Thrutopia
Description
By Jem Bendell, Rupert Read:
"Historians and archaeologists can contribute ... as curators of possibility. They can contribute to dialogue from a stance of ‘positive pessimism’ that explores potential ‘thrutopias’: ways of getting through what is coming as well as humanly possible, given the impossibility now of perfect utopias. Thrutopia, a concept drawn initially from readings of Ursula le Guin’s great novel of political possibility ‘The dispossessed’, centres process rather than outcome, and possibility rather than alleged certainty.
Thrutopianism is thoroughly reality-based, and combines optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect.
In being grounded in the non-negotiability of truthfulness about both our tragic predicament on the one hand and the vast and exciting chance we have of acting for good on the other, thrutopianism connects naturally with ‘apocalypse’ in its true sense: revelatory vision, once the veil of our hand-and-mind-forged manacles has been rended. We might then hazard a label such as ‘hopeful apocalypticism’ to the attitude which we along with the kind of historians and archaeologists for whom we write aim henceforth to take: active hope grounded in truthfulness and curiosity towards how really tough moments in our common human heritage were handled.'