It is no coincidence that Thomas More set Utopia on an island. He was a teenager when the Americas were discovered, a time when the world learned that more was possible than we knew. He could not have known that this discovery would change everything, with 1492 sparking a series of events that would propel humanity to become a very different species, one which today could no longer survive as most people survived then. More was imaginative, but no human is capable of imagining change on the scale that has occurred. The search for utopias is the constant attempt to stretch our imaginations over what is possible.
Four later Oscar Wilde wrote that the only worth- while maps of the world were ones that included utopia. Utopia was no longer a sensible object of deri- sion. So much was changing so quickly that clearly the near future would be very different from the recent past and so what mattered was how the future could be shaped and how we, with our limited imaginations, could try to look into the fog of possibilities. The world- wide emancipation of women that was well under way then was clearly one of the greatest changes to the species. Men had almost always dominated before and did in almost all other mammal species, but the change is only clear in hindsight and few men saw it coming. We are changing as a species.