Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The Golden Rose of Utopia

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.

--Eric Fromm

It is comforting to think that at some future date humanity will take stock of its successes and mistakes, its errors in judgment and its ability to surmount obstacles long enough to see where Utopia lies. Utopia is that perfect world we are sure we can find if we only look hard enough. I’m sure most of us would settle for a minor Utopia if it brought peace and a way to create good at the same time.

Here is a story of two such attempts and a hint at what we may have learned from them:
Tucked away in a remote spot in Indiana, USA, is one of the few examples in America of a community that owes its early creation to the hopes and dreams of communal living. New Harmony, Indiana,in the center of America,was founded in the early 1800’s by George Rapp and his group of Ex-Lutheran Christian "Rappites" from Pennsylvania. Rapp later sold the property to intellectuals led by the Englishman, Robert Dale Owen. New Harmony exists today as a sad example of man’s inability to find harmony in communal life--two communities, one founded on religion, and one established on the love of knowledge; both floundered and fell, unable to realize their dream of a Utopian world.
After the failure of the religious Rappite group in the 1820s, Owen's intellectuals sailed down the Ohio River on what history knows as "A boatload of knowledge," and they eagerly put their plans for a perfect society based on reason and good will into effect. In spite of their good intensions, lack of communal interest and, perhaps, a bit of laziness, caused Robert Owen's dream to also collapse.
What is left today in New Harmony are symbols of disappointment and continued hopes and dreams: A Roofless Church, commissioned by Owens’s granddaughter, who believed that only under the open sky could all men come together in prayer; a Labyrinth, or maze, symbolizing man’s complicated, puzzling life-journey, and a stone commemorating Paul Tillich, a Christian existentialist minister, whose ashes are scattered in the park underneath the large sycamore trees. Tillich loved this community and on his stone is this Tillich quotation:
"Man and nature belong together in their created glory – in their tragedy
and in their salvation."

His memorial is dedicated to the human bridge linking philosophy, theology and technology--the mind and spirit working together to craft a world dedicated to the common good of man: a Utopia, a dream, a salvation. Is the final answer really to be found on that human bridge? Knowledge alone wasn’t enough, religion alone wasn’t the answer, at least in the form presented, and technology alone simply provides toys for our amusement or our destruction. If we could just take a step beyond our single-minded attitudes we might have something to celebrate.

Longman Dictionary

Education Fire

News

%