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"Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is... involv'd and interwoven with the knowledge of evill"

-John Milton, Areopagitica

Dystopias and utopias have remained a point of fascination because of both their extreme nature and their ability to imagine the grand and grotesque. Recently, dystopias in particular have seemed to capture the public's attention, with their portrayal of all the ways society can go wrong-one needs only to think about examples from pop culture such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Good Place, Handmaid's Tale, and The Maze Runner. This is perhaps an indicator that society's fears, rather than its hopes, are at the forefront of its collective minds. But what is it that keeps dystopias and utopias so fashionable, so perpetually intriguing, and most of all, so diverse? How is it that we keep coming up with infinitely many ways for the world to go so perfectly right or horribly wrong?

The truth is that, at their core, utopias and dystopias are a reflection of human nature itself, and the potential within that nature. It is this potential that enables humans to build cities and destroy wildlife, to dramatically increase human lifespans and happiness but also to create (and use) the atomic bomb. It is an undeniable fact that for better or worse, humans have changed and shaped the world to their liking- in a way that could lead to our demise or to a yet unprecedented level of prosperity. Indeed, in many people's conceptualization of the future, extreme prosperity is followed by extreme destruction. However, like human nature, dystopias and utopias, the good and the bad, are intricately wound up in each other. As John Milton argued in Areopagitica, a speech decrying the censorship of books, one cannot know good without also knowing evil. He says that it is only through confrontation with evil, through temptation, that true good can be expressed, as a "good" choice is meaningless without an alternative.

The reason why utopias and dystopias ultimately stand the test of time and keep society's fascination is because they reflect the polarity of human nature-extreme violence and destruction; extreme healing and unity. Utopias and dystopias then are an exploration of those poles; a journey through which society better understands its limits and potential downfalls. Utopias hold perpetual interest because, like a cockatoo with a mirror, humans are fascinated by this vision of themselves that behaves like them yet remains apart from them. In the same way, dystopias hold within them the power of the abject, the ability to show society what it is it fears most about itself.

Utopias have always existed in the imagination as what society could look like if human nature was purely good, and many religions have painted the picture. In Christianity's Garden of Eden as well as in Heaven, humans are imagined without evil, purified by God. Religion has imagined the evil of human nature as well in the purest form of dystopia: Hell.

The dramatization of humanity's good and evil, and the exploration of what that would look like, has taken form in more contemporary ways as well. The Handmaid's Tale explores the potential of human nature to oppress, as well as the potential to survive adversity. The Hunger Games, explores the same, and evokes the question, "what are we capable of?" Within both of these works, the good of human nature is illustrated as well, a tiny flame that cannot be suffocated no matter how great the darkness. Another contemporary example is The Giver, which instead of exploring what we are capable of, explores the idea that it is the range of emotion, of good and evil, that makes us human. Were society ever to try to change or limit human nature to create utopia, the resulting lives and society would be less meaningful, for what is happiness without sadness? What is good without evil? Milton would argue that we cannot know one without knowing the other. These facts of life, like the light and the dark, must operate in tandem to create the dimensionality of human experience, and the meaning found in it.

Ultimately, utopias and dystopias are so compelling because they reflect human potential exaggerated on a grand scale. The potential of a single human who is actively good, multiplied by a million humans who are actively good, results in a utopia. The way in which this delicate balance swings ultimately rests with the author of such societies, and their belief in whether human nature is good or evil-as well as how "good" and "evil" is best expressed. In fact, this conflicted duality of human nature itself is what relegates both utopia and dystopia to the realm of fiction and prevents them from being achievable in reality. Such is the reason why utopias and dystopias become so prickly to write about and analyze; to reconcile the pure good of utopia with the duality of human nature is impossible. To truly have utopia, human nature itself would have to change to allow for an elevated state of being.

Humans are all mixtures of good and evil, of right and wrong, of negative outcomes born of the best good intentions. Humans are both the terrorism of 9/11 and the heroism of its first responders. Because of this duality, pure utopia will never exist, and neither will pure dystopia. Instead, society will always be a mix, and must not only come to terms with, but also celebrate the real world ramifications of this fact.

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Utopias and Dystopias: The Potential of Human Nature - The Digital Literature Review

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By: Katrina Brown “Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is… involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill” -John Milton, Areopagitica…

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How to recognize a dystopia - Alex Gendler

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Why are we so fascinated by dystopian fiction? | Scope

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As a child, I had a deep fascination with dystopian novels. For me, they became a way to escape reality and live in a different world for a little while. However, as I got older, I began to realize that these novels may not be too far a reach from reality.

A dystopian world can be defined as an "imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control" ("Dystopias: Definitions and Characteristics"). Dystopian literature can serve as a form of criticism of the current systems in society that place restrictions on freedom. In my project, I wanted to research how the perceived issues about governmental control are represented across dystopian novels in the past century. In particular, I wanted to focus on these two explorations:

1. How the government is represented in these novels.

2. How citizens in a society are represented through their relationship with the government.

Through these different questions, I wanted to investigate how these novels reflect common issues and societal fears about the power of the government that have stayed prevalent all the way through to our present day.

Choosing My Text Corpus

To accomplish this kind of large-scale analysis, I used a word-embedding model to explore the relationship of words in a corpus of texts. Specifically, I used word2vec to build a vector space model, which turns the words in my corpus into vectors and positions them in vector space based on their common contexts and usages. To learn more, you can check out Ben Schmidt's introductory post on the specifics of word2vec here.

I wanted my vector space model to represent a range of dystopian texts across the past century characterized by oppressive power structures. My final corpus consisted of eleven dystopian novels published from 1895 to 2011, and altogether had 813,102 words (which is on the lower end of words needed to accurately train a model).

I found these texts on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. Due to the limitation of available modern day novels as text files, my contemporary novels are limited to popular young adult literature. In future work, I would like to find modern dystopias marketed to adults as well to create a more balanced corpus.

Data Preparation and Model Training

To prepare my data to be trained, I started by stripping out any metadata in my files and text added in by Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive. After this, there were a lot of decisions I had to make at the individual level for my files. For example, the texts from Internet Archive were made through OCR, so some files had spelling errors that I had to manually go in and fix. In Animal Farm, a "Y" had often been read as a "\". Since I manually had to fix these errors, there was a risk of human error in preparing my corpus. I also had some texts with words that had been broken up over line breaks. When fixing these words, it meant that hyphenated words over a line break also got combined into one word. However, since the amount of actual words broken up was more than the hyphenated words, I chose to go ahead and make these changes.

After I prepared my data, I went through the process of training my model in RStudio. At first, my data seemed skewed towards The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games, because I had used the entire trilogy for both of these series in my corpus. I decided to fix my corpus and use the first book of each series so that I could have more reliable and balanced results.

While training my model, since my corpus was quite small, I trained my model with 500 iterations to ensure it was thoroughly trained. Since this took upwards of two hours to run, I was unable to test higher iterations to see if this would substantially improve the results of my data. In future work I would like to try more iterations, but for the purposes of my research question, 500 iterations yielded thought-provoking results about my text corpus.

Historical Background

Before I explain my findings, I want to provide some historical context about dystopian novels. My hope is that in conjunction with each other, the rhetoric used in my corpus and the broader historical research can help answer questions about how these novels function as representations of issues surrounding authority.

In the journal article Structural Roots of Visions of the Future: World-System Crisis and Stability and the Production of Utopian Literature in the United States, Kriss A. Drass and Edward Kiser research what type of world climate utopias and dystopias are likely to be written in based on historical trends. In times of political, economic, and cultural crisis, writers will focus on constructing utopic forms of society. In contrast, in times of stability, writers will end up writing dystopia forms of texts (Drass and Kiser 422-423). When stability exists, a successful model of control has already been established, so there will be large resistance to any suggestions of alternatives that threaten to disrupt this "utopia". At this time, ideological discourse is limited, because those in power have established one dominant ideology that they want to maintain. (Drass and Kiser 425). Dystopian novels tend to be constructed in resistance to these narrow views to criticize the danger of this type of controlled structure.

I also want to introduce the term "false consciousness," a term used by Marxists to demonstrate how those in power can exploit the working class. "False consciousness" refers to when people believe in a worldview that actually serves the interests of others, unable to understand the true reality of their situation because of ideology constructed by those in power (Crouteau and Hoynes 157-158). For more information about ideology, you can go here.

Now, with these ideas about ideology and power in mind, let's take a look at my queries!

Government and Control

Since each dystopian novel uses different language to talk about their society, I first figured out which other words to explore in relation to government to explore how authoritative structures are represented in these novels.

Generally, in using word2vec data, words with a score of 50% or higher are considered similar enough to be of significance. In the case of this project, given the size of my corpus and the diversity in language used throughout these texts to describe dystopia, I decided to also look at words that fall in the 40%-50% range of similarity.

I started off by doing a "closest to" search of the word "government". This query looked for words closest to "government" in the vector space model, which includes both words used in the same way and in similar contexts to "government" in the text corpus. The higher the percentage of the resulting word the more related that word is to "government".

I then ran queries on the top ten words that were similar to government, as well as specific words from each novel that were representative of authority, and explored the different results that these queries brought up.

The most interesting result I found was the query for the word "control" and the fact that the closest word was "reality". Other similar terms represented the idea of control over what people think ("brain" and "mind") and what people believe ("beliefs"). These words all seemed reminiscent of the dominant government ideology that I introduced above, where the beliefs of a society are controlled by those in power.

Intrigued, I wondered what I would find if I did a "closest to" search on "government" + "control", which brought up the words closest to these two words in the vector space model.

I found that "reality" was the second most similar word used in context with "government" and "control". As Drass and Kiser discuss, dystopias have a trend of resulting from times of stability. During this time, dominant ideology is used to control the everyday lives of people (Drass and Kiser 423). If ideology is too narrow and does not allow room for alternate forms of belief, it can start to serve as a form of reality control. If the government has the ability to control people's realities, then they can control people's thoughts and actions.

As I thought about these results, I realized an extreme form of reality control is seen in Fahrenheit 451, where the dominant ideology is that all books should be burned because they are offensive. Who decides this reality? If people can read books and think on their own, they can become a threat to government. Therefore, by controlling people's beliefs about reality, the government can control them. In 1984, the government rewrites information in the newspapers in order to control the truth, and in Divergent people are raised to believe that they only belong in one faction, so that no one person possesses too many skills.

If reality as a form of governmental control is a dominant theme across these dystopian novels, then this might be a reflection of the writers' fears of a skewed reality from narrow and restricted ideology in society. In times where a few powerful people dictate the beliefs and values of a society, how much of what we are told is really in our best interest?

Society: How is freedom and slavery defined?

To further explore this idea, I wanted to look into how citizen's lives are described in relation to the government. To do so, I ran a "closest to" search on "slavery" and "freedom" to see how the rights of people were described.

What stood out to me the most was the fact that the word "ignorance" appeared close to both "freedom" and "slavery". The phrase ignorance is bliss came to mind, which inspired my exploration into exactly how ignorance could be a form of freedom and a form of slavery, hoping to better understand what these results mean in the context of dystopian novels.

I first decided to look at ""freedom" and "ignorance" without "slavery" to understand how ignorance was functioning as a form of freedom. To do this, I ran a "closest to" search on "freedom" + "ignorance" - "slavery", which gets me the words in the vector space model closest to freedom and ignorance, but not slavery.

While the percentages of the results were not very high (my corpus is quite small), I still found the results to be pretty informative. The words "phrases", "unconsciousness", "forgetting", and "thinking" all stood out to me in connection with ignorance as a form of freedom. Much like the phrase ignorance is bliss, if one can live their life unconsciously, either through oblivion or by choosing to forget, they can achieve a mental state of freedom. Doing so means not questioning ideological phrases passed down by those in power, but instead blindly choosing to accept the ways of society. In this way, ignorance can function as a coping mechanism in the controlled society described in dystopias (and the realities dystopian writers find themselves in), in order to feel free in an environment limited by extreme governmental control.

To look at ignorance as a form of slavery, I ran a "closest to" search with "ignorance" + "slavery" - "freedom". The similarities were about 10% higher than the ones for the last query.

The terms "slogans", "circulated", and "peace" brings me back to the idea of "false consciousness" that I introduced at the beginning. In order to maintain peace and stability, those in power circulate their own ideologies, slogans, and propaganda to keep the working class hard at work. In this situation, ignorance serves as a form of "false consciousness", where people are oblivious to the dangerous forces that are working against their interests. Through ignorance, people become a slave to government ideologies. Those in power then have the ability to manipulate the reality and beliefs of others by telling them what they should want or should need (much like the Fahrenheit 451 example, people are raised to believe books are bad for them).

It is also quite interesting that "church" appears to be the most similar word in this query. Thinking about religion in dystopian novels through the lens of "enslaving the ignorant", the church can use ideologies to dictate what people should believe, how they should act, and what is deemed as good religious behavior. The danger comes when people blindly follow the ideas of the church without stopping to question if it is in their best interest, ignorant to any bad intentions that might be at play.

Conclusions and Future Work

These queries bring to light some of the dominant themes surrounding government control across these dystopian novels. Using knowledge from Drass and Kiser's research to analyze the data, I found queries that demonstrate how reality can be dictated by government ideologies, and how "freedom" and "slavery" can be defined by one's own knowledge or ignorance of this reality. This data may begin to tell us something about the similiar fears of the people writing the novels, as writers reflect on the dominant ideologies at play in their own societies, the realities these ideologies construct, and how this lends the government power over the people. This is a promising starting point for further research on how dystopia function to critique and represent power structures in society. Since my text corpus is small, I would need a much larger corpus of dystopian novels combined with more research done on the historical background of these novels to make definite conclusions about the representation of government in dystopian literature. Yet, even queries from a corpus of 800,000 words yields really interesting results! I am curious to see how these results change or stay the same as more novels are added within a larger time frame, especially with new dystopian novels that arise as our political climate keeps on shifting.

Sources

Croteau, David R., and William Hoynes. "Media and Ideology." Media/SocietY: Industries, Images, and Audiences, Sage Publications, 2014, pp. 152-186.

Drass, Kriss A., and Edgar Kiser. "Structural Roots of Visions of the Future: World-System Crisis and Stability and the Production of Utopian Literature in the United States, 1883-1975." International Studies Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, 1988, pp. 421-438. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2600591.

"Dystopias: Definitions and Characteristics." ReadWriteThink, International Literacy Association / National Councils of Teachers of English, http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson926/DefinitionCharacteristics.pdf

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As a child, I had a deep fascination with dystopian novels. For me, they became a way to escape reality and live in a different world for a little while. However, as I got older, I began to realize that these novels may not be too far a reach from reality.

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What might this art piece be suggestings about extreme government oversight?

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'How do we keep this from happening?': 'The Giver' author Lois Lowry joins The Velshi Banned Book Club

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Initially published in 1993, Lois Lowry's "The Giver" grapples with heavy themes including the weight of memory, the freedom of choice, society and governmental control, and individualism. While dystopian literature has become increasingly popular in recent years - especially in the young adult and children's genres - "The Giver" was the first.

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Start: pg. 20

End: pg. 28

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When I first started my internship with CELL this summer, I wrote an " About Me " in which I explored the possibility that my interest in sustainability stems from ulterior motives: "maybe it's because she secretly believes that one day one of those dystopian teen novels that are so popular nowadays is actually going to become reality and she wants to be able to strike it out on her own, off the grid."

Well, you caught me. That's really the reason I've been doing all this. I'm getting ready for the inevitable dystopian disaster that will provide a setting perfect for the next Hunger Games spin-off. And if you've been reading my blog at all this summer, you might just be ready, too.

All joking aside, I've come to my last week with CELL-my last blog post. So I thought I would end at the beginning. A circle, so to say. Like the Earth. Or a closed-loop system. Or that recycling triangle thing.

Which means that I'm returning to the list that I composed on the very first day of my internship, inspired by my not-completely-joking "About Me" speculation. So here it is: a list of Off-The-Grid Sustainable Skills That Would Be Useful in a Dystopian Teen Novel! (May also apply to Post-Apocalyptic or Fantasy Novels for any age, or really any books where they do anything interesting.)

Basic Wilderness Survival:

Starting a fire and knowing how to cook over it

Finding water

Hunting (note: hunting is sustainable only when it's conscientiously done, i.e. from species whose populations are booming, and only for what you need to survive; never for sport alone)

Archery (I'm looking at you, Katniss.)

Traps

Also fishing (note: the same rules apply to fishing as do to hunting)

Foraging or Wildcrafting (identifying safe plants to eat)

Finding/making shelter

Navigation (by sun and stars)

Telling time (by sun and stars)

Bandaging wounds

Knowing natural medicine for illness

Avoiding poisonous plants and animals

Cleaning animals you've hunted and using all the parts so none go to waste

Trades:

Farming

Carpentry/construction

Mechanics (or, being able to tinker with things and get them working again instead of just tossing them out and buying a new one)

Cooking and baking from scratch (I'm talking grinding the flour scratch)

Other:

Communication (got to make those friends)

Canning (there are no high-energy refrigerators in this world)

Collecting water

Passive solar energy (meaning: letting the sun keep you warm)

Composting (for the garden you grow)

Predicting the weather (accurately-not like Karen from Mean Girls)

Entertainment (all electricity and energy and TV/computer-free):

Singing

Dancing

Storytelling

Playing basic, portable musical instruments (not the high-maintenance ones)

As you may notice, many of these "skills" focus on a few basic concepts:

1. Having a deep knowledge of nature and natural systems

2. Making things

3. Functioning without the internet (or electricity of any kind)

Obviously, this list is just for fun. (Until it's REAL.) (Just kidding.) You probably have some skills you'd like to add, maybe even things you already do (or read in a book somewhere). I'm of the opinion that it can't hurt to know how to do some (or most, or all, if you're an overachiever) of these things. At the very least, we can practice our sustainable skills now, and hopefully we'll never have to live in a dystopian world.

Good luck to all you eco-adventurers out there. It's been great writing blog posts at you. And stay tuned for more exciting things to come from CELL.

By(e) Jessica Edington

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Sustainable Skills You Need To Survive a Dystopian Teen Novel

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When I first started my internship with CELL this summer, I wrote an " About Me " in which I explored the possibility that my interest in sustainability stems from ulterior motives: "maybe it's because she secretly believes that one day one of those dystopian teen novels that are so popular nowadays is actually going to become reality and she wants to be able to strike it out on her own, off the grid."