Utopia Unlimited

Southland Times, Issue 25747, 10 August 1945, Page 4

Utopia Unlimited

IN his address to the Invercargill Rotary Club on Wednesday evening, Mr A. W. Milburn, of Dunedin, outlined a modern Utopia in which enthusiasm for work would | produce plenty, the economic system would be simplified and subordin- ! ated, marriage would take place at early manhood, and there would be a permanent surplus of new houses. In addition there were to be no police because a simple moral law was universally accepted. These points hardly do justice to his full text, but they convey the naive detachment with which Mr Milburn surveyed his subject. To the Rotary members the address would be full of pleasantries, ironically feinting at existing conditions and showing a genuine sense of humour. But was Mr Milburn serious? He may not have been. Nevertheless, the prevalence of utopias and their zealous enthusiasts makes it worth while I facing the facts. Utopias usually present us with an accomplished fact. A picture is drawn of a model state, where the people are a select body of admirable citizens who all conform to a given formula. Such a uniformity implies that all recalcitrant citizens are cast out by exile or purge, not a pleasant or practical step in a democracy. Perhaps it is unfair to accept Mr Milbum’s allegory too seriously, but it shares one supreme weakness with all other similar schemes. It provides no bridge over which we might pass from the conditions we know to the vision we do not know. The pressure groups in democracy, sectional differences, the national debt, the frailties of human nature, the bonded agreements with other nations —these and other existing facts are lightly bypassed. There is much in our social structure which can be tilted at with good reason, but the way of reform lies not in the direction of Utopias (which seldom agree with each other), but 'by the primary work of educating and stirring public opinion to remove anomalies in restricted areas of life. True reform is a slow process eliminating individual social problems as gradual steps towards the reconstruction of the whole. Utopia begins with a hypothetical people and creates a tremendous system on paper working from the top downwards. True reform begins in the heart of the community as we know it and meet it in experience, and struggles with near realities working from ’ the ground upwards. The distant vision, i even if a distorted picture, is use- | ful in stirring thought and awakening criticism, but let it capture the mind exclusively and futile fanaticism expends valuable but misdirected energy propounding and defending illusions which have disappointingly little to offer men and women seeking enlightenment. The truest reform is always the most difficult and is always incomplete to the extent to which human nature is imperfect. There is perhaps no more significant example of the slow and difficult nature of securing enduring reforms and of the futility of complete theorized systems than the experience of new governments when they secure power. Inevitably there are among their' number exponents of utopia whose schemes range from “every man a millionaire,” to “money for nothing,” but a very short experience of the realities of government gives them new and deeper insight, and the highly coloured slogans are lost amid the mass of practical details to which they must give their attention. Imagination can be a valuable stimulus—nature’s i means of disturbing complacency, j Uncontrolled it can be a deceptive

master, misleading and confusing men at that point where clear thinking in the realities of experience is so desperately needed.