their own homes—and with any luck comes to understand, yes, there is an aspiration or so floating around out there, and, if he, she, hasn’t seen too many horror movies, been too beaten up in body and mind, regains a little faith in a world at least potentially redeemable. He, she, grows up into a mortgage-paying, law-abiding adult who at least wants to give his, her, own children a better chance. And may or may not have the resolution, the constancy, so to do. Not to love, which is easy, but to be in truth, in fact, in deed, lovable. I hear the divorced parent saying, ‘Oh, the kids are all right. They know I love them,’ but it isn’t true. The kids are not all right. You may love the kids, but you are not worthy of their love. You look after yourself, not them. You have betrayed them, and they hate you for it.
Q: Well, that is a matter of opinion. And this notion of an ad-hoc committee of neighbours, with power of life and death, is surely very eccentric.
A: What are juries but ad-hoc committees of neighbours? Juries saw no problem deciding whom they were to despatch from this world: let similar bodies decide who is to come into it.
Q: It seems to me that the citizens of Darcy’s Utopia are going to be kept very busy.
A: Indeed. Idleness, in this nation of no work, will not be encouraged. There will be no ‘training in leisure’. Darcians will be hard at work, repairing the past, safeguarding the future; they will have no need of theme parks. Darcy’s Utopia has a Mission Statement, as does any corporate enterprise in the business world. ‘We are working towards a secular, unicultural, multiracial society.’ When citizens are called upon to make up their minds, pass laws or make regulations—their decisions will be infused with the light cast by this statement, and so by and large will work towards this end. It may be hard to take a step in the right direction, but it will be still harder to take a step in the wrong. We have a time scale, too. We give ourselves two hundred years to achieve it. If it doesn’t work, we rethink.
Q: Secular? But isn’t religion a civilizing force? Aren’t many of our social problems due to the decline of religion?
A: Now look. Nice orderly home-and-family-loving people are the ones who believe in God and even still go to church. They are nice people: they believe that everything ought to be fair, that is to say that virtue is rewarded and villainy punished. Since they can’t see it happening on earth they invent a heaven in which it does. And a kind of consensus develops amongst right-minded people in your neighbourhood, that if you keep to certain rules and rituals then by God, by magic, you’ll get to heaven, you won’t even have to die. Eat the wafer, chant the lyric, bow to Mecca: please God and he’ll be kind. But these people are not nice, orderly, home-and-family-loving because they believe in God. The temperament comes first. Acknowledging God is effect, not cause. And institutionalize the religion, any religion, and you’re in trouble. Nice people become guilty people, cruel people, unhappy people, trapped in belief structures their temperaments don’t agree with, taught peculiar beliefs in school, threatened by hell and afflicted by superstition. And what terrible damage they do, have done through the centuries, from the Inquisitor General to Stalin, to your young neighbour in the IRA who believes in the Catholic God and uses that to justify his murdering you in your bed, to the Mullah who whips up the faithful to civil strife in the name of Allah, to the Moonie who steals your children’s money and affections.
People like rules: it is not good for them to have them. The individual must come to his, her, own decision as to where morality lies. Do what you like in your own home, worship whatever God you please, but shut up about it in public. In Darcy’s Utopia church services of various denominations will exists and blind eyes will no doubt be turned. Common sense will prevail. But the jury of neighbours who decide upon your fertility might not look too kindly upon you if they think you are going to bring up your children as Jehovah’s Witnesses or Servants of Baal, or use the terror of hell as a way of controlling them: or beat the