Utopia

Lepapillon0311

<font size="5"><font face="tahoma">"Fellow men! I promise to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, and in the most beautiful gardens; where he may accomplish, without labor, in one year, more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, and intersect the land everywhere with beautiful canals, and roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for traveling one thousand miles in twenty-four hours; may cover the ocean with floating islands moveable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security, and with all the comforts and luxuries, bearing gardens and palaces, with thousands of families, and provided with rivulets of sweet water; may explore the interior of the globe, and travel from pole to pole in a fortnight; provide himself with means, unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments yet unknown: free himself from almost all the evils that afflict mankind, except death, and even put death far beyond the common period of human life, and finally render it less afflicting. Mankind may thus live in and enjoy a new world, far superior to he present, and raise themselves far higher in scale of being." -Mr. Etzler, a Pennsylvania visionary whose book is quoted in H. D. Thoreau's essay "Paradise (to be) Regained (1843). Thoreau remarks: "It would seem from this . . .that there is a transcendentalism in mechanics as well as in ethics. While the whole field of the one reformer lies beyond the boundaries of space, the other is pushing his schemes for the elevation of the race to its utmost limits. While one scours the heavens, the other sweeps the earth."
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<br>"If by eating this fruit they find themselves outside the paradise of childish innocence and popular belief, they do by their bearing give us the impression that the experience is worth its cost. It is only the half-educated, those who would follow wisdom and at the same time look back over their shoulders casting longing glances at comforting ignorance, unable to say farewell, who dwell upon the painfulness of knowledge. I have the suspicion that those who wear a long face as if they knew some dreadful secret that would break the heart of the world if the rest of mankind knew it, are men who find in the Byronic attitude a convenient way of convincing themselves that they are intellectual heroes." --Everett Dean Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education.
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<br>You are right,' said Pangloss, 'for, when man was placed in the Garden of Eden, he was placed there ut operaretur eum, to dress it and keep it; which proves that man was not born for idleness.' 'Let us work without theorizing," said Martin, 'tis the only way to make life endurable.'" Voltaire, Candide
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<br>[When Dean Brann went to Greece] "[m]y outward purpose was to study Greek antiquities, but my inward desire was to see the world through an air that was actively transparent, an atmosphere through which places and things assumed a beautiful clarity and clarified beauty." Dean Eva Brann of St. John's College, Democractic Distinction.
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<br>"Plato hoped to find the good life sub homine, and St. Augustine sought it sub deo. It remained for Thomas More to propose that it might be found sub lege." --B.F. Skinner, Utopia As A Cultural Experiment [nb: Three strikes--Skinner's out.]
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<br>"It was Plato's belief in the individual which caught [Mary Renault's] imagination and which furnished her with an ethical code she attempted to maintain throughout her life. Plato's views on politics seemed equally valid: a good state would be produced only by good people; first educate the few to a knowledge of the good, then permit them to rule. Systems alone could not create the ideal state; only individuals could."--David Sweetman.
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<br>"Never was a finer canvas presented to work on than our countrymen. All of them engaged in agriculture or the pursuits of honest industry, independent in their circumstances, enlightened as to their rights, and firm in their habits of order and obedience to the laws. This I hope will be an age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded on principles of honesty, not of mere force." Jefferson to John Adams
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<br>[Aldous Huxley:] "Don't imagine that a miscellaneous group can live together, in closest physical proximity, without rules, without shared beliefs, without public and private spiritual exercises, and without a magnetic leader.'" cited in David E. Shi, The Simple Life
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<br>"[The Puritans] wanted to "effect a second Protestant Reformation, to give up England and the Church of England as beyond saving and to withdraw from them as they had withdrawn from Rome a hundred years before . . . to [John] Winthrop and his family it would have furnished an escape from the contagious wickedness that surrounded them and, through repudiation, a freedom from responsibility. . . [but he was not one of] the intransigents, the undeviating purists who have to be right whatever the cost [such as those who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620] . . But most Puritans saw the problem of sin could not be escaped so easily, and were sufficiently charitable toward their neighbors to think that England and her churches were still worth saving." Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop
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<br>"By constantly attributing 'true' piety and simplicity to earlier generations, the Puritan reformers developed a nostalgic and self-flagellating mode of discourse that dates back to Aristophanes and Moses and has since become commonplace. . . Yet the simple life as an enduring social norm has never been realized. . . . 'Simplicity,' observed the Quaker reformer Richard Gregg in 1936, 'seems to be a foible of saints and occasional geniuses, but not something for the rest of us' . . . Thoreau noted likewise that simplicity was for the few, rather than the many. By its very nature, then, voluntary simplicity has been and remains an ethic professed and practiced primarily by those free to choose their standard of living." David E. Shi, The Simple Life
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<br>"Theocratic utopias have usually lasted about 20 years, just long enough for a new generation of children to grow up and rebel against the power of the founding fathers." Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds
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<br>"The original goal of economic self-sufficiency for the colony as the best way to preserve social unity by insulating its members from greed and corruption was quickly being supplanted by a thriving commercial system linking Massachussettes Bay with an international trading network. As profits and personal incomes increased, so too, it seemed, did high living and spiritual deadness. . . Ships brought not only new goods but new people and new ideas. Such developments combined to weaken the unity of village life and undermine communal supervision of personal behavior." David E. Shi, The Simple Life
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<br>"The longing to go back to some simpler form of life, to be rid of modern so-called conveniences, is typical of a whole generation of middle-class radicals (myself included) whose loudest spokeman was Orwell." Mary McCarthy
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<br>"Through watching a mouse running about . . . not looking for a place to lie down in, not afraid of the dark, not seeking any of the things which are considered to be dainties, [Diogenes] discovered the means of adopting himself to life . . . . One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away his cup with the words, 'A child has beaten me in plainness of living.' He also threw away his bowl when in like manner he saw a child who had broken his plate take up his lentils with the hollow part of a morsel of bread. . . . It was his habit to do everything in public, the works of Demeter and Aphrodite alike. . . . Once after masturbating in the market he said, "I wish it was as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach." Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers
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<br>"Like much of rural America, what had been integrated mix of farms and small communities is declining. Most new property owners are buying for recreation. There's nothing wrong with recreational people except they're not usually here and they've replaced people who were. As the year-round population declines, community institutions fold." Donald McCaig, The American Homeplace
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<br>"The artist finds a place that is beautiful, undiscovered, and suits his pocketbook. He goes there for two years. The third year other artists follow him; the fourth year come the retired British admirals and 'vamps;' the fifth year the artist leaves; the sixth come the wealthy people who spend a lot of money on it, makng it as ugly and as dear as possible, but they soon tire and go away. Then the artist comes back again; and begins all over, picking the bones of what the Money bags had killed." Edward Simmons [an American artist in France].
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<br>"I am by nature a lover of unfrequented shrines, and when the crowds arrive with their litter I am tempted to turn to other altars. Am I to blame for leading on the crowd? My author's vanity--and his vanity is the canker and curse of an author's life--flatters me by saying I am to blame, but my common sense answers this with the melancholy reflection that we are all Time's children and simply discover what is already in the air. We keep at most but a few days ahead of the crowd, which would arrive anyhow without our leading." Logan Pearsall Smith, letter to Robert Gathorne-Hardy, April 11, 1920.
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<br>"In rural and coastal Maine even today, the five months of the year from June through October are spent largely in making preparations for the other seven. The Popham colonists had almost no time at all to provide properly for the gales and blizzards to come . . . One thing they did accomplish beofore illness and the weather defeated them. They built a boat. This was the 'pretty Pynnace' Virginia, of about thirty tons. The Virginia, the first ship to be built and launched by Europeans in the New World, might be considered the mother of the American Merchant Marine." Louise Dickinson Rich, State o' Maine
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<br>"No truly great question had ever agitated the campus since the original days of the founder, but the ordinary trivia of college life were here blown up, according to critics, out of all proportion. There had been no loyalty oath, no violation of academic freedom, but problems of freedom and fealty were discovered in the smallest issue, in whether, for example, students in the dining hall, when surrendering their plates to the waiters, should pass them to the right or left, clockwise or counterclockwise . . . at an all-college meeting. . . President Maynard Hoar had come within an ace of resigning when his appeal for moderation in the discussion had been met with open cat-calls from the counterclockwise faction. " Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe.
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<br>"The first change came in the 'eighties, with the earliest detachment of big money-makers from the West, soon to be followed by the lords of PittS*urgh. But their infiltration did not greatly affect old manners and customs, since the dearest ambition of the newcomers was to assimilate existing traditions. Social life, with us as with the rest of the world, went on with hardly perceptible changes till the war abruptly tore down the old framework, and what had seemed unalterable rules of conduct became of a sudden observances as quaintly arbitrary as the domestic rites of the Pharoahs. . . That I was born into a world in which telephones, motors, electric lights, central hating (except by hot air furnaces) X-rays, cinemas, radium, aeroplanes and wireless telegraphy were not only unknown but still mostly unforeseen, may seem the most striking difference between then and now; but the really vital change is that, in my youth, the Americans of the original states, who in moments of crisis still shaped the national point of view, were the heirs of an old tradition of European culture which the country has now totally rejected." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward
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<br>". . . the Indian had become dependent on the gun, woolen cloth, iron kettle, knife and many smaller articles. When fall came and the year's hunt began it became necessary to supply the hunter with all such essentials. If he did not have them he and his family might starve, and if they escaped starving they would have been so busy getting food and clothing by primitive means that they would have no time to kill fur bearing animals [to sell to European traders]." Pinkerton, Hudson's Bay Company [nb--Thomas Jefffeson suggested using trade rather than war to subjugate the Indians becuase it was cheaper and more thorough].
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<br>"All great movements, every vigorous impulse that a community may feel, become perverted and distorted as time passes, and the atmosphere of earth seems fatal to the noble aspirations of its peoples. A wide humanitarian sympathy in a nation easily degenerates into hysteria. A military spirit tends toward brutality. Liberty leads to license, restraint to tyranny. The pride of race is distorted into blustering arrogance. The fear of God produces bigotry and superstition. There appears no exception to the mournful rule, and the best efforts of men, however glorious their early results, have but dismal endings, like plants which shoot and bud and put forth beautiful flowers, and then grow rank and coarse and are withered by the winter. It is only when we reflect that the decay gives birth to fresh life, and that new enthusiasms spring up to take the place of those that die, as the acorn is nourished by the dead leaves of the oak, the hope strengthens that the rise and fall of men and their movements are only the changing foliage of the ever-growing tree of life, while underneath a greater revolution goes on continually." --Winston Churchill, The River War
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<br>". . . there may be a city happy in isolation, which we will assume to be well-governed . . .but such a city could not be constituted with any view to war or the conquest of enemies--all that sort of thing must be excluded. Hence we see very plainly that warlike pursuits, although generally deemed to be very honorable, are not the supreme end of all things but only the means. And the good lawgiver should enquire how states and races of men and communities may participate in a good life, and in the happiness that is attainable by them," --Aristotle, Politics.</font></font>