June 1962 — VOL. 43, NO. 6 —
In Search of a Canadian
Utopia
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A map of the world must include
Utopia, because that is the one country at which humanity
is always landing. No sooner does it land than it looks out
and sees a better country, and sets sail again.
Every enlightened and active—minded person is to some
degree a Utopian. He pictures to himself the political, social
and industrial conditions under which he should like to live,
and, at least in some small degree, he tries to realize those
conditions.
Few persons in the Western World give in to the thought
that things have been already settled for them. We know that
things accepted today as part of our way of life were once
merely dreams, and we look forward to having our own dreams
come true.
The word "Utopia" was first used by Sir Thomas More in 1516
as the name of a far distant island on which, according to
his story, there existed an ideal commonwealth. It has made
its way into the dictionary as meaning "a place, state or
condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, customs
and conditions."
Some people may think it more or less childish to read utopian
literature, but one of the great benefits is this: it helps
us to break through the barriers of conventional thinking
and see things fresh, from new points of view. There is, in
the more serious utopian literature, a great treasury of creative
ideas and useful practical devices.
"What is Utopia?" is a legitimate and perhaps a useful question
to raise. Some of the writers portray its citizens as living
leisurely lives, with an abundance of the necessities of life,
and enjoying the advantages furnished by gadgets. That thought
was in keeping with the physically hard times in which the
books were written. But the utopian idea has something for
the mind and spirit, too.
The essence of any civilization is found in its sense of
values, demonstrated in its preferences, its moral commitments,
its aesthetic judgments, its loyalties, its conception of
the good life, its standards of excellence, its measures of
success, and what it teaches its young people about the things
for which men shall live.
The Golden Age
Where do we get the idea of a Golden Age? Writing in the
eighth century B.C., a Greek shepherd—poet described
the five ages of the world. First was the golden race of mortal
men, then silver, then bronze, then a race of heroes, and
finally our own, the race of iron. We have picked up the phrase
to designate a period of stability and harmony.
King Alfred pictured the Golden Age of England as a far—off
time in which "no one had yet heard of Viking ships of war".
A Chinese philosopher saw in it a time when "one village might
look at the smoke rising from the chimneys of another nearby
without envy or rivalry".
It is evident that many of the ancient fables of the Golden
Age had foundations in fact. We find vestiges of them preserved
in the present time, and echoes of their idealism in our minds.
The utopian brings together the best ideas of the Golden Age
and modifies them to fit the new environment.
We have, in fact, enough ideas lying around us and proffered
to us to build a dozen utopias, but they are a hodgepodge
of undigested thoughts. They have one thing in common, despite
their diversity of form: the desire for a fuller, more interesting,
more satisfying life. In seeking this, they range from Aladdin's
magic lamp, which gives us everything we want at once and
free of cost and work, to the prophet's cry for reformation
of life and character.
The first utopian we know of who was in a position to put
his ideas into practice was the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Within
a crescent of hills, remote from the everyday life of Egypt,
he built a new city devoted to emancipating the human spirit
in religion, art and ethics. It was the most striking change
in any ancient state.
Several centuries later a king of India, Asoka, introduced
idealism which ranged all the way from planting shade trees
to founding hospitals, from sending missionaries to the aborigines
to appointing officers to administer charities at home; from
providing for the education of women to cultivating medicinal
herbs. As H. G. Wells says: "More living men cherish his memory
today than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne."
For every man who has had the authority to give reality
to his utopia, there have been thousands who could only plan,
propose and exhort.
Plato, who had an uncanny knack of being right, is still
referred to by the advanced thinkers of today although he
wrote his Republic 2,300 years ago. Plato set his utopia
in an inland region with no facilities for maritime trade
and little economic activity except subsistence farming. He
points up the prosperity which results when pious, law—abiding,
industrious pioneers develop a civilization in peace.
The first utopian of what we might call the beginning of
our present scientific age was Francis Bacon, who wrote New
Atlantis in 1626, professing an aggressive faith in the
liberating role of science. About the same time, Thomas Campanella,
an Italian, took bits and pieces of preceding utopias and
built them into City of the Sun. Shakespeare's ideas
of utopia appear in The Tempest, where Gonzalo would
"... with such perfection govern, sir, to excel the golden
age", and in King Henry III, where Jack Cade promises
a realm in which there shall be no money, but all shall eat
and drink at the king's expense.
By the nineteenth century people were forecasting plastics,
synthetic fabrics, combine harvesters, radio, television,
automobiles and air conditioning, and incorporating these
in their utopias. Henry Thoreau rejected such pictures of
a mechanized civilization, and stood out for simple living.
A Massachusetts author, Edward Bellamy, wrote Looking
Backward in 1888, making his utopia of the year 2000 a
single industrial unit, with compulsory work service for everyone.
There were, too, less pretentious utopias. Robinson Crusoe
found one where he was allowed to live in an exotic setting
without any of the puzzling responsibilities of a wife and
children. Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed to try the experiment
of human perfectibility on the banks of the Susquehanna River,
where his little society was to have combined the innocence
of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and genuine refinements
of culture. He remarked in an essay: "we at length alighted
on the firm ground of common sense from the gradually exhausted
balloon of youthful enthusiasm."
Utopias and us
These Utopias, and others, were based upon the idea of progress,
or, at the very least, a change from a worse to a better state.
Mankind has risen from his former lowly condition just because
of them. Individuals stepped out of the routine rut of their
existence and attempted to do something that had not been
accomplished before.
A new state arises out of the needs of mankind, but someone
has to be first to see the needs. He gets an idealistic vision
of what seems to be a good society, though such social conditions
may never have existed, and then compares that apparent perfection
with the imperfect reality of present society.
To assume that either man or his environment has changed
so much that lessons of the past no longer apply is unrealistic.
How can we appreciate freedom, opportunity, and luxury without
an appreciation of the spent hope and sweat and blood and
treasure that went into gaining them? How can we be sure that
our way is the best way unless we have learned about the blind
alleys into which our forefathers wandered, and the great
array of things that might as well not be tried again?
There are lessons, too, about how the importance of movements
which in their own time meant little became the rallying ground
for advancement in a later age. Consider Magna Charta, the
Great Charter forced from King John after the revolt of the
barons in 1215. When Shakespeare wrote a play called King
John he completely omitted what appears to us to have
been the most dramatic event in that monarch's life. Five
centuries after King John the Charter became the corner—stone
of liberty for the English—speaking world.
The thing to do with utopian dreams is not to give them
up but to test them. Some dreams have undeniable grandeur
and nobility, but upon sober examination they turn out to
be impractical. Others, like the idealized code written aboard
the Mayflower during the long slow passage from Plymouth
to Massachusetts in 1620, have vitally affected millions of
people through many generations.
Consider James H. Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana,
published in 1656. Arthur E. Morgan points out in Nowhere
was Somewhere that it has almost lost its status as a
utopia because it has been so widely used in making actual
constitutions. For example, when congressmen in the United
States argue for the separation of the legislative, executive
and judicial branches of the government they are going over
the arguments of Oceana.
Because of the advances made in the Western World, there
is not much to be learned from those utopian creations which
dealt with the elemental needs of men, such as abundance of
food, shelter and clothing; freedom from oppression; freedom
from excessive toil, and opportunity for self—expression.
These material utopias, now largely matters of fact, release
men from immediate preoccupation with material wants, but
they leave more profound problems of life still unsolved.
Are we attacking these? Alfred North Whitehead thinks not:
"No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that
does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and
idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying
the penalty for it."
In Canada today
It will not do for us in Canada to take too petty a view
of our stature. To people in many other lands Canada seems
to have nearly reached the utopian ideal. If poverty has not
been completely abolished, at least a larger proportion of
our population lives in comfort than in any previous civilization.
We have, through the forty—hour work week, the leisure
eulogized by utopian writers. We use food and clothes so lavishly
that we seem, to other people, wasteful. Our amusements, our
educational opportunities, our ability to travel, and our
freedom from hard labour ... all these surpass the most
golden dreams of the ancient utopians.
But it would be disastrous to our future if we were to settle
down and say "Now we are all right". We must continue to cultivate
our garden.
We have an excellent foundation in the values to which we
give allegiance tabulated for us by Professor George S. Counts:
1. Our ethical standards derived from the Hebraic—Christian
faith;
2. Our adoption of the humanistic spirit of the Greeks and
of the Renaissance, which emphasizes the dignity of man;
3. Our confidence in the scientific method of hypotheses
tested by instruments as the safest path to truth;
4. Our adherence to the Roman and Anglo—Saxon rule
of law to provide channels for peaceful change in society;
5. Our democratic faith in liberty, equality and fraternity,
which came to us from the eighteenth century philosophers
and the French Revolution.
Confederation
All of these principles are incorporated or implied in the
charter of Confederation. The men who framed it were well
aware of the need for political union in order to preserve
this country's civil and political liberties, but they did
not place a political yoke around our necks. Instead, they
reached out to the future, to a fuller, richer, and more various
life of all the provinces through co—operation centrally
attained.
The hundred years since they framed their charter, based
upon everlasting principles and incorporating the practicalities
of their day, have been years of testing.
It is no easy task to govern in Canada, either in federal
parliament or provincial legislatures. Many people of sound
judgment and good ability are needed, and every voter has
a say in choosing the wisest men.
The purpose of those who govern, as Plato had the merit
of seeing, is to make the safety and interest of their citizens
the great aim and design of all their thoughts and endeavours,
without ever considering their own personal advantage; and
so to take care of the whole collective body of the nation
as not to serve the interest of any one party to the prejudice
or neglect of all the rest.
There are many definitions of what is the interest of the
people, but for Canadians it may be taken to mean this: the
right of every man to enjoy, in accordance with his aptitudes
of character and mentality, the material and spiritual opportunities
that nature and science have placed at the disposition of
this nation.
Before we can enjoy the perfection of a government like
that, we need to educate all our people so that they are qualified
to select the best leaders. The duty to vote is a duty to
equip oneself to vote. Wise decisions cannot be extracted
from blank ignorance.
There is a collateral duty upon those who proffer themselves
for office. How have they trained themselves to deserve confidence
in their judgment? Leaders hold their positions only on sufferance,
and they must justify themselves by other means than appeals
to inheritance, possession or popularity.
Some hindrances
There are three failings which interfere with the development
of a nation: prejudice, a passion for security, and nationalism.
A utopia may exist though each of its parts has a diversity
of operations, but it cannot exist without unity of spirit.
Co—operation is the basis of utopian life, as it is
the basis of democracy. There is no "ism" that will add one
inch to our advance toward a better Canada.
This means that we need a broad tolerance, a seeing of the
good points on both sides of a question. This does not mean
keeping always in the middle of the road. The middle way may
have a part of the vices of both extremes and none of their
virtues. As someone put it, when you walk in the middle of
the road you are likely to be run over by both lines of traffic
instead of by only one.
To be tolerant is not to be indifferent, and it is incompatible
with ignorance. It is a positive and cordial effort to understand
another's beliefs, practices and habits, without necessarily
sharing or accepting them.
Mutual understanding is based on the acceptance of our widely
differing characters and ways of looking at and interpreting
the world. The Emperor Hadrian excoriated races who had lived
side by side for centuries without having "the curiosity to
get to know each other, or the decency to accept each other".
Many inventors of utopias have made them intolerably dull,
because their main preoccupation was with security and ease.
They are like people who build a golf course which is all
green, without fairway, rough, bunkers or hazards.
The self—respecting person can stand a world without
a fence around it. He needs opportunities of adventure, of
trying for himself. He knows that if he stops thinking of
government as it should be, and thinks only of what it does
for him, he loses control of it by becoming its beneficiary
and client.
Pope Leo XIII said in his Encyclical of May 1891: " If any
there are...who hold out to a hard—pressed people freedom
from pain and trouble, undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment,
they cheat the people and impose upon them, and their lying
promises will only make the evil worse than before."
When preoccupation with security begins to dominate human
life, the scope of human life begins to be diminished. It
is right that the state should be a machine fit to serve men,
but with the least possible risk of crushing them.
A broad view needed
The third wrecker of utopian dreams is the spirit of nationalism,
whether it be of the city, province, state or nation. Many
people believe that nationalism is the basic ill of our age,
but it is not a new disease. The great Greek war was a struggle
between the Union of which Athens was the mistress and the
states' rights group of which Sparta was the head. It was
insistence upon the rights of the province in preference to
those of the nation that caused the destruction of Greece
itself.
Many useless words are spoken, many fruitless efforts are
spent, and many needless enmities are aroused, by sectional
divisions over public questions. Rabbi Robert Gordis put it
forcefully: "No greater peril threatens the survival of the
race than nationalism, man's total absorption in his own ethnic
or political group."
The opposite to rampant nationalism is the voluntary association
of men and women for the preservation and cultivation of a
cherished body of ideals, practices and values.
This seems to lead into consideration of world—wide
relationships, and no country can ignore them. We often develop
a sense of bitterness and frustration at the failure of world
organizations to achieve lasting peace and harmony, but we
never quite give in to the feeling that the goal should be
abandoned.
Through example and the force of our representation in international
affairs we should strive to bring back order, scruple and
principle into society. Thereby we enhance our own prospect
of building the ideal commonwealth we see in our mind's eye.
No country, big or little, can sail serenely down the stream
of time looking only at the brave bow wave it is cutting,
or at the picturesque wake it is leaving. Even a utopia must
pay attention to the surrounding shores. To paraphrase a great
Roman: "So far as we are Tom, Dick or Francois, our country
is Canada; but so far as we are men, it is the world."
We recall one great moment in the late war, the moment in
1940 when England suggested that France unite with her and
that they become one people under law; but it slipped away.
Things became less desperate, and the moment was lost.
Unless peace is to depend on a balance of terror, the world
needs something of the spirit of the Commonwealth. It exists
for the help and comfort of its members and as an encouragement
to all who want political freedom and friendship with their
fellow men.
What to do
We should take a look, once in a while, at what has been
accomplished instead of brooding over what we have not yet
succeeded in doing. We can transfer thought of the Golden
Age from the past to the future, exchanging a disillusioned
view of human destiny for one that is optimistic. It is the
cult of deprecation that endangers our social stability and
holds up our efforts to progress. It is better, said Confucius,
to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.
Utopia is, above all, a place of and for educated people.
If we are to build a Canada nearer to our hearts' desire,
as Archimedes offered to move the world, we need, like him,
some ground to stand on and a sturdy fulcrum. Education provides
these.
As long ago as 1944 the Canadian Education Association was
discussing with school authorities the possibility of some
organized plan for making education a greater force for national
unity. The plan envisaged: (1) exchange of correspondence
among students and teachers in different parts of Canada;
(2) exchange of teachers of different provinces; (3) encouraging
teachers to attend summer school in another province.
Education with its wings spread widely wilt help to build
social sense, which includes the answer to the critical problem
that all utopians have to face: how shall our larger utopia
keep from being neglected through every one's concern for
his little private utopia? Only educated men and women can
think of the broader scene.
Utopia is not made by talking, but by learning, thinking,
planning and working. Many a proposed Utopia had the fatal
flaw of excusing and justifying the slackening of men's efforts
to straighten out their immediate world. Just to propose a
beautiful future is not equivalent to its realization.
We are concerned to better today's conditions; we are equally
charged with planning to improve them tomorrow. Our grandchildren
will be fortunate indeed if we have envisioned a great pattern
and laid a few foundation stones.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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