A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗
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freedoms for our like and our choice, just as spacious as we can get
them—and it is only the multitudinous uncongenial, anxious also for
similar developments in some opposite direction, that checks this
expansive movement of personal selection and necessitates a
compromise on privacy.
Glancing back from our Utopian mountain side down which this
discourse marches, to the confusions of old earth, we may remark
that the need and desire for privacies there is exceptionally great
at the present time, that it was less in the past, that in the
future it may be less again, and that under the Utopian conditions
to which we shall come when presently we strike yonder road, it may
be reduced to quite manageable dimensions. But this is to be
effected not by the suppression of individualities to some common
pattern, [Footnote: More’s Utopia. “Whoso will may go in, for there
is nothing within the houses that is private or anie man’s owne.”]
but by the broadening of public charity and the general amelioration
of mind and manners. It is not by assimilation, that is to say, but
by understanding that the modern Utopia achieves itself. The ideal
community of man’s past was one with a common belief, with common
customs and common ceremonies, common manners and common formulae;
men of the same society dressed in the same fashion, each according
to his defined and understood grade, behaved in the same fashion,
loved, worshipped, and died in the same fashion. They did or felt
little that did not find a sympathetic publicity. The natural
disposition of all peoples, white, black, or brown, a natural
disposition that education seeks to destroy, is to insist upon
uniformity, to make publicity extremely unsympathetic to even the
most harmless departures from the code. To be dressed “odd,” to
behave “oddly,” to eat in a different manner or of different food,
to commit, indeed, any breach of the established convention is to
give offence and to incur hostility among unsophisticated men. But
the disposition of the more original and enterprising minds at all
times has been to make such innovations.
This is particularly in evidence in this present age. The almost
cataclysmal development of new machinery, the discovery of new
materials, and the appearance of new social possibilities through
the organised pursuit of material science, has given enormous and
unprecedented facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local
order has been broken up or is now being broken up all over the
earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, everywhere men are
afloat amidst the wreckage of their flooded conventions, and still
tremendously unaware of the thing that has happened. The old local
orthodoxies of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amusements
and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the important small
things of the daily life and the old ritual of thought in the
things that make discussion, are smashed up and scattered and mixed
discordantly together, one use with another, and no world-wide
culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differences, no
wider understanding has yet replaced them. And so publicity in the
modern earth has become confusedly unsympathetic for everyone.
Classes are intolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact
provokes aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts,
and the subtler people are excessively tormented by a sense of
observation, unsympathetic always and often hostile. To live without
some sort of segregation from the general mass is impossible in
exact proportion to one’s individual distinction.
Of course things will be very different in Utopia. Utopia will
be saturated with consideration. To us, clad as we are in
mountain-soiled tweeds and with no money but British bank-notes
negotiable only at a practically infinite distance, this must needs
be a reassuring induction. And Utopian manners will not only be
tolerant, but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will be
understood perfectly and universally that on earth are understood
only by a scattered few; baseness of bearing, grossness of manner,
will be the distinctive mark of no section of the community
whatever. The coarser reasons for privacy, therefore, will not exist
here. And that savage sort of shyness, too, that makes so many
half-educated people on earth recluse and defensive, that too the
Utopians will have escaped by their more liberal breeding. In the
cultivated State we are assuming it will be ever so much easier for
people to eat in public, rest and amuse themselves in public, and
even work in public. Our present need for privacy in many things
marks, indeed, a phase of transition from an ease in public in the
past due to homogeneity, to an ease in public in the future due to
intelligence and good breeding, and in Utopia that transition will
be complete. We must bear that in mind throughout the consideration
of this question.
Yet, after this allowance has been made, there still remains a
considerable claim for privacy in Utopia. The room, or apartments,
or home, or mansion, whatever it may be a man or woman maintains,
must be private, and under his or her complete dominion; it seems
harsh and intrusive to forbid a central garden plot or peristyle,
such as one sees in Pompeii, within the house walls, and it is
almost as difficult to deny a little private territory beyond the
house. Yet if we concede that, it is clear that without some further
provision we concede the possibility that the poorer townsman (if
there are to be rich and poor in the world) will be forced to walk
through endless miles of high fenced villa gardens before he may
expand in his little scrap of reserved open country. Such is already
the poor Londoner’s miserable fate…. Our Utopia will have, of
course, faultless roads and beautifully arranged inter-urban
communications, swift trains or motor services or what not, to
diffuse its population, and without some anticipatory provisions,
the prospect of the residential areas becoming a vast area of
defensively walled villa Edens is all too possible.
This is a quantitative question, be it remembered, and not to be
dismissed by any statement of principle. Our Utopians will meet it,
I presume, by detailed regulations, very probably varying locally
with local conditions. Privacy beyond the house might be made a
privilege to be paid for in proportion to the area occupied, and the
tax on these licences of privacy might increase as the square of the
area affected. A maximum fraction of private enclosure for each
urban and suburban square mile could be fixed. A distinction could
be drawn between an absolutely private garden and a garden private
and closed only for a day or a couple of days a week, and at other
times open to the well-behaved public. Who, in a really civilised
community, would grudge that measure of invasion? Walls could be
taxed by height and length, and the enclosure of really natural
beauties, of rapids, cascades, gorges, viewpoints, and so forth
made impossible. So a reasonable compromise between the vital and
conflicting claims of the freedom of movement and the freedom of
seclusion might be attained….
And as we argue thus we draw nearer and nearer to the road that goes
up and over the Gotthard crest and down the Val Tremola towards
Italy.
What sort of road would that be?
Section 3
Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under modern conditions must
involve something more than unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, and
the very proposition of a world-state speaking one common tongue
carries with it the idea of a world population travelled and
travelling to an extent quite beyond anything our native earth has
seen. It is now our terrestrial experience that whenever economic
and political developments set a class free to travel, that class at
once begins to travel; in England, for example, above the five or
six hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find anyone who is
not habitually migratory, who has not been frequently, as people
say, “abroad.” In the Modern Utopia travel must be in the common
texture of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh scenery, to
meet a different complexion of humanity and a different type of home
and food and apparatus, to mark unfamiliar trees and plants and
flowers and beasts, to climb mountains, to see the snowy night of
the North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow great
rivers, to taste loneliness in desert places, to traverse the gloom
of tropical forests and to cross the high seas, will be an essential
part of the reward and adventure of life, even for the commonest
people…. This is a bright and pleasant particular in which a
modern Utopia must differ again, and differ diametrically, from its
predecessors.
We may conclude from what has been done in places upon our earth
that the whole Utopian world will be open and accessible and as safe
for the wayfarer as France or England is to-day. The peace of the
world will be established for ever, and everywhere, except in remote
and desolate places, there will be convenient inns, at least as
convenient and trustworthy as those of Switzerland to-day; the
touring clubs and hotel associations that have tariffed that country
and France so effectually will have had their fine Utopian
equivalents, and the whole world will be habituated to the coming
and going of strangers. The greater part of the world will be as
secure and cheaply and easily accessible to everyone as is Zermatt
or Lucerne to a Western European of the middle-class at the present
time.
On this account alone no places will be so congested as these two
are now on earth. With freedom to go everywhere, with easy access
everywhere, with no dread of difficulties about language, coinage,
custom, or law, why should everyone continue to go to just a few
special places? Such congestions are merely the measure of the
general inaccessibility and insecurity and costliness of
contemporary life, an awkward transitory phase in the first
beginnings of the travel age of mankind.
No doubt the Utopian will travel in many ways. It is unlikely there
will be any smoke-disgorging steam railway trains in Utopia, they
are already doomed on earth, already threatened with that
obsolescence that will endear them to the Ruskins of to-morrow, but
a thin spider’s web of inconspicuous special routes will cover the
land of the world, pierce the mountain masses and tunnel under the
seas. These may be double railways or monorails or what not—we are
no engineers to judge between such devices—but by means of them the
Utopian will travel about the earth from one chief point to another
at a speed of two or three hundred miles or more an hour. That
will abolish the greater distances…. One figures these main
communications as something after the manner of corridor trains,
smooth-running and roomy, open from end to end, with cars in which
one may sit and read, cars in which one may take refreshment, cars
into which the news of the day comes printing itself from the wires
beside the track; cars in which one may have privacy and sleep if
one is so disposed, bathroom cars, library cars; a train as
comfortable as a good club. There will be no distinctions of class
in such a train, because in a civilised world there would be no
offence between one kind of man and another, and for the good of the
whole world such travelling will be as cheap as it can be, and well
within the reach of any but the almost criminally poor.
Such great tramways as this will be used when the Utopians wish to
travel fast and far; thereby you will glide all over the land
surface of the planet; and feeding them and distributing from them,
innumerable minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picture
them,
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