Word: utopias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Imagine a world of peace, unity and oneness. A world where racial and religious strife has ceased to exist, where people worship, govern, and even speak as one. To more than three million people around the globe today this is not some unattainable utopia, but a vision destined to become reality...
...future dreamed up for Vogue -- a bearded figure in an immaculate white jumpsuit wearing a circular antenna as a halo on his head, John the Baptist among the insulators. Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush toward Utopia is clearly signified by things like a 1933 Raymond Loewy metal teardrop desk-mounted pencil sharpener. In the twelve years between the Wall Street Crash and Pearl Harbor, the American imagination seems to have oscillated between two images, the streamline and the breadline -- the former promising relief from the latter...
...future world in which Lantry finds himself is, unsurprisingly, an anti-utopia; crime is unknown, death is not feared and Ray Bradbury books have all been burned. Well, maybe not such an anti-utopia after all. But Lantry just can't seem to enjoy himself. Apparently he disapproves of the unquestioning happiness of the amazingly well-adjusted people he meets. So he kills them...
Similarly, we should not let the current debate about a single technological utopia such as SDI so dominate our thinking that we fail to evaluate its various dimensions in relation to alternative visions of the long-term future. A responsible moral approach to the nuclear future requires us to avoid large risks to the crucial values of survival and freedom that we must pass on to future generations, and to make continual efforts to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons whenever that does not increase risks. Such an approach requires hard thinking about uncertain probabilities and proportionate risks rather than succumbing...
...imagination -- despite its present-day reality of myriad gridlocked campers frying in the sun at the tepid edge of a half-dead sea -- was created by these painters and their followers. Their relations with this place, or more properly their invention of it, gave modernism its one practical utopia of the senses, a bourgeois Eden whose roots wound back through a coastal peasant culture (still unhurt by tourism in the 1920s) to the Greco-Roman past. Instead of the pie in the sky offered by constructivism, they contemplated the langoustes on the table, bringing their sensuous embodiment to an extraordinary...