us a bogus war.
Not everyone bought it. One of the biggest protests of all time came out onto the streets of London to protest Blair’s eagerness to make a war criminal of himself, two million people, which is massive. But did the kleptocrats listen? Did they fuck. War went ahead, and two million dead Iraqis later, we know it was all a sham.
What has any of this to do with Utopia? Well, much like in the show, I believe we all saw a similar media campaign, fear-mongering, a stoking of our most basic insecurities and terrors, all with the effect of making us compliant to the wishes of the powers-that-be. What are those wishes? On that, I’m not going to speculate, suffice to say that, to a large extent, the fear campaign worked. The world over (the ‘developed’ world, at least), people had their most basic rights trampled on, ripped up, discarded, and all in the name of this invisible (and let’s face it, as we now know, not-so-scary) bogeyman. Weren’t we all persuaded that our lives were in grave and unequivocal danger? Subjected daily to pictures of people on ventilators, medical professionals in Hazmat suits, cities being sprayed down for the infection, the plague, the pestilence. Truly, there was some apocalyptic shit afoot. Or so it seemed. What now appears to have happened is that we were subjected instead to a horror that existed largely in the media – not a real horror, just the threat of a horror, the façade of horror; you know like that scene in A Clockwork Orange where Malcolm McDowell has his eyes pinned open and subjected to images of war… that was us. For two whole years. Locked in our homes, the television broadcasting images of death and destruction. Apocalypse. We were the experiment. We were the subjects of the Aversion Therapy.
But it’s all fine now. They have the answer for us. They gave us our shots and we’re okay now. The shots don’t seem to do much but they keep pumping it into us, and in that we’re comforted. And hey, the apocalyptic reels have slowed a bit and we all feel somewhat reassured. Isn’t life better now?
Apocalypse makes for great television. And not only in fiction. We had our own ‘real-life’ apocalypse, and we watched it avidly for years on end. We’re still loaded with it; perhaps it’s part of our DNA now. Just as long as there’s the mirage of a cure…
I’m not really one to go looking for messages in fiction, but if Utopia has one it may well be this: We can always be counted on to be complicit in our own subversion. In a world of apocalyptic certainties, we are all Mr. Rabbit.
Utopias, in theory
Dunbar’s number. Many of you have heard of it. Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist who, some years ago, came up with a number that he suggested represented the most stable unit of people that could live together in a society in relative harmony. Actually, there were several numbers: 5, 15, 50, 150, 500 and 1500. The number ‘5’ was the number of people with whom he figured we formed our closest-knit unit, namely, the nuclear family (or modern alternative). On this small group, Dunbar proposed, we expend up to 40 per cent of our social energy. Go outwards from 5, and you get to 15 (intimate bonds), 50 (the social ‘band’), 150 (small community), 500 (large community) and 1500 (‘tribe’). I’ve no idea why these units bear some kind of numerical symmetry, but I guess there’s some kind of impressive, mathematical weirdness involved. Dunbar came to his numbers by examining three primary groups: new-age utopian communes in North America, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Hutterites of Germany, a kind of self-sustaining community, like the Amish or Mennonites, built around strong religious bonds. Dunbar noticed that the Hutterite communities always ‘fractured’ when they overshot 150; what tended to happen was they’d wait until the number was 200, and then the group would split in two, into one group of 150 and one of 50. This way, there was ‘inbuilt’ stability to the split, the Hutterites somehow intuiting that 50 and 150 were much more stable than, say, two groups of 100. It seems they had come to the conclusion that 150 was the “limit at which community cohesion can be maintained without the need for formal laws and a police force with which to maintain discipline”. Hear that? Yes… tightly control the population and eliminate the need for authoritarian control. Anthropologist Anthony Forge came to a similar conclusion by observing farming tribes in New Guinea, concluding that, “when community size exceeds 500, the rising intensity of social and other stresses threaten community coherence and stability, and cohesion can only be maintained if some mechanism is available to suppress or mitigate these disruptive forces”. Forge went with the higher number, but both men seems to agree on the basics.
The numbers in the kibbutzim were not so clear cut, but the minimum number of souls that gathered in any one kibbutz was 150. A clear factor in this number seemed to be the minimum people required to sustain an ecological balance, and to have sufficient bodies in order to make any kind of agricultural endeavour viable. Nevertheless, the mean size of the kibbutz amounted to about 468 individuals, just within the proposed upper limit of five hundred.
Interestingly, Dunbar noticed that religious communities survived significantly longer than secular ones, theories for this positing that perhaps religion functions as the social glue, or that maybe the abstract notion of God acts as the ‘all-seeing eye’, like Bentham’s panopticon, maintaining self-control within the population.
What is most interesting, perhaps, is that Dunbar, in a separate study, linked the size of our social groups to brain size, or more accurately, to the size of a certain part of our brain. This became known as the ‘Social Brain Hypothesis’. By studying apes, Dunbar came to the conclusion that the size of our neocortex informs the size of the social group to which we may belong. By finding the correlation between the volume of the neocortex and the size of the social group, Dunbar posited that the maximum size of the neocortex directly determined the absolute limits of the size of the social group. Incredible.
So what of modern societies, and what of the virtual world, where we all exist with increasing duration, each day being sucked deeper into the universe that exists purely in virtual electronic spaces and algorithm? Well, Dunbar went back to work a few years ago, in 2016, and performed a study that examined the social circles of people on Facebook. There exists real and observable constraints on the social energy which we can invest in our real-world social relationships, yet there is no ceiling to how many people can interact with our posts online. Yet, despite this, he saw that many of the same laws applied: “…there is a cognitive constraint on the size of social networks that even the communicative advantages of online media are unable to overcome.” Dunbar observed the same structure of hierarchical layers within online social systems as he did with human and primate social groupings, namely, the increasing units in multiples of 5, which functioned in the virtual world much as they did in the real. The mean network size of those online amounted to around 100–200, and furthermore, heavy users of social media did not have larger offline social networks than those who spent less time online. Common sense might tell you that indeed the opposite is true. His conclusion:
“…online social networks remain subject to the same cognitive demands of maintaining relationships that limit offline friendships. These constraints come in two principal forms: a cognitive constraint derivative of the Social Brain Hypothesis and a temporal constraint associated with the time that needs to be invested in a relationship to maintain it at a requisite level of emotional intensity.”
What am I getting at? Well, I’m all for the virtual environment. Not only is it essential for me in maintaining long-distance friendships, but, as a creator, it is indispensable in getting my name out there and getting my work into the hands of those that would enjoy it. But, as an environment, I believe that for many of us the sheen has worn off, the novelty of it long-disappeared. I keep a Twitter account with some three hundred odd followers, and don’t know a single one of them. But that’s a different story.
Social groups, on or offline, appear prone to very specific laws. There is no perfect environment out there within which you might flourish, but you might just increase your odds of finding balance should you bear these laws in mind. Keep your circle tight. Keep it small. Keep it close. Forget about the rest. It seems utopia is only in your own head, after all.