This is particularly in evidence in this present age. The almost
cataclysmal development of new machinery, the discovery of new
materials, and the appearance of new social possibilities through
the organised pursuit of material science, has given enormous and
unprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local
order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the
earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are
afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and still
tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local
orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements
and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important small
things of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in the
things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixed
discordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wide
culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no
wider understanding has yet replaced them. And so publicity in the
modern earth has become confusedly unsympathetic for everyone.
Classes are intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact
provokes aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts,
and the subtler people are excessively tormented by a sense of
observation, unsympathetic always and often hostile. To live without
some sort of segregation from the general mass is impossible in
exact proportion to one's individual distinction.
Of course things will be very different in Utopia. Utopia will
be saturated with consideration. To us, clad as we are in
mountain-soiled tweeds and with no money but British bank-notes
negotiable only at a practically infinite distance, this must needs
be a reassuring induction. And Utopian manners will not only be
tolerant, but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will be
understood perfectly and universally that on earth are understood
only by a scattered few; baseness of bearing, grossness of manner,
will be the distinctive mark of no section of the community
whatever. The coarser reasons for privacy, therefore, will not exist
here. And that savage sort of shyness, too, that makes so many
half-educated people on earth recluse and defensive, that too the
Utopians will have escaped by their more liberal breeding. In the
cultivated State we are assuming it will be ever so much easier for
people to eat in public, rest and amuse themselves in public, and
even work in public. Our present need for privacy in many things
marks, indeed, a phase of transition from an ease in public in the
past due to homogeneity, to an ease in public in the future due to
intelligence and good breeding, and in Utopia that transition will
be complete. We must bear that in mind throughout the consideration
of this question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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