Utopian narratives of the pre-modern world deemed cultivation of mind and spirit as the main occupation of the perfect society. Scientific and technological achievements in such narratives were virtuous as long as they were subordinated to the spiritual needs of the society. With the advance of industrialization and secularization, people began thinking about technological progress as a goal in itself which did not require any justification.
Continuous scientific discovery and constant economic growth are generally believed to bring considerable changes in standards of living, alleviate people's pain and suffering, provide ultimate cures, and spare humankind from toil. In contemporary science fiction people often fantasize about a world so technologically advanced that even basic physical needs are eliminated from everyday concerns. In such utopian visions not only hard labor but also sleep, eating, and reproduction become mechanized and artificially sustained. But is this really the future we are hoping for?
The moment you get a religion which thinks primarily about the bigger and better future – as do all the political religions from Communism and Nazism up to the, at present, harmless, because unorganized and powerless, forms of Humanism and Utopianism – it runs the risk of becoming ruthless, of liquidating the people it happens to find inconvenient now for the sake of the people who are going, hypothetically, to be so much better and happier and more intelligent in the year 2000… Aldous Huxley
from letter to Julian Huxley, 23 November 1942
To the classical Utopists, freedom was relatively trivial. Clearly they considered virtue and happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and as being altogether more important things. But the modern view, with its deepening insistence upon individuality and upon the significance of its uniqueness, steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until at last we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life, that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, the choiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law. H. G. Wells
from “A Modern Utopia,” 1905
