My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has at the end of an
eventful day, and as we walk along in silence towards our inn I rove
from issue to issue, I find myself ranging amidst the fundamental
things of the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and
passions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult of all sets
of compromises, those mitigations of spontaneous freedom that
constitute the marriage laws, the mystery of balancing justice
against the good of the future, amidst these violent and elusive
passions. Where falls the balance of freedoms here? I pass for a
time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question that, after
all, Schopenhauer failed completely to answer, why sometimes in the
case of hurtful, pointless, and destructive things we want so
vehemently....
I come back from this unavailing glance into the deeps to the
general question of freedoms in this new relation. I find myself far
adrift from the case of the Frognal botanist, and asking how far a
modern Utopia will deal with personal morals.
As Plato demonstrated long ago, the principles of the relation of
State control to personal morals may be best discussed in the case
of intoxication, the most isolated and least complicated of all this
group of problems. But Plato's treatment of this issue as a question
of who may or may not have the use of wine, though suitable enough
in considering a small State in which everybody was the effectual
inspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern
conditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily higher
standard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity of
migration inconceivable to the Academic imagination. We may accept
his principle and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine)
among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find all
that a modern would think of as the Drink Question untouched.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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