Utopias

I saw recently a very entertaining article by Mr. Walter Lippman in the New Republic on the subject of Utopias. Mr. Lippman raised the question of why it was Utopias had gone out of fashion. Since Mr. Wells wrote his Modern Utopia no one has had a shot.

It is, of course, not the longest period in human history which has gone without a new Utopia. As far as I know, nothing of the sort was constructed between the time of Plato and that of Sir Thomas More. Reasons might, no doubt, be discovered for this long lapse. The Romans were too realistic to bother about such things, and in the Middle Ages the only people who could write were priests, and they probably did not dare outline any other perfect society than that of the New Jerusalem. In fact, Utopias of any merit have until recently always been produced at long intervals: with the exception of Bacon’s New Atlantis and Campanella’s City of the Sun, which were, I think, published in the same year. The nineteenth century must have produced more imaginary states of this kind than all its predecessors put together. And if we stop constructing Utopias, this will happen not because we have ceased to hanker after them, but because the complexities of civilization have become too unmanageable to handle. When the structures of society and industry were comparatively simple, a man could invent an ideal state which would not look too far removed from the states he knew. We can still go on dreaming of little paradises, such as that in Morris’s News from Nowhere; but what it is difficult to do is to describe fully an imaginary community which is world-wide, or, at any rate, in contact with the whole world, which has to face the problems of race, and which has to take over from existing civilization our highly developed methods of manufacture and distribution of labour. Mr. Wells did try to depict a state that might grow out of the existing order; but his picture is notably less complete than those of older writers. He could only hope to produce his effect by giving us a series of cinema glimpses of various aspects of life. Personally, I doubt whether any one else will even attempt the job.

One could wish that somebody would make a thorough study of the principal Utopias that the mind of man has conceived. Such a study would offer many interesting paths to research. We might find out, for example, to how great an extent the Utopians of various ages and nations have been influenced (as Plato was conspicuously influenced) by the transient conditions of their own time. For instance, the great variety of opinion which Utopians have held with regard to the precious metals would be worth examination. Some have held them in great respect; others have vindictively suggested that they should be put to the basest possible uses. Again, how far has each writer of this kind been influenced by his predecessor? It can scarcely be supposed, for instance, that Campanella did not lift his communistic ideas bodily from Plato, or that Mr. Wells’s class of Samurai owed nothing to the same inspiration. Sometimes one sees a quite minor and obviously personal idea lifted clean or adapted with slight alterations which make it all the more curious. For example, in More’s Utopia brides and bridegrooms before marriage always inspected each other in a state of nature. It is to be presumed that More had some peculiar crank on this subject; for he mentions the possibility of concealing deformities as though it were a common practice that should certainly be guarded against by law. When we get to Bacon we find this odd idea copied, with the difference that it is now the friends of the respective parties that make the examination.

The endless queer details in Utopias would in themselves make such a study amusing. Plato’s passion to secure that no mother should know her own child; the preposterously exact account of the amount of money subscribed towards the foundation of the new state in Theodor Hertzka’s Freeland; the wonderful battle between the fleets of, if I remember rightly, Abyssinia and Europe in the same book; the trains going two hundred miles an hour, so smoothly that people played billiards on them, in Mr. Wells’s New World. I remember another Utopia, an obscure eighteenth-century one, in which persons who had committed murders were given the choice of being executed in honour or surviving in disgrace. If they chose death they were led to the scaffold amid universal applause, their names were inscribed upon rolls of honour, and their relatives were given fat jobs. Then, again, one could have a quite interesting chapter on the various literary devices by which authors have precipitated readers into their supposititious communities. More’s introduction—with the bronzed and bearded seaman who went out with the companions of Columbus and was stranded on an unknown island—is as charming as any. Later dodges have been more far-fetched. Mr. Wells’s transferment to the twin-world of this one is very subtle; Edward Bellamy made his hero wake up after centuries in a room where he asked for Edith (his old fiancée) and was conveniently answered by another lady of the same name. I say nothing of the books which lie on the outskirts of Utopian literature, such as various grotesque Utopias and anti-Utopias and books like Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race and W. H. Hudson’s The Crystal Age, which last is, I believe, the only book on record which purports to have been written by a man who dies in the last chapter and describes his own demise. And the practical attempts to set up working ideal communities—such as the Oneida community which developed into a prosperous “Mfg. Coy.”—are another pleasant by-way.

I think that with all the peculiarities of time and place, all the eccentricities of personal taste, and all the genuine varieties of ideals allowed for, a student of Comparative Utopianism would probably find that there was a good deal in the way of method and a very great deal in the way of aim that all Utopians have in common. Mr. Yeats once suggested that if we put together whatever the great poets have affirmed in their finest moments we should come as near as possible to an authoritative religion. In the same way, one feels that if one tabulated the ideals of the most successful writers of Utopias we should be able to extract, if not a residuum of agreed schemes, at least a common element of aspiration which we might fairly say represented the permanent ideals of the human race respecting the ordering of our life on earth. Really intelligent and altruistic men—and nobody without some intelligence and some altruism would bother to conceive a Utopia—have a tendency to dream the same sort of dreams. To take it on its negative side, no deviser of an ideal state, as far as I am aware, has proposed immense inequalities in the distribution of wealth, crowded and insanitary houses, child labour, wars of aggression, or sweating. There are large numbers of industrious and accurate people in this country and America who are hunting for subjects about which they can write volumes of “research.” I wish one of them would write the book I suggest.