Word: utopia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...greatest irony of the concept of Utopia is that people are still searching for it when, at the dawn of the 21st century, most citizens of the world's industrial democracies are already living in one. Does anyone doubt that if we could communicate with any person--even the wealthiest and most privileged--who lived much before 1900, and told them that we live in a time when even ordinary people have clean clothes and houses, nutritious food and potable water with which to bathe and cook, the freedom to quit any job we dislike, the ability to hear symphonic...
...critique of the exhibit at the New York Public Library "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World" [IDEAS, Nov. 6], Robert Hughes said, "This is a show about failure." However, there are thousands of successful utopian communities in operation today. Monasteries and other religious communities exist in all parts of the world from Tibet to America...
...Utopia means conformity, a surrender of the individual will to the collective or the divine. "In la sua voluntate e nostra pace" (In His will is our peace), wrote Dante of the joys of heaven, where all choice is excluded by contemplation of the Divine: perfect obedience, perfect happiness, no worries. For God, substitute adepts, the People, the Charismatic Leader, or any one of a number of beguiling gurus, from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Jim Jones with his refreshing drafts of Kool-Aid in distant, steamy Guyana. The Utopian state of mind indicates a yearning to be released from history...
Basically, Utopia is for authoritarians and weaklings. But it was also loved by philosophers, when they were in a what-if frame of mind, dreaming up systems. Two of Plato's works, The Republic and The Laws, have recognizably Utopian elements. One of the most charming items in this show is a Renaissance miniature from Florence by Zanobi di Strozzi, circa 1470, showing St. Augustine of Hippo dreaming up the City of God, taking dictation (so to speak) from an image of Florence itself, complete with Brunelleschi's great dome, which floats in the blue air before...
After a while at this show, you may think that to be deprived of a life in Utopia may be a loss, a sad failure of human potential. Until, that is, you consider how unspeakably awful the alternative would...