Sabbatical Book Club: Utopia for Realists

Revelation 21:1-4, 22:1-5

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Over the last month or so, I have been sharing some highlights of my sabbatical reading. If you’re thinking it has all sounded a little serious and not very relaxing, first off you need to remember that I am an absolute theology nerd, and second I can assure you that there was plenty of less worthy reading mixed in, I just haven’t worked out how to get a sermon out of My Cousin Rachel yet.

This morning’s book is ‘Utopia for Realists’ by the Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman. As the title suggests, it offers a pragmatic approach to recreating society as a ‘good place’, which is the literal translation of ‘utopia’. It seemed an appropriate choice for this Remembrance Sunday, as we move from lamenting the horrors of the past and present, to hoping for a better future.

This book is slightly unusual in that it is the only one I have chosen for this sabbatical book club that isn’t explicitly theological or spiritual, and in fact I am not clear on Rutger’s own religious views. I don't think he is committed to any religious practice, although I may have misunderstood or misremembered that. I do know that his father was a Protestant minister, and I am sure that his Christian upbringing shaped much of his thinking. I certainly see much of the way of Christ and the economics of the kingdom in his writing. At any rate, I believe that everyone carries the image of God and so everyone is capable of expressing the heart of God, whether or not they would understand or frame it in those terms, so we should be open to listening to all people.

I first came across Rutger Bregman when I read his book ‘Humankind’, in which he posits that human beings are fundamentally good. He examines historical events to show that crises more often lead to solidarity than to anarchy, even if biased storytelling by the media may make it appear otherwise. He debunks the notorious Stamford Prison Experiment as having been heavily manipulated, suggesting cruelty is most often born out of broken systems and twisted narratives. And he notes that while ‘The Lord of the Flies’ perpetuates a myth of innate savagery, the truth is that a group of shipwrecked Tongan boys was able to organise themselves democratically and survive for a year without violence. In short, he argues that we are kinder than we think, and we need to tell better stories so that we believe it.

For me this all resonates with the idea of original blessing, which reminds us that in the beginning, before any nonsense with apples and snakes, God looked at humanity and said “this is very good”. It rebuffs the Augustinian notion of original sin, and the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, both of which see humanity as fundamentally broken, treating the fall as more definitive for our nature than creation. I name dropped Augustine and Calvin there not to show off, but to emphasise that these ideas do not come from Christ, and so we might suggest that they are not inherently Christian. Please don’t imagine I’m naive about the human condition, I spent enough time studying the Bosnian War to know the darkness and depravity we are capable of, I just refuse to believe that is our default setting.

That’s all to say that I came to ‘Utopia for Realists’ knowing that Rutger Bregman holds what I believe to be a deservedly hopeful view of humankind, and so I was interested to discover what his imagined utopia would look like. I was delighted to find that in many ways it looks quite a lot like the kingdom of heaven, but with more talk of economic policies than mustard seeds, a little less poetic and a little more practical.

One of the core ideas Rutger examines is Universal Basic Income, or UBI for short. This is the idea that all people should receive an unconditional and guaranteed stipend to cover basic necessities. Anyone would then be able to earn an extra wage on top of that, but everyone would have sufficient means for a decent standard of living, because our worth does not depend on our productivity. Critics have dismissed it as unfair or idealistic, and argued that it would encourage laziness, but Rutger points out that trials carried out in numerous places over several decades have been remarkably successful, alleviating poverty and encouraging entrepreneurship with no significant decrease in hours worked. In fact, a trial in America in the 1960s was so successful that twelve hundred economists signed a letter in favour of it, and Nixon almost signed it into law.

I have spoken about UBI before, in the context of the parable of the workers in the vineyard. This is the story in which a landowner employs workers at several points during the day, and then gives them all the same wage, regardless of how many hours they have worked. Those who were employed first are outraged, but the landowner dismisses their complaints, essentially saying “this is how I do things”. Jesus begins the parable by saying this is what the kingdom of heaven is like, so surely we are to understand that God’s economy is not based on our ideas of fairness, but on God’s desire to see all people flourish, the same principle underlying Universal Basic Income.

Another idea Rutger puts forward is the fifteen hour working week. Perhaps surprisingly, this was first proposed in 1930 by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who believed that mechanisation would reduce the working week to an average of fifteen hours within a century. Even before him, the nineteenth century philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that the best use of more wealth was more leisure. And yet that is not what has played out. The industrial revolution may have increased productivity, but capitalism has increased consumption at an even greater rate, so that even with the introduction of weekends and working time directives, we work on average more hours a year than medieval subsistence farmers, and we are so exhausted that the leisure time we do have is often spent staring at a screen for lack of energy to do anything else.

A fifteen hour working week may sound like a pipe dream, but again there have been trials that have shown it is possible for companies to reduce hours without reducing wages. It would represent a fairly significant shift in the way we order society, and we might need to consume a little less and profit a little less in order to make it work, but it could be enormously beneficial, and again I think we find support for it in scripture. The practice of sabbath is intended to remind us that we are not defined by our labour and rest is sacred. The many festivals lasting multiple days are in part an encouragement to spend time in simple enjoyment. And the story of Mary and Martha tells us that it is okay to stop even when we think there is more work to be done, because there are some things that are more important.

Perhaps most controversially, Rutger also argues in favour of open borders. There is no question that wealth is unequally distributed, not just within societies but between countries. Someone living on the poverty line in America is still in the wealthiest 14% globally. Greater freedom of movement would allow people to move to where the wealth is, but it would also allow people to take wealth back with them, and so may be more effective than development aid in levelling the playing field. There are a number of objections commonly raised against open borders, but many of these rest on false assumptions. And as Rutger points out, wanderlust is in our blood. Borders and passports are relatively recent inventions, and for many thousands of years, human progress was driven by movement. 

Turning once more to scripture, we see again and again a call to care for the foreigner, so clearly God expects the foreigner to come to us. And you don’t have to go far in the Bible before you trip over someone on the move. Abraham setting out for the promised land, Jacob and his sons moving to Egypt to escape famine, Moses and the people leaving Egypt to escape slavery, Ruth travelling to the place of her mother-in-law's birth, Jesus and his parents fleeing Herod, Paul travelling the known world with the gospel... And of course there is John’s vision of the utopia that is the new heaven and the new earth, in the closing chapters of Revelation. In between the verses we heard earlier, we are told of the heavenly city that “on no day will its gates ever be shut...the glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it”. If heaven has open borders, then perhaps it is something we could at least aspire to.

These are some pretty radical ideas, and perhaps you are thinking that this utopia doesn’t sound very realistic. I would say two things to that. First, after reading Rutger Bregman’s book, and also Ed Miliband's ‘Go Big’, I believe it is more realistic than you might think. Whatever reservations you have, I encourage you to at least explore these ideas a little further. Second, the resurrection didn’t seem very realistic either, until it happened. Utopia will require us to rethink our ideas of fairness and progress and identity, but resurrection requires us to rethink our ideas of pretty much everything, so surely we should be up for the challenge. Rutger ends ‘Utopia for Realists’ by saying this: “If we want to change the world, we need to be unrealistic, unreasonable and impossible.” So here is to being all of those things, and writing a better story.