Word: utopias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Less loftily, others contend that Utopia can be achieved by a liberation of the instincts. Philosopher Herbert Marcuse argues that today's technological society has concentrated undue power in the hands of a few political and economic monopolies that suppress the freedom of a paralyzed citizenry. Only by removing this "surplus repression" and "eroticising the entire personality" can man once again learn how to love and create. The libidinal mystic Norman O. Brown wants to return to the unfettered pleasure seeking of infancy, where all "pansexual" desires are instantly gratified. "The real world," he writes in Love...
...certainly not the traditional idea. The creators of classic Utopias were not much interested in liberating the personality or reaching the inner man. They wanted to constrain the inner man with his ungovernable impulses. They wanted-let us admit it-to repress the personality. "The tyrant of individualism has forever been put down," boasted a 19th century Utopia called The Crystal Button. In a 1903 Utopian novel, Limanora, everyone is deliberately made to work too hard to have time to think about himself or his desires. Those who persist in the glorification of sensory pleasures are exiled to an island...
That first and greatest of Utopian thinkers, Plato, banned most poets from his Republic because they exalt emotion over reason. Even so cheerful a philosopher as Sir Thomas More (who invented the name Utopia, which is Greek for no place) argued that all sensual pleasures should be pursued only for the sake of health. Other Utopians were equally antiseptic. In The City of the Sun, by the 17th century writer Tommaso Campanella, no woman was permitted to have sexual intercourse until she was 19; a man had to wait until he was 21-or longer, if he happened...
...expression was to be freely indulged; its 1,600 inhabitants-the ideal number-would work and make love as they pleased, at least until the millennium came, when the oceans would be transformed into the kind of lemonade Fourier enjoyed at Paris cafes. But the principal passion of most Utopias continued to be rule making. A mythical land called Lithconia, invented by an anonymous American writer, abolished marriage and approved free love. Almost free. Before the passion could be consummated, the lovers-to-be had to sign a register. As long as their names appeared on it, they were forbidden...
...creating a Utopia, an author assumes a God-like stance -a fact admitted by the social engineer who devised the briskly efficient community described in Psychologist B.F. Skinner's novel Walden Two. "I like to play God," the master-manipulator proclaims. "Who wouldn't, under the circumstances? After all, even Jesus Christ thought he was God!" In a way, it is something of a relief to turn from social architects who want to program human behavior to the modern variety of Utopian, who seeks power only for pleasure. "Do it!" commands the Utopian sprite Jerry Rubin-meaning just...