The City of Utopia: Amaurotum
The City of Utopia: Amaurotum
More, T 1964, ‘The best state of the Commonwealth’, ‘The Cities, especially Amaurotum’, and ‘social realations’, in E Surtz (eds.) Utopia, Book II, Yale University Press, New Haven, pp59-66, 75-81.
The reading seems to be very similar to the ideas expressed in Alois Huxleys The Island published in 1962. Amaurotum being an idyllic island isolated 15 miles offshore from an existing continent. The island, based of a unidentified amount of separate nation states that culminate in a senate, or a congress to decide issues has ties with the socialist or communist notions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles.
Amaurotum is seen in the time when there was no mass transport, where horse and cart were the main means of cargo shipping and walking for human transport. Thus the distances of cities are relegated to this. Each city has a sufficient hinterland to support its needs. However a mere 12 miles radius may not be enough to feed a cities population of approximately 60000 (not including the country) strong “But that the city neither be depopulated nor grow beyond measure, provision is made that no household have fewer than ten adults or no more than sixteen adults; there are six thousand such households in each city” . For a Utopia one wonders at such ability of agricultural mass production.
The cities themselves spread what food around that is surplus to other nation states that surround them, as each nation state and each city does this, is not the practice of spreading the good eternal, as each one individually in receiving goods from the other must pass them on? Rather a utopian ideal would be to send the surplus to an individual non-partisan city that would centralise the spreading equally of the provisions to the other cities (this is mentioned however is statement of what happens not how it happens).
What truly speaks from the article is the colonising mindset and dogma that it was written with. “The inhabitants who refuse to live according to their laws, they drive from the territory which they carve out from themselves… They consider is a most just cause for war when a people which does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste nevertheless forbids the use and possession of it to others.” When one thinks of the colonisation of Australia, this rings true, for the hopes and dreams of Australia containing an inland sea. When More describes the lake one can see ties with Amaurotum; “As the winds are kept off by the land which everywhere surrounds it, the bay is like a huge lake, smooth rather than rough, and thus converts almost the whole centre of the country into a harbour.”
Much of the ideas of family and community living, the rarity of visitors, the idea that no inhabitant should slay animals is repeated in Huxleys The Island especially the phrase “no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it.” But one must ask if indeed this relegated type of life would truly be enough to satisfy a vast population size, with no mention of real law and order or punishment. Could this seeming utopia where perfection wins simply turn into a cackotopia where perfection IS? Perhaps we should listen to John Stuart Mills Brittish Parliament speech in 1868. In that speech, Mill said, "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable" .
Perhaps the best way to describe the human need for an Oasis is to take an exerpt from 'The Island' p.86:
“Give us this day our daily faith, but deliver us, dear god, from Belief.”
This was as far as he had got this morning; and now there was a new section, the fifth.
“Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is the price we must pay for being the sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”
Utopia then is the idea that those two thirds of unhappiness in the human condition can be controlled, but as ‘aspirants to liberation’ would this control work? and for how long?
More, T 1964, ‘The best state of the Commonwealth’, ‘The Cities, especially Amaurotum’, and ‘social realations’, in E Surtz (eds.) Utopia, Book II, Yale University Press, New Haven, pp59-66, 75-81.
The reading seems to be very similar to the ideas expressed in Alois Huxleys The Island published in 1962. Amaurotum being an idyllic island isolated 15 miles offshore from an existing continent. The island, based of a unidentified amount of separate nation states that culminate in a senate, or a congress to decide issues has ties with the socialist or communist notions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles.
Amaurotum is seen in the time when there was no mass transport, where horse and cart were the main means of cargo shipping and walking for human transport. Thus the distances of cities are relegated to this. Each city has a sufficient hinterland to support its needs. However a mere 12 miles radius may not be enough to feed a cities population of approximately 60000 (not including the country) strong “But that the city neither be depopulated nor grow beyond measure, provision is made that no household have fewer than ten adults or no more than sixteen adults; there are six thousand such households in each city” . For a Utopia one wonders at such ability of agricultural mass production.
The cities themselves spread what food around that is surplus to other nation states that surround them, as each nation state and each city does this, is not the practice of spreading the good eternal, as each one individually in receiving goods from the other must pass them on? Rather a utopian ideal would be to send the surplus to an individual non-partisan city that would centralise the spreading equally of the provisions to the other cities (this is mentioned however is statement of what happens not how it happens).
What truly speaks from the article is the colonising mindset and dogma that it was written with. “The inhabitants who refuse to live according to their laws, they drive from the territory which they carve out from themselves… They consider is a most just cause for war when a people which does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste nevertheless forbids the use and possession of it to others.” When one thinks of the colonisation of Australia, this rings true, for the hopes and dreams of Australia containing an inland sea. When More describes the lake one can see ties with Amaurotum; “As the winds are kept off by the land which everywhere surrounds it, the bay is like a huge lake, smooth rather than rough, and thus converts almost the whole centre of the country into a harbour.”
Much of the ideas of family and community living, the rarity of visitors, the idea that no inhabitant should slay animals is repeated in Huxleys The Island especially the phrase “no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it.” But one must ask if indeed this relegated type of life would truly be enough to satisfy a vast population size, with no mention of real law and order or punishment. Could this seeming utopia where perfection wins simply turn into a cackotopia where perfection IS? Perhaps we should listen to John Stuart Mills Brittish Parliament speech in 1868. In that speech, Mill said, "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians, or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable" .
Perhaps the best way to describe the human need for an Oasis is to take an exerpt from 'The Island' p.86:
“Give us this day our daily faith, but deliver us, dear god, from Belief.”
This was as far as he had got this morning; and now there was a new section, the fifth.
“Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is the price we must pay for being the sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.”
Utopia then is the idea that those two thirds of unhappiness in the human condition can be controlled, but as ‘aspirants to liberation’ would this control work? and for how long?
If I revisited this reading it would be prevalent to mention the comments of the roman emperor about cities requiring sufficient land to grow (vitruvious)
ReplyDeleteIncluding utopian ideologies such as Plato and republic, and no doubt the Niccomachean ethics by Aristotle.