ULTRAMONTANISME
UNITÉ (FR/EN)
UNIT or UNITY. n. In capitalist and hierarchical society, we improperly call “units” or “unities” particular agreements on common ends to any groupings. But these so-called unities, generally sectarian and partial — and even contradictory among themselves — sooner or later lead, except in rare exceptions, to conflicts, painful splits, and fiercely hostile oppositions. We know, moreover, that any organization involving the privilege of function is unjust, anti-unitary.
Very different is the anarchist unity founded on the pure love of free, happy and safe life, whose ideal is succinctly indicated in its motto: “To establish a social milieu that ensures for each individual the maximum well-being and freedom appropriate to each era.”
Such an ideal obviously implies a morality that justifies it, a morality of just reciprocity that we find in the following old and double aphorism: Do not do to others what you would not want done to you; but always act towards others as you would like to be acted towards you in identical circumstances. (Assuming, of course, a sufficient knowledge of the contemporary good.)
This just precept, however, encounters many transgressions, social consequences or regrettable lacks of conscience and illogical contradictions. In any case, it is this moral aphorism that constitutes the fundamental unitary criterion, since any deviation from its principle is absolutely incompatible with sympathetic unity. But experience teaches us to go beyond the limits of equal reciprocity, and to ask nothing above personal faculties, if we want to contribute to living and salutary unity. It is, in fact, necessary that the strong, the best gifted, work generously for the weak; and it is clear that all those who manifest such dispositions, form at all times and in all places, the best elite.
Despite certain erroneous assertions — and although it evolves through acquired knowledge — unity always depends more on the will than on knowledge, because blinding vanity is common, even among scholars. If the unitary basis is sentimental, its immediate and effective cause results everywhere from common needs, maintained or modified by shared tendencies and knowledge.
The trilogy of unity, deeply egalitarian and libertarian, is: orienting love, revealing science and productive work. This unity concerns all the normal and consistent egoisms of the civilizable world. Its natural and entirely effective hierarchy cannot engender any artificial dependence, any authority. It is, in all areas, a free manifestation of individual and collective life, exempt from petty, dogmatic, vicious and fatal uniformity,
Vital anarchist unity is not a relative and temporary agreement, but a permanent harmony with general and progressive tendencies, always correlative to time and means. It is, finally, the synthesis of enlightened love, ideally absolute, but effectively relative and conditional. Its element remains constantly individual and sympathetic, soliciting all good feelings and all knowledge useful to happiness, security, and world peace.
— A. Mauzé.
UNITÉ (PROLÉTARIENNE)
UNIVERS
URBANISME
UTILITARISME
UTOPIE — UTOPISTE
UTOPIA. — UTOPIAN. Whether we consider this term from a moral or material angle, or even from a social angle, the most commonly accepted meaning is that we consider as utopia everything that seems impossible to achieve. The domain of absolute impossibilities, of things that will never see the light of day, that cannot, no matter how hard we try to achieve them, take shape, that must always remain in the state of a dream, of a chimera, such is the one that suits utopia and those — the utopians — animated by this mad ardor to form imaginary and senseless projects.
Is it necessary to add that the anarchists, in whom the overly keen partisans of Authority see only the most incorrigible of utopians, have a somewhat different conception of utopia? Has not History, as well as experience and daily observation, long since convinced them of the perfect accuracy of Lamartine’s words that “utopias are often only premature truths,” no less than of the rigorous accuracy of Anatole France’s words that “the utopia of yesterday is, most often, only the reality of tomorrow”?
It is not rash to suggest that utopia is simply subject to the great law of Progress and that one cannot admit this law, as well as its innumerable and obvious manifestations, without, at the same time, considering utopia as a fact conceived, at a given moment, by some brilliant and audacious brain, but whose materialization only becomes effective after multiple and laborious gropings, painful and persevering efforts and the difficult conquest of all those who had long been skeptical about the definitive triumph of this fact.
Let us consider at once that the idea of utopia is in formal antagonism with the religious idea and that if the one (the idea of utopia, which, as we have seen, is included in the idea of progress) — that if the one was so long fought, stifled so to speak, it is because the other was, for centuries and centuries, completely dominant. But since modern times and, in an infinitely more sensible and rapid way, for some fifty years, in an era that finally saw the triumph of systems based on the observation and study of Nature, the notion of progress tends to develop and we see quite naturally many social plans or systems, considered until then as pure utopias, entering the domain of positive achievements.
Yes, as the Gods fade away, the will and power of men assert themselves! We no longer dare to tell the individual that all ideals of a happy life are placed in the past, that they must cast their gaze backwards! Without divine help, having, for gods only its own efforts, Humanity achieves, each day, some Progress and makes its own civilization, which it now knows it can no longer expect from the hands of a Creator!
The marvelous is, in fact, increasingly eliminated from the world and from humanity by the sole fact of a slow and continuous transformation in time, of a forward march making the intervention of the miracle totally useless, but requiring, on the other hand, a will to act, the use of all human knowledge, on which depends the solution of the various problems, considered until today as utopian, which abstract thought had posed!
Throughout the ages, Man has succeeded in triumphing over almost all the forces hostile to Nature. The attempts made, for example, a century ago, to enslave and domesticate the elements, attempts that then seemed most utopian, are today crowned with success and the conquests of progress in the material domain are such that one can boldly advance that the most daring, the most audacious conceptions are already permitted and assured of triumph in a more or less near future. Man has conquered Nature by making utopia a magnificent and fertile reality!
Is it absurd to claim that it could not be otherwise in both the moral and social domains?
Certainly, it is fitting to recognize that the progress, the transformations, the conquests accomplished by humanity on the material plane have not been accompanied by the same conquests, the same transformations and the same progress in the moral order and even less, perhaps, in the social domain. The individual has, without doubt, triumphed more easily over the hostile forces that surround them than over the impoverishing passions that they carry within them. Thanks to powerful devices, they rise without difficulty into the air; too rarely, alas! and very often still at the cost of a thousand efforts, they rise above a humanity where petty and vile feelings persist! They continue to struggle in the thousand lies of daily life and bring to the realization of this seductive social harmony so generously conceived by the “Utopians” of the 19th century only a will too weak, an energy too often failing!
Here, two conceptions clash, one declares that the individual will never free themselves from the thousand prejudices that obscure their reason, which a clearly hostile environment as well as a radically false education have only maintained and developed. A conception that is inspired by this theory by virtue of which progress, in the moral order, would be only a marking time, without taking into account this undeniable fact, obvious as the light of the sun, that since our ancestors have preserved us from many errors into which they have fallen, it becomes, consequently, quite logical that it is in our power to spare our descendants our own errors! It is noteworthy that the supporters of this conception, who readily declare themselves to be positive, enlightened minds, proclaim that the individual can never live without an authority which bends them to all the obligations and all the duties which life in society entails, from which follows, naturally, the classification, the categorization of individuals into masters and slaves, therefore: into rich and poor!
The other conception — that of the “utopians” who are anarchists — is based on the following considerations.
By honestly questioning History, do we not immediately measure the immensity of the path traveled by this single observation that, starting from a more than precarious liberty of which force was the only measure, the individual, by the various degrees of a freedom that is more or less guaranteed by what one could call a hierarchy of privileges, rises little by little to a liberty that their increasingly animated feeling of equality ensures and which will only be limited, after all, by the right of which they have an increasingly clear consciousness and that they tend, every day more, to recognize in their fellows?
They know, these irreducible “utopians,” that if the theory of uninterrupted progress is contradicted by a thousand facts, which show us, in fact, that a later state is not necessarily ahead of the one that precedes it; that if there are ebbs and flows, momentary stops, sometimes definitive setbacks and even new beginnings, it remains no less true that morality, as well as the notion of life of the 20th century for example, prevail — and by a large margin — over the abominable superstitions of the Catholic Middle Ages and that, in our days, however dark the hours we are living in, however disturbing the events of which we are and will still be witnesses, we are justified in affirming that, more and more, human right is replacing brutal force and divine grace; simple justice is replacing mystical love or the notion of charity; reason, the spirit of revolt, scientific experience to ecstasy, to the spirit of submission and to ignorance!
No more providential fatalism, but the certainty that time, circumstances and above all the individual himself remain the great and decisive factors of evolution, that the human being, the artisan of their destiny, imprints on history something of their activity and that, if it is true that the physical and intellectual environment modifies, to a large extent, characters, morals, institutions, it is nevertheless “from man that the creative will is born which constructs and reconstructs the world” (E. Reclus).
When anarchists dream of “final harmony,” when they aspire to the establishment of a just and fraternal society, from which all oppression would be banished, where human beings would finally cease to be dependent on and at the mercy of others, their adversaries — the supporters of the principle of authority — never fail to call them “utopians”! It is indeed very difficult to rise to this notion of facts, that there can only be two methods in social matters: one that consists in making society retrograde, in making it resolutely go backwards, and the other that wants men to go resolutely forwards. And, however painful may be the contradiction that exists between the new conception of the world, to which all truly enlightened and entirely disillusioned minds rally, and the old institutions struck dead, which find supporters only among those who derive all their privileges from them, it is absolutely necessary to make a choice between these two methods.
Now, anarchists are convinced that the salvation of Humanity cannot be in the past: they can therefore place all their hopes only in the future. Really anxious to finally put an end to the inner turmoil that occurs in the great majority of individuals, that is to say the perpetual disagreement between form and substance, they affirm and are able to prove that what Humanity needs above all, in order for it to know happiness, is the possibility for it to live in conformity with its own conceptions and views. May the obsolete forms disappear and new forms take their place which will be inspired only by sovereign reason and a healthy justice!
Men — as we have said — tend to free themselves from the Gods. On the other hand, progress teaches them truths, establishes principles from which results a morality infinitely deeper and otherwise sublime than all the religious moralities in use and which, in turn, have proven themselves powerless to develop noble feelings and to create joy and well-being. A new morality, which incites the individual to practice towards their fellows this great law of solidarity ,without which no civilization is possible or sustainable and on which will be based the society conceived by the anarchists and which future generations more virile and with a more active will will bring, from the “utopia” into the field of fertile realities by finally giving rise to the arrival of a Humanity that will live and develop in an atmosphere of truth and justice, conducive to the blossoming of feelings of fraternity and mutual aid!
— Achille Blicq.
UTOPISTES (LES) ET LA QUESTION SEXUELLE
