Word: utopians
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...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...
...basic concept of human rights has undergone an enormous change in the last 50 years from being dismissed as a utopian ideal, to a universal acknowledgement that those rights should be fact," said Graham T. Allison '62, Dillon professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government...
...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, to shed the burdens of free will, failure, improvisation...
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...
...photos and engravings of panopticons, meeting houses, commune buildings, phalansteries and other social-idealist architecture in the 19th century stretch of this show. They resemble prisons and nunneries because they were prisons and nunneries, the difference being that the prisons meant to keep sinners in, whereas the Utopian buildings aimed to keep them out. But the same grim coerciveness suffused both, as we know from their ultimate state forms in the 20th century: Nazism and communism...