Dystopia as dashed dreams?

With each victory over some aspect of poverty or misery, the definitions of each are defined "up" to whatever the next level was.

I think that the dystopian books and movies arose from a generation (mine) that grew up in the post-WW2 era, a time which may have been the peak of our prosperity in the USA. These dystopian stories play upon a worry to which we are prone: that things are going to get worse. I tend to think they will.

My father is a retired electrical engineer and ISP; he tends to think that human ingenuity will solve all of our problems. We've had many discussions about this issue...

You might want to look at some of the better studies of pastoral. Raymond Williams Country and the City might be good.

Pastoral had its heyday in a period when man was making very slow progress in improving productivity and the maintenance of social order and organization were the main controllable factors governing the success or failure of a society.

Pastoral yearns for a time when this order was natural . . and also yearns for a time when things were uncomplicated, un-alienated and justice was meted out to all as a matter of course.

Complex social organization was the enemy.

Anthony Burgess, who wrote the (vastly superior to the film) book, A Clockwork Orange(/u>, said that the book was written as a response to the social engineering of post-war Britain. He supported socialism but thought that a moral fable about how far it should go was grist for the literary mill. The book's original version had Alex settling down to a normal domestic life. This wasn't done to give it a happy ending but to illustrate the point that social engineering was useless. Alex just did what he was going to do anyway, after a period of youthful rebellion, unfortunately carried out by raping and busting other people's noses.

I think the Book of Revelations counts as dystopian. Maybe Ragnarok and the kali yuga too (although we're supposedly already in the latter).

Dystopias often include not just low standards of living, but rampant crime, evil people everywhere, chaos, war, etc.

A lot of dystopia is about the tradeoffs and down side of progress, e.g. authoritarianism, bureaucracy, and boring routines. And then, there are almost-perfect systems which make life really quite nice 99% of the time, except when they collapse into highly-efficient wars or cyclic depressions. Dystopias tend also to involve questions about what the real goals are -- some utilitarian Utopias (e.g., enormous numbers of healthy, well-fed people living in enormous blocks of highrises and eating seaweed pellets and yeast cakes) are not places where you'd want to live.

I'd heard somewhere that Burgess was a conservative. I had remembered reading something from him in my Norton Reader (which also contained several digs at the Bell Curve) in which he said America was a "pre-war country" and needed more socialism so we would lower expectations, so I reinterpreted that as sarcasm. Because I haven't heard much collaborating evidence for that view, I'll go with diana here.

Steve Sailer claimed Burgess was a conservative:
http://manwhoisthursday.blogspot.com/2007/03/conservative-writers.html
Maybe he was a still a socialist. A "Red Tory"?

In line with what John Emerson said, I'd broad-brush dystopias as riffs on the themes of 'be careful what you wish for' and 'with power comes responsibility'... themes familiar enough from myths and fairy-tales, as well as from Spider-man.

More specifically, and within the above broad framework, dystopias in the contemporary sense were conceived in direct response to utopian visions. So it may make most sense to look at why utopian visions arose... I'd tentatively suggest that it's the sense of whole cultures/civilizations having the power to shape their own destinies that is critical.

Of course, opposed visions of idylls and distopias are old as the hills (look at the expulsion from Eden into a life of suffering); modern utopias and dystopias are merely versions of this that put humans (or at least analogues thereof) in the driving seat. In this sense, both utopian and dystopian visions are products of an age of affluence... but because affluence enables self-determination more than because they are about expectations.

Maybe it's a relic of our Malthusian past... I mean, under the Malthusian trap if things got better and life was good it only meant that they'll get worse again once population grows. If we can stay out of it for a few thousand years maybe we'll evolve to the point where predictions of environmental doom, dystopian sci-fi and post-apocalyptic visions will lose most of their emotional appeal and will no longer be taken seriously.

I had thought Burgess was a conservative until I read his memoirs, Little John and Big Wilson in which, to my mild surprise, himself as having been turned "bloody purple" as a result of experiences in wartime and post-war Britain. He wrote, "We were all bloody purple."

Purple meaning a very deep shade of pink. The common man had had enough of officer's snobbery and being controlled by a viciously class-ridden society that had dragged Britain into one disastrous war, which made the next one inevitable. And they were sick of the Empire. That was why Churchill got booted - he was associated with the Empire and class snobbery, something that still to this day mystifies Americans (esp. neocons, for whom Churchill is the Messiah.)

Naturally, the moment the socialists became ascendant, he became a critic.

I think that the best word to describe Burgess would be contrarian. But no one word could sum up such a complicated man. He was truly an illustration of the saying, "more than the sum of his parts."

Some of the dystopias I read strike me as straight-out arguments or propaganda for or against a particular idea, with the imaginary future as a handy vehicle. Jack London's The Iron Heel is a straight Marxist tract in the form of a novel- here's what the oppressive bourgeois state will become (he'd respond with your view about affluence with an "of course!" - as a true believer in stage theory). Henry Hazlitt's Time Will Run Back reads like an effort to make von Mises' Socialism - and especially the problem of economic calculation - more readable than the original. Brave New World struck me as, more than anything, a straight attack on Utilitarianism - "You want to build society to maximize pleasure, and minimize pain? Here you go. Like it?" (The hero ends by demanding the right to be unhappy.) A Clockwork Orange - on Behaviorism and the social-engineering ideas that came with it. (I thought the bitterest line was the part where Alex starts complaining about the Beethoven in the backgrounds, and the doctor replies with something like, "Hmmm? I know music is an emotional intensifier...").

That said, older writers (17th-early 18th century) who wanted to put their social criticisms into novel form seemed to prefer far-off countries or a fictionalized past to a dynamically changing future - Byron's Childe Harold, Voltaire's Huron or Zadig, these are the examples I'm thinking of.