Edwin Warner
A Voyage to
Utopia
Time
magazine January 1971
ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ
A Voyage to
Utopia in the year 1971
Those once
myriad visions of ideal societies have all but disappeared, or have been
transmogrified into the demonic dreams of science-fiction. Gone are the blessed
isles, the jungle retreats, the mountain fastnesses, the subterranean
wonderlands that promised a perfect life free of toil and torment. The urge to
envision an earthly paradise seems to have spent itself.
After all
these centuries of trying, the search for paradise is not so easily abandoned.
If man cannot find paradise in one place, he will look for it in another—and so
he has today. He has found it within himself. In spite of all that Freud has
taught the 20th century about the ambivalence of inner drives and longings, a
growing number of modern thinkers have put their faith and hope in the psyche
as the last refuge of idealism in a corrupt, unhappy world.
Charting the
physical decline of one civilization after another, Historian Arnold Toynbee
took comfort in what he called the “etherealization” of mankind: the tendency
of advancing societies to encounter internal rather than external challenges,
to move from a material existence to one that is more spiritual.
Similarly,
the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was persuaded that evolution
has brought civilization to a higher state of consciousness — a “noosphere”
that will ultimately unite man, at the “Omega” point, with God.
Escape from Repression
Less loftily,
others contend that Utopia can be achieved by a liberation of the instincts,
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse argues that today’s technological society has
concentrated undue power in the hands of a few political and economic
monopolies that suppress the freedom of a paralyzed citizenry. Only by removing
this “surplus repression” and “eroticising the entire personality” can man once
again learn how to love and create.
The libidinal
mystic Norman O. Brown wants to return to the unfettered pleasure seeking of
infancy, where all “pansexual” desires are instantly gratified. “The real
world,” he writes in Love's Body, “is
the world where thoughts are omnipotent, where no distinction is drawn between
wish and deed.”
Even mental
aberration can be a form of Utopia, maintains British Psychoanalyst R.D. Laing,
The schizophrenic makes a journey into self, says Laing, that is every bit as
awesome as exploring a jungle or climbing Mount Everest. He goes “back and
through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of
Adam and perhaps even further into the beings of animals, vegetables and
minerals.”
The new
utopianism has brought a revival of mysticism and a fascination for the
religions of the East, such as Zen Buddhism, which promise perpetual escape
from everyday reality into a richer world of the spirit.
According to
Historian Theodore Roszak (The Making of
a Counterculture), “objective consciousness,” which deals with the here and
now, is being replaced in the counterculture by a “superconsciousness” that
overflows all logic and limits.
Roszak wants
to restore the wisdom of the shaman to an honored place in modern society, That
ancient wise man of primitive life, Roszak contends, is able “to diffuse his
sensibilities through his environment, assimilating himself to the surrounding
universe.”
Acting on
this advice, Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda of U.C.L.A. put himself in the
hands of a Mexican Indian shaman. As Castaneda describes it in The Teachings of Don Juan, the objective
world vanishes completely as the author moves from one hallucinogenic drug to
another in a fury of inner feelings that he rather tamely calls “nonordinary
reality.”
Drugs, of
course, are a favorite way of reaching inner Utopia. It was no accident that Aldous
Huxley, who renounced classical Utopia in his scathingly satirical Brave New World, should turn to drugs in
a desperate attempt to find an alternative. His last novel, Island, limns a different kind of
paradise, where everybody is kept mildly euphoric with the help of drugs and
hypnosis.
Others have
followed in Huxley’s path with even greater exuberance. Timothy Leary, for
example, urged taking LSD in order to “groove to the music of God’s great song.
If you become an ecstatic saint,” he added, “you become a social force. New
underground movements spring up.” In a twinkling, the world can be transformed,
The American superstate disintegrates as revelers turn on, tune in, drop out.
The Burden on Youth
In Ideology and Utopia, Sociologist Karl
Mannheim pointed out that every utopian movement requires a certain class
interest to sustain it, The economic needs of the deprived proletariat, for
example, inspired the socialist Utopias of the 19th century. The burden of
today’s inner-directed Utopia has been placed on youth.
In the most
talked-about book of the year, The
Greening of America, Yale Law Professor Charles Reich contends that Utopia
has all but arrived, its insignia evident everywhere in the dress and song of
youth, in its language and gesture. The rest of the population has no choice
but to fall in line and enjoy the inevitable triumph of Consciousness III. The Greening of America has succeeded in
empurpling not a few reviewers and readers with rage. The dissenters argue that
neither drugs nor superconsciousness, nor even “grooving to God's great song,”
is their idea of Utopia.
It was
certainly not the traditional idea. The creators of classic Utopias were not
much interested in liberating the personality or reaching the inner man. They
wanted to constrain the inner man with his ungovernable impulses. They
wanted—let us admit it—to repress the personality. “The tyrant of individualism
has forever been put down,” boasted a 19th century Utopia called The Crystal Button.
In a 1903
utopian novel, Limanora, everyone is
deliberately made to work too hard to have time to think about himself or his
desires. Those who persist in the glorification of sensory pleasures are exiled
to an island called Kloriole, which, perhaps not incidentally, sounds like a
detergent. Today,
it would doubtless be a very crowded island.
[ μετάφραση στα
Ελληνικά:
Σε ένα ουτοπικό μυθιστόρημα του 1903, το Limanora, ο καθένας σκόπιμα
αναγκάζεται να δουλέψει τόσο πολύ σκληρά για να έχει χρόνο να σκεφτεί τον εαυτό
του ή τις επιθυμίες του. Όσοι επιμένουν στην εξύμνηση των αισθητηριακών
απολαύσεων εξορίζονται σε ένα νησί που ονομάζεται Kloriole. ]
That first and greatest of
utopian thinkers, Plato, banned most poets from his Republic because they exalt emotion over reason.
Even so
cheerful a philosopher as Sir Thomas More (who invented the name Utopia, which is Greek for no place)
argued that all sensual pleasures should be pursued only for the sake of
health.
Other
Utopians were equally antiseptic. In The
City of the Sun, by the 17th century writer Tommaso Campanella, no woman
was permitted to have sexual intercourse until she was 19; a man had to wait
until he was 21—or longer, if he happened to be palecomplexioned. Those
stalwarts who managed to abstain until they were 27 were to be paid homage at a
public gathering, where hymns were sung in their honor.
[ μετάφραση στα
Ελληνικά:
Στην «Πολιτεία του Ήλιου», του συγγραφέα του 17ου αιώνα Tommaso
Campanella, καμία γυναίκα δεν επιτρεπόταν να έχει σεξουαλική επαφή μέχρι τα 19
της. ένας άντρας έπρεπε να περιμένει μέχρι να γίνει 21 ετών — ή περισσότερο, αν
τύχαινε να είναι ωχρόκομψος. Σε όσους στρατιώτες (κάτοικοι) κατάφερναν να
απόσχουν από τα ερωτικά μέχρι τα 27 τους θα τους αποδοθούν τιμές σε μια δημόσια
συγκέντρωση, όπου ψάλλονταν ύμνοι προς τιμήν τους. ]
In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim's Progress, the voyager
Christian can reach the Celestial City—which 17th century artists sometimes
pictured as a snugly fortified medieval town—only by conquering the fleshly
temptations celebrated by today’s turned-on idealists. Sidestepping sleepy-eyed
Sloth and Presumption, Christian gains Utopia, or Paradise, by following the
directions of the chaste damsels Discretion, Prudence, Piety and Charity.
When the age
of sentiment arrived in the late 18th century, emotions, it is true, were
treated with more forbearance. The utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier designed
a “phalanstery” (from the Greek
“phalanx”), a community where self-expression was to be freely indulged; its
1,600 inhabitants—the ideal number—would work and make love as they pleased, at
least until the millennium came, when the oceans would be transformed into the
kind of lemonade Fourier enjoyed at Paris cafés. But the principal passion of
most Utopias continued to be rule making.
A mythical
land called Lithconia, invented by an
anonymous American writer, abolished marriage and approved free love. Almost
free. Before the passion could be consummated, the lovers-to-be had to sign a
register. As long as their names appeared on it, they were forbidden by law to
take another lover. No one, apparently, ever escapes the long arm of the law in
Utopia.
[ μετάφραση στα
Ελληνικά:
Μια μυθική γη που ονομάζεται Lithconia, που
εφευρέθηκε από έναν ανώνυμο Αμερικανό συγγραφέα, κατάργησε τον γάμο και
ενέκρινε την ελεύθερη αγάπη. Σχεδόν ελεύθερη. Προτού ολοκληρωθεί το πάθος, οι
μελλοντικοί εραστές έπρεπε να υπογράψουν σε ένα μητρώο. Για όσο εμφανίζονταν τα
ονόματά τους (στο μητρώο), τους απαγορευόταν από το νόμο να πάρουν άλλον
εραστή. ]
Many Utopias
tried to return to a simpler, less artificial existence. In Louis Sébastien
Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year 2500,
simplicity was achieved, in part, by burning all superfluous reading matter in
one vast holocaust. As the state Librarian dryly explained: “It is an expiatory
sacrifice to veracity, to good sense and true taste.”
[ μετάφραση στα
Ελληνικά:
Πολλές Ουτοπίες προσπάθησαν να επιστρέψουν σε μια πιο απλή, λιγότερο
τεχνητή ύπαρξη. Στα «Απομνημονεύματα της Χρονιάς 2500» του Louis Sébastien
Mercier, η απλότητα επιτεύχθηκε, εν μέρει, καίγοντας όλη την περιττή
αναγνωστική ύλη σε ένα τεράστιο ολοκαύτωμα. Όπως εξήγησε ξερά ο κρατικός Βιβλιοθηκάριος:
«Είναι μια εξιλαστήρια θυσία για την αλήθεια, την καλή λογική και το αληθινό
γούστο».
]
In 19th century New England,
Transcendentalist intellectuals, much like today’s commune dwellers, tried to
put Utopia into practice. At Brook Farm, they earnestly devoted themselves to a
rigorous life of the soil. But their personalities proved too complex for their
simple rural setting, and they soon fled back to the security of imperfect,
industrial society.
Menace in Perfection
As the
industrial era advanced, Utopians sought salvation in technology. The
efficiency of machines was supposed to compensate for wasteful human habits.
Writers competed in producing the most dazzling visions of the future, even
though their speculations were soon made obsolete by rapid progress in real
life.
In 1883, for
example, the Scottish writer John Macnie wrote of a Utopia called The Diothas, in which he described a
horseless carriage that could go as fast as 20 miles per hour (faster
downhill). Obviously carried away by his vision, he even fantasized a “white
line running along the center of the road. The rule of the road requires that
line to be kept on the left, except when passing a vehicle in front. Then, the
line may be crossed, provided the way on that side is clear.” O brave new
world!
Technology
proved to be a dubious means of establishing universal human happiness. Its
resources were too easily employed to destroy life instead of enhancing it.
Hideously enough, totalitarians like Hitler and Stalin were the first to make
Utopia a practical possibility on earth. They appropriated the iron discipline
of Utopia while discarding its yearnings for community and brotherhood.
Observing
Bolshevism in action, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in alarm:
“Utopias seem very much more realizable than we had formerly supposed. Now we
find ourselves facing a question which is painful in a new kind of way: how to
avoid their actual realization.” This fear was shared by many other writers who
began to turn out anti-Utopias warning of the menace in the quest for
perfection.
In creating a
Utopia, an author assumes a God-like stance —a fact admitted by the social
engineer who devised the briskly efficient community described in Psychologist
B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two. “I
like to play God,” the mastermanipulator proclaims, “Who wouldn't, under the
circumstances? After all, even Jesus Christ thought he was God!”
In a way, it
is something of a relief to turn from social architects who want to program
human behavior to the modern variety of Utopian, who seeks power only for
pleasure. “Do it!” commands the utopian sprite Jerry Rubin—meaning just about
anything one wants to do. And it can be done with a clear conscience as well.
Even if
someone does not want to do anything, he can help build Utopia. If Marshall
McLuhan is to be believed, just by sitting around and watching television,
people participate in a tribalism of feelings that is making the whole world
one.
One what?
Vegetable? Well, vegetables are much on the minds of Utopians these days. Many
of them have rejected meat and its association with the hunt and the kill.
Everything that is disagreeable is permanently banned from today’s Utopia. If
you follow your inner light, you cannot possibly go astray.
Loss of Control
The classic
Utopians were more realistic. They knew that evil could not simply be willed
(or smoked) away, that it had to be handled decisively or it would undermine
human community. “All that is necessary to describe the new society is to
describe a new way of life,” writes Charles Reich at his most euphoric. But
while he is contentedly describing Utopia for the benefit of his enchanted
listeners, others may be acting quite contrary to such instructions. The
weakness of inner Utopia is that it surrenders control of outer events. In the
end, it may prove to be guilty of the most discussed sin of modern times. It
may be irrelevant.
The classic
Utopias were often quite relevant to the real world. They projected patterns of
life and politics that were later adopted. Universal suffrage, the separation
of the powers of government, the basic ingredients of the welfare state were
first suggested by utopian thinkers.
Wrote Anatole
France: “Without the Utopians of other times,
men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. Utopia is the principle of
all progress, and the essay into a better world.”
A world
increasingly threatened by universal pollution and weapons of total destruction
needs utopian thinking more than ever. It may be that only a vision of Utopia
can combat the dystopia of contemporary life.
Yet a Utopia
without a respect for the richness of individuality is not worth having—the
chief lesson, perhaps, of the 20th century. It is out of revulsion against the
omnipotence of the technological state that the inner Utopians have rebelled.
In doing so, they have created a monster of the spirit just as surely as
earlier Utopians built a prison for the body. Utopia is not meant to be lived
in. At its best, it is a model for the exemplary life, not a guide to reality.
As he brought
his majestic Republic to a close,
Plato acknowledged that he had written it to build a better city within the
heart of man. We live in a world that is part reality, part dream; the tension
between the two is the source of our creativity. If the temptation of the
traditional Utopia was to slip into totalitarianism, the temptation of the new
is to dream one’s life away.
Edwin Warner
Time magazine, January 18, 1971,
pp. 18-19.
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 28 Δεκεμβρίου 2024 :
Edwin Warner
A Voyage to Utopia
Time magazine January 1971
ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ ]
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