Dylan Evans is in some danger of beating Madeleine Bunting into second place for the Madeleine Bunting Prize for the most representative Madeleine Bunting article. He it was, you may remember, who back in June shared with readers of the Guardian his laughable views about Beethoven; and he, equally, was it who, a month later, vouchsafed to us his cramped and miserable views about the ordinary run of his fellow human beings. Today Evans has been let loose again, in the same place, on the subject of utopia. There is certainly something to be said for utopian thinking. It can help to shine a critical light on things that are wrong with the world as it is - which is plenty. But it does make a difference whether or not its advocate has some reasonable purchase on current realities. Dylan Evans's (com licença) critique of the present is pure Bunting. He writes:
Look at the way we live now, in the west. We grow up in increasingly fragmented communities, hardly speaking to the people next door, and drive to work in our self-contained cars. We work in standardised offices and stop at the supermarket on our way home to buy production-line food which we eat without relish. There is no great misery, no hunger, and no war. But nor is there great passion or joy. Despite our historically unprecedented wealth, more people than ever before suffer from depression.What can you do here but fall about and cackle helplessly? I just love 'self-contained cars'. Better would be cars which you can fall out of so as to fall into other people's. Then there's 'we eat without relish' (hey, you could pick some up at that supermarket) and 'nor is there great passion or joy'. Well, speak for yourself, why don't you? More seriously, read some of what this guy wrote and then try distinguishing between serious human problems and dinner-party chat. Even more seriously, try not to write that...
... liberal democracy on its own is a limp, anaemic idea.There is room for improvement, it is to be hoped, on what liberal democracy has so far managed. But it is the indispensable historical starting point towards anything that might be better than it, and 'limp' and 'anaemic' is not what anyone would say who had had to suffer the alternatives.