Читать книгу Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon - Страница 16

– So vast and profound a re-organisation of its manners and customs it’s hardly worth even dreaming of.

– But given the dream; a world in which utopianism ceases to be a dirty word: and a vision arises of a human society which echoes actual human needs; in which it’s recognised that daily nine-to-five work (if you’re lucky) is inappropriate in a prosperous technological society in which machines and computers do the donkey-work, and was never much cop anyway. (People wake and sleep in rhythm – sixteen hours on, eight hours off, roughly – but endeavour tends to come in bursts – weeks on, weeks off: how can nine-to-five be anything but a tedious pain?) In which over-manning is seen as desirable, and inflation is not a devil to be feared and loathed. In which everyone can walk to work. In which every child is a planned and wanted child and parenthood a matter of a joint opting in, not a failure to opt out, and compulsory parental leave (both parents) extends for six years (that would soon cut the birth rate): thirty million is probably a good workable level for the nation. In which school is not compulsory, but in which TV and film fiction is banned by order of the censor general: too much fiction is bad for you. So boredom, not the law, drives the young to school. In which people have enough confidence to see that the cloning of people is a perfectly possible route for humanity’s future. If nature creates the Taleban can human ingenuity do so much worse? Courage, courage!

Okay, I’m joking.

Failing all this, I’d settle for one little simple change in the law. That someone who leaves their employment because they’re expected to do something immoral or disgusting isn’t then declared to be wilfully unemployed and ineligible for unemployment or housing benefit. Employees once had the courage to blow whistles: now it is too difficult. It’s a pity. Societies are self-righting, given just half a chance.

‘Oh well, business as usual,’ was my mother’s sighing response to news of NATO’s bombing of Serbia. ‘How the menfolk love a war.’