What is the ideal society?

 A common theme that runs though ancient and modern societies is the idea that, if isolated and handled properly, humankind can life in a more harmonious and fulfilling way than we typically do today.  History is filled with the stories of Utopian groups who have conceived of a way to live where all aspects of life may be different than world from which they have come, but the new "order" leads to better lives better lived.

I came across Thomas More's Utopia recently, which sparked my thinking.  If you Google it you will come across the Wiki summary, which is not bad.  I encourage you to find a copy of the English translation and read it.  I direct you to a chapter called, A Day In Utopia, in which More outlines the basic way of life for the people living there, and points out the advantages of the new way of living.  Along the way he points out that the basic problem with normal society is that it is based on the principle that The Rich Get Richer, and the Poor Get Poorer.  It was first published in 1516, in Latin, in Belgium.   He was hanged for heresy in 1535.

You remember Ralph Waldo Emerson, of course.  His Transcendentalists formed a utopian compound in the Concord, MA area in the 1820's.  It ran out of food in the first winter and didn't really succeed.  If you get a chance to read any of the accounts of the group and how they operated, it was a real collection of special people.  One guy would not wear clothes and would only eat crackers, for example.

The most successful group of that time was John Noyes' quasi-religious community in Oneida NY in the 1850's.  It persisted until a tornado almost wiped it out in 1878, but it exists today as the flatware company Oneida Ltd.  I don't think there remains the sort of living arrangement Noyes set out in his original vision (read about it and you will see just how different it was).  He had some strong feelings about sex, I can tell you.

Jim Jones and his band of religious zealots who "drank the Kool-Aid" in Guyana in the 1970's are another kind of societal group seeking to create a new way of living.  For many years we had the garlic-growing Love Isreal group in Arlington.  Remember them?

So, the question to be discussed is, What is the Ideal Society?  What sort of norms and values need to be shared in common to make one successful?

What is Becoming? What is Being?

One of the most reliable participants of this blog, Michelle, sent me an excerpt from Appendix G of Abraham Maslow's "Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences".  I believe this is the same Maslow who developed the Hierarchy of Need.  Anyway, this excerpt dealt with his attempt to describe the characteristics of Being, what he calls B-Values.   This got me to thinking...

I find that I need to sync with the “voice” the writer uses, especially when reading philosophy.  When I started reading the section, at first I thought I wasn’t going to make it.  Choppy sentences, half statements, and repeated phrases all leave me cold, often.  When I got to the 14 points and he offers what is essentially a “definition by thesaurus” I needed to scan ahead to see if it was going to make any sense.  I then went back and read through the words, and I started to get into his head a bit. 

The Becoming/Being process isn’t intuitive for most people, and it took me a long time to take the concept seriously.   The final paragraph in this section deals with this, of course.  Joining with the universe on a primal level and being fully human are not my personal definitions for Being, but they are certainly lofty ideals.  My favorite statement in this arena is “become who you are”.  This is the essence of Becoming, to me.  I believe that when we are in harmony with our personal essence, we can just Be, as in Be Ourselves.  This is Being.  Becoming and Being.  Finding harmony in our essences.

I looked up the origin of Becoming, and found this:

In the philosophical study of ontology, the concept of becoming originated in ancient Greece with the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who in the sixth century BC, said that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming (i.e., everything is impermanent).

As usual, all of modern philosophy is but a footnote to the Greeks.