Word: utopias
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...were all a little mad that winter," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, recalling the emotional excitement of 1840. "Not a man of us that did not have a plan for some new Utopia in his pocket." As common as a handkerchief and as casually displayed. Today, pockets seem to be empty of anything so inspiring. People are doubtless as distressed about social conditions as they were in 1840, but what has happened to Utopia? Those once myriad visions of ideal societies have all but disappeared, or have been transmogrified into the demonic dreams of science-fiction. Gone are the blessed isles...
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...