Utopia

As the Declaration of Independence was being signed in 1776, the United States adopted the Latin phrase E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—as its de facto motto. This phrase encapsulated the nascent country’s aspiration to gather diverse people around a shared cause, an objective immediately at odds with the very limited human rights practices of the time. The sentiment bannered nearly two centuries of calamitous nation building—the breaking free of colonial foundations and establishment of independence from Great Britain, land seizure and forced displacement, economies built by enslavement, warfare with Native American tribes, Civil War and Reconstruction, arts cultivation, industrialization, urbanization, waves of immigration, and efforts to establish standards of living—before being usurped in 1956 by “In God We Trust,” the Christian majority’s reaction to the perceived threat of Communism with a show of divine providence.

This battle between utopian plans for a just society and ascendant ideologies characterizes the ongoing project of the US, a place that has prided itself on fostering both equity and disruption. Indeed, the utopian paradox arrived as a sort of metaphor for this country. First articulated in 1516 by Sir Thomas More as a “new world” condition, utopia translates from Greek to “no place.” More’s Utopia, a sociopolitical satire set on an island republic, depicts the Americas as lands upon which to strive for the presumably unachievable beau ideal.[2] The US has come of age adapting this script. From the ideal societies envisioned by early religious colonizers to the Constitution’s checks and balances, through abolition, suffrage, the New Deal, the space race, digital democracy, and on, we have pursued and reimagined utopias—only to see them undermined and reshaped by the turbulence of human behavior.

In the twenty-first century, two issues best characterize the US’s utopian paradox: threats to liberal values, which pit social justice reforms against individual freedoms, and our accelerating immersion in the simulated realities of digital and virtual realms, commercial media, and consumer culture.[3] The US’s liberal democracy—which aims to accommodate resistance while accepting difference—strains as the nation works to adopt more inclusive frameworks, transitioning, as the Smithsonian itself acknowledges, “from a society dependent on coherence of a singular set of values and practices to one that derives its strength and unity from a deep tolerance of diversity.”[4] We have become both unprecedentedly isolated and at odds with one another while being more connected than ever.

Notes:

[1] James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Dial Press, 1962).

[2] The text has served as both a critique of colonialism and minimization of the civilizations already populating the Americas.

[3] See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

[4] Walter E. Washington, “Report of the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian Institution,” Smithsonian Institution, 1993.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)