A: Chance and luck will be a factor in Darcy’s Utopia, as elsewhere. But good luck attends the happy. Darcians will try to be happy, to avoid self-righteousness. The self-righteous seldom smile.
Q: Would you describe yourself as happy?
A: I’m getting there. I don’t have children, which makes it easier. To have these hostages to fortune wipes the smile from many a woman’s face. Consider Brenda. In Darcy’s Utopia parents will have some reassurance in the fact that at least the neighbours thought they were fit to rear children: some of the responsibility for failure, should failure there be, ‘will rest with the community. But I like to think the neighbours, the ten just persons, men and women both, who have seen you in the shops, who have watched you cross a road, who understand your body language, will make the right decision.
Q: Could we get back to this uniculture of yours? Don’t you mean monoculture?
A: No. Monoculture assumes the domination of the single majority culture: that ‘they’ will be subsumed into ‘us’. That the eaters of curry must learn to love fish and chips, that husbands of four must become husbands of one, that young blacks must drive cars in the fashion of elderly whites: that the custom and laws of the majority will prevail. In a uniculture this is not the case. A uniculture is a matter for rational decision: we will be prepared to make value judgements. Better a culture in which men have one wife and women need not shroud themselves in black, we’ll say. Or perhaps we won’t. Better one in which marriages are arranged than left to love. Let us all sing the Darcian Anthem every morning at ten a.m. Let men wear skirts, not women trousers. Let us all change our names four times in our lives. Let us take our education in our middle not our opening years. Or whatever is decided. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll change it. And if you don’t like it, you can live somewhere else. And we might even divide Darcy’s Utopia into four and have a different Mission Statement in each, and citizens can move to the one they prefer: or work to change the one they’re in, if they prefer. Oh yes, Darcy’s Utopia will be all freedom and hard work, and all alive and energetic with a perpetual sense of achievement. Who will need religion when heaven is here on earth?
Q: This unicultural society of yours. Isn’t it going to be rather dull? What about the richness, the diversity of the multicultural society in which all decent non-racist folk take such pleasure?
A: Goodness, how you do sometimes remind me of Bernard! How all-pervasive is the orthodoxy of right-thinking people. I have never heard a member of an ethnic minority obliged to dwell within the barbarous framework of a powerful, prosperous, white, allegedly Christian culture talk about the richness of the multicultural society. That is left for members of the host community to do, as it busies itself ghettoizing the minority; and as it ghettoizes it mumbles, and if you listen carefully you can just discern beneath the self-righteousness, the self-congratulation, the following: ‘Okay, okay, so you were having a hard time in your own country. You poor things! Come over here and join us by all means—but not too many of you, so we’ll vet you as you come in; and not make getting in pleasant or easy; and just please stick to your own districts, and keep your own religion and dance away to tambourines, or bow to the East, or whatever you like to do to remind you of home—or home as it used to be a hundred years ago but certainly isn’t now—and aren’t we clever, and kind, and good, the way we give you your roots back?, and with any luck your children will grow up well-behaved and pleasant; ours certainly aren’t; because your children come of a society which, being somewhere else and a long time ago, is probably better than ours. And speak your own language, please: we’ll even teach it to you in our schools to prove how understanding we are, just so long as you do our dirty work for less wages than our own kind are prepared to accept: just so long as you keep yourselves to yourselves, and don’t let your children marry ours, because what we’re all terrified of, so