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

partly by the strength and idiosyncrasy of

the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that

chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly

both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this

sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be

made. The “natural” social reference of a man is probably to some

rather vaguely conceived tribe, as the “natural” social reference of

a dog is to a pack. But just as the social reference of a dog may be

educated until the reference to a pack is completely replaced by a

reference to an owner, so on his higher plane of educability the

social reference of the civilised man undergoes the most remarkable

transformations. But the power and scope of his imagination and the

need he has of response sets limits to this process. A highly

intellectualised mature mind may refer for its data very

consistently to ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable as

God, so comprehensive as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in

things. I write “may,” but I doubt if this exaltation of reference

is ever permanently sustained. Comte, in his Positive Polity,

exposes his soul with great freedom, and the curious may trace how,

while he professes and quite honestly intends to refer himself

always to his “Greater Being” Humanity, he narrows constantly to his

projected “Western Republic” of civilised men, and quite frequently

to the minute indefinite body of Positivist subscribers. And the

history of the Christian Church, with its development of orders and

cults, sects and dissents, the history of fashionable society with

its cliques and sets and every political history with its cabals and

inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of

men to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves,

but which still does not strain and escape their imaginative

grasp.

 

The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this

inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary

aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order

of the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the whole

science of aggregations in relation to that World State to which his

reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to

the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising

process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of

aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men

narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.

 

He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in

such matters, that the same man in different moods and on different

occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith,

not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that

the more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the State

maker’s point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as

what it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he is

aggregating at all, unless he aggregates _against something. He

refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite

inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The

tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively

hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would

seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of

the human mind. When we think of the class A as desirable, we think

of Not-A as undesirable. The two things are as inevitably connected

as the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our little

fingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not,

comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may remark, all gods

that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attempt

to universalise the idea of God trails dualism and the devil after

it as a moral necessity.

 

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial

sociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy

men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in the

minds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all

sorts of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfaces

of my botanist’s mind. He has a strong feeling for systematic

botanists as against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewd

and evil scoundrels in this relation, but he has a strong feeling

for all botanists, and, indeed, all biologists, as against

physicists, and those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he

regards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded scoundrels in this

relation; but he has a strong feeling for all who profess what is

called Science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers,

and literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoral

scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all

educated men as against the working man, whom he regards as a

cheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel in this

relation; but so soon as the working man is comprehended together

with those others, as Englishmen—which includes, in this case, I

may remark, the Scottish and Welsh—he holds them superior to all

other sorts of European, whom he regards, &c….

 

Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangements

of the sympathies one of the chief vices of human thought, due to

its obsession by classificatory suggestions. [Footnote: See Chapter

the First, section 5, and the Appendix.] The necessity for marking

our classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessive

contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it

with implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat of

irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way;

there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at

once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of

seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a

certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair

have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy

persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all

Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all

curly-haired people are good-natured; all hunchbacks are energetic

and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisations

have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by

great numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class is

one’s own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which

one refers one’s own activities, then the disposition to divide all

qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one’s own

class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.

 

It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such

generalisations with suspicion; it is part of the training of the

Utopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, to

mingle something very like animosity with that suspicion. For crude

classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all

organised human life.

 

Section 2

 

Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like minor

aggregations, concerned for the most part with details and minor

aspects of life, one finds among the civilised peoples of the world

certain broad types of aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, the

national ideas, ideas which, in their perfection, require a

uniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common

religion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought,

and a compact organisation acting with complete external unity. Like

the Gothic cathedral, the national idea is never found complete with

all its parts; but one has in Russia, with her insistence on

political and religious orthodoxy, something approaching it pretty

closely, and again in the inland and typical provinces of China,

where even a strange pattern of hat arouses hostility. We had it in

vigorous struggle to exist in England under the earlier Georges in

the minds of those who supported the Established Church. The idea of

the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought,

with all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one laughs

at talk about Swedish painting or American literature. And I will

confess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions is

so imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I have

committed myself to a short assertion of the exceptionally noble

quality of the English imagination. [Footnote: Chapter the Seventh,

section 6.] I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about

English superiority which I should reject indignantly were the

application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe the

scenery of England, the poetry of England, even the decoration and

music of England, in some mystic and impregnable way, the best. This

habit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those

in which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution of

man’s mind. It is part of the defect of that instrument. We may

watch against it and prevent it doing any great injustices, or

leading us into follies, but to eradicate it is an altogether

different matter. There it is, to be reckoned with, like the coccyx,

the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix. And a too consistent

attack on it may lead simply to its inversion, to a vindictively

pro-foreigner attitude that is equally unwise.

 

The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across the

boundaries of national ideas and in conflict with them, are

religious ideas. In Western Europe true national ideas only emerged

to their present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation

had liberated men from the great tradition of a Latin-speaking

Christendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic Church has sustained as

its modification of the old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule

of the pontifex maximus. There was, and there remains to this day, a

profound disregard of local dialect and race in the Roman Catholic

tradition, which has made that Church a persistently disintegrating

influence in national life. Equally spacious and equally regardless

of tongues and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking religion of

Mahomet. Both Christendom and Islam are indeed on their secular

sides imperfect realisations of a Utopian World State. But the

secular side was the weaker side of these cults; they produced no

sufficiently great statesmen to realise their spiritual forces, and

it is not in Rome under pontifical rule, nor in Munster under the

Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas a Kempis and Saint Augustin’s City

of God that we must seek for the Utopias of Christianity.

 

In the last hundred years a novel development of material forces,

and especially of means of communication, has done very much to

break up the isolations in which nationality perfected its

prejudices and so to render possible the extension and consolidation

of such a world-wide culture as mediaeval Christendom and Islam

foreshadowed. The first onset of these expansive developments has

been marked in the world of mind by an expansion of political

ideals—Comte’s “Western Republic” (1848) was the first Utopia that

involved the synthesis of numerous States—by the development of

“Imperialisms” in the place of national policies, and by the search

for a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions and

linguistic affinities. Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the like

are such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency

of progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition

which ignored “race,” and the aim of the expansive liberalism

movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the

world, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into

trousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate the

exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some

absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the fact

that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage and

pantaloons among the