The
Philosopher's City
The last fortress of
indoctrination had been torn down. The last palace of authority had been turned
into a museum. The last watering hole of greed and stupidity had been abandoned
to the foxes. This was now the philosophers city. It looked much as it always
had. The rows of marble streets and Greek columns imagined in the heads of
idealists was always just a romance. Only the people inside the city were any
different. The invisible web of law and hierarchy called 'order' had changed
with them.
Homelessness
and poverty were impossible here. The doors to every house were left open (only
the individual rooms had locks). Entering without knocking would earn a dozen
disdainful looks from the current occupants. This was the law. If someone stole
from another persons complex who would they sell it to in a place where
currency was impossible? Material greed had also been knocked on the head.
Starvation
was also physically impossible. Not only had the houses been combined into
massive complexes, with numerous open kitchens spread throughout them, but the
public cafés and tea houses were always staffed, inviting passers-by indoors.
They wanted to feed people. The granaries were always looking to get rid
of their overflowing stores, and the greenhouses were free to roam; the
tomatoes to pluck, or mint-leaves to pick.
Boredom
was impossible here. If a philosopher did not have a question on their mind,
then the city would provide it for them.
And without a shadow of a doubt, everyone had the capacity to be a
philosopher. Anyone looking for a new challenge could find it quite easily.
Debates raged on street corners, a group of friends huddled in a park and
discussed their ideas, packed lecture halls filled with excitement as grand new
ideas were discussed by the more learned ones. And if the citizen was tired of
the talk and needed grittier work, there were a thousand and one unskilled
tasks that needed doing.
A
workshop could easily be booked and materials acquired, the labs were
looking for geniuses and technicians alike, the larger farms and factories
outside the city were run by people looking for a break from it all. New skills
were always waiting to be learnt, and it was not hard to find the confidence to
acquire them in such an encouraging environment.
This
was the philosophers city, and nothing was banned, for there was no authority
to ban it. Life's urges were channelled, like bubbling water through careful
canals. In the Beirut quarter dancers would fling and eroticism would
flower, honey-wine flowed by the gallon and pigs dripping in fat spun on their
flaming spits. Shamelessly they explored their perversions and their pleasures.
Naturally
this repulsed those in the Epicurean quarter (known as the garden of the
city), who removed themselves from the more visceral aspects of life. Not
because they found the rampant desire-chasing immoral, but they considered such
desires to be harmful to their state of happiness. Here the plainer
epicureans could live in contentment amongst the like-minded, conducting
experiments of both thought and science in their quest for knowledge, and
flowering in gentle creativity and self-exploration.
In
the Warriors quarter, leaders and authoritarians were hunkered over
chess boards and wargames, commanding illusory armies across bloodless
battlefields. Tournaments were rife, alliances and rivalries bloomed, tribes
and clans forged and fell apart. The soldiers sparred with foam weapons and armour,
each striving to become a master of their art. When the moon was high and the
(digital) wolves howled, they would take to the field beneath their home-made
banners and play at war. Violence was moved to an unreal plane, and violence
outside it became impossible.
Then
there were the 'wilds', dominating the least populated quarter of the city. You
did not tread too deep into this forestland without your enthusiastic guides,
for bears lurked among the overgrown brush and scrub-land, and the howls of a
fox by moonlight could scare a city-lubber out of their wits. To make fire here
required skill, to make shelter a different form of intelligence, to eat a
patience for berries and seeds. Harder still was the discovery of meaning, here
in the forest where the sky was obscured and the perceivable world shrunk down
to the inside of a wooden nut.
And
that was it. Was there a single essential thing the philosophers city was built
upon? I would not dare to say. Yet if I had to guess, it would be this
realization: that everything around us today is the result of an idea. This
means it is changeable. We are already living in someone else's utopia (and
it is usually the utopia of someone rich and powerful, shaped to fulfil their
own sense of self-importance). This order is not inevitable, and not built on
anything natural. For there is no utopia
in our nature, only the way of the hunter, which for so long was nestled in the
gaian bosom, doing what it could to survive. We can neither call our nature
good nor evil, for these moral values come much later. Nor can we paint the
natural state of mankind with the utopian brush of nostalgia.
It
is culture that is the true creator of our world. The values surrounding
us, that have become invisible through their absorption into our routines, are
just that - artificially created values. Physical processes of the body we
think manifest themselves in inevitable 'evil' ways, can actually be
channelled, and the darker side of our nature can be controlled, once and for
all.
Selim 'Selim' Talat
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Utopia' Issue 44
