Word: utopians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...remarkable open letter, obviously written more in sorrow than in anger, may well be Solzhenitsyn's farewell message to the Politburo. It reveals Russia's greatest writer as an uncomfortable and uncompromising prophet, a utopian conservative who fears for the future of his beloved country as much as he hates what the Soviet system has done to its past. English-language publication rights have been given to Index, a London-based magazine devoted to one of Solzhenitsyn's favorite causes, the abolition of censorship. Excerpts...
...goals set by the Great Society's engineers. The poor were given money or in-kind benefits like food stamps, but that was not good enough. They were expected to show rapid improvement in school, in their health, in their ability to find jobs. It was a nearly Utopian prescription, and when the programs fell short of the ambitious goals, their advocates despaired and their critics attacked them as unworkable. Writes Robert J. Lampman, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin: "The best became the enemy of the good...
...change the conditions that cripple children," Eisenberg explained one day last month. "I'm interested in reading proficiency and reading retardation, for example, and social class is the best single indicator of how well children are going to read...Now it is not as though if we had a utopian society there still wouldn't be reading problems, or uneven rates of development. But if you have the combination of biological insult and developmental pressures...And families may serve as the immediate transmitter of culture to the child. So that even apart from the effects of malnutrition...
Suffering? Evil? Recite no Book of Job to Miss Mannes on the tragic mysteries of life, and mention "God's will" at your own risk. There must be no real losers, even at the end. This seems to be the Utopian dream hidden within the politics of euthanasia...
...times, Fromm's premises seem as sweeping as those Utopian prescriptions. His picture of the peace-loving primitive man is unconvincing ("Wars among primitive hunters are characteristically unbloody"). His explanation for the rise of patriarchal rule during the urban revolution seems equally shaky ("No longer the womb, but the mind became the creative power, and with this, not women, but men dominated society...