Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
The scheme was not easy to apprehend; it was essentially different from anything then known, though superficially like several bankrupt Utopias. Ruskin did not want to found a phalanstery, or to imitate Robert Owen or the Shakers. That would have been practicable and useless. He wanted much more.
Have we no experience of what the people love? Comrades, dear democratic ladies and gentlemen, pursue, by all means, your schemes for righting the world, dream your dreams, conceive Utopias, but leave the artists out. For, tell me honestly, does any one of you believe that during the last three hundred years a single good artist would have been supported by your system?
Is it my fault if belief in Divinity has become a suspected opinion; if the bare suspicion of a Supreme Being is already noted as evidence of a weak mind; and if, of all philosophical Utopias, this is the only one which the world no longer tolerates? Is it my fault if hypocrisy and imbecility everywhere hide behind this holy formula?
But this friendly criticism seems to call for a reply, because it involves a question of principle which I have often noted in all discussions of Utopias and Millennia. For my generous critic seems to take it for granted that women are not now dependent on the labour of men for their support that some, or even most of them, are in a position of freedom.
Are we but mocking at Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and generalised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering personalities jar and squabble? Do I mean we are never to view the promised land again except through a foreground of fellow-travellers?
Nor does he stop at a wish to see those concentrations scattered. The very ambitions and Utopias bred within them are anathema to his soul, that places simplicity above cleanliness in divine proximity.
By our personal union with Jesus Christ through faith, our individual perfection, both in the sense of maturity and in that of the realisation of ideal manhood, is assured, and in Him the race, as well as the individual, is redeemed, and will one day be glorified. The Utopias of many thinkers are but partial and distorted copies of the kingdom of Christ.
I should be less severe upon their ideas if I were not irreversibly convinced, in my reason and in my heart, that communism, republicanism, and all the social, political, and religious utopias which disdain facts and criticism, are the greatest obstacle which progress has now to conquer.
This zeal, unknown to the coarser simplicity of the time of the Judges, inspired tones of moving prophecy and tender unction, which the world had never heard till then. A strong tendency toward social questions already made itself felt; Utopias, dreams of a perfect society, took a place in the code.
Both believe that "it's a jungle out there". Both seek social mobility through control of the means of production. Both claim to be egalitarian forms of social engineering and are civilizing, millennial, universal, missionary pseudo-religions. The denizens of the nether regions of central and eastern Europe have been the victims of successive economic utopias.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking