Now did I say anything of the sort? ...
I had to bring him, I suppose; there's no getting away from him in
this life. But, as I have already observed, the happy ancients went
to their Utopias without this sort of company.
Section 5
What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all his
Anti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his own
limitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about loose, and
nothing has any necessary link with anything else in his mind. So
that I cannot retort upon him by asking him, if he objects to this
synthesis of all nations, tongues and peoples in a World State, what
alternative ideal he proposes.
People of this sort do not even feel the need of alternatives.
Beyond the scope of a few personal projects, meeting Her again, and
things like that, they do not feel that there is a future. They are
unencumbered by any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to
that. That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain our
friend's high intellectual mobility. Attempts to correlate
statesmanship, which they regard with interest as a dramatic
interplay of personalities, with any secular movement of humanity,
they class with the differential calculus and Darwinism, as things
far too difficult to be anything but finally and subtly wrong.
So the argument must pass into a direct address to the reader.
If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide synthesis of all
cultures and polities and races into one World State as the
desirable end upon which all civilising efforts converge, what do
you regard as the desirable end? Synthesis, one may remark in
passing, does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean
uniformity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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