At the Browser, John Gray decries the idea of Utopia, which was considered extremist in the days of George Ripley’s failed Brook Farm experiment, but has become more centrist in our age, resulting in tortured nation-building experiments in the Middle East. An excerpt:

“Q: If utopias are unreachable – you could say that in Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, which coined the term, that’s the whole point – why does that make the striving for them pernicious?

John Gray: There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw inIraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was extremist, but now we have the utopian idea of building democracy inLibya or Afghanistan. So the utopian impulse – the impulse to achieve what rational thought tells us is impossible – has migrated to the centre of politics. That is connected with humanism and the idea of progress.”