When I use a word . . . Utopias, dystopias, cacotopias, agathotopias, kalotopias, and the NHS

Utopias

The word “utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas More as the title of the 1516 novel that we now call Utopia, but whose original Latin title was Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia, which I translate as A truly golden little book, no less educational than entertaining, about the best way of running a republic and the newly discovered island of Utopia. His book was not the first of its kind, but he gave it a name that had not previously been coined.

More fashioned his title from two Greek words, οὔ, not, and τόπος, a place, and Latinised his coinage by adding the suffix –ia. There are two words for “not” in Greek, οὔ and μή. As Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon puts it, “οὔ [is] the negative of fact and statement, as μή of will and thought; οὔ denies, μή rejects; οὔ is absolute, μή relative; οὔ objective, μή subjective.” Since οὔ typically qualifies verbs, in More’s construction the verb “to be” is to be understood: Utopia=[it is] not a place.

More originally intended to call the book Nusquama, from the Latin nusquam, in no place or nowhere. However he later changed the title from Latin to Greek, Utopia, supposedly on the suggestion of Erasmus.1 And thereby hangs a pun, as More explicitly showed, giving his work an alternative title in a verse that followed the frontispiece:

HEXASTICHON ANEMOLII POETE

Laureati Hythlodei ex sorore nepotis in Utopiam insulam.

Utopia priscis dicta, ob infrequentiam,

Nunc civitatis aemula Platonicae,

Fortasse victrix, (nam quod illa literis

Deliniavit, hoc egovna prestiti,)

Viris &opibus optimisque legibus

Eutopia merito sum vocanda nomine.

In an English translation by Ralph Robinson, published in 1556, this appeared as the second verse under the heading “iiii verses in the Utopian tongue … rudely Englished”:

Me Utopie cleped Antiquitie

Voyde of haunte and herboroughe,

Nowe am I like to Platoes citie,

Whose fame flieth the worlde throughe.

Yea like, or rather more likely

Platoes platte to excell and passe.

For what Platoes penne hathe platted briefely

In naked wordes, as in a glasse,

The same have I perfourmed fully,

With lawes, with men, and treasure fyttely.

Wherfore not Utopie, but rather rightely

My name is Eutopie; a place of felicitie.

So the idea that it was a misconception that the intended etymology was εὐ τόπος (as it were, a place of wellbeing) rather than οὔ τόπος (no place) is itself a misconception. The ambiguity was intentional on More’s part, following Erasmus’s suggestion—his Utopia can be either “no such place” or “a goodly place.” It was certainly the former, although perhaps not intended to be the latter, in view of More’s satirical approach.

Dystopias

Subsequently, taking a cue from this etymological ambiguity, untranslatable if a single word is desired, and building on the supposed origin of the word from the Greek adverb εὐ, well, rather than οὔ, not, the term “dystopia” was coined as an antonymic counterpart to “utopia.” It came from the Greek inseparable prefix δυσ–, which was added to words either to reduce or destroy a good meaning or to enhance a bad one. It implies, for example, ill, hard, bad, unlucky. The English equivalent would be mis- or in technical terms dys-. Dysacousia … dysmyotonia … dyszoospermia—Dorland’s Medical Dictionary lists well over 200 such terms.

The coinage “dystopia” is attributed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to Greg Negley and Max Patrick in their 1956 survey of utopias, Quest for Utopia, in reference to Joseph Hall’s satirical 1605 novel Mundus Alter et Idem (An Old World and a New One Just Like It), written under the pseudonym Mercurius Britannicus.2

But in fact the word appeared as early as 1747, in a poem titled “Utopia: or Apollo’s Golden Days,” published by George Faulkner of Dublin in an anonymous 24 page pamphlet, but later attributed to the Reverend Doctor Lewis Henry Younge:

“Unhappy isle! scarce known to Fame;

DUSTOPIA was its slighted name.”

Other antedatings have also been found.3

Cacotopias

Worse, perhaps, than a dystopia is a cacotopia, from the Greek adjective κᾰκός, bad or evil, which therefore also plays on εὐ rather than οὔ. This word is generally said to have been invented by Jeremy Bentham in his Plan of Parliamentary Reform in the Form of a Catechism (1818): “As a match for Utopia, (or the imagined seat of the best government,) suppose a Cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government) discovered and described, would not filth in this shape [sc. rotten at the core] be a ‘fundamental feature’ in it?”

Bentham’s text is quoted in part in the OED,4 which says “Apparently an isolated use.” However, other instances are easily found. John Stuart Mill, for example, during a parliamentary debate on Ireland in 1868, said of the then Conservative party that “It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called Dystopians, or Cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.”56

Mill’s use of the word, 50 years after Bentham, has been widely quoted, but an antedating of Bentham’s use can be found, and it comes from more than a century earlier.7 In 1714–15 a curious work was published in eight parts, titled News from the Dead: or, The Monthly Packet Of True Intelligence from the Other World, and attributed to “Mercury,” clearly a pseudonym. A second edition in a single volume was published in 1719 and a third in 1756, under the imprint of W. Needham of London.

The book begins with “The Printer’s Advertisement,” in which it is anonymously explained that late one Saturday night, when the printer was alone in his printing room, he heard the letters in his printing machine “rattling against one another … moving up and down, [with] no visible Cause that put them in Motion.” He then saw “a little dapper Fellow, about twice the Size of an Umble-Bee, jump up upon the Edge of one of the Boxes, in the Dress and Posture, just for all the World, as you see in the Title Page.” The illustrated figure referred depicts the God Mercury carrying his caduceus and being chased by the God Pan on horseback. Mercury proceeded to make the machine print half a sheet of text, and explained that he intended “to present the upper World with a Weekly Account of all the Remarkable Passages that happened in the Infernal Regions, … every Saturday Night.” The book that emerged, therefore, consisted of the accumulated accounts provided to the printer by Mercury. The author was later revealed to be Thomas Berington.

The word “Cacotopia” appears six times in the text, on the first occasion in a bulletin from Helliopolis (note the spelling), headed True Intelligence from the Other World, and referring to “his infernal Majesty in [the Kingdom of] Cacotopia.” In the next bulletin, addressed “To my worthy Friend Devil Arioc” from one signing himself Ramiel, we read “”I saw no small Joy and Satisfaction break forth in his Looks at that Name. Cacotopia! says he, what Pleasure and Joy flow into my Heart and Bowels, at the Mention and Thoughts of that sweet Place!”

After that there are relatively few uses of the word, but it seems to have been rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century. In a long introduction to his 1978 novel 1985, a sequel to George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949), Anthony Burgess discussed Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1923 novel We, which he credited as having influenced Orwell, calling them both cacotopias: “Dystopia has been opposed to eutopia, but both terms come under the utopian heading. I prefer to call Orwell’s imaginary society a cacotopia—on the lines of cacophony or cacodemon. It sounds worse than dystopia. … Most visions of the future are cacotopian.”

And a year later, Philip Howard, one time literary editor of The Times of London, noticed a trend8: “It must be a sign of the times. We seem to have stopped believing in Utopia and to need a word for its exact opposite. At any rate, in British political discourse there has recently been discovered a Disunited Nations of Dystopias and Cacotopias, meaning places or systems of government where everything is for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds: Nasty Nowheres, in fact … A Dystopia or Cacotopia is applied to visions of hell on earth like 1984 and Anthony Burgess’s Tucland.” The reference is to Burgess’s 1985.

Another year later, Howard published an extended version of his essay, in a book titled Words Fail Me.9 There he cited an even earlier use of cacotopia, but spelt differently: kakotopia, more closely mimicking the original Greek, in an essay by Lewis Mumford, “Utopia, The City and The Machine,” in which he refers to “a negative utopia, a dystopia or … its dark shadow, kakotopia or hell.” 10 Mumford, in fact, had often used the variant spelling, and it turns out that the apparent disuse of the term “cacotopia” is distorted by the use instead of “kakotopia,” of which several examples can be found in the 19th and 20th centuries. The earliest that I have found, in a relatively cursory search, is from 1820. It appears in the second volume of Journal of a Tour in the Levant by a British diplomat, William Turner, which was published in three large volumes and dedicated to William Canning: “At Kakotopia (translated, it means an unlucky spot,) we stopped in a mud cottage, which we left at half-past three, after devouring a couple of fowls.” Turner listed Kakotopia as a place among several others that he visited on the island of Cyprus.

“Kakotopia also appears, for example, in John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera. Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871, Letter VIII): “Utopia and its benediction are probable and simple things, compared to the Kakotopia and its curse, which we had seen actually fulfilled. We have seen the city of Paris (what miracle can be thought of beyond this?) with her own forts raining ruin on her palaces, and her young children casting fire into the streets in which they had been born, but we have not faith enough in heaven to imagine the reverse of this, or the building of any city whose streets shall be full of innocent boys and girls playing in the midst thereof.”

There are many other examples.

Philip Howard mentioned other possible alternatives to “eutopia,” namely agathotopia and kalotopia, from the Greek adjectives ἀγαθός, good, and καλός, beautiful. Most subsequent instances of “agathotopia” are attributable to the late Nobel award winning economist James E Meade (1907–95), who used it in publications such as Agathotopia: The Economics of Partnership (1989) and Liberty, Equality and Efficiency: Apologia pro Agathotopia Mea (1993). “Kalotopia” has rarely been used, although there are instances antedating Howard’s suggestion. Perhaps it is too close to “kakotopia” for comfort.

A final thought

Even in dystopian (or cacotopian) fictions there is a great deal of wish fulfilment,11 albeit tempered by the recognition that Eutopia is not achievable. Non-existent medicines that are described in such fictions often appear at first blush to be beneficial, but they generally spring unpleasant surprises.

The term “utopiate” was coined by Richard H Blum and others in 1964 to describe LSD12: “If the drug does, or is believed to, produce desirable changes in others, it is a Utopian tool. Elsewhere one can see drugs used to mold behavior: sedatives are given by physicians in hospitals to produce passivity in patients who are “crocks” and “cranks”; mothers give tranquilizers to children to make them docile. LSD can be used as a device for social engineering, a “Utopiate” to construct more pleasing surroundings and to mould people to one’s desire.” Such apparent optimism was ill founded.

Extending this to healthcare in general, how should we describe the current NHS in terms of any of the many types of –topias that have previously been hypothesised? Its founders presumably had some kind of eutopia in mind, or at least an agathotopia, but it appears to have turned into some degree of a dystopia if not yet a cacotopia.