"Not in Utopia - subterranean fields, -
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, - the place where, in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!"

That's Wordsworth, in The Prelude

But I still think that there's truth in what Oscar Wilde said about us needing to have Utopia somewhere in our map of the world. And he wasn't talking about some foreign country where they've got it all right - the false utopias that devastated this century. (And the fantasy of the triumphant Free Market System is just another of these.)

We have to have some picture in our minds of how it could be better, so that we can look at what we have, and see that it falls short of what we need, and doesn't have to be that way. That's what Thomas More was doing when he wrote Utopia, he wasn't suggesting that it was a perfect society that should be imposed on Tudor England, he was presenting it as a way of measuring how far Tudor England fell short of what it should have been.

Thee was some discussion on the radio about the best way to describe this past century, and it set me thinking.

I decided that the best way to describe would be as The Wasted Century. That's "wasted" in three senses - in the devastation we achieved, in our failure to make good use of the amazing resources we have obtained, and in the prevailing sense of exhaustion and disillusion, like some kind of collective hangover.

Which paradoxically makes me think things are going to start getting better. I think the protest om Seattle (for all it's downside, which I do not disregard) was a token of better days to come.