...many people claim to aspire to. It is likely that there are very few people who if asked if they would like to live in a utopian society would say no. The odd thing is that the definition of what utopia actually is can be highly debatable. The term itself was coined by Thomas More. The word Utopia came from the word eutopia which means good place and the word eutopia which means no place. So, essentially More wanted to describe a place that was good but did not exist. There are many different solutions or ideas for creating utopian societies. Large scale ideas do not seem to work very well for a variety of reasons. Forcing people into utopia is not only a difficult way to create a utopian society, but also inherently contradictory. One of the best solutions is one in which membership in the society is voluntary, and the size of the society is kept at a manageable number. This solution appears to be the only one that is truly feasible assuming that people are self interested. The world which More created was kind of complicated. As far as laws go, there were very clear cut laws, but lawyers did not exist. Private property was allowed to exist because if there was common property, people would not work hard for the property that they had. Money also did not exist. All people were involved in some sort of farming as well as another trade. All Utopians only worked six hours a day. The other time that they spent was up to them, as long as they did something productive...
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...Personal or Political? Cleverly penned to literally mean ‘no place,’ Utopia is an ideal discussed by Thomas More in Utopia. With connotations of eternal and universal bliss, the potential of a Utopian society easily strikes a chord in anyone’s heart to continuously pursue. Therefore, isn’t that ultimately what we are all trying to do, reach our Utopia? It is common knowledge that we are all diverse and individual people, so is a true worldly Utopia possible? We each form our own individual Utopian ideals, and while some theories may connect in ways with another’s opinion, a Utopia is more of a personal ideal and less of a societal or political ideal. The foundation of a Utopia is where most commonalities in opinions are found: job or purpose, happiness, belonging, positive environment, insurance of safety and sustenance, and the perfect amount of order. Getting to a more specific level, however, reveals differences in issues of strong government control or complete independence, stationary communities or nomadic, living off the land or to focus on a life with industrialized advancements, etc. In More’s Utopia, the perfect amount of order is similar to the United State’s House of Representatives, in which one person per city is made the voice of the people. The votes are ultimately out of the public’s control and are the Representative’s own personal opinion of what is best for the people. (More) When the time comes to vote on issues like control, as a country we do our...
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...perfect, highly desirable society where all citizens live in peace. The job of a utopian society, whether it is real or not, is to create a desirable goal for all people. "An ideal may be reasonably defined as a standard of perfection supremely desirable but not fully attainable",(Bottiglia). An example of a place that fits these standards is Eldorado from Voltaire’s Candide. Candide stumbled upon this place of great wealth and beauty with Cacambo and thought it must be the best possible world, therefore a utopia. “Fountains of pure water, rose-water, and sugar-cane liqueur played unceasingly in public squares, which were paved with a kind of precious stone smelling of cloves and cinnamon”,(Butt...
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...able to affect various communities by its writing, art work and literacy. The contact zones, according to the book are quite important areas as they are areas where a community is able to see the world in a foreign community perceptive. Contact zones as defined in the book, are areas where various communities meet and have an uneven exchange in culture and beliefs. Mary Pratt tries to explain how our cultural knowledge is misguided due to the fact that we missed a crucial part of our heritage and the heritage of other communities too. This is mainly due to the fact that most of it is hidden from us by those who are supposed to preserve and pass it to us. Accepting us involves appreciating our past that is our history and upholding it by making sure that the future generations receive the information as it is. Those charged with the preservation of our culture choose the parts of history to pass down and deliberately omit others as a means of defending the community from the subsequent humiliation and shame that is associated with our dark past (Pratt, page. 494). Staying within our cultural boundaries we are only able to hear and learn from only of the goods of our community. The truth is culture and religion has its ups and downs. More and different stories about our communities can be heard in the contact zones when the different communities that have lived closed together interacted though unevenly....
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...Where Is Utopia in the Brain? DanieL s. Levine Introduction The designer of utopian societies, whether fictional or real, often confronts the limits of what is possible for members of our species. But how severe or flexible are those limits? The explosive growth of behavioral neurobiology and experimental psychology in the last decade has produced many results on the biological bases of social interactions. This growth suggests that we can now look to science for some partial answers to the question of limits. Until recently, the social sciences and the biological sciences have mainly developed separate and disconnected accounts of human behavior. In the “nature/nurture controversy,” for example, anthropology has tended to emphasize cultural influences on human nature whereas behavioral biology has tended to emphasize genetic influences. The journalist Matthew Ridley (Nature via Nurture) provides an accessible account of the intellectual history and rhetoric of these two fields. Yet an increasing number of scholars in both areas are now realizing that behavioral biology and anthropology are studying the same human phenomena from different viewpoints. This overlap means there should be an underlying reality that is consistent across the different disciplines regardless of any disagreements in terminology. The behavioral biologist Edward O. Wilson calls this type of interdisciplinary commonality consilience, a term coined earlier by the nineteenth-century philosopher William Whewell...
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...government. That is what we need. Trust helps people communicate and bond with with each other. Doubt is the opposite and can lead to chaos and instead of people working together, they woild be fighting against each other. If a ruler tries to enforce a rule about trusting and bonding, how would that make a difference to the society? See the problem with that, is that everyone is unique and different. That's what makes the world how it is now. It's made of different cultures, religions, languages and different skin...
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...Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper co Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH LOVE TO JulieWalwick (1959-2010) Contents ix Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION i The Problem with Work i CHAPTF1 37 Mapping the Work Ethic CHAPTER 2 79 Marxism, Productivism, and the Refusal of Work CHAPTER 3 113 Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income CHAPTER 4 151 "Hours for What We Will": Work, Family, and the Demand for Shorter Hours 5 CHAPTER 175 The Future Is Now: Utopian Demands and the Temporalities of Hope EPILOGUE 227 A Life beyond Work 235 255 Notes References 275 Index Acknowledgments thank the following friends and colleagues for their helpful feedback on versions of these arguments and portions of the manuscript: Anne Allison, Courtney Berger, Tina Campt, ChristineDiStefano, Greg Grandin, Judith Grant, Michael Hardt, Stefano Harney, Rebecca I would like to Karl, Ranji Khanna, Corey Robin, Rudy, Karen Kathy Stuhldreher, and Robyn Wiegman. Thanks also go to Robert Adelman, Brittany Faullmer, Dennis Keenan, Marcie Patton, the Seattle FOJ, Julie Walwick, Cat Warren and David Auerbach, Diana Weeks, Lee Weeks, and Regan Weeks. An earlier version of a portion ofchapter...
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...H.G. Wells published many books during his life as a novelist, including the Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and the War of Worlds (1898) (Milliken). With these books, and others, H.G.Wells adopted the nickname the “father of science fiction”. His first book, and one of the most famous, was The Time Machine, published in 1895. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine became a classic taking his readers on a futuristic journey that inspired science fiction novelists and books for years to come. In The Time Machine, H.G. Wells uses social commentary to describe how life could evolve. Social commentary is a spoken or written act of rebellion toward an individual or group; commentary on social issues or society. The Time Machine uses allegory as a mechanism for...
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...brought into being by Sir Thomas Moore, and from then on to the 19th century, utopian fiction has experienced a development and a dramatic turn into just the opposite tone, dystopian. These two distinctive streams in British literature, with a same distant source, contain totally different settings—if the utopian novels have demonstrated the perfectly idealized future society for mankind, then the dystopian ones describe the least ideal society, and it is usually considered that a dystopia is the vision of a society in which condition of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain.1 As material civilization develops into a certain level and can be considered as more than sufficient, then the world is superior to spiritual civilization; however human spirit is the reflection and is controlled by the substances. So, in a highly-developed society with rich material life and high technology, human spirit indeed has no real freedom. Of course, flooding modernized technologies provide human beings a better living condition, but they are covering up an empty and weak spiritual world. Human beings are made to be squeezed to become the flat and instrumental existence surround by machines which makes them feel it is a perfect world. It is obvious that this point contains a positive function in terms of political...
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...As information and communication technology advances, it has continued to change the world around us and the way that we interact with each other. While the development of new technologies has its advantages, there are disadvantages associated with these developments as well. No doubt, technology is moving our world into the future; which I believe is heading towards a combination of a utopian and dystopian society. In the reading by Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, McLuhan makes the argument that humans participate in “hot” and “cold” media, which are described as scale measuring the extent that people interact with media, with “hot” requiring less participation compared to “cold” which requires more effort and participation on the part of the consumer. I believe that “hot and...
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...Science fiction literature usually deals with worlds that are different from our own and the consequences of change as a result of new scientific technologies, discoveries, or different social systems. It is the only genre that shows an outsider’s viewpoint on how a society could run in a different manner, allowing us to envision a desirable future and evaluate ways to work towards it or it advises us of the future we should steer clear of and aids us in ways of avoiding it. Science fiction is often observed in a dystopian setting. A dystopia is an imaginary world that intentionally overstates social problems in order to make a point about society's defects. In particular, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin is a science fiction based short story set in a dystopian society masquerading as a utopian society...
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...life like Disneyworld where they can get everything just in a second, of a scene in which everyone can go back home without being stuck in traffic jam for hours or, of a space where there is no pollution and diseases. However, despite the fact that such an ideal life has stayed in people’s mind, not too many people believe a real utopia exists. It is similar to when audiences watch a romantic movie with a perfect ending and tell themselves this can only happen on the screen where all the lines have been written and edited carefully. Without any hope for any possible alternatives, eventually, no one would strive to create a peaceful and fantasy world according to their dream. However, there is a country that is making the dream of a lot of people come true. In a recent decade, Singapore has been moving towards the idea of improving their social and economic problems through constructing the modern building projects. Needless to say, their significant achievement in economic social development has brought them opportunities to become one of the most stable economies in the world regardless of a limited space and sacred natural resources. Singapore is among the countries that has the lowest rate of unemployment, highest adequate living conditions and social pension, and fastest economic growth in Asia. Furthermore, it is also well known for the green environment and energy efficiency. Although Singapore is believed to be a clear example of how a utopian plan has improved human development...
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...there was a clash of cultures, with new ideas pushing away old ways and mayor cultures oppressing others. b. Immigration and migration shape the early United States, for example: The first person to be processed at Ellis Island was Annie Moore who arrived from Ireland on January 1, 1892. As the first immigrant Annie Moore was given a $10 gold piece. She soon was married and gave birth to eleven children. While Annie Moore was the first immigrant, she was definitely not alone. Some famous immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island included Charles Chaplin, Cary Grant, Harry Houdini, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is easy to see from this list how immigrants have changed the face of the United States. All of these famous people contributed to the United States, giving a bright future for innovative contributions to the young nation. c. The most important change in the United States ‘ involvement in foreign affairs from 1789 to 1877 was expansion of its territory. Marked by a treaty with France buying Louisiana territory doubling the United States, and other treaties with France, and Britain. The Treaty of Guadalupe added more territory and Texas being annexed. d. In the period 1789 until 1877, the signs that signs that the United States had developed a state constitutional democracy were such as the constitution and the bills of rights ratified, although women rights to vote were denied Elizabeth Candy Stanton continued the fight. Major...
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...The Future Beyond Utopia With the advent of future developments in science and technology, we will assign more and more decision making to machines. At present this is evident in military systems in which electronic sensors maintain the ideal flight characteristics in advanced aircraft. The capacities of computers today exceed five hundred trillion bits of information per second. The complexity of today's civilization is far too complex for human systems to manage without the assistance of electronic computers. Computers of today are relatively primitive compared to those that will evolve in the future. Eventually the management of social systems will call for require electronic sensors interconnected with all phases of the social sequences thus eliminating the need for politics. Today modern industrial plants have built in automatic inventory systems, which order materials such as bearings and other mechanical replacements well in advance. We believe it is now possible to achieve a society where people would be able to live longer, healthier, and more meaningful productive lives. In such a society, the measure of success would be based upon the fulfillment of one's individual pursuits rather than the acquisition of wealth, property, and power. Although many of the concepts presented here may appear as unattainable goals, all of the ideas are based upon known scientific principles. It is not my purpose to write an article that would be acceptable to people this is...
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...“Squat Grey Building” that is the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre; you will see the motto of the World State: Community, Identity, and Stability. These three words reflect the ultimate goal of the Utopia that is the World State. “Community” means that everyone within the Utopia must work together to maximize happiness for the society as a whole. “Identity” refers to the five classes of hereditary social groups that are created through genetic engineering. Finally, “Stability” refers to the ultimate goal of the Utopia. By creating similar people and censoring and controlling actions, the society looks to minimize conflict, risk, and overall change. The three goals of the World State are completely controlled through the use of science and technology in Brave New World, which thereby stripped its residents of all social aspects and personal freedoms. By creating the Brave New World Huxley shows the importance of technology and progress to society, which makes us stop and consider how our current progress and advancements in technology have affected our society as a whole. Before looking into how people in the World State are restricted from having any free will, it is important to define what it means to be human. In my opinion, all humans are born with free will. I would define free will as the equal and inalienable rights to be an individual who can make their own choices. The ability to act at one’s own discretion without constraint is simply the inherent...
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