George Scialabba’s Utopian Hopes

George Scialabba. The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia. Yale University Press, 2026. $32.50. 288 pp.

George Scialabba’s new collection of book reviews and essays, The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia, asks and answers three questions. First, is there anything to hope for beyond our current predicament—and if so, what is it? Second, in what is this hope rooted, if anything at all? And third, what can we do to realize it? Christians who pick up this book will therefore find in Scialabba someone who asks the right questions, even if his answers ultimately fall short. After all, Christians are supposed to be a people of hope.

With a career not tied to the academy or a think tank, Scialabba is a well-read thinker whose day job was as a building manager in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a public intellectual, he also wrote essays and book reviews, and this new volume assembles about two dozen of these, going back over four decades. From commentary on friendly left-wing writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Seymour Hersh, to more scathing criticisms of less sympathetic conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Irving Kristol, Scialabba takes his reader on a journey through the fertile mind of a true member of the contemporary American Left—and one who is relentlessly in pursuit of hope.

Is there anything to hope for?

What is the substance of Scialabba’s hope? As the title suggests, it is an “intelligent utopia,” a world—and an America—that resides in a future that offers more democracy and equality in all areas of life, in politics and in the economy alike. It’s a world of solidarity, benevolence, and sympathy toward all people, especially the poor and the suffering. And, perhaps most important, it’s a world full of people who possess the virtues necessary to sustain these ideals, especially when the temptations toward self-interest and self-reliance are strong. A tall task, Scialabba admits, but such is the substance of things unseen, as it were.

We get the clearest picture of this in his 2012 homage to Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas.” If democracy and solidarity are the goals, the love of money is our greatest obstacle to achieving those goals. This means that any political or social reform must overcome that basic problem. Money dominates American politics, mostly through virtually unlimited campaign contributions from the wealthy elite. Voters and politicians are stuck in a system over which they have little control and agency, so American “democracy” is one in name only. Perhaps a better name for the American political system would be plutocracy.

So what’s the solution? Besides health care and meaningful work for all (to cite just two of Scialabba’s standard social democratic aspirations), he offers a surprisingly specific one: election in the House of Representatives by lot. Because campaigns and elections require so much financing, only the wealthy can play the game with any success. Instead, what we need is an election of 435 House members (the Senate and Presidential elections will have to stay put for now) done completely at random. This will hopefully prevent the rigging of elections by the rich and provide a true representation of the teachers, nurses, and welders in our communities.

Scialabba rightly admits that the prospects for such a reform are grim, since any change like this would only happen “over Money’s dead body.” Still, this is the right place to start for any kind of meaningful political and social reform. So many of our demands for justice can only happen if some more basic structural reform is accomplished first, paving the path for the necessary conditions for the change we really desire. For example, those who have long called for an end to abortion in America faced the obvious problem for decades that the Supreme Court had constitutionalized it as a right in Roe v. Wade. While the overruling of Roe and Casey in Dobbs did not bring an end to abortion, at least it made it possible for anti-abortion laws to be enforced at the state level.

Scialabba’s larger calls for democracy, solidarity, benevolence, and sympathy are worth taking a moment to review as well. For one, the language of solidarity should strike a chord with the Christian reader. Anyone familiar with Catholic social teaching will particularly resonate with Scialabba’s rhetoric. Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan and its teaching that even our greatest enemies demand our love and compassion. Or consider the language driving the pro-life movement over the last 40-50 years. At its best, it’s the language of solidarity with those within the human community who literally cannot speak for themselves. Or take a tour through the encyclicals of popes going back to Leo XIII in the 19th century, and you’ll find consistent references to solidarity and the idea that we all belong to a single human family.

Racial, ethnic, national, and religious differences can never eliminate the most basic bond we have as image bearers of God. And while Catholics and others will quickly add that subsidiarity–the notion that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and that nonstate institutions have a vital role to play in a flourishing community–must complement solidarity lest we descend into state collectivism, Scialabba’s call for greater solidarity may be the one we need today in a world of seemingly intractable division and strife.

Is this hope rooted in anything?

Scialabba’s hope for greater democracy and solidarity should push the Christian reader to question whether or not we have lost a sense of the human bond we all share. But perhaps the more intriguing contributions he offers are in his answers to the other two questions about hope: Is it grounded in anything, and what can we do to realize it?

To the question of grounding, he begins the book by citing one of his intellectual heroes Richard Rorty, who rejects both reason and revelation as proper foundations for common morality. Revelation belongs only to a few, Rorty contends. Reason, while necessary to work out the details of hope’s substance, is not sufficient either.

In his reflection on Charles Taylor entitled, “Can We Be Good Without God?” Scialabba follows Taylor’s critique of modernity as “scientific rationality,” which transforms morality into mere preference and its evil cousins, relativism and subjectivism. If morality can be reduced to taste and preference, then it does seem to follow that our communities will struggle to find shared ways to name not just what is right and wrong but even who we are as human beings in the world. Could God therefore be the answer, Taylor wonders?

While Scialabba honors the ambition and scope of Taylor’s project, he shows his cards by admitting that he is himself a kind of “pragmatic naturalist.” While not wanting to reduce everything to its most basic material bits, Scialabba prefers a naturalistic explanation of reality to something more metaphysical, when it is adequate to perform the task of explanation in a particular case. If, for example, a community wanted to explain the existence of human rights, why not just ground those rights in a Hobbesian view that human beings are just “matter in motion,” and that our basic material desire is to preserve our existence? Is this not easier than an elusive and controversial theological or philosophical foundation? More than that—and probably more at the center of his worldview—is Scialabba’s pragmatism. Human rights just seem to work for us, as one of his moral heroes John Stuart Mill argued. Who needs metaphysics, or a shared telos, Scialabba wonders, when we seem to muddle through without them?

So not only can we be good without God, but we probably don’t need to explain why we should strive for justice at all. That ancient question Glaucon and Adeimantus asked Socrates in the Republic—why is a just life worth pursuing, when the unjust seem to do just fine in their own pursuits?—turns out to be impossible, unnecessary, and irrelevant to answer. Instead of carrying on for ten books in the dialogue trying to answer the question, Plato through Socrates would have been better off patting the earnest young Athenians on their heads. He shouldn’t have discouraged a life of justice in the process, but should have insisted that worrying about such a foundation is likely a waste of time.

But even this is not the fulness of what Scialabba has in mind, even though he is indeed a kind of pragmatist. His answer to the question for the basis of our solidarity is that it is found in our moral imagination. More specifically, it is the act of imaginatively identifying with people who are not you, especially those who are suffering. Compassion, or a “suffering with,” is really what he has in mind—where we learn to walk in the shoes of America's kindergarten teachers who collectively earn less money than the top 25 hedge fund managers in the same country. Or when we imagine what it is like to live without clean water, malaria-protecting mosquito nets, or access to life-sustaining nutrition and food. Scialabba’s basis for hope, therefore, is found in the moral imaginative faculty that is common to all of us, if only we would recognize and use it.

Certainly the Christian reader can appreciate this move by Scialabba, even if we are not finally satisfied with a non-theological grounding. When Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, is it not to get us to imagine what it’s like to be beaten and on the side of the road? Or consider Paul’s experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus. What does Jesus say to Saul who becomes Paul, except to ask him why he is persecuting Jesus, because to persecute God’s people is to persecute God himself? Identification with the suffering of the world is surely at the heart of God and what it means to follow Him. Can this not be a shared basis for our hope?

Why is it so hard to realize this hope?

If solidarity is the substance of our hope, grounded in our collective capacity to imagine the suffering of others, why is this so hard to realize and fulfill? What do we need to do to make this happen?

In short, “you must change your life.” It is worth remembering that the love of money is the chief obstacle to realizing the hope that we have. Scialabba further develops this idea when he argues that the moral imagination of contemporary America has been and continues to be captured by a passion for self-reliance and economic self-interest. Instead of imagining ourselves in the shoes of others, we can only imagine what it’s like to be us. It is the water we swim in. Thus the more accurate description is not that we have the wrong moral imagination, but that we have none at all.

But “you must change your life.” The answer is not superficial or mechanical. It is not a simple call to more activism, lobbying, or political action. We must first work on ourselves before we can realize the hope that we really have. We must recover the “impulse of sympathy,” which is the “origin of moral imagination.” The solution is not to be found out there, but within. Plato believed that we all possess an internal truth but have forgotten it because of the darkness of the Athenian sophists. Anamnesis, or the act of remembering the truth we have always possessed but forgotten, is the only way forward. So it is with Scialabba, who shares with Percy Shelley the need to find again the love for others we all have within us, a love that transcends reason and serves as the basis for a life of moral imagination.

Practically speaking, it is not clear what Scialabba has in mind to restore this inclination toward benevolence. He mentions a program of “democratic pedagogy,” but it is not clear what that entails. However, he is at his most profound and most resonant with Christian teaching when he suggests the following in his penultimate chapter, “More Than Human?” He says, “Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan–state, corporations, and media–possible. And an important form of rootedness is our internalization of the Word in one form or another: sacred scripture or poetic tradition or civic mythology or family lore.”

Could it be, then, that the way we realize the hope within is to go back to the basics, remove ourselves from the distractions of money and consumerism, and to open ourselves to a revelation from beyond? Not really to look within, therefore, but to wait and look and hope for the One who can save us from our contemporary troubles. In the end, I wonder if this is the truest aspiration of Scialabba’s compelling book.