Ethics -- Fiction; Religion and sociology -- Fiction; Upper class families -- Fiction
We must wake up to the fact that we shouldn't get Utopia by turning out
Mr. Jason and the highly efficient gentlemen who hired and financed him.
It wasn't so simple as that. Utopia was not an achievement after all, but
an undertaking, a state of mind, the continued overcoming of resistance
by a progressive education and effort. And all this talk of political and
financial "wickedness" was rubbish; the wickedness they complained of did
not reside merely in individuals it was a social disorder, or rather an
order that no longer suited social conditions. If the so-called good
citizens would take the trouble to educate themselves, to think instead
of allowing their thinking to be done for them they would see that the
"evils" which had been published broadcast were merely the symptoms of
that disease which had come upon the social body through their collective
neglect and indifference. They held up their hands in horror at the
spectacle of a commercial, licensed prostitution, they shunned the
prostitute and the criminal; but there was none of us, if honest, who
would not exclaim when he saw them, "there, but for the Grace of God, go
I!" What we still called "sin" was largely the result of lack of
opportunity, and the active principle of society as at present organized
tended more and more to restrict opportunity. Lack of opportunity, lack
of proper nutrition,--these made sinners by the wholesale; made, too,
nine-tenths of the inefficient of whom we self-righteously complained. We
had a national philosophy that measured prosperity in dollars and cents,
included in this measurement the profits of liquor dealers who were
responsible for most of our idiots. So long as we set our hearts on that
kind of prosperity, so long as we failed to grasp the simple and
practical fact that the greatest assets of a nation are healthy and sane
and educated, clear-thinking human beings, just so long was prostitution
logical, Riverside Franchises, traction deals, Judd Jasons, and the
respectable gentlemen who continued to fill their coffers out of the
public purse inevitable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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