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

who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or

who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or

brutalising surroundings that gave their gifts no scope, did in

Utopia encounter happier chances, and take up the development and

application of social theory—from the time of the first Utopists in

a steady onward progress down to the present hour. [Footnote: One

might assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four-fifths

of the Greek literature now lost to the world, there perished,

neglected, some book of elementary significance, some earlier

Novum Organum, that in Utopia survived to achieve the profoundest

consequences.] The differences of condition, therefore, had widened

with each successive year. Jesus Christ had been born into a liberal

and progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic Ocean

to the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall,

and Mahomet, instead of embodying the dense prejudices of Arab

ignorance, opened his eyes upon an intellectual horizon already

nearly as wide as the world.

 

And through this empire the flow of thought, the flow of intention,

poured always more abundantly. There were wars, but they were

conclusive wars that established new and more permanent relations,

that swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; there

were prejudices tempered to an ordered criticism, and hatreds that

merged at last in tolerant reactions. It was several hundred years

ago that the great organisation of the samurai came into its present

form. And it was this organisation’s widely sustained activities

that had shaped and established the World State in Utopia.

 

This organisation of the samurai was a quite deliberate invention.

It arose in the course of social and political troubles and

complications, analogous to those of our own time on earth, and was,

indeed, the last of a number of political and religious experiments

dating back to the first dawn of philosophical state-craft in

Greece. That hasty despair of specialisation for government that

gave our poor world individualism, democratic liberalism, and

anarchism, and that curious disregard of the fund of enthusiasm and

self-sacrifice in men, which is the fundamental weakness of worldly

economics, do not appear in the history of Utopian thought. All

that history is pervaded with the recognition of the fact

that self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than the

satisfaction of hunger; that it is an essential of a man’s existence

no doubt, and that under stress of evil circumstances it may as

entirely obsess him as would the food hunt during famine, but that

life may pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and effort.

Every sane person consists of possibilities beyond the unavoidable

needs, is capable of disinterested feeling, even if it amounts only

to enthusiasm for a sport or an industrial employment well done,

for an art, or for a locality or class. In our world now, as in

the Utopian past, this impersonal energy of a man goes out into

religious emotion and work, into patriotic effort, into artistic

enthusiasms, into games and amateur employments, and an enormous

proportion of the whole world’s fund of effort wastes itself in

religious and political misunderstandings and conflicts, and in

unsatisfying amusements and unproductive occupations. In a modern

Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there

must also be friction, conflicts and waste, but the waste will

be enormously less than in our world. And the co-ordination of

activities this relatively smaller waste will measure, will be the

achieved end for which the order of the samurai was first devised.

 

Inevitably such an order must have first arisen among a clash of

social forces and political systems as a revolutionary organisation.

It must have set before itself the attainment of some such Utopian

ideal as this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal imperfection,

realise. At first it may have directed itself to research and

discussion, to the elaboration of its ideal, to the discussion of a

plan of campaign, but at some stage it must have assumed a more

militant organisation, and have prevailed against and assimilated

the pre-existing political organisations, and to all intents and

purposes have become this present synthesised World State. Traces of

that militancy would, therefore, pervade it still, and a campaigning

quality—no longer against specific disorders, but against universal

human weaknesses, and the inanimate forces that trouble man—still

remain as its essential quality.

 

“Something of this kind,” I should tell my double, “had arisen in

our thought”—I jerk my head back to indicate an infinitely distant

planet—“just before I came upon these explorations. The idea had

reached me, for example, of something to be called a New Republic,

which was to be in fact an organisation for revolution something

after the fashion of your samurai, as I understand them—only most

of the organisation and the rule of life still remained to be

invented. All sorts of people were thinking of something in that way

about the time of my coming. The idea, as it reached me, was pretty

crude in several respects. It ignored the high possibility of a

synthesis of languages in the future; it came from a literary man,

who wrote only English, and, as I read him—he was a little vague in

his proposals—it was to be a purely English-speaking movement. And

his ideas were coloured too much by the peculiar opportunism of his

time; he seemed to have more than half an eye for a prince or a

millionaire of genius; he seemed looking here and there for support

and the structural elements of a party. Still, the idea of a

comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind

the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the

ostensible world was there.”

 

I added some particulars.

 

“Our movement had something of that spirit in the beginning,” said

my Utopian double. “But while your men seem to be thinking

disconnectedly, and upon a very narrow and fragmentary basis of

accumulated conclusions, ours had a fairly comprehensive science of

human association, and a very careful analysis of the failures of

preceding beginnings to draw upon. After all, your world must be as

full as ours was of the wreckage and decay of previous attempts;

churches, aristocracies, orders, cults….”

 

“Only at present we seem to have lost heart altogether, and now

there are no new religions, no new orders, no new cults—no

beginnings any more.”

 

“But that’s only a resting phase, perhaps. You were saying–-”

 

“Oh!—let that distressful planet alone for a time! Tell me how you

manage in Utopia.”

 

Section 2

 

The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not base

their schemes upon the classification of men into labour and

capital, the landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like. They

esteemed these as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to

statesmanship, and they looked for some practical and real

classification upon which to base organisation. [Footnote: In that

they seem to have profited by a more searching criticism of early

social and political speculations than our earth has yet undertaken.

The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just the

same primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenth

century—they began with the assumption that the general conditions

of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.] But, on the other

hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because

practically homogeneous, which underlies modern democratic methods

and all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to

the Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other

than provisional classifications, since every being is regarded as

finally unique, but for political and social purposes things have

long rested upon a classification of temperaments, which attends

mainly to differences in the range and quality and character of the

individual imagination.

 

This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served its

purpose to determine the broad lines of political organisation; it

was so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within

two or even three of its classes. But that was met by giving the

correlated organisation a compensatory looseness of play. Four main

classes of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the

Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are

supposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latter

are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They

are not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any

class by special breeding, simply because the intricate interplay

of heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes to

which people drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until

differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and woman) must

establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract

classification by his own quality, choice, and development….

 

The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a

wide range of types, but they agree in possessing imaginations that

range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to

bring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and

recognition. The scope and direction of the imaginative excursion

may vary very greatly. It may be the invention of something new or

the discovery of something hitherto unperceived. When the invention

or discovery is primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of

Poietic mind; when it is not so, we have the true scientific man.

The range of discovery may be narrowed as it is in the art of

Whistler or the science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide

extent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific

inquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher.

To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type, reacted upon by

circumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by human thought

and feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good or

beautiful, entered life through the poietic inspirations of man.

Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future must

come also through men of this same type, and it is a primary

essential to our modern idea of an abundant secular progress that

these activities should be unhampered and stimulated.

 

The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merging

insensibly along the boundary into the less representative

constituents of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a more

restricted range of imagination. Their imaginations do not range

beyond the known, experienced, and accepted, though within these

limits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly than members of

the former group. They are often very clever and capable people, but

they do not do, and they do not desire to do, new things. The more

vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable people in

the world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthy

than the Poietic types. They live,—while the Poietics are always

something of experimentalists with life. The characteristics of

either of these two classes may be associated with a good or bad

physique, with excessive or defective energy, with exceptional

keenness of the senses in some determinate direction or such-like

“bent,” and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may display

an imagination of restricted or of the most universal range. But a

fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that ideal

our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the

“Normal” human being. The very definition of the Poietic class

involves a certain abnormality.

 

The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this Kinetic class

according to the quality of their imaginative preferences, the Dan

and Beersheba, as it were, of this division. At one end is the

mainly intellectual, unoriginal type, which, with energy of

personality, makes an admirable judge or administrator and without

it an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, or common

scholar, or common scientific man; while at the other end