The idolum of eutopia which we may seek to project in this or that
region is not a _carte blanche_ which any one may fill in at his will
and caprice; certain lines have already been fixed; certain spaces have
already been filled. There is a consensus among all utopian writers,
to begin with, that the land and natural resources belong undividedly
to the community; and even when it is worked by separate people or
associations, as in Utopia and Freeland the increment of the land--the
economic rent--belongs to the community as a whole. There is also
a pretty common notion among the Utopians that, as land is a common
possession, so is work a common function; and no one is let off from
some sort of labor of body or mind because of any inherited privileges
or dignities that he can point to. Finally, there is the almost equally
common notion, among the utopians, that the perpetuation of the species
leaves plenty of room for improvement, and that, as far as human
knowledge and foresight are worth anything, it should be applied to
propagation; so that the most reckless and ill-bred shall not burden
the community with the support of their offspring while those of finer
capacity are neglected or overwhelmed in numbers.
Besides these general conditions for the good life which the utopians
unite to emphasize, there are certain other points in the utopian
tradition of which one writer or another has given the classic
statement.
With Plato we see the enormous importance of birth and education; we
recognize the part good breeding, in every sense of the word, must
play in the good community. Sir Thomas More makes us aware of the fact
that a community becomes a community to the extent that it has shared
possessions, and he suggests that the local group might develop such a
common life as the old colleges of Oxford have enjoyed. When we turn
to Christianopolis, we are reminded that the daily life and work of
the community must be infused with the spirit of science, and that an
acute practical intelligence such as we find today among the engineers
need not be divorced from the practice of the humanities. Even the
nineteenth century utopias have a contribution to make. They remind
us by their overemphasis that all the proud and mighty idealisms in
the world are so many shadows unless they are supported by the whole
economic fabric--so that “eutopia” is not merely a matter of spiritual
conversion, as the ancient religions taught, but of economic and
geotechnic reconstruction. Finally, from James Buckingham and Ebenezer
Howard we can learn the importance of converting the idolum of eutopia
into plans and layouts and detailed projections, such as a townplanner
might utilize; and we may suspect that a eutopia which cannot be
converted into such specific plans will continue, as the saying is, to
remain up in the air.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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