A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Topographical

 

Section 1

 

The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental

aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin

quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and

static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the

forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a

healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in

an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other

virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Gods

grew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincible

dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic,

must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading

to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome

the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now

not citadels, but ships of state. For one ordered arrangement of

citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness safe and assured

to them and their children for ever, we have to plan “a flexible

common compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of

individualities may converge most effectually upon a comprehensive

onward development.” That is the first, most generalised difference

between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias

that were written in the former time.

 

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible,

if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole

and happy world. Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed,

impossible, but most distinctly impracticable, by every scale that

reaches only between to-day and to-morrow. We are to turn our backs

for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is,

and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing

that perhaps might be, to the projection of a State or city “worth

while,” to designing upon the sheet of our imaginations the picture

of a life conceivably possible, and yet better worth living than

our own. That is our present enterprise. We are going to lay down

certain necessary starting propositions, and then we shall proceed

to explore the sort of world these propositions give us….

 

It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for awhile

to be free from the carping note that must needs be audible when

we discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves from

practical difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is good

to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the

brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we

think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.

 

There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. This is to be a

holiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all that,

we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to have our

untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to his

Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of things

together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble,

perfect—wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as

it pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as good in

its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world before the

Fall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out into the

possibilities of space and time. In space and time the pervading

Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. Our

proposal here is upon a more practical plane at least than that.

We are to restrict ourselves first to the limitations of human

possibility as we know them in the men and women of this world

to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of

nature. We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons,

sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and

vermin, out of men and women with like passions, like uncertainties

of mood and desire to our own. And, moreover, we are going to accept

this world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation towards

it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the mood of the Western

peoples, whose purpose is to survive and overcome. So much we adopt

in common with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world of

Here and Now.

 

Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian precedents,

we may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone of public

thought may be entirely different from what it is in the present

world. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict of

life, within the possibilities of the human mind as we know it. We

permit ourselves also a free hand with all the apparatus of

existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself, with houses,

roads, clothing, canals, machinery, with laws, boundaries,

conventions, and traditions, with schools, with literature and

religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in

fact, that it lies within man’s power to alter. That, indeed, is the

cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the

Republic and Laws of Plato, and More’s Utopia, Howells’ implicit

Altruria, and Bellamy’s future Boston, Comte’s great Western

Republic, Hertzka’s Freeland, Cabet’s Icaria, and Campanella’s City

of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the

hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from

tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude

possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such

speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that

regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human

power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past,

and to evade, initiate, endeavour, and overcome.

 

Section 2

 

There are very definite artistic limitations also.

 

There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about

Utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively

jejune. That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is

largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised

people. In almost every Utopia—except, perhaps, Morris’s “News from

Nowhere”—one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical

and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy,

beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever.

Too often the prospect resembles the key to one of those large

pictures of coronations, royal weddings, parliaments, conferences,

and gatherings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead of a

face, each figure bears a neat oval with its index number legibly

inscribed. This burthens us with an incurable effect of unreality,

and I do not see how it is altogether to be escaped. It is a

disadvantage that has to be accepted. Whatever institution has

existed or exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, by

virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect of realness

and rightness no untried thing may share. It has ripened, it has

been christened with blood, it has been stained and mellowed by

handling, it has been rounded and dented to the softened contours

that we associate with life; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine

of tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the thing that is

merely suggested, however rational, however necessary, seems strange

and inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its

unqualified angles and surfaces.

 

There is no help for it, there it is! The Master suffers with the

last and least of his successors. For all the humanity he wins to,

through his dramatic device of dialogue, I doubt if anyone has ever

been warmed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic of Plato; I

doubt if anyone could stand a month of the relentless publicity of

virtue planned by More…. No one wants to live in any community of

intercourse really, save for the sake of the individualities he

would meet there. The fertilising conflict of individualities is the

ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no more

than schemes for bettering that interplay. At least, that is how

life shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions. Until you

bring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universe

ceases when you shiver the mirror of the least of individual

minds.

 

Section 3

 

No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia.

Time was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise

sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from

outward force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive

war, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in theory, like

China and Japan through many centuries of effectual practice, held

themselves isolated from intruders. Such late instances as Butler’s

satirical “Erewhon,” and Mr. Stead’s queendom of inverted sexual

conditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan method of

slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule. But

the whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of any

such enclosures. We are acutely aware nowadays that, however subtly

contrived a State may be, outside your boundary lines the epidemic,

the breeding barbarian or the economic power, will gather its

strength to overcome you. The swift march of invention is all for

the invader. Now, perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a

narrow pass; but what of that near to-morrow when the flying machine

soars overhead, free to descend at this point or that? A state

powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be

powerful enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively

ruling, yet passively acquiescent in all other human organisations,

and so responsible for them altogether. World-state, therefore, it

must be.

 

That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central Africa, or in

South America, or round about the pole, those last refuges of

ideality. The floating isle of La Cite Morellyste no longer avails.

We need a planet. Lord Erskine, the author of a Utopia (“Armata”)

that might have been inspired by Mr. Hewins, was the first of all

Utopists to perceive this—he joined his twin planets pole to pole

by a sort of umbilical cord. But the modern imagination, obsessed

by physics, must