If you know from where to set sail, with a friendly pilot offering expertise, it should not take you too long to reach Utopia. Since the first woman or man first yearned for a better place, dreamers have dreamed them at the tops of mountains and cradled in hidden valleys, above clouds and deep under the earth – but above all they have imagined them on islands.

The island utopia has been a standard since antique times: Eusebius’s Panchaea and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun; Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, and Antangil, from the anonymous 1616 novel of that name; Bacon’s Bensalem; Robert Paltock’s Nosmnbdsgrutt, from The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins; Huxley’s Pala; Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia; and countless others. And in the centre of that great archipelago of dissent and hope, one place, one name, looms largest.

This island, this book, is the paradigm. “More’s Utopia,” in the words of the scholar Roland Greene, “is perhaps the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage [and] introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopian”, defined by “a multifarious phenomenon which I will call island logic”.

But, to repeat, it is not a long voyage to get there. Citizens of More’s Utopia “keep up the art of navigation”, pass back and forth on various tasks, trading surpluses of “corn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle … to other nations”. Only the thinnest stretch of ocean separates Utopia from the mainland. For somewhere so famously and constitutively nowhere, this no-place Utopia is very close to the shore.

And there’s a more startling surprise with regard to its island-ness, a fact of which not nearly enough is generally made:

Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527) Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

This was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus, that conquered it … brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into … good government … Having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug … and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he, beyond all men’s expectations, brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours, who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were struck with admiration and terror.

This most famous example of the island utopia, the ideal type itself, is not by nature an island at all. The 15 miles of water that keep it apart from the main body politic are not there by God’s will, but by the sweat of native people, among others, digging at an invading conqueror’s command. The splendid – utopian – isolation is part of the violent imperial spoils.

The classic reactionary attack on the utopian impulse is that it is, precisely, no place, impossibly distant. But disavowed and right there in More’s foundation myth of the dream polity is a very different unease: that, wrought by brutality, coerced from above, it is all too close.

In the words of Ursula K Le Guin, “Every utopia since Utopia has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgment, both a good place and a bad one. Every utopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a utopia.”

These contradictions thrive in single heads as easily as between them, and in the texts those heads produce. The interminable debates about what More “really” meant miss this obvious fact, and are thus of as much use as any other discussion of “actual” artistic or political “intent” that treats it as a given or a secret to be decoded. Which is to say: some, but not much.

Was More’s utopia blueprint, or satire, or something else? As if these are exclusive. As if all utopias are not always all of the above, in degrees that vary as much in the context of their reception as of their creation.

The dangerous drive, the dystopia-in-utopia, then, is not only in the impulse, though it can certainly reside there, but in the actuality: that proximity of the island to the shore. Tragedians making their peace with power, liberals loudly warn against utopianism from below (often full of sentimentalism for their own dead radicalism, and lachrymose at their new realism); alongside them the hard-right radicals of power and oppression dream their own dreams of the good life: supremacist arcadias. And those who rule, more powerful and traditionally less voluble than their apologists, calmly configure and effect utopias of their own. In which those they rule have no choice but to live and serve and die.

A view of Utopia – Ambrosius Holbein woodcut from a 1518 edition of the book. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Those who rule calmly effect utopias of their own, in which subjects have no choice but to live and serve and die

These are a few of the limits of utopia. But the fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesn’t mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary. Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire. For recognition, like all desire, and for the specifics of its reveries and programmes, too; and above all for betterness tout court. For alterity, something other than the exhausting social lie. For rest. And when the cracks in history open wide enough, the impulse may even jimmy them a little wider.

We can’t do without Utopia. We are all and have always been Thomas More’s children. Even his literary ancestors were also his pre-emptive descendants, throwing him up, making him a hinge point, so his ditch-demanding king could give their earlier yearnings a name. That we must keep returning to the text, with whatever suspicion, is to honour it. It gave us a formulation, a concept, we needed. Though it is perhaps past time to rethink that word.

We don’t know much of the society that Utopus and his armies destroyed – that’s the nature of such forced forgetting – but we know its name. It’s mentioned en swaggering colonial passant, a hapax legomenon pilfered from Gnosticism: “for Abraxa was its first name”. We know the history of such encounters, too; that every brutalised, genocided and enslaved people in history have, like the Abraxans, been “rude and uncivilised” in the tracts of their invaders.

A start for any habitable utopia must be to overturn the ideological bullshit of empire and, unsentimentally but respectfully, to revisit the traduced and defamed cultures on the bones of which some conqueror’s utopian dreams were piled up. “Utopia” is to the political imaginary of betterness as “Rhodesia” is to Zimbabwe, “Gold Coast” to Ghana.

How, then, might we set out for New Abraxa? “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward,” says Le Guin. And so she suggests instead the formula people of the Swampy Cree First Nation have traditionally used in orientation to the future: Usà puyew usu wapiw!

“I go backward, look forward,” it means. It describes the common porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum, backing into a rock crevice, from where it can watch for danger ahead. “In order to speculate safely on an inhabitable future,” she says, “perhaps we would do well to find a rock crevice and go backward.” Far from hyperbolic, the adjective “inhabitable” seems admirably restrained in the face of the social and ecological degradation of accelerating neoliberalism.

From those rocks, the porcupine can plot its own utopias. And, at least as important, going backward, looking forward, it can try to escape the onrushing utopias of those in power.

But such utopias of the powerful have levelled many landscapes. They’re distinguished by their flattening power, by the fields of rubble they leave. What if they sweep up all the rocks and leave none between which to hide?

Marlon Brando, Fairuza Balk and David Thewlis in The Island of Dr Moreau (1996). Photograph: Allstar/New Line Cinema

That defensive porcupine gait recalls another. The motion has a counterpart, a poignant inversion, the buffeting of a figure long since a cliche of radical pessimism, but the endless citation of which still can’t quite strip it of its power and importance.

Walter Benjamin’s angel of history.

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread … His face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … [A] storm … blowing from Paradise … irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The porcupine goes backward, looks forward, to see futures – to avoid some, to plan another. The angel goes forward, looks backward, in anguish – plunging towards a future it can’t see, mourning pasts it can’t redeem.

The history of all societies is a history of monsters on all sides. Our utopianism is always already a chimera

Which way are the predatory utopias twisting us? Is the porcupine pulled from its broken crevice and wrenched around to hurtle future-ward in their slipstream? Or does the angel manage to catch the walls of the canyon with the tips of its outstretched wings and hold on and turn and wriggle into a place to hide and grit its teeth and face the telos of the wind? Will the porcupine become the angel, or the angel the porcupine?

Yet again, there’s no either/or. The history of all hitherto existing societies, it’s been pointed out many times, is a history of monsters, on all sides. Our utopianism is always already a chimera. Angelus erethizon: a porcupine with celestial wings; a seraph bristling with spines.

And like those other hybrids, our cousins, the beast-men of More(au), who ultimately overthrew the ghastly utopia that created and despised them, it must learn to move with an unprecedented crossbred gait. To use its parts and powers in ungainly but effective ways: stilt-walking on wingtips, gripping with the quills of feathers and the quills of a sharper, martial kind. Fighting on four legs, two and none, and swimming – it’s close to the shore – to New Abraxa.

It will move, perhaps, as it is just possible we might, with a new motion neither and both animal and divine.

• The quincentenary edition of Thomas More’s Utopia is published by Verso in conjunction with Somerset House as part of UTOPIA 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility. Details: utopia2016.com