Word: utopianizing
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...surviving saints of the civil rights movement, John Lewis, now a Democratic Congressman from Atlanta, remains most committed to its original creed. Unlike black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael, who ousted him from the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966, Lewis never abandoned his belief in a utopian "beloved community" in which all men and women are created equal regardless of their race. Unquestioning faith in that idea led Lewis from his family's sharecropper farm in Alabama to the front lines of the battle for racial justice during the 1960s; he never flinched as he suffered arrests...
Though the public saw him as the archetypal modernist, he was disconnected from much modern art. Some of the greatest modern painters--Kandinsky, for instance, or Mondrian--saw their work as an instrument of evolution and human development. But Picasso had no more of a Utopian streak than did his Spanish idol, Goya. The idea that art evolved, or had any kind of historical mission, struck him as ridiculous. "All I have ever made," he once said, "was made for the present and in the hope that it will always remain in the present. When I have found something...
...could dawdle and daydream. His grand plan for cities seemed fantastical and cinematic--the basic building block was not a house but a farm, where each man could grow his own food on an acre block reserved for him since birth--and he was easy to dismiss as hopelessly Utopian. But fortunately for history, he often got to lay his dreams down in concrete and clay tile, giving us Fallingwater, New York City's Guggenheim Museum, the S.C. Johnson Wax building, the Robie House, Unity Temple and more than 450 other buildings, each a lesson in poetic functionalism...
...contemporary of Nostradamus was Sir Thomas More, whose Utopia was not so much a vision of the future as a vision of a better society and thus a reproach to present evils. But henceforth, Utopian dreams of reform invariably mingled with anticipation of tomorrow. This was particularly true in the 18th century, with the Age of Reason's belief in the perfectibility of human nature and the near inevitability of progress. Revolution was in the air, and revolution itself is a kind of prophecy--a violent prediction...
...February 1957, Mao drew his thoughts on China together in the form of a rambling speech on "The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People." Mao's notes for the speech reveal the curious mixture of jocularity and cruelty, of utopian visions and blinkered perceptions, that lay at the heart of his character. Mao admitted that 15% or more of the Chinese people were hungry and that some critics felt a "disgust" with Marxism. He spoke too of the hundreds of thousands who had died in the revolution so far, but firmly rebutted figures--quoted in Hong Kong newspapers--that...