bread and roses
Bread and Roses – An Utopian Survey and Blueprint – (1944) – by ethel mannin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Mannin
Ethel Edith Mannin (6 October 1900 – 5 December 1984) was a popular British novelist and travel writer, political activist and socialist. She was born in London.
Mannin’s father, Robert Mannin (d. 1948) was a member of the Socialist League who passed his left-wing beliefs on to his daughter. Mannin later stated that: “His socialism went a great deal deeper than any politics or party policy; it was the authentic socialism of the Early Christians, the true communism of ‘all things in common’ utterly-and tragically-remote from Stalinism”. When at boarding school, following the outbreak of World War I, Mannin was asked to write an essay on “Patriotism”. Hoping to impress her favourite teacher (a Communist sympathiser) Mannin’s essay was an advocacy of anti-patriotic and anti-monarchist ideas. For writing the essay, Mannin’s headmistress scolded her and made her kneel in the school hall all morning..Her writing career began in copy-writing and journalism. She became a prolific author, and also politically and socially concerned.
She came to support anarchism, and wrote about the Russian-born, American anarchist Emma Goldman, a colleague in the Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista at the time of the Spanish Civil War.
Mannin listed Bart de Ligt and A. S. Neill as thinkers who influenced her ideas. She described W. Somerset Maugham and Aldous Huxley as the writers she most admired, called Norman Haire the “one completely rational person she had ever met” and stated her “opposition to capital punishment, orthodox education and blood sports”.
Mannin’s 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described by historian Robert Graham as setting forth “an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society”.
She married twice: in 1919, a short-lived relationship from which she gained one daughter, Jean Porteous, a conscientious objector in WW2, for whom she gave evidence at a Tribunal; and in 1938 to Reginald Reynolds, a Quaker and go-between in India between Mahatma Gandhi and the British authorities. In 1934–35 she was in an intense but problematic intellectual, emotional and physical relationship with W. B. Yeats, who was on the rebound from Margot Ruddock and about to fall for Dorothy Wellesley (a detailed account is in R. F. Foster’s life of Yeats, concluding mainly that her emotional engagement was much less than his). She also had a well-publicised affair with Bertrand Russell.
notes/quotes from 125 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ethel-mannin-bread-and-roses]:
3
I. UTOPIA — THE EVERLASTING DREAM
Throughout the ages, from the earliest times, men of all nations have dreamed of that ‘ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under perfect conditions’. What constitutes ‘perfect conditions’ is obviously a matter of personal preferences and prejudices,..t but there is a common basis to the visionary dream in all its forms — the increase of human happiness, or, perhaps, more accurately, well-being — the greatest good for the greatest number, whether it is the Golden Age of ancient Greek and Roman mythology, or the confused contemporary dreams of a ‘brave new world’.
unless we listen deep enough.. then all the same missing pieces
cut out all the cancerous distractions if we just org around those 2
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
But satire is unconstructive, and however tedious and limited the White Papers and blue-prints they are an expression of the old, deep, ineradicable dream. .. but in this country, it would seem, Utopia is to be translated into terms of the Beveridge Report and Mr. Churchill’s uninspired programme of ‘houses, jobs, security’ — as though all that human beings needed for happiness was the roof overhead, employment, freedom from want. As though men had abandoned the dream that they came to a city — a free city of the sun…. Well might they cry, ‘We asked for a dream, and ye give us a White Paper!’
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For some time past, now, there has been a murmuring amongst the people, and that ‘things have got to be different’ is the general expression of that murmur..t ‘..a very strong feeling persists, throughout the working-classes and the lower middle-classes, that ‘things have got to be different — somehow’, seems to me undeniable.
graeber make it diff law et al
But though the people murmur, the politicians have no vision. The people ask for a brave new world, and they are offered homes — ‘pre-fabricated’, of all ghastly notions — employment, security, all the old make-shifts..t For all their talk the politicians are not concerned to rebuild Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land; they have no vision in which they see ..They are Planners who, fundamentally, have no plan.
Collect material from far and wide, and sort it all out into neat little heaps — education, housing, public health, social services, the Scott and Uthwatt reports, taxation, ‘the coal problem’, ‘the problem of population’, ‘the economics of peace’; collect it from the Common Wealth people, the Fabians, the Labour Party, the Communists, the British Council, the British Association for Labour Legislation, the London Council for Social Sendee, the Association for Education in Citizenship, the Council for Educational Advance — this, that and the other party, council, society, association — collect it and sort it and summarize it, until you are all but engulfed in it and your head spins, and still it does not make a plan..t — in the sense that Plato’s Republic, Plutarch’s Sparta under Lycurgus, More’s Utopia, were plans. It no more makes a plan than a heap of leaves makes a tree. It is not even a Paradise on paper. It has no pattern.
need to try a sabbatical ish transition
‘Modern Utopianism’, writes H. J. Massingham in his The Tree of Life ‘makes no attempt to go outside the terms of reference to the existing order or disorder. The Doctrine of Creation is completely outside it….’
In this book it is proposed to go outside those terms of reference, and attempt to offer ‘a doctrine of Creation’. It is proposed to hold steadily to the whole through the detail.
if only.. but ‘outside’ has to be sans any form of m\a\p.. which we haven’t yet tried
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Utopia is the everlasting dream of the Good Life in the heart of man.
definitely not what is described pp 17-22 et al
need hardt revolution law – via imagine if we ness
It is also the sanity, the basic wisdom, in the mind of man under the rubble that civilisation, with its industrialisation and its illusion of progress, has imposed.
rather.. the heart of man .. deep w/in
intellectness as cancerous distraction
‘Things have got to be different.’ We are agreed upon that. In the following chapters we will consider what sort of things, and how they could be different, to the common advantage.
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II. THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF UTOPIA
That something is fundamentally wrong with society as we at present know it is evident from recurrent cycles of unemployment between wars, poverty in a world of plenty, and science put to destructive instead of creative uses.. In England, during the trade boom which followed the last war, before the slump came, there were *still a million and a half unemployed. Under the existing system the unemployed can only be fully absorbed in a world at war — that is to say that whereas they cannot be absorbed for creative purposes they can be absorbed for destructive purposes. They can be employed killing and destroying, or in producing the weapons for killing and destroying. If we were confronted with children who, when they were not either smashing windows or collecting stones with which to smash windows, found themselves with nothing to do, we should be very shocked; something must be very wrong with such children, we should say, that they could only occupy themselves destructively. **But there might not be anything, fundamentally, wrong with the children; they might simply be lacking in any natural creative outlet, and thus disposed of their energies and passed the time as best they could. Similarly, ***there is nothing fundamentally wrong with human nature; what is wrong is the shape which civilisation, with all its twistings and turnings — fallaciously called ‘progress’ — has assumed..t
*ie that still ‘inside’ .. if talking unemploy rates et al
**grammatis broken law et al
***need to trust this and try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness if we want to see the dance dance.. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
Human nature is capable of being incredibly base, stupid, brutal. …. Human nature in the mass can be base and ugly; but it can also be fine and beautiful.
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all 7.. wow
There is hope for humanity all right: all it needs is to be given a chance — the creative chance. The need is not for palliatives and compromises and reforms, but for a new way of life..t
*a legit nother way.. hari rat park law et al
No leader can do this; no politician; no one man with any one scheme; nor a hundred men with a hundred schemes. Only the people themselves can find the way — out of the dream in their hearts, out of their impassioned desire for that new world which is only brought about by a new way of living. Impracticable? Within ‘the terms of reference to the existing order or disorder’, yes. But Utopia is outside of those terms of reference. Utopia is concerned with the soul of man,..t and through that recognition the brotherhood of man.
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
Nobody, perhaps, reads Oscar Wilde’s little book The Soul of Man nowadays, though Robert Ross described it as ‘unique in English literature’. The present writer read it first twenty-five years ago and has just re-read it with intense pleasure. It is an indictment of the social system and a vindication of individualism. Wilde declares, ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.’..t
hardt revolution law – instigating utopia everyday
Wilde was a natural anarchist. He saw all authority as degrading — to those who exercised it and those over whom it is exercised. ‘When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used’, he maintained, ‘it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other peoples second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. “He who would be free”, says a fine thinker, “must not conform.” And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us.’..t
That ‘coarse comfort, like petted animals’ is exactly the aim of such palliatives as the Beveridge Plan. Wilde saw Individualism as ‘what, through Socialism, we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, *there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind.. t **All modes of government are failures…. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy simply means the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out’..t
*something we haven’t yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
**need to try/see a nother way sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
Wilde’s Utopian conception of the State was a voluntary association for the organisation of labour and the distribution of necessary commodities..Wilde wanted all unpleasant, uninteresting, ugly work, done by the machine — ..At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man..
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(Wilde did not live to see the machine as a colossal and diabolic agent for the destruction of man, raining death and destruction from the skies at the rate of thousands of tons per minute.)
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Those who regard the machine as the enemy and destroyer of civilisation, maintain that only by de-industrialisation and return to the cultivation of the soil and handcrafts will mankind come to the Good Life.
Here, then, are two sharply-defined attitudes — Gill’s attitude, endorsed as much by the D. H. Lawrence-ites (‘They talk of the triumph of the machine, But the machine will never triumph’) as by the Aldous Huxley-ites, who find in Brave New World a modern vindication of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’, the attitude that the machine is wholly evil, and that it will ultimately destroy the civilisation dependent on it, and the attitude maintained by Morris and Wilde, and in recent times by H. J. Massingham and Wilfred Wellock, that, rightly used, the machine could be made to serve and enrich human life.
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Aldous Huxley himself does not maintain that the machine is wholly evil. He regards it as harmful and dangerous, because it tends to destroy the creative impulse in human beings, which he regards as ‘the source of man’s most solid, least transitory happiness. The machine robs the majority of human beings of the very possibility of this happiness’. But he insists that it must stay — that as a matter of sheer practicality, at this stage of civilisation, its use cannot be discontinued. ‘The machines must stay; it is obvious. They must stay, even though, used as they are now being used, they inflict on humanity an enormous psychological injury that must, if uncared for, prove mortal. . In our present mechanised society human beings are only free to live, in the real sense, outside of their working hours — and even then their leisure is devoted to mechanised pleasure for the most part.
Oscar Wilde, living in a less highly-industrialised age, could afford to be more optimistic. He anticipated a time when ‘while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure — which, and not labour, is the aim of man — or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But this happy state of affairs, Wilde acknowledged, could only exist in a new social order,..t where the machine, instead of being private property, used competitively for the making of private profit, was the property of all, and used for the common good.
Wilde’s socialism was the easy idealism of a man who had not thought very deeply on sociological issues. He was first and last an artist and an aesthete; he wanted a world in which there would be boundless leisure for the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things; he wanted a society in which the soul of man might have room for expansion to this end; and he believed in a kind of socialism as the means to this end. Unfortunately socialism is no guarantee that the machine will be used for the service of man, but only for the State.
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12-16 all..
In our present competitive world everyone grabs for himself; everyone wants more money, even the comfortably-off, even the rich. If a man, particularly a young man, declares that he is not interested in making money he is considered either a hypocrite or a crank. If a young man declares that he is not interested in ‘getting on’ he is considered ‘no good’, a person of no initiative or enterprise. To ‘make good’ means to ‘make money’. Jesus completely failed to make good. At the age of thirty he threw up a good trade — carpentry — to become a preacher, and for three years lived from hand to mouth, taking no thought for the morrow, and having at times not where to lay his head, and was finally executed, as we know, between a couple of thieves, as an agitator subversive to the State. Any young person, asked what he or she intends to ‘do’ in life, and replying, ‘Just be’, is regarded as lacking in natural ambition — since an ambition to be, in the sense of ‘accepting life simply and naturally and enjoying if, is not considered a natural ambition … outside of Utopia. Nobody is ambitious in Utopia; there is no place for ambition in the brotherhood of man. The slogan of the French Revolution serves Utopia well enough — Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.
But in Utopia these brave words are more than a slogan; they are a reality. As this writer sees it they represent the basic principles of that ‘ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants live under perfect conditions’.
The word Freedom has a fine ring about it, yet no word is more mis-used today; no word is emptier of true meaning; politicians mouth it as an American chews gum. . Whenever a country goes to war it is for its conception of freedom. ‘Your freedom is at stake,’ the governments cry, to the peoples, ‘To arms!’ and the peoples obey, obedience to governments having become a habit of their civilisation. There was never a war yet that was not fought for freedom — or the illusion of it. Yet the world is in chains. Where are the free peoples of the world? Do they exist anywhere outside of Utopia? You who read this — how free are you? You, woman-of-the-house, imprisoned in your life; you, man-in-an-office, imprisoned in your job. You who think yourselves progressive — how free are you? You, chained by moral fears you do not own except secretly in the sleepless nights of your guilt and anxiety, to an unhappy marriage, an unhappy love-affair, to the demands of families and outworn loves — the chains we call ‘loyalties’ and ‘duties’, the chains of conscience and moral upbringing. You whose very lives can be conscripted an it please your government … all in the cause of what governments call ‘Freedom’.
*black science of people/whales law – we have no idea what legit free people would be like
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But what governments call Freedom is not what is understood by that term in Utopia. In the everyday world freedom is liberty to ‘do what you like, as long as you do what you’re told’. . The Romanies are probably the freest people in the world, but they only remain so by keeping moving; they must always be moving on, beyond reach of the long arm of the law. Where laws begin to operate there is an end of freedom. Natural liberty is a state in which there are no laws, and natural liberty is what, in Utopia, is understood by freedom.
a first principle of such a society must be freedom, since only under freedom does Man attain to his true stature, and only in freedom is happiness — that happiness which is what Havelock Ellis calls ‘the deepest organic satisfaction’ — possible. And endlessly we come back to the profound truth of the assertion of modern psychology, *‘Be happy and you will be good’. At this point there is always someone to protest, **‘But what about people who find their happiness in anti-social conduct? The Borgias, presumably, were happy when poisoning their guests, but it was hardly happiness for their victims. Isn’t this where your be-happy-and-you-will-be-good philosophy breaks down?’ The answer to that is that the Borgias may have found pleasure in their poisonings, but not happiness. The criminal is never happy; his conduct is the expression of his fundamental unhappiness. Happy people no more wish to commit homicide than they wish to commit suicide. (It is an interesting and significant psychological fact that suicides very frequently show homicidal tendencies.) Given the ‘perfect conditions’ of Utopia it is reasonable to suppose that there will be no crime, no anti-social conduct, at least within a generation or two. ‘Utopia within our time’ would involve a carrying-over of neuroses from our present deplorable society, nor would the children be immune, since they would have had a bad start. There would be, necessarily, what the communists call ‘the period of transition’, but ultimately society would emerge as good because it was happy — because it was integrated, whole.
*eu\daimon\ia happy..
**if anti social ness.. then not legit happy ness
The implications of this Utopian freedom are tremendous. In society as we at present know it *we have no conception of freedom in the real sense. We consider ourselves ‘free’ if we manage to live our own lives — as we say — in defiance of the conventional moral code; to be indifferent to public opinion we consider great liberty; we count it freedom to swim, somehow, against the tide. Whereas in truth freedom is swimming in whatever direction we choose in a tideless sea, unhampered. In our existing society there is no real freedom even for the most daring, the most rebellious, the most courageous; a certain measure may be had — at a price, which is a contradiction in terms, for the essence of freedom is that it is free..t
*black science of people/whales law
need the unconditional part of left to own devices ness of an undisturbed ecosystem
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Only through a passionate, dynamic, desire for real freedom can humanity hope to achieve Utopia. Which is another way of saying, *‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you’. Lin Yutang, in The Importance of Living, quotes Bernard Shaw as rightly saying that ‘the only kind of liberty worth having is the liberty of the oppressed to squeal when hurt and the liberty to remove the conditions which hurt them’. This is true of liberty in our existing society, but in Utopia there are, obviously, no oppressed and thus its freedom is freedom to live in the fullest sense. **Liberty to protest against injustice and oppression, and to fight these evils, is a very limited conception of freedom. .t As the Distributists assert, ‘The right of liberty is not restricted to one particular liberty, to liberty of religion, conscience, action, and so on; it is the right of choice in all things in which the exercise of the choice does not injure the right of choice of others’. The full implications of Utopian freedom we will consider in detail later.
*huge.. why we need to listen to itch-in-the-soul to hear/see/be it
**any re ness.. as cancerous distraction
Here, concerned with basic principles, let us consider the nature of this free society — not its structure; that also will come up for consideration later. The nature of the present system in democratic countries is competitive, because capitalist. In a communist country, in which the abolition of capitalism automatically disposes of competition, the nature of the system is theoretically communistic; in practice, to judge by the only communist regime by which to judge, the U.S.S.R., it becomes bureaucratic, as undemocratic as a Fascist regime, and, with the rise of bureaucracy and a privileged class of intellectuals and state officials, as lacking in the equality — which is the essence of true communism — as a capitalist or a Fascist society. The equality and fraternity of the French revolutionary slogan are essential to a truly free society. Such a society must be classless. It must be communistic in the sense in which the early Christians were communistic — with all things in common; its basic law cannot be better defined than by the Marxist, ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs’, but whilst accepting this basic principle of Marxism it radically differs from the Marxist interpretation of communism in its refusal to grant authority to the State. A free society is, in fact, a Stateless society, in which man lives in brotherhood with man, on terms of equality, ungoverned, and with all things in common.
The unspoiled primitive combines a beauty, peacefulness and equanimity both of individual disposition and of community life, with an absence of all those social, economic, and political institutions inseparable from civilisation’. He refers in this connection to the ‘undirected, unorganised, unprogressive and uncontaminated life force of human nature’.
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It is this uncontaminated life force deep within human nature that has to be tapped, to be released for the realisation of Utopia.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
*How is this to be achieved? If there is any concise cut-and-dried answer to so long and broad and deep a question it is perhaps best expressed in the single world — education. Through the re-education of humanity to the conception of a new Golden Age, and the necessity for it. The need is for a renaissance of spiritual values in opposition to the current materialism. It is a task for the teachers and preachers, and under this heading writers and poets should be included, for a poem, or a play, or a book, or a story, may have a greater educative value, yield a brighter spiritual illumination, than any lesson or lecture or sermon; sudden realisation may come from a single sentence of inspired utterance — The Christian Church could greatly serve this needed spiritual renaissance, but it needs first a spiritual renaissance of its own. Bland pink parsons, over-fed and underworked, mouthing platitudes in pulpits to middle-class congregations, have as little relation to Christian inspiration as they have to the pale Galilean himself. **The founder of the Christian religion had a message for humanity, and for nearly two thousand years the Church has been failing to pass it on. It has mumbled at the people, and the people have mumbled the orthodox responses, and fine churches have been built and dedicated to Christ, candles have been burnt and incense scattered and fine robes worn, but Jesus of Nazareth walked with fishermen by the sea, and preached from a hillside, under the open sky, and everything he said was very simple, with the profundity of simple things. He bade us love one another, and forgive one another; he bade us love our enemies, and turn the other cheek, and be humble, and without riches, and pointed out that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us.
*oh my.. ed is not answer as you’re describing it.. it could be.. if ed = drawing out, uncovering what is already inside.. but otherwise.. just calling for more of people telling other people what to do.. oi
**already written on each heart.. just need means/time/space to hear/see/be that
But the bland pink parsons have come between us and the pale Nazarene; there is no more room for him in the great churches than there was in the inn, and his profound, simple, inspired utterances are lost in all the mumbo-jumbo. The Church has had great power, great influence, but never, ironically enough, in the cause of Christian teaching. It has, nevertheless, immense educative potentiality. But first the priests and ministers, the vicars and deans and bishops and archbishops, all these ‘professional Christians’, must not merely preach and teach the doctrines of Jesus but themselves lead simple, humble Christian lives. At present the only outstanding practising Christian is a man who does not profess Christianity, the Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, whose tremendous moral influence over the masses is significant.
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If, through our teachers and preachers and writers and poets, humanity can be re-educated to new values — to the conception qf a co-operative instead of a competitive form of society, a conception of the real meaning of freedom and brotherhood — the ideal commonwealth, in which men and women live happily, fully, and at peace, becomes practicable along with the perfectability of man. Utopia becomes realisable as man becomes ready for it.
not how it works if already on each heart.. no train.. no prep
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III. UTOPIAN ADMINISTRATION
Utopia, as Sir Thomas More wrote, is ‘the only commonwealth that truly deserves that name’ because, ‘in all other places it is visible, that while people talk of a commonwealth, every man seeks only his own wealth; but there, where no man has any property, all men zealously pursue the good of the public … in other commonwealths every man knows that unless he provides for himself, how flourishing soever the commonwealth may be, he must die of hunger; so that he sees the necessity of preferring his own concerns to the public; *but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich….’
In order to secure this equal distribution of goods in common, and for the smooth running of the community generally, there has, obviously, to be some form of organisation, and it is both interesting and useful to consider the provision made by the various planners of Utopias.
*a sabbatical ish transition.. org’d around legit needs
then thru at least p 22 gives ies of ‘utopias’ that are no diff than now.. dictator/authoritarian/oppressed ness..oi
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Mr. (hg) Wells does not believe, as Morris and Wilde believed, that there is most freedom where there is least law. He maintains, indeed, that ‘there is no freedom under anarchy’,
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In Mr. Wells’s Utopia man is still a long way off perfection; there are still policemen and punishments. Wells does not acknowledge that perfectability of man which Massingham envisages, and which Morris, in his Utopian scheme of things, takes for granted. Wells declares definitely that, ‘In a modern Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there must also be friction, conflicts, and waste, but the waste will be enormously less than in our world.’ (Morris, on the other hand, maintained that friction, whether between individuals, socially, politically, or between nations, was due to the lack of freedom in the lives they lived. He protested vehemently against the idea that ‘human nature’ was full of ineradicable Original Sin. He contrasted the human nature of ‘paupers, of slaves, of slave- holders’, with the human nature of ‘wealthy free-men’. He believed, in short, with Robert Browning, ‘Oh, make us happy and you make us good ! ’ His Utopia was to be run on the principle on which A. S. Neill runs the community of his free school — ‘ Not be good and you will be happy, but be happy and you will be good’. Morris makes his Utopian mouth-piece declare, conclusively, ‘Experience shows that it is so’, which is Neill’s own experience in the microcosm of his school.
a s neill.. summerhill et al
Even Rousseau, that life-long and impassioned champion of freedom, believed in ‘law and order’.
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Man’s passion for being governed might be described as the chief neurosis of civilisation..t From Plato down to Rousseau there is this preoccupation with the State, in one form or another. It is not until we reach the end of the eighteenth century and William Godwin that we get any conception of man ungoverned and free.
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Had the experiment (aragon) been allowed to develop Spain might have shown the whole Western world a new and happier way of life. As it was, it survived long enough for an exciting indication of ‘possible worlds’ — a practical, workable alternative to centralisation of government and control generally.
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Perhaps it may be objected, ‘All this may work well enough for the organisation of agriculture and industry, but if there is no central government how is taxation to be imposed for social service and the upkeep of armies and navies? Are you going to have army and navy syndicates, and to whom will people pay their taxes?’
Such questions indicate an inability to think other than in terms of the existing order. In Utopia there is no taxation — even under a rational system of society that was not fully Utopian taxation could be abolished. The anarcho-syndicalist experi- ment in Catalonia succeeded in abolishing taxation to some extent; in some districts it even dispensed with money. But we will consider the whole question of money and exchange in a later chapter.
Obviously Utopia can only exist in an Utopian world; it is an affair of the brotherhood of man, not of one nation or race. Morris, writing of his socialist England, and Bellamy of his socialist America, visualised their Utopias in a changed world, nQt isolated amidst the old order of civilisation. And in a world living in the spirit of the brotherhood of man, a world without frontiers or governments, to what end would there be armies and navies? ..Armies and navies exist for the protection of governments and States and their pos- sessions; wars are fought between the Haves and the Havenots, for the balance of power between States, for the domination — for purposes of money and power — of one nation by another; in a world in which governments and frontiers have been swept away war is automatically abolished. Morris, in his essay, How We Live and How We Might Live , defined war as competition between nations — competition for world-markets — and saw our present system as ‘based on a state of perpetual war’. War is the antithesis of mutual aid. It is, in Morris’s words, ‘pursuing your own advantage at the cost of someone else’s’. In the world as it is today, its whole civilisation based on competition, the struggle for world-markets, it is inevitable. Even a non-capitalistic country like the U.S.S.R. has found it inevitable — because it is isolated in a capitalistic world, and because, too, in spite of being non-capitalistic it is still imperialistic.
Imperialist interests constitute the prime cause of war. Or, to put it more simply, in the words of the eighteenth century American Quaker, John Woolman, ‘the seeds of war have nourishment in our possessions’. .. all of whose observations and researches bear witness to the anthropological fact that man only becomes war-like as he becomes ‘civilised’ and acquires possessions. As Dr. Worrall points out, civilisation produces wealth, and wealth produces property, and property produces the power of a ruling class. ‘The story of warfare’, he writes, ‘is that of the increasingly violent behaviour of ruling groups, doubtless stimulated by a variety of causes once it had become organised. The institution of private property, so often associated in its beginnings with rulers, the very fact itself of possessing power and desiring more, have doubtless played important parts in accentuating this form of behaviour.
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That there should be imperialism in the Utopian conception of living is as unthinkable as that there should be war, because imperialism is opposed to the whole principle of the brotherhood of man…The Utopians do not subscribe to the humbug of dominating other races for their ‘ own good ’, *because of their ‘inability to rule themselves’; they have no sense of ‘trustee-ship’ and the **‘White Man’s Burden’, no sense of any superiority in the possession of a white skin. They do not pay lip-service to the brotherhood of man; they live it.
At present living presents innumerable problems — in short, ‘the problem of life is to live’; but in the Utopian world in which men and women are free, living co-operatively, no one coercing, or robbing, or exploiting anyone else, living presents no major problems, and the small inevitable problems of human relationships are — with the new spirit in the heart of man, and the rationality of the world in which he lives — readily soluble.
36
Then, also, there is a more intelligent attitude to food; the teaching of food-values is part of the education in the schools. The Utopians fully understand what is meant by a ‘balanced’ meal, and appreciate its value, and therefore they do not eat the wrong foods — foods which ruin their digestions and tempers.
oi oi oi
37
here is this vigorous picture of Cobbett, and thqre are dyspeptic looking people who exist on ‘garden stuff’, coarse bran, concoctions called ‘oat-biks’ or something of the kind, and the whole, as likely as not, washed down with ‘ pip-and-peel water’, or a dandelion coffee or herb tea, all of which may be excessively healthy — and excessively is probably the key-word — but which no one could call gay.
And the Utopians are nothing if not gay. They are gay in their work and in their leisure; gay in their religion and gay in love; gay in their attire and in their homes; they drink gaily and eat gaily, recognising fully that, as Llewelyn Powys asserted, ‘To pour out water from a jug, to break bread, to open a bottle of wine, are lordly offices ’.
rabelais and his world ness.. m of care – oct 31 24 – carnival and laughter ness
They are long-lived because they do not wear themselves out, as people quite literally do in our present conditions of living, with the wear and tear of too much work and the wrong kind of work — that is to say useless work, done only for the profit-motive, or uncreative work, or mechanical or unpleasant work which could be alleviated by a proper division of labour and an intelligent use of the machine — and with worry over making money, and the strain of ‘re-creations’ which in fact are misnamed since they do not re-create. The Utopians, too, eat and drink sensibly on the whole, live and work under healthy conditions, and possess a natural zest for life; their attitude is that it matters less how long you live than how much, and so, ceasing to worry, they retain their youth for a long time, and do not whittle their years away.
hari present in society law et al.. supposed to’s of school/work et al.. bs jobs from birth et al
Utopia has little use for hospitals. In the Utopian world it is only a matter of time — of the transition period from the bad old times to the ideal conditions — before the scourges of tuberculosis, cancer, venereal disease, influenza, and the com- mon cold, die out, because the healthy organism is not suscep- tible to disease . * * The Utopians achieve health not merely because of healthier living conditions and rational ideas about fopd and recreation, but because happiness is also a contributory factor to health, as it is to the preservation of youth. It is not only our unhealthy living conditions today — too many hours devoted to indoor work, too much indoor 4 recreation ’, ignorance concerning food-values — that are conducive to ill-health today, but our mental conditions; illness, today, is escape from responsibility for many people. It is enough to make one ill!” we say when we are worried and over- worked, and if the con- ditions of strain continue we do, in fact, become ill; we break down, as a machine breaks down, lacking oil, or misused. We may call it being 4 run down’, or a ‘nervous breakdown’, but the truth is that our unconscious has found a way out for us, an escape from the strain and difficulties. That is why the ‘nervous breakdown’ is so seldom found amongst working-class people; they can’t afford it; it is an essentially middle and upper-class luxury. The nervous breakdown is unknown in Utopia, for the good reason that there is no psychological need for it.
Beyond the transition period in Utopia the aged present no problem, for they have grown old in a healthy life and instead of being frail and infirm are active members of the community — if not as vigorous as in their youth — to the end. They are not at three-score years and ten worn out with a life-time of drudgery, or, on the other hand, self-destroyed by a flabby parasitic existence and a gross self-indulgence. What we call ‘social services’ are needed in our world because of the lack of mutual aid in society itself. Our hospitals, alms-houses, sana- toria, our infirmaries and workhouses and pensions schemes, are society’s apologies for man’s inhumanity to man..t Where there is love — in the real sense of brotherhood — there is no need for charity. Charity is merely the cold substitute for love. As Blake said — ‘Mercy could be no more If there was nobody poor.’
any form of people telling other people what to do ness.. need to try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
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The Utopians have been educated to a strong social sense; they have discovered how to live harmoniously together; they have learned the value of mutual considerateness, and look back in amazement and horror on the days when each lived for himself, grabbing what he could, and when existence was a freely acknowledged ‘struggle’. Freed from the artificialities of governments Utopian humanity has reverted to the natural law of co-operation, and each has become aware of his oneness with each.
oi to ed.. what happened to no one unable to do whatever on their own ness
40
IV. EDUCATION AND THE CHILD IN UTOPIA
Reference was made in the previous chapter to a transitional period in Utopia during which time there would be an un- avoidable carry-over — of neuroses and false values and prejudices — from the bad old days of competitive life. This implies a gradual re-education of the older generation, and some new form of education for the generation that would grow up under the changed conditions. It is necessary to consider, therefore, what we mean, ideally, by education.
Neill does not deny the importance of education; on the contrary he asserts that it is all-important, that it is every- thing, but by education he understands creation, not learning. He insists that education is a drawing out, not a putting in; not an absorption of facts, but a release of creative energy.
oooooooooof – if that were only what we acted on.. a drawing out.. but we can’t seem to let go of some form of people telling other people what to do .. we haven’t yet tried the the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
need imagine if we ness
43
Would-be writers would have to earn their livings in some other way until such time as they had established themselves as writers; there would be no subsidising of ‘the artist’, no setting him aside as something privileged and apart, for, as Eric Gill was never tired of insisting, ‘the artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist ’..t
art – being human ness
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
44
Education in Utopia, is, then, first of all a drawing of creativeness, the direction of childhood’s energy into creative — as opposed to destructive — channels, and through this the discovery of each child’s natural bent; in adolescence, or whenever the child is ready for it, comes the groundwork of more specialised education, the Three R’s, and after that the course of specialisation to equip the young person to take his or her place as a useful member of society.
oi.. 3 r’s? groundwork? equip? useful? member?.. oi the red flags
It is obvious that even in Utopia there must be degrees of ability; *there will always be the exceptional people who can paint or compose or write, or all three, and who can also build walls, cook excellent meals, repair burst pipes, into the bargain. There will always be the geniuses and the near-geniuses; the brilliant and versatile people; and the people whose minds are by the natural co-operation of self-respect from within with social respect from without.’ slow and dull and whose standard of intelligence is low; but in Utopia is a place for them all. You do not need a brilliant, versatile mind to do good wood-carving or lay bricks well, and both these are very useful trades. And you may be intellectually brilliant and a perfect fool at any manual task. The function of Utopian education is to discover ‘the special kind of artist’ in each human being, and the good poet is not held in greater esteem than the good shoemaker, but each is appreciated for the quality of his work, each recognised as a craftsman in his own particular line; no one sneers at the shoemaker for not knowing the difference between a ballad and a ballade, and not caring, nor at the poet because he cannot drive a nail into a wall without hitting his thumb. **Each contributes his own particular art to society in return for what he takes from it, in accordance with the communistic principle of from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.
*oh my
**yeah.. but via the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
45
He (herbert read) supports Eric Gill’s contention that every man is an artist, and that no special honour is due to anyone of any special sensibility, since it is all an accident of birth, and the exercise of his gift is what he owes to the society in which he lives.
oi
47
It is a great deal more important to know what constitutes a balanced meal and how to prepare it than to know historical dates and how to do long division. .The two major crimes in the English kitchen are the boiling of vegetables and the addiction to the frying-pan.
There is little doubt that the ideal diet is vegetarian, and uncooked at that. Ideal, that is, from the point of view of health and longevity. In Utopia, however, enjoyment of life is considered of more importance than longevity, and not many people with a zest for life feel that living to be two hundred has any value if it means the sacrifice of gastronomic pleasures. If one is never to eat, drink and be merry, they ask, what is the point of living so long?
The more they learn about dietetics and the human body the more the Utopians move towards rationality in the matter of food as in all else. Even so, with their fully developed, uninhibited — thanks to a real education — zest for living they occasionally abandon the rational in favour of enjoyment. Their education is too liberal to permit them to be doctrinaire.
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The W.’E.A. report ..The report asserts that ‘ability to profit should be the sole test for admission to a university, as to all types of school’. That, of course, is the Utopian contention. To what other ends should the schools and universities — rationally — exist, other than to serve those who can profit by what they have to offer? At present the value of what they have to offer is open to question, and it is taken for granted that a long and expensive education is a good education.
In Utopia all the things that so exercise the educational planners in the world today cease to exist as problems. When every form of educational facility, whether technical or academic, is free to all who can profit by it, there is obviously no need for grants or scholarships; when education itself is free, in the sense of there being no compulsion for a child to learn what it is not interested in, there is obviously no question of punishment, corporal or otherwise. ..
*There are obviously certain things that people living in a civilised society must know; it is clear that they must know how to read and write and do simple arithmetic; they must know the technique of their trade or profession. . Telling a child ‘this is wrong, this is right; this is bad, this is good* is completely useless; the child may accept these adult valuations, but the acceptance will not prevent it doing the ‘bad’ things if to do so suits its purpose, and not doing the ‘good* things. All that these valuations, imposed from without, authoritatively, from teacher or parent, achieve is the securing of a sense of guilt, and perhaps fear as well, in connection with certain things.
*oi oi oi whalespeak
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To insist that a child is a natural barbarian and must be taught to be good, is to insist on the idea of Original Sin; but belief in the original goodness of the human being, that it is born good but made ‘bad’ by moral training and artificial discipline, is a basic principle of Utopian education.
and if we actually believed/tried that.. we’d be able to try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
At this point you perhaps protest, “But if there is no compulsion, what happens if a child does not want to attend school of any kind, and the parents are not concerned to persuade him?” It is quite simple. In that case the child does not attend any school. As he becomes adolescent he may wish to acquire some learning. Or he may develop school-going friends and wish to attend school because they do. But if he doesn’t he is nevertheless learning all the time, his natural child’s creativeness working in happy alliance with his freedom. No Utopian parent would think of using that moral coercion we call ‘persuasion’. *By the time he reaches adolescence the child grows tired of running wild, and begins to identify himself with grown-ups; he perceives the usefulness of knowing how to read and write and add, and there is probably some special thing he wants to learn — such as how to drive a train or build a bridge or a house. It is all very much simpler than our professional educationists would have us believe.
*oi oi oi whalespeak
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He adds, significantly, ‘We must reconcile education with liberty’. This can only be achieved through an Utopian education is education through freedom; it is as natural as the law which welds the community into an harmonious whole. Through it men cortie to the “bread and roses” of a balanced life.
Education as it is popularly understood today gives neither. That is to say it neither equips young people to earn their bread, nor does it given them that culture they seek. When they leave their public schools, their high schools, their secondary schools, their universities they are already well on into their teens; if they have gone on to the universities they are already in their twenties; a great deal of money has been spent on their ‘educa- tion’, and they are completely unequipped to earn their livings. The public school boy is fit for nothing except to pass on to a university; the girl as often as not forgets all her expensive schooling and gets down to realities by taking a commercial course and learning shorthand and typing, and book-keeping — which she could have done when she finished with her elementary education at fourteen or fifteen. The superstition that there is some particular virtue attaching to the passing of the examina- tion commonly known as ‘Matric’ dies hard. Whereas, in hard fact, what the potential employer wants to know is not ‘What exams have you passed?’ but ‘What can you do?’ And the more highly educated the young thing the less can the wretched creature do….
so bread = earn a living ness and roses = culture
oi to that then..
we so need detox if even most (mannin?) liberated thinkers still talk in terms of what an employer wants.. of earning a living ness.. ooooof
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the Utopian conception of education draws out of the young the creativeness *which enables them to earn their bread, in due course, according to their natural inclination and ability, and leaves them free to **develop the sensibility to appreciate an infinite variety of life’s most delicately perfumed and lasting roses….
*so not free in that ‘utopia’ ness.. oi..
**rose is metaphorically our best?.. to me.. oi
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Childhood in Utopia is altogether a|very natural business. In our world the child is ‘brought up; in Utopia it is allowed to grow up. In our world it is hedged round from infancy with every kind of superstition and prejudice and fixed idea; it must do this because it is good for it; it mustn’t do that because it is bad for it; it is slapped and scolded and punished by parents, teachers, ‘nannies’ into a conventional mould labelled ‘the well-behaved child ’, as though manners, politeness, etiquette have anything whatever to do with the candid, eager, questioning animal that is the natural child. In Utopia no one is in the least interested as to whether the child says Please and Thank You, and whether it has nice table manners and is ‘obedient’, none of these things — manners, politeness, obedience — is required of it; what the Utopians regard as important in a child is its fearlessness, its unspoiled honesty, its unselfconsciousness. They know that the well-behaved child is a little hypocrite, and they prefer their children natural and honest; they are concerned with the child’s happiness, not with its ‘pretty ways’. They are not concerned to show their children off with personal pride, possessively; they respect the individuality, the separateness of the child; they do not claim that because it is flesh of their flesh it is also soul of their soul; they do not even want that it should be. They want that it shall be itself, and to this end instead of bringing it up they leave it alone to grow up naturally. They believe in the freedom of the child as they believe in the freedom of adults; they believe in the importance of human beings growing up in freedom; they know that when childhood is not free it is difficult to become free in later years, that all manner of fears and phobias and prejudices are carried over — sex fears, and fears of God, guilt-fears — and that in spite of intellectual convictions it is not easy to root out these fears;..they know that to ensure this they must begin at the beginning; that is to say from infancy.
left to own devices ness.. usefully preoccupied et al
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In the day-nurseries and nursery-schools of our present world there would seem to be too much organising of the child’s activities — well-meaning adults organise games, singing, dancing, story-telling, discussion circles; toys are provided ready-made, and whilst all this makes the question of amusement and ‘what to do’ easy for the children it destroys initiative. ..nurseries are so well organised that ‘No child wanders aimlessly about the room, “looking for something to do”; for each one there is an occupation suited to his age or development’. But looking for something to do develops, as nothing else can, a child’s natural resourcefulness and enterprise…The Utopians give their children clay and pieces of wood and drawing materials, and all manner of odds and ends, from which things can be created. They know that a child can do more with a couple of old boxes and a piece of sacking than with the most elaborate of toys. In Utopia, if a child demands of an adult ‘What shall I do?’ the adult says briefly, T’ve no idea’ — and leaves the child to its own resources, knowing that only in this way can initiative be developed.
usefully ignorant et al
In the day-schools and nursery-schools of Utopia, therefore, there is no organisation of the children’s play, but *instead every facility for them to amuse themselves; there are constructive materials available, and sand-pits and swings and see-saws, and chutes to slide down, and a shallow pond in which to wade and on which to sail boats which they have made themselves. There are careful, watchful adults in the background to see that the children come to no harm and to deal with the minor acci- dents that invariably befall children in the course of their play, and to give guidance and assistance where it is sought ..but they keep unobtrusively to the background…there is none of that art-and-crafty quaintness so beloved by the grown-ups of our world in nursery decoration and which takes no account of the things that really appeal to children. Perhaps the Utopian nurseries look rather bare and unattractive and untidy to our eyes, but they are designed and arranged for the use of children, not for the aesthetic pleasure and sentimentality of adults.
*hari rat park law et al.. city sketchup ness et al.. in the city.. as the day
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Perhaps at this point it will be asked — as in Utopia there is no State to subsidise creches, clinics, day-nurseries, nursery- schools, isn’t the charge per child going to be heavier than in our society, to cover the upkeep of these fine places? The answer to which is that there is no charge for any of the social services in Utopia any more than for anything else! Why should education be free and a charge made for the use of clinics, creches, etc.? When the land and the means of production are the property of the people themselves they are able to take what they want for whatever purpose it is needed; there is no question of ‘over- head’ and ‘upkeep’. ‘But the people who run these places will need paying?’ No; people in Utopia do not work for money any more than they produce for profit. They work as their contribution to the society from which they take.
There is no religious teaching of any kind in any of the Utopian schools, and there are no Sunday schools. The Utopians firmly believe that religious belief is something which the individual must evolve for himself in his maturity if and when he feels the need for it. They believe that the healthy, happy child has no need of ‘God’ in any form ; he has his inward fantasy life of make- believe, and his outward life of creativeness, of doing, and is satisfied by these preoccupations. They believe that to attempt to give the child an idea of ‘ God ’ in any form is to implant guilt, and therefore fear, into the child. The child feels no need either of prayer or worship. There is a human need for ‘God’ , but the child’s simplicity knows no such need. The Utopians know that you cannot teach a child ‘ to love God ’ you can only teach it to fear God. They know that a young child does not really love anyone; he certainly cannot love ‘God’, whom he cannot conceive except as a vague and dreadful presence. Neill declared roundly, ‘Religion to a child simply means fear…. And to introduce fear into a child’s life is the worst of all crimes. For ever the child says Nay to life; for ever is he an inferior; for ever a coward.’ The Utopians do not believe in Original Sin. They believe that the child is born good — perfectly pure and good, and that there is no such thing as the bad child, but only the unhappy child. In those rare cases in which they find such manifestations of unhappiness they do not punish the ‘crime’, but seek to find out the cause, in order that the emotional malad- justment in the child may be righted.
It will be understood, therefore, that the Utopians do not recognise what we call ‘child delinquency’. If a child sets fire to a rick, or heaves a stone through a window, he is not hauled, as in our world, before a children’s court for judgment and punishment and the various methods of ‘ reform ’ that never do reform. If his parents, or whoever has the care of him, are unable to find out the cause of his *anti-social conduct and, by finding it out, redirect his energies from destructive into normal constructive channels, the services of a trained psychologist are invoked, in the same way that if he were found to be suffering from some physical disability the services of a trained medical man would be invoked. The psychologist does not psycho- analyse the child; he does not adopt the clinical attitude; he comes to an understanding of the child by **the simple process of being on the child’s side. It will be understood, therefore, that only people who really love children can qualify as child- psychologists; they must be people who are instinctively on the child’s side, who approve of the child, and are capable of conveying that approval to the child. In our present world there are plenty of people who declare that they ‘love’ children, and many of them practise as child-psychologists, and they are full of text- book knowledge and theories, but the only ones who really help children out of their maladjustments and into happiness are the ones the children themselves recognise as being on their side — there was the late Homer Lane and his Little Commonwealth; there is David Wills and ‘the Hawkspur Experiment ’ of the ‘Q,. Camps’; there is A. S. Neill and his free school. There are, perhaps, a few others, but they are very few, because in our present society the idea of discipline for its own sake, and the importance of adult authority, dies hard.
*oi.. who decides this
**actually need there to be no sides.. but yeah.. unconditional love
58
When the Utopians assert that they love children they do not mean it in the selfish, possessive way in which people commonly ‘love’ children in our world, forcing their own moral codes on them, exercising authority over them, demanding respect of them, and obedience, and at the same time expecting love from them. The Utopians make no such demands of children — above all they make no emotional demands, thus leaving the children free to give; loving children means, *for them, leaving them alone, giving them freedom, believing in their natural goodness..t, accept- ing them on terms of equality, believing in ‘that of God’ in every child as in every man — and really believing in it, not merely saying that they do and then trying to mould the child to their own conception of goodness, and in the process turning the God in the child into a little devil….
*huge huge huge.. the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
1 yr to be 5 again.. a sabbatical ish transition
The Utopians are aware that the impressions formed in the early years of childhood are deep and lasting, determining the future development of various mental and emotional trends in the child.. that ‘everything happens before the age of five’. ..No children should have been born, say the Utopians, during those years of hell let loose, just as no children should be born into poverty and squalor, because it is important that a child’s earliest memories should be happy ones, should establish a foundation of happiness upon which to build a happy life.
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V. UTOPIA AND ART
The consideration of what we mean by education leads on naturally to a consideration of what we mean by art, since outside of its utilitarian purpose of fitting human beings to take their place in society the function of education is, as has been indicated, the development of sensibility — what is generally called ‘ culture ’, though it is a bad word. It is a bad word because it is a thoroughly ambiguous word, a pretentious word, a charlatan of a word. No wonder Herbert Read echoes Eric Gill a$d cries ‘to hell with culture’. Read, in his little book under that title, asks ‘What is culture?’ and points out that the Greeks hadn’t a word for it. ‘They had good architects, good sculptors, good poets, just as they had good craftsmen and good statesmen. They knew that their way of life was a good way of life…. But it would never have occurred to them that they had a separate commodity, culture — something to be given a trade-mark by their academicians, something to be acquired by superior people with sufficient time and money, something to be exported to foreign countries along with figs and olives. It wasn’t even an invisible export; it was something natural if it existed at all — something of which they were unconscious…. It could not even be described as a by-product of their way of life; it was that way of life itself.’
‘Culture’ suggests something special and apart, outside of daily life; cultured tastes are carefully cultivated tastes, imposed from without, diligently acquired ; ‘ art ’ is something in a museum or gallery; *we talk about Art with a capital A, and by a cultured person we understand a person with an appreciation of Art with a capital A. It is all false, artificial..t Because art, as Eric Gill was never tired of pointing out, was simply something well made — from a fine painting to a piece of domestic pottery. Herbert Read reminds us that in the Middle Ages, ‘Its architects were foremen builders, its sculptors were masons, its illuminators and painters were clerks. They had no word for art in the sense of our “fine arts”; art was all that was pleasing to the sight; a cathedral, a candlestick, a chessman, a cheese-press’.
Art became beautiful things made specially for the privileged few who could afford them; the machine dispensed with the necessity for handicrafts ; the common things of daily life began to be mass-produced; the beautiful things became ‘art’, not for the common people; there arose the cult of art, the thing called ‘culture’..t
another art world ness
In Utopia, where every man is a special kind of artist, over and above the utilitarian aspect, education brings out the artist in every man, develops his natural tastes..t No one considers him uncultured — that is to say lacking in sensibility — if he fails to appreciate Shakespeare and Beethoven; it may well be that his sensibilities do not reach out to the past at all; he may be of those who do not want their poetry written down, who find it implicit in the rhythm of a bird’s wings, the movement of cloud- shadows over hills; music, for him, may be something he makes for himself from a hollow reed, or that comes idly into his head as he ploughs a field or works a lathe. It does not indicate a greater degree of sensibility to take music and poetry ready-made from the past.
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In Utopia, what in our world we call art — music, painting, poetry, sculpture — is all part of life, not something apart in museums, galleries, concert-halls. That is not to say that there are no museums, galleries, concert-halls. Museums and galleries are useful in the way that libraries are, for reference, but the idea ‘ of a piece of sculpture being made or a picture painted merely in the hope of acquisition by a museum or gallery, the idea that there is any ‘honour’ in such acceptance, is alien to the Utopian conception. In Utopia good pictures and sculpture are put into museums and galleries only if no better purpose can be found for them;..t it is a matter for regret with the painter or sculptor.
The difference between art in Utopia and in our present world is to be found in the popular attitude to it. .. Whereas in Utopia you can hear as good music in the market-place as at the concert- hall, see as good painting on a street wall as in a picture gallery; it is part of daily life, all the time.
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..where it is purely for delight that, too, being freely available to all, becomes also a part of daily life.There is likewise poetry and literature and the drama, sometimes purely for delight, sometimes for the illumination of life — but never, and this is important to the Utopians, never degraded to the purpose of propaganda.
At this point it becomes important to make clear what is meant by ‘propaganda’. ..Nazis and Communists alike wage war on what they decide is ‘decadent’ art; by which they mean art which does not conform to or fit in with their particular political dialectic.
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In Utopia it is obvious that there is much less scope for social significance in art, since the social problems are disposed of; there is no unemployment (except the happy unemployment of desired leisure in which to enjoy life) , no poverty, no prostitution, no war, none of the things that artists in our present society feel called upon, on occasion, to indict.
pretty sure legit free people (artists) would ‘indict’ employment.. if talking unemploy.. not free
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As to the Fine Arts, they are so integrated with the decorative and applied arts that to all intents and purposes they cease to exist. Painting and sculpture exist primarily in relation to architecture, and architecture, more than any of the arts, is the expression of the human spirit. The architecture of Utopia, therefore, is of noble proportions, because its spires are the spires of dreams; its arches lofty with ideals. Utopia is com- pletely free of the hideous architectural vulgarities which indus- trialism, with its money values
?
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It cannot be over-emphasised that in Utopia the conception of the artist is that of the workman, the good craftsman ; the fine arts and the decorative arts merge, and all work well done is art, something made, the creative product of human skill.
oi.. who’s deciding this ‘well done’ ness.. even if self.. cancerous distraction
And the Utopians apply the same criticism to a film as to a stage play, or a story, or a novel, or a painting, that is to say they demand that it shall have sincerity and truth, and that it shall, in one way or another, illuminate some aspect of life; whether it is realism or fantasy they demand these qualities of the finished production.
oi.. any form of m\a\p
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VI. WORK AND LEISURE IN UTOPIA
People know how to put their leisure to good use — the truly recreative use, that is to say, for the re-creation of their energies, the refreshment of their minds and spirits.
oi.. let go of defining ness.. of inspecting ness
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*Some of the unpleasant jobs of our present society are abolished by the Utopian way of life. They have, for example, no sewage system as we understand it, a wasteful system, which pours out into the sea what should, by every natural law, be returned to the soil.
*most? all?.. ie: peepoople ness et al
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It is an old question — a favourite question of those who assert that the principle of mutual aid applied to human society is not practicable. Alexander Berkman answered it years ago, and his answer cannot be bettered. He considered that the Bolsheviks in the early days of the revolution made a mistake in attempting to establish the principle that whoso shall not work neither shall he eat. He pointed out that it had proved impractical in application and was both unjust and harmful. ‘It was impractical’, he explained, ‘because it required an army of officials to keep tab on the people who worked or didn’t work..t It led to incrimination and recrimination, and endless disputes about official decisions.
berkman impractical law – huge
So that within a short time the number of those who didn’t work was doubled and even trebled by the effort to force people to work and to guard against their dodging or doing bad work. It was the system of compulsory labour which soon proved such a failure that the Bolsheviki were compelled to give it up. Moreover, the system caused even greater evils in other directions. Its injustice lay in the fact that you cannot break into a person’s heart or mind and decide what peculiar physical or mental condition makes it temporarily impossible for him to work. Consider further the precedent you establish by introducing a false principle and thereby rousing the opposition of those who feel it wrong and oppressive and therefore refuse co-operation. A rational community will find it more practical and beneficial to treat all alike, whether one happens to work at the time or not rather than create more non-workers to watch those already on hand, or to build prisons for their punishment and support. For if you refuse to feed a man for whatever cause, you drive him to theft and other crimes — and thus you yourself create the necessity for courts, lawyers, judges, jails and warders, the upkeep of whom is far more burdensome than to feed the offenders..t And, these you have to feed anyhow, even if you put them in prison.’
huge huge.. inspectors of inspectors and why we need the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. otherwise.. myth of tragedy and lord abounds
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‘The revolutionary community’, he concludes, ‘will depend more on awakening the social consciousness and solidarity of its delinquents than on punishment. It will rely on the example set by its working members, and it will be right in doing so. For the natural attitude of the industrious man to the shirker is such that the latter will find the social atmosphere so unpleasant that he will prefer to work and enjoy the respect and goodwill of his fellows rather than to be despised in idleness .’
oi.. that’s a raised eyebrow ness et al.. not the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
It is probable that in the transition from the old order to the new order of the ideal commonwealth there will be people who so lack social sense that they will take advantage of the situation to evade their share of the common responsibility, just as children who have hitherto known only orthodox schools when transferred to the atmosphere of a free school, where there is no compulsion and no punishment, take pleasure in throwing stones at the win- dows and staying away from lessons. *After a time, the novelty of freedom wears off, and when they realise that there really is no compulsion and there really are no punishments it ceases to be exciting to throw stones and refuse lessons, and their natural creativeness asserts itself; throwing stones and idling is non- creative and a bore. **No one can be completely idle for ever; it becomes too insufferably boring. There is also, as Berkman points out, ***the uncomfortable feeling of being despised by their fellow- men — despised and resented. ****Sooner or later they must inevitably discover something which it gives them pleasure to^do, and which is *****at the same time useful to society — something which wins them the respect of their fellows.
*we do need means to hasten this detox as detox.. aka: detox leap
**rather.. no one is ever idle.. millman never nothing law et al
***huge red flag.. don’t have a system where people change because of other people’s opinions..
****we have means to hasten this now.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
*****huge huge cancerous distraction.. ooof.. need to try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
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Our moments of idleness are not less sanctified. We waste time only as we find no satisfaction in the thing we do. In Utopia no one wastes time, not in spite of so much leisure, but because of it.
rather.. wasting time is irrelevant.. not an obsession.. if that it’s ‘not’ being done
need eu\daimon\ia ness for the dance to dance
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VII. CONSUMPTION AND EXCHANGE IN UTOPIA
In his Utopia More had every city divided into four, with a market-place in the middle of each where the goods produced were sorted and distributed to the appropriate store-houses, ‘and thither every father goes and takes whatsoever he or his family stand in need of, without either paying for it, or leaving anything in exchange’. There is no reason for giving a denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among them; and there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure that they shall always be supplied. It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous; but besides fear, there is in man a pride that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp or excess. But by the laws of the Utopians there is no room for this, and as they all ‘content themselves with fewer things, there is great abundance of all things amongst them \
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To the Utopians it is obvious that money is a sham; that the only real wealth is the land and what it, directly or indirectly, produces. It seems to the younger ones, who have grown up in the ideal commonwealth, droll that there was ever a time when wealth was thought of in terms of money, and that money was not silver or gold but mere paper, and that in a world of plenty people starved and went homeless and in rags because they had not sufficient of these pieces of paper to procure the necessities of life..t
this is ridiculous ness
‘Were the people all mad?’ they demand, and it is difficult for them to grasp that what seems to them a tremendous game of make-believe was taken seriously as ‘the economic system’..t The older Utopians remember the passing of the money system during the transitional period of change-over from the old order to the new. First of all food was distributed free, and when people got used to this innovation and ceased to think it extraordinary, more and more things — both goods and services — were gradually made available without the exchange of money. All travel was made free, and of course all education and medical services, and then more and more goods, after food, clothes, and so on, till the people got used to doing without money, and there ceased to be any use for it at all..t
today we have a means to hasten that process/detox..
ie: any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do as the planned obsolescence .. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
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But barter, it should be emphasised, was never at any time the Utopian solution to the problem of consumption and exchange. Barter they regarded as absurd as money, for how ire the values of things to be assessed? .. There is no sense in it at all, and yet we all accept the idea without question. The truth is that at a certain moment, in a :ertain place, to a certain person a certain thing has a certain value. For example, to a naked, starving, penniless and homeless man clothing, food, and shelter are of infinite value. But that value can only be expressed in terms of the things themselves, not in terms of another thing called money, which, so far as the man is concerned, does not exist’.
If all the diamonds mined were released on to the market they would be of no more value than glass beads; their price is only kept up by giving them a false scarcity value. ..And who is it and what is it that determines that a meal and a bunch of violets are each ‘worth’ five shillings? As Mr. Mennell observes, it is all moonshine, a mere fiction, the most fantastic make- believe.
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These people starved and were homeless and went in rags not because there was not enough food or clothing or shelter to go round, but simply because they had no tokens to exchange for these things, and they lacked these tokens because they lacked work.
earn a living ness
‘The question of markets.’ The world’s perpetual preoccupation — as though the business of living were not preoccupation enough! Abolish money and you abolish this ‘question of markets’, which is only another way of saying this question of profits. When there is no money system there cannot be any exploitation of labour and raw materials for private profit, and instead of being ‘everywhere in chains’ Man is set free to take his part in production for the common good. Then, as Morris says, only the goods which are really needed are produced; there ceases to be any need for mass-production and competitiveness, and Man is released from the domination of the machine and is free to make it what it should be — his servant. When nothing is for sale money obviously ceases to have any use. And in Utopia nothing is for sale, neither goods nor labour.
Certainly at this point comes the demand, both horrified and incredulous, ‘Do you mean that we are expected to believe in a community in which people work for nothing?’
But what would be the point of working for money if money will not buy anything?
And who is to assess the value of a man’s work? And how is it to be assessed? In our present society the miner, engaged in work which is dangerous, unpleasant, and of vital value to the community, gets on an average £5 a week and less; an exiled European boy-king gets £2,000 a month. ..The one worker is as valuable as the other; there can be no real assessment of respective values. No law can apply save the rational one of ‘from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs’, which we have already postulated as a basic principle of an Utopian society.
‘But if everybody can get what they want for nothing obviously no one will do any work!’
If nobody did any work then there would be nothing for anyone — no food or clothes or houses or furniture, and humanity would die out. But humanity is not like that. It has the will to live. The one great basic right is the right to live — and that is a right which our present society, with its slumps and depressions and unemployment problems, denies. We talk about the right to work; Utopia insists on ths right to live. The difference is fundamental.
irrelevant s ness
We have already seen that in Utopia the stress is not on bigger and better employment, but on bigger and better un- employment — that is to say leisure. 2 The abolition of the money system makes this possible. In our present society any folly and waste will be excused on the grounds that ‘it all makes work’. In Utopia they are not concerned to make work, but to make leisure. And in their work everything they make or produce is for use, not profit. But, as we have seen, there is no question of applying the harsh principle of ‘whoso will not work neither let him eat’. Jesus, it may be remembered, did not so insist, but urged that we should consider the lilies of the field, that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not so arrayed….
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In our present society people work in order to live; in Utopia they work because complete idleness is intolerably boring, and because of the creative need in everyone, and because people will do with pleasure voluntarily what is tedious to do under compulsion, whether the compulsion be authoritarian or economic. In Utopia there is no compulsion of any kind; people work because it is a natural human activity.
1\ no such thing as complete idleness 2\ in utopia boring also an irrelevant term
Let us take this very common argument point by point. In the first place why should you assume — so conceitedly! — that you are different — that whereas you would work without any economic necessity to do so others wouldn’t? Why should you assume that because you would be ‘bored to death without work of some sort, other people wouldn’t be, but would enjoy complete idleness indefinitely? We have discussed the recreative value of idleness, but it obviously only has that recreative value when it is a change from its antithesis — occupation. We are agreed that in a leisured civilisation idleness is an ‘opportunity of the spirit’, an enrichment, but the spirit devoted to idleness exclusively would lose the capacity for enrichment, for lack of creative outlet. Out of the deeps of an insufferable ennui would come the cry:
‘What pleasure have we of our changeless bliss?’
The pleasure of idleness exists only by contrast with occupa- tion. ..Their lives are utterly lacking in satisfaction.
It is probable that in the transitional period from the old order to the new there might be a good deal of idleness, from the sheer novelty of the absence of necessity to work. But that such a state of affairs would last is highly unlikely. The novelty would wear off in time, and the creative impulse assert itself. When people are free to work at what they like, at what they enjoy, work ceases to be a drudgery, and becomes a source of satisfaction; when people may have all the leisure they feel inclined for, saturation point is soon reached.
The present writer is in entire agreement with Robert Mennell, when he says, ‘I do not share the common fear of slackers. Let them slack, loaf about, play games, loll by the fire till they are sick of so doing. Let them go travelling until they are fit or fcd-up and come back, as they will, begging to be allowed to settle down and take a hand with the rest as respected and self- respecting citizens’.
oi
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But when no social position has to be established there is no point in possessing more than is needed, and the Utopians, once out of the transitional period in which everything is a novelty, and people are perhaps greedy because they cannot grasp that everything they want is freely theirs, so that there is no need to grab, realise this. ..When possessions cease to have any cash value they cease to represent power and position, cease to have significance, so that there is simply no point in acquiring more of anything than is needful ; an excess of possessions merely becomes an embarrassment and a nuisance, and makes the owner look ridiculous, like a man wearing a thick overcoat in midsummer. Parasites flourish in our present society, because the social structure encourages their existence,..t its whole basis being the exploitation of the many by the few, for private profit…With the abolition of money new values are evolved — a beautiful home, for example, *reflects not the owner’s financial and social status, but his taste; a thing is assessed not for its cash-value but for its usefulness or beauty. There is no question of not working at a certain trade or profession because ‘there’s no money in it’; people work at the things which interest them, and for which they have ability. ..They agree with Winstanley that ‘when mankind began to buy and sell, then he did fall from his innocency’.
*same song if still reflecting/assessing what people do
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The answer to that may be taken from our own society — even when other work is available there are still men who choose to go down the mines. What work is more dangerous and unpleasant and, incidentally, worse paid, than going to fight in a war? Yet men freely volunteer for such work, freely risk their lives and face unspeakable horrors. Why? Because of a sense of duty to their country; because of a conscience which insists that this is something they ‘ought’ to do; because they believe it is ‘right’ to do it — and some, perhaps, attracted by the mere fact that it is dangerous.
oh my.. not a sign of good nature.. a sign of sea world intoxication
In Utopia men are not called upon to risk their lives and take other men’s lives in war; they are not asked to undertake anything more dangerous or unpleasant than coal-mining, and this they do for the same reasons that men go to war — as a job that has to be done … until such time as the community learns, by engineering enterprise, to manage without coal. And this is one of the objectives of Utopian engineers and scientists. Far less coal is needed in Utopia, of course, thanks to the general de-industrialisation, plus the fact that there is no great com- petitive export trade to sustain, and water-power, for the production of electricity, is highly developed. Utopian engineers hope and believe that it is only a matter of time before they devise a means of getting such coal as is needed by machine, without having to send men underground for it.
In the meantime, whilst a certain amount of coal is needed, there are always volunteers for the mines. These volunteers work only a few hours at a time underground, and are the heroes of the community. A man is proud to acknowledge that he has worked in the mines, and his relatives regard him much in the way that in our own society we regard men who have won the V.C. It is an honour to have a miner in the family. .. they know this, and there is no lack of volunteers, because in any community there is no lack of unselfish and heroic human beings — since this is so in our own society it could hardly fail to be so in Utopia, where all work is for the common good.
oi to honour ness and hero ness.. that’s coercion.. voluntary compliance.. manufacturing consent.. et al
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The coal is got and the corn is raised, and often it happens that one man in his time plays many parts in the stirring and continuous drama of the world’s work. No work that people do voluntarily can be soul-killing and lacking in interest. What is soul-killing is work done purely for money — either out of economic necessity, or from motives of greed — ‘and from lack of opportunity to do anything else — none of which conditions can apply in Utopia.
If and when, for any reason, there is a shortage of any commodity, then the syndicate responsible organises a rationing system as our present society does in time of war and scarcity.
There is no buying and selling. Everything — food, houses, clothes, entertainment, public services, transport, books, furniture, education — is completely free. There is no barter. No compulsion to work. No wages.
a sabbatical ish transition ness.. whatever for a year
‘Won’t it make everything very complicated?’
On the contrary, it simplifies everything. Nothing could be more complicated than finance — the stock exchange, the banking system, the credit system, and the labyrinth of accountancy..t
graeber violence/quantification law et al
Robert Mennell, himself a business-man, declares, ‘More than half the worry and effort of any business is connected with the cash and price problems, buying and selling, costing, charging, checking and collecting the money..t The choice and assembling of the most suitable materials and personnel, the calculating of weights and measures, strains and stresses, these would be simplified out of recognition if price considerations could be eliminated. … If cash considerations were eliminated, countless thousands of men and women now engaged on money calculations would be set free for useful work for the public good or for the cultivating and beautifying of their own minds and bodies as well as their own houses and gardens ’. He adds that ‘As a result of this release of man-power, production under scientific planning, and with mechanical devices being used to their full capacity, would so vastly exceed our power of consumption that the time available for living as distinct from earning a livelihood, would soon transform the world’.
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do) as the planned obsolescence.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
In Utopia there is no question of *earning a living. Living is not something which should have to be earned; the basic right of all existence is the right to live . To this, in a truly civilised society, should be added the right to live abundantly , l But only in a **moneyless society is man freed from the necessity — and degradation — of having to earn his living.
*earn a living ness
**has to be more than moneyless.. ie: sans any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do
The people who insist that a moneyless society is impractic- able merely assert their lack of faith in humanity. They refuse to believe in the perfectability of man — despite the anthropologists. It is precisely because the mass of people lack faith and vision that the idea of Utopia is relegated to the realm of impossible idealism.
Money is not wealth. Money produces nothing. When there is a famine money is useless; its falsity is then revealed; it ceases to have reality as wealth. The only real wealth is the land.
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VIII. UTOPIA AND THE LAND
The collectives are, in effect, village communes which adjust their local affairs in their own way, but which are unified in the national agricultural federation of syndicates. The function of the national federation is research, the administration of agricultural colleges, contact with the factories manufacturing agricultural implements and turning the raw materials supplied by the farms — cereals, fruit, sugar-beet, etc. — into foods for distribution through the common store-houses. Everything is simply and sensibly organised into regional and national federa- tions, with delegates elected from the various groups. The delegates and officials appointed hold office for short periods only, and are not singled out for any special privileges, so that there is no danger of a bureaucracy of a privileged class arising, and power remains evenly, because collectively, in the hands of the workers. There is, in short, no administration from the top; everything works from the bottom up.
ooooof.. still form of people telling other people what to do
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Kropotkin worked out that 1,000 acres of good agricultural land — land in ‘good heart’ as the agriculturists say — was sufficient, properly cultivated, to feed 1,000 people and their livestock, and allow some over for public gardens and other uses.. He insisted that from the technical point of view there is no obstacle whatever to such an organisation being started tomorrow with full success. ‘The obstacles against it are not in the imperfection of the agricultural art, or in the infertility of the soil, or in climate. They are entirely in our institutions, in our inheritances, and survivals from the past — in the ghosts which oppress us.’
for sabbatical ish transition..?
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IX. HOUSING AND THE HOME IN UTOPIA
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In all the newly-built houses there is a living-room opening out into a little garden, and in both houses and flats a compact kitchen, opening, conveniently, out of the living-room; there is also what in our world we refer to as a parlour, but which the Utopians — using a word of ours that has fallen out of usage — call more explicitly a ‘withdrawing room’, since it serves any member of the family who for one reason or another wishes to withdraw from the communal living-room, in order to study, or entertain or talk with a friend in private, or merely in order to be alone. The Utopians regard the withdrawing room as a very important feature of the home, socially and psychologically.
bachelard oikos law.. pascal quiet law.. et al
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Every house and flat has a good bathroom, a warm, pleasant, properly-equipped place, heated airing-cupboards, cool cupboards for storing food, deep closets for clothes — so vastly superior to the wardrobes popular in our own era and designed more for show than for real use. Every kitchen has a refrigerator, good deep sink, plate-rack, two draining-boards, good dresser, an electric cooker, and every kind of electrical labour-saving device for keeping the home clean and bright with the minimum of labour. The modern houses and flats in Utopia have deep windows and sun-balconies, and a great many of them have been not merely designed but built by the people who live in them, since the Utopians consider that there are few activities in life more satisfying than building one’s own house — few things, the cultivation of the soil apart, more truly creative. It appals them to reflect that in the pre-Utopian era probably not one person in a thousand had the slightest idea how to lay a brick or any concep- tion of the workings of the house — how the plumbing, heating, and lighting arrangements, the internal organs of the living body of the house, worked, so that if anything went wrong they had to send out for assistance instead of being able to right matters themselves. They were a strange people, purely, the Utopians think, who knew neither the inner workings of their own houses or of their own bodies.
In the housing of Utopia all the things regarded in our world as luxuries are taken for granted — such things as refrigerators, central heating, bathroom showers, swimming pools, tennis- courts, Vita-glass windows, everything designed for health, com- fort, convenience. All this is possible when building is for use and not for profit, and when the people have, as Morris said, a sense of architectural power and know that they can have what they want.
In Utopia, as we have seen, there is no communal living — other than the natural communal life inseparable from living in a society — because it is as unnatural as cooping human beings up all day in shops, offices, factories. The Utopians observed that in the U.S.S.R. — which some people at one time believed to be Utopia, or Utopia in the making, despite evidence to the contrary- people showed a tendency to cling to small houses and gardens in preference to the great, barrack-like blocks of Workers’ Dwellings, to which the devout Communists waved foreign visitors with such pride, and in which home-life was ‘simplified’ almost out of existence. The Utopians do not make a fetish of ‘The Home’ as something almost holy; neither do they adopt the cynical attitude, ‘there’s no place like home — thank God!’ They recognise, simply, that human beings are individualistic, and that a place of one’s own has a psychological and a sentimental value for the majority of people. ..The natural grouping for human beings is the Family. Outside of this there are the solitaries who like to live alone, and unattached people who like to live with a friend of the same sex until such time as one of them falls in love and marries and a new Family is started.
In Utopia the Home is not the prison it so often is in our own society, and the Family is not something to shudder away from and escape at all costs — for the good reason that the Utopians are morally emancipated, and parents do not seek to maintain a hold upon their children, nor do they live together unhappily for ‘the sake of the children’. This means that the home is an harmonious place, free of conflict between husband and wife, betweeh parents and children. There is no question of the father being the Head of the Family. The Utopian home is a microcosm of Utopia itself, since in it no one is set in authority over another, but all are equal, and, freed of petty tyrannies and the grudges they set up, the co-operative spirit of society at large prevails in the home.
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Home, in Utopia, is a happy place, because it is a place of freedom. The Father is not the symbol of authority — God and the policeman and the schoolmaster rolled into one, as all too often in our present society — nor the child of Original Sin. The Mother does not seek to bind the children to her by a kind of spiritual umbilical cord; the Children have no fear of the parents, and therefore no hatred of the home, nor that morbid attachment to the home which is bound up with anxiety and is a sign not of a good home but of a bad one . 1 There is no neurotic bondage because there is no sense of moral obligation binding the family together, imparting unnaturalness to a natural association. The Utopians know that Tove beginning as a bond becomes a bon- dage’. They know, too, that unhappy people, frustrated emo- tionally, sexually, creatively, cannot live harmoniously together, either in the association of the home or in society at large. The Utopians, in their free, classless, co-operative society, know no such frustration, but are fulfilled in their whole natures, physical and spiritual; they have, therefore, nothing to ‘work off’ on their children; the father does not bully, the mother does not nag, or, at the other extreme, seek compensation by over-loving her children, so that mother-love becomes smother-love. Instead of being a breeding-ground for neurosis the Utopian home is a good training-school for the wider world outside — is, in the best sense, an introduction to life. Free of discipline from the top — the authoritarian discipline of the parents — the child of the Utopian home discovers for itself the natural discipline of life itself; in freedom he discovers that as a member of the small society of the home he cannot live as a law unto himself — for one thing the other members of the community will not stand for it, and for another he discovers that it does not work; and because he discovers this for himself— instead of being ‘ taught ’ it — it really makes an impression on him. At school this impression is reinforced, because in the free schools of Utopia there is again, as we have seen, no discipline from the top, but the natural discipline of the commu- nity, which alone has value, because out of it alone can grow the co-operative spirit.
‘The influence of the home’ really counts for something in Utopia; for something generous and fine. We say in our world that ‘charity begins at home’, narrowing down the word ‘charity’ to something mean, to the penny in the orphanage collecting box. But in Utopia charity means something deep and rich; it means understanding and tolerance and forgiveness; warmth and kindness and love. It means all that is contained in a phrase meaningless in a competitive society — ‘the brotherhood of man’.
No social or moral law coerces family life in Utopia — any more than nesting birds and their fledglings. Everything which makes Utopia the ideal commonwealth has its nucleus in the home — freedom, equality, love. The child’s first world is the home; in our society it is a world of frustration, tyranny, fear, conflict. In Utopia — Utopia begins at home.
This does not mean that the Utopian child has no desire to stretch his wings outside of the home. Even in Utopia the home is too narrow to confine adolescents and their natural, excited curiosity about life. The young person may feel perfectly free and happy in the home yet still have a need for independence, and this need is no criticism of the home or the parents, but entirely natural, since the home belongs to the parents, the furniture and decoration is of their choosing, expressive of their personality and their generation, and youth has other ideas, other tastes, and its own personality seeks its own expression. And the child, no less than the adolescent, needs its own world, its own outlets. A child is not a small adult, but something quite different; children and adults are no more suited to live together than are human beings and animals. The Utopians know this, and consider it wise that children and young people should live away from home a good deal, and schools — boarding-schools for the children from five to fifteen, and day nursery-schools for the children under five — make this possible. The adolescents are able to board at their technical schools and training colleges, and when they feel like going off and living on their own, before marriage, there is no family complication of anyone being hurt or disapproving. It seems to Utopian parents perfectly natural that the young should want to live their own lives in their own way, and as the parents never frustrate, or attempt to ‘frustrate, their children, there is real friendship and respect and understanding between them.
oh my
In short, there is the same free association in the Utopian home as there is in its society at large, and a fine symbolism in the sun- light and air invited through its deep windows.
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X. WOMAN IN UTOPIA
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XI. UTOPIAN MORALITY
A barnyard promiscuity is not the Utopian conception of sexual freedom. By freedom they do not understand licence to degrade ‘the stroke of genius on the part of God ’, but freedom to live and love fearlessly and honestly, and when love dies, if it does, to face the fact no less courageously and honestly, without self-deception or cant. The Utopians have no false romantic notions about passion and physical fidelity. They know that passionate love between two people dies in time a natural death, but that that is not necessarily the end of love ; if when passion dies there is no love it means there never was, that only lust drew the two people together. They are not censorious of lust; indeed they agree that it is ‘the bounty of God’, but they know that it is no basis for a lasting partnership, and maintain that when there is no more than that between lovers, when it is over — passion having run its course — they do best to part, with no pain or bitterness, since they have had mutual delight of each other. Similarly they hold that physical infidelity is not necessarily a betrayal of love — that people are not necessarily ‘unfaithful’ to each other, in the true sense, because they sometimes enter into a temporary physical relationship with someone else. They dislike the word ‘faith- fulness’ reduced, like the word ‘morality’, to a purely sexual issue.
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Anti-social conduct is frequently found to be purely neurotic, and the Utopians are full of compassion for these maladjusted people. They regard them not as wicked people, but as unhappy and mentally sick people, for whom everything possible must be done. They hold that in an ideal commonwealth, where poverty and want are unknown, if anyone steals it can only be psychological stealing, since all material motive for theft is removed; and that if anyone is violent, and wound or kills another, there must be something seriously wrong with his psyche, and he is held not as a criminal, but as a sick person until his sickness is cured. It is believed that as Utopia develops such ‘problem people* will cease to occur, for criminality and neurosis can no more flourish in a rational society than can disease germs in a healthy body. The Utopians know that the causes of crime are to be found mainly in social conditions; that poverty, injustice, exploitation, frustration — social and sexual — the money system, are the chief evils in which crime is rooted and which corrupt man’s natural goodness, warping his psychology, and distilling the spirit of hate and vio- lence and intolerance, and the lust for power, into the heart of man. In Utopia the causes of crime do not exist, since there is no poverty, but every one has all he wants, no injustice or exploitation, since there are no class-distinctions and no production for profit, and no social or sexual frustration, because there is social equality and sexual freedom ; but until all the people of the Utopian world have been born and grown up there, there must continue to be a certain amount of maladjustment carried over from the old bad systems by which men lived — or, rather, existed, since under the non-Utopian systems human beings spend so much time earning their livings that they have little time in which to live.
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The Utopians consider it completely fantastic that there should be laws controlling human relationships.
marriage\ing.. et al
Partings in such circumstances are as painful in Utopia as in any other form of society. But at least the memory of love is not degraded by sordid financial squabbles and bickerings over the custody of the children. As freely as they came together the couple who can no longer live happily together part.
Jealousy does occasionally occur, but it is considered a weak- ness, never in any circumstance justified. No one, the Utopians insist, has any ‘ rights ’ in anyone else, and if one partner deviates from ‘the faithful nuptial union between man and wife’ however much the other partner may regret this, and however human it may be to feel grieved about it, no one has the right to feel aggrieved , because such a feeling implies a possessiveness alien to the whole Utopian conception of sexual relations. Men and women do not ‘ belong ’ to each other but to themselves. Sadness that one’s partner no longer desires oneself is natural enough, they say, and morally legitimate, but not anger or resentment; and anyone who feels such an anger or resentment, to the point of a crime passionnel , must be regarded as a sick person, unfit to mingle freely with other human beings, at least until there has been considerable sexual re-education.
If anything can be said to shock the Utopians it is jealousy. They regard it and fear as the two most degrading of human emotions.
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Had no one any conscience, they wonder, that people could be happy knowing that in their midst fellow human beings were shut up for months and years, and under the most inhuman conditions, being punished — tortured is how they see it — for that for which they should have been pitied .
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The Utopian conception of happiness is something basically different from our own. Whereas we pursue happiness they wait quietly for it to enter into them. They believe, profoundly, that it is a state of being , not of having . It is an attitude of mind ; an acceptance of life. They do not experience, therefore, the rest- lessness common to our way of living; they do not have to be constantly seeking sensation — the sensations of love, the sensations of pleasure. They are at peace within themselves, and this peace they call happiness. It is not a bovine content, but rich in satis- faction; they are happy because they are fulfilled in their creative impulses, because each does what he likes to do, and it is a satisfaction to him; he is aware of his integral place in society; he has this sense of integration with the whole fabric of society. In their relations with each other there is this same serenity of mind; marriage for them is not a frenzied perpetuation of passion’s trance; it is not romanticism, ‘flowery and false’; they know passionate, romantic love and delight in it, but they know that passion and romance do not ‘marry’ people to each other, that ‘ marriage ’ is the love and friendship, the tenderness and devotion, left when the first wild feelings have subsided, and though it is true that unhappiness sometimes enters into their relations with each other, there is far less unhappiness than between the men and women of our world, and because of their education and their attitude to life, the essential rationality of their whole conception of happiness, they are far better equipped to face it — and in due course recover from it.
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They consider it immoral to take from society — that is to say, from the common storehouses, which contain the products of the earth and of man’s labours — without contributing to it. But they would consider it even more immoral to punish the transgressor; not merely, they say, would it not cure him of his anti-social con- duct, but harden him and turn him into a positive enemy of society; it seems to them, also, that to cause another human being to suffer in the name of punishment is to impose wrong upon wrong, and no good can come of it.
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XII. UTOPIA AND RELIGION
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XIII. UTOPIA— THE WILL TO THE DREAM
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It is true that not every step in the right direction is cancelled out by a negation of liberty; reforms we must have; there must be amelioration of the human lot; but *let us be under no illusion that the road to Utopia is paved with reforms. To achieve Utopia ‘we must first expiate our past, we must break with it; and we can only expiate it by suffering, by extraordinary, unceasing labour. **Utopia has nothing to do with reform; Utopia is the new heaven and the new earth; it does not spring from any political party or system, but from the dream in the heart of man; a revolution in the human mind. ..There is no realisation of Utopia without the change of values, and no change of values without change of heart — spiritual revolution. Utopia can be founded only on man’s love for man; on love and co- operation; not on hate and the seizing of material power.
*yeah to ‘not reform’ and ‘break from past’.. but not to takes a lot of work ness.. oi
*yeah that.. need global detox leap
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Utopias cannot exist islanded in a non-Utopian world, but these experiments indicate what is possible given the will to the dream.
It is no part of the business of the planner of an ideal common- wealth to set forth instructions as to how it may be achieved ; his function finishes when he has shown what could be done — given the will of the mass of people. *Towards that end he can urge a new conception of education; he can warn against the rising tide, the impending doom ; he can, by the preaching of fundamental values, stimulate thought, the realisation of the urgent need for a new way of living as an alternative to destruction. Which brings us back to our original contention that Utopia is concerned with the soul of Man, and, through the recognition of that, with the brotherhood of Man. **Humanity has to be doubly re-educated, first to the conception of a new Golden Age, and then to the necessity for it, and that is the task of the teachers and the preachers, the writers and the poets and the dreamers. Only the dreamer can give us the necessary inspiration, the authentic vision. His function is that of teacher and preacher, not of director. He cannot give you the earthly paradise within the terms of reference of the existing order. ***He can but say to his fellow-men, ‘ If you do this and this, and cease to do that and that, you will achieve this heaven on earth I have outlined for you ’, and if they are so infatuated with money and machines that they prefer hell upon earth, with its wars and famines and squalors, its privations in the midst of plenty, its mad-house economics, and its ultimate des- truction of the earth’s productivity, which is the destruction of life itself — it is their own calamitous affair.
*oi..
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
**oi.. this is just more people telling other people what to do.. what we need to be listening to is itch-in-the-soul .. each soul.. not looking for inspiration from some other.. if preacher/teacher.. then director.. then people telling other people what to do
***oi.. awful way to end.. same song
Ideally, then, God should send another Flood, but of his mercy receive into the Ark those prepared to begin again in the Garden of Eden in the morning of a new world.
don’t need a flood.. need a means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
London, December, 1943 -May, 1944.
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be you. 