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 the real
power of the world resides."
"Ah!" said I, "and now we come to the thing that interests me most.
For it is quite clear, in my mind, that these samurai form the real
body of the State. All this time that I have spent going to and fro
in this planet, it has been growing upon me that this order of men
and women, wearing such a uniform as you wear, and with faces
strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is the
Utopian reality; but that for them, the whole fabric of these fair
appearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at
last, back I should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life
of earth. Tell me about these samurai, who remind me of Plato's
guardians, who look like Knights Templars, who bear a name that
recalls the swordsmen of Japan ... and whose uniform you yourself are
wearing. What are they? Are they an hereditary caste, a specially
educated order, an elected class? For, certainly, this world turns
upon them as a door upon its hinges."