I-topia, Utopia, We-topia

I like this Dylan Evans fellow in the Guardian. An except from his latest (I'm blogging from a PDA, so pardon the poor formatting):

"...If idealism without a dose of reality is simply naive, realism without a dash of imagination is utterly depressing. If this really was the end of history, it would be an awful anticlimax.

"Look at the way we live now, in the west. We grow up in increasingly fragmented communities, hardly speaking to the people next door, and drive to work in our self-contained cars. We work in standardised offices and stop at the supermarket on our way home to buy production-line food which we eat without relish. There is no great misery, no hunger, and no war. But nor is there great passion or joy. Despite our historically unprecedented wealth, more people than ever before suffer from depression.

"The major political parties are reduced to tinkering with the details of our current system. Their only objective seems to be: more of the same, only perhaps a little bit more cheaply. They have no grand vision.

"It is this complacency, this lack of idealism, that is in part responsible for the repugnance with which Muslim extremists view western society. When George Bush speaks of exporting democracy to the Middle East, he should realise that liberal democracy on its own is a limp, anaemic idea.

"If the west is to provide a more inspiring ideal, then it is time we devoted more thought to the questions that Plato, More and Marx placed at the heart their utopias; the question of how to make work more rewarding, leisure more abundant, and communities more friendly."

This is partly the point that Will Hutton made in his review of the Play Ethic, In Praise of Slow and How to be Idle. Should the West be seeking a more holistic and rounded lifestyle, to answer the spiritual and qualitative charges of Islam and others?

Comments

[Jeremy]

"Should the West be seeking a more holistic and rounded lifestyle, to answer the spiritual and qualitative charges of Islam and others?"

Umm...yes! But I think this sense of "rounded" or "more holistic" is largely lost on most of us. Individually, we think it means something like paying more attention to work-life balance, but without really knowing how or why. And collectively, it seems as though most of us have already gone too far down the road from being citizens to being consumers.

[ian]

Liberal society is an 'anaemic idea'? This is the kind of thing that only someone living in a liberal society would say. Tell it to those living under dictatorship. The article is a pile of guff. Suggest a quick reading of 'Terror and Liberalism' to anyone impressed by it.