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

is the

mainly emotional, unoriginal man, the type to which—at a low level

of personal energy—my botanist inclines. The second type includes,

amidst its energetic forms, great actors, and popular politicians

and preachers. Between these extremes is a long and wide region of

varieties, into which one would put most of the people who form the

reputable workmen, the men of substance, the trustworthy men and

women, the pillars of society on earth.

 

Below these two classes in the Utopian scheme of things, and merging

insensibly into them, come the Dull. The Dull are persons of

altogether inadequate imagination, the people who never seem to

learn thoroughly, or hear distinctly, or think clearly. (I believe

if everyone is to be carefully educated they would be considerably

in the minority in the world, but it is quite possible that will not

be the reader’s opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary

line.) They are the stupid people, the incompetent people, the

formal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organised

State, should, as a class, gravitate towards and below the minimum

wage that qualifies for marriage. The laws of heredity are far too

mysterious for such offspring as they do produce to be excluded from

a fair chance in the world, but for themselves, they count neither

for work nor direction in the State.

 

Finally, with a bold disregard of the logician’s classificatory

rules, these Utopian statesmen who devised the World State, hewed

out in theory a class of the Base. The Base may, indeed, be either

poietic, kinetic, or dull, though most commonly they are the last,

and their definition concerns not so much the quality of their

imagination as a certain bias in it, that to a statesman makes it a

matter for special attention. The Base have a narrower and more

persistent egoistic reference than the common run of humanity; they

may boast, but they have no frankness; they have relatively great

powers of concealment, and they are capable of, and sometimes have

an aptitude and inclination towards, cruelty. In the queer phrasing

of earthly psychology with its clumsy avoidance of analysis, they

have no “moral sense.” They count as an antagonism to the State

organisation.

 

Obviously, this is the rudest of classifications, and no Utopian has

ever supposed it to be a classification for individual application,

a classification so precise that one can say, this man is “poietic,”

and that man is “base.” In actual experience these qualities mingle

and vary in every possible way. It is not a classification for

Truth, but a classification to an end. Taking humanity as a

multitude of unique individuals in mass, one may, for practical

purposes, deal with it far more conveniently by disregarding its

uniquenesses and its mixed cases altogether, and supposing it to be

an assembly of poietic, kinetic, dull, and base people. In many

respects it behaves as if it were that. The State, dealing as it

does only with non-individualised affairs, is not only justified in

disregarding, but is bound to disregard, a man’s special

distinction, and to provide for him on the strength of his prevalent

aspect as being on the whole poietic, kinetic, or what not. In a

world of hasty judgments and carping criticism, it cannot be

repeated too often that the fundamental ideas of a modern Utopia

imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities, a

certain universal compensatory looseness of play.

 

Section 3

 

Now these Utopian statesmen who founded the World State put the

problem of social organisation in the following fashion:—To

contrive a revolutionary movement that shall absorb all existing

governments and fuse them with itself, and that must be rapidly

progressive and adaptable, and yet coherent, persistent, powerful,

and efficient.

 

The problem of combining progress with political stability had never

been accomplished in Utopia before that time, any more than it has

been accomplished on earth. Just as on earth, Utopian history was a

succession of powers rising and falling in an alternation of

efficient conservative with unstable liberal States. Just as on

earth, so in Utopia, the kinetic type of men had displayed a more or

less unintentional antagonism to the poietic. The general

life-history of a State had been the same on either planet. First,

through poietic activities, the idea of a community has developed,

and the State has shaped itself; poietic men have arisen first in

this department of national life, and then that, and have given

place to kinetic men of a high type—for it seems to be in their

nature that poietic men should be mutually repulsive, and not

succeed and develop one another consecutively—and a period of

expansion and vigour has set in. The general poietic activity has

declined with the development of an efficient and settled social and

political organisation; the statesman has given way to the

politician who has incorporated the wisdom of the statesman with his

own energy, the original genius in arts, letters, science, and every

department of activity to the cultivated and scholarly man. The

kinetic man of wide range, who has assimilated his poietic

predecessor, succeeds with far more readiness than his poietic

contemporary in almost every human activity. The latter is by his

very nature undisciplined and experimental, and is positively

hampered by precedents and good order. With this substitution of the

efficient for the creative type, the State ceases to grow, first in

this department of activity, and then in that, and so long as its

conditions remain the same it remains orderly and efficient. But it

has lost its power of initiative and change; its power of adaptation

is gone, and with that secular change of conditions which is the law

of life, stresses must arise within and without, and bring at last

either through revolution or through defeat the release of fresh

poietic power. The process, of course, is not in its entirety

simple; it may be masked by the fact that one department of activity

may be in its poietic stage, while another is in a phase of

realisation. In the United States of America, for example, during

the nineteenth century, there was great poietic activity in

industrial organisation, and none whatever in political philosophy;

but a careful analysis of the history of any period will show the

rhythm almost invariably present, and the initial problem before the

Utopian philosopher, therefore, was whether this was an inevitable

alternation, whether human progress was necessarily a series of

developments, collapses, and fresh beginnings, after an interval of

disorder, unrest, and often great unhappiness, or whether it was

possible to maintain a secure, happy, and progressive State beside

an unbroken flow of poietic activity.

 

Clearly they decided upon the second alternative. If, indeed, I am

listening to my Utopian self, then they not only decided the problem

could be solved, but they solved it.

 

He tells me how they solved it.

 

A modern Utopia differs from all the older Utopias in its

recognition of the need of poietic activities—one sees this new

consideration creeping into thought for the first time in the

phrasing of Comte’s insistence that “spiritual” must precede

political reconstruction, and in his admission of the necessity of

recurrent books and poems about Utopias—and at first this

recognition appears to admit only an added complication to a problem

already unmanageably complex. Comte’s separation of the activities

of a State into the spiritual and material does, to a certain

extent, anticipate this opposition of poietic and kinetic, but the

intimate texture of his mind was dull and hard, the conception

slipped from him again, and his suppression of literary activities,

and his imposition of a rule of life upon the poietic types, who are

least able to sustain it, mark how deeply he went under. To a large

extent he followed the older Utopists in assuming that the

philosophical and constructive problem could be done once for all,

and he worked the results out simply under an organised kinetic

government. But what seems to be merely an addition to the

difficulty may in the end turn out to be a simplification, just as

the introduction of a fresh term to an intricate irreducible

mathematical expression will at times bring it to unity.

 

Now philosophers after my Utopian pattern, who find the ultimate

significance in life in individuality, novelty and the undefined,

would not only regard the poietic element as the most important in

human society, but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility of

its organisation. This, indeed, is simply the application to the

moral and intellectual fabric of the principles already applied in

discussing the State control of reproduction (in Chapter the Sixth,

section 2). But just as in the case of births it was possible for

the State to frame limiting conditions within which individuality

plays more freely than in the void, so the founders of this modern

Utopia believed it possible to define conditions under which every

individual born with poietic gifts should be enabled and encouraged

to give them a full development, in art, philosophy, invention,

or discovery. Certain general conditions presented themselves as

obviously reasonable:—to give every citizen as good an education

as he or she could acquire, for example; to so frame it that the

directed educational process would never at any period occupy the

whole available time of the learner, but would provide throughout

a marginal free leisure with opportunities for developing

idiosyncrasies, and to ensure by the expedient of a minimum wage

for a specified amount of work, that leisure and opportunity did

not cease throughout life.

 

But, in addition to thus making poietic activities universally

possible, the founders of this modern Utopia sought to supply

incentives, which was an altogether more difficult research, a

problem in its nature irresolvably complex, and admitting of no

systematic solution. But my double told me of a great variety of

devices by which poietic men and women were given honour and

enlarged freedoms, so soon as they produced an earnest of their

quality, and he explained to me how great an ambition they might

entertain.

 

There were great systems of laboratories attached to every municipal

force station at which research could be conducted under the most

favourable conditions, and every mine, and, indeed, almost every

great industrial establishment, was saddled under its lease with

similar obligations. So much for poietic ability and research in

physical science. The World State tried the claims of every living

contributor to any materially valuable invention, and paid or

charged a royalty on its use that went partly to him personally, and

partly to the research institution that had produced him. In the

matter of literature and the philosophical and sociological

sciences, every higher educational establishment carried its

studentships, its fellowships, its occasional lectureships, and to

produce a poem, a novel, a speculative work of force or merit, was

to become the object of a generous competition between rival

Universities. In Utopia, any author has the option either of

publishing his works through the public bookseller as a private

speculation, or, if he is of sufficient merit, of accepting a

University endowment and conceding his copyright to the University

press. All sorts of grants in the hands of committees of the most

varied constitution, supplemented these academic resources, and

ensured that no possible contributor to the wide flow of the Utopian

mind slipped into neglect. Apart from those who engaged mainly in

teaching and administration, my double told me that the world-wide

House of Saloman [Footnote: The New Atlantis.] thus created

sustained over a million men. For all the rarity of large fortunes,

therefore, no original man with the desire and capacity for material

or mental experiments went long without resources and the stimulus

of attention, criticism, and rivalry.

 

“And finally,” said my double, “our Rules ensure a considerable

understanding of the importance of poietic activities in the

majority of the samurai, in whose hands as a class all