Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
THE STORY OF UTOPIAS
THE
STORY OF UTOPIAS
IDEAL COMMONWEALTHS
AND
SOCIAL MYTHS
BY
LEWIS MUMFORD
With an Introduction
by
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON
“_A Map of the World that
does not include Utopia is not
worth even glancing at._...”
GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO. LTD.
LONDON CALCUTTA SYDNEY
_Published 1923
by_ GEORGE G. HARRAP & CO. LTD.
_39–41 Parker Street, Kingsway, London, W.C.2_
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first outline of this book dates back ten years; and since then I
have woven it and rewoven it in my mind. The actual work of composition
was started by a suggestion from Mr. Van Wyck Brooks; and without Mr.
Brooks’ encouragement I should perhaps never have begun or carried
through the task. The general background of ideas has been heavily
colored by my contacts with Professor Patrick Geddes, through his
books and by correspondence; and I owe a debt to him I have not always
been able to acknowledge in direct reference or in quotation marks. I
take the opportunity here to express the hearty gratitude which might
otherwise have been conveyed in the more archaic form of a dedication.
In the revision of the MS. I have been blessed with the generous advice
and criticism of a number of friends; in particular, Mr. Clarence
Britten, Mr. Herbert Feis, Mr. Geroid Robinson, and Miss Sophia
Wittenberg, each of whom performed a unique service. To Messrs. Victor
Branford and Alexander Farquharson of the Sociological Society of Great
Britain I am indebted for many pertinent suggestions. My thanks are
also due to the editors of The Freeman for permission to use extracts
from two articles: Towards a Humanist Synthesis and Beauty and the
Picturesque. Finally, Mr. Hendrik van Loon’s friendly interest calls
for a departing beam of gratitude.
LEWIS MUMFORD.
New York City.
CONTENTS
_Introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon, Ph.D._
CHAPTER ONE
How the will-to-utopia causes men to live in two worlds, and
how, therefore, we re-read the Story of Utopia--the other
half of the Story of Mankind. 9
CHAPTER TWO
How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just
round the corner. How Plato in the Republic is chiefly
concerned with what will hold the ideal city together. 27
CHAPTER THREE
How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas
More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the
New World. 57
CHAPTER FOUR
How the new Humanism of the Renascence brings us within sight
of Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a
glimpse of a modern utopia. 79
CHAPTER FIVE
How Bacon and Campanella, who have a great reputation as
utopians, are little better than echoes of the men who
went before them. 101
CHAPTER SIX
How something happened in the eighteenth century which made
men “furiously to think,” and how a whole group of
utopias sprang out of the upturned soil of industrialism.
111
CHAPTER SEVEN
How some utopians have thought that a good community rested
at bottom on the right division and use of land; and what
sort of communities these land-animals projected. 131
CHAPTER EIGHT
How Étienne Cabet dreamed of a new Napoleon called Icar, and
a new France called Icaria; and how his utopia, with that
which Edward Bellamy shows us in Looking Backward, gives
us a hint of what machinery might bring us to if the
industrial organization were nationalized. 149
CHAPTER NINE
How William Morris and W. H. Hudson renew the classic
tradition of utopias; and how, finally, Mr. H. G. Wells
sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings
them into contact with the world of the present. 171
CHAPTER TEN
How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the
modern age; and how they made the world over in their
image. 191
CHAPTER ELEVEN
How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the
partisans. 235
CHAPTER TWELVE
How the half-worlds must go, and how eutopia may come; and
what we need before we can build Jerusalem in any green
and pleasant land. 265
BIBLIOGRAPHY 309
INTRODUCTION
[Illustration]
It is a sunny day and I am sitting on the top of a mountain.
Until this morning, it had been the mountain of a fairy story that was
twenty centuries old.
Now, it is a mighty hill and I can feel its warm coat of white
reindeer-moss, and if I were willing to stretch out my hand, I could
pluck the red berries that are in full bloom.
A hundred years from now it will be gone.
For it is really a large chunk of pure iron, dumped by a playful
Providence in the very heart of Lapland.
Do you remember an old tale of Norse mythology? How somewhere, far in
the north, there stood a high peak of iron, which was a hundred miles
high and a hundred miles wide? And how a little bird came to it once
every thousand years to sharpen its beak? And how, when the mountain
was gone, a single second of all eternity would have passed by?
I heard it told as a child.
I remembered it always, and I told it to my own boys when they began
to learn history. It seemed the invention of some prehistoric Hans
Christian Andersen. It belonged to the imaginary scenery of our dreams.
The story has come true, and I have found my old mountain where I least
expected it.
To make the cycle of coincidence perfect, this hill was named after
a bird. The Lapp, with a fine sense of sound, called the ptarmigan
“Kiru.” Kirunavaara no longer hears the shrill “kiru-kiru” of rising
birds. Twice a day it listens to the terrific detonation of half a
hundred charges of dynamite.
Then it is shaken by the little trains which carry the rock to the
valley.
In the evening, it sees the lights of the large electric engines
which hoist the valuable metal across the arctic wilderness of Lake
Tornotrask.
Two months later, the ore has been melted and worked into those modern
articles of trade which go by the name of bridges and automobiles and
ships and apartment houses and a thousand other things which once
promised to elevate man from the ranks of the beasts of burden.
What has become of that promise, the survivors of the last eight years
know with great if gruesome accuracy.
Even the humble Lapp has heard of the great upheaval, and has asked why
the white people should kill each other when the whole world was full
of reindeer and when God has given us the hills and the plains so that
forever there should be food enough for the long days of summer and the
longer nights of the endless winter.
[Illustration]
But the ways of the Lapp are not the ways of the white man.
These simple followers of a pure and much undiluted nature follow the
even tenor of their ways as their ancestors did, five and ten thousand
years ago.
We, on the other hand, have our engines and we have our railroad
trains and we have our factories and we cannot get rid of these iron
servants without destroying the very basis of our civilization. We may
hate these ungainly companions, but we need them. In time to come, we
shall know how to be their masters. Then Plato shall give us a revised
Republic where all the houses are heated by steam and where all the
dishes are washed by electricity.
We are not suffering from too much machinery, but from too little. For
let there be enough iron servants and more of us shall be able to sit
on the tops of mountains and stare into the blue sky and waste valuable
hours, imagining the things that ought to be.
The Old Testament used to call such people prophets. They raised
strange cities of their hearts’ delight, which should be based
exclusively upon righteousness and piety. But the greatest of all their
prophets the Jews killed to make a Roman holiday.
The Greeks knew such wise men as philosophers. They allowed them great
freedom and rejoiced in the mathematical precision with which their
intellectual leaders mapped out those theoretical roads which were to
lead mankind from chaos to an ordered state of society.
The Middle Ages insisted with narrow persistence upon the Kingdom of
Heaven as the only possible standard for a decent Christian Utopia.
They crushed all those who dared to question the positive existence of
such a future state of glory and content. They built it of stone and
precious metals, but neglected the spiritual fundament.
[Illustration]
And so it perished.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fought many bitter wars to
decide the exact nature of a whitewashed Paradise, erected upon the
crumbling ruins of the mediæval church.
The eighteenth century saw the Promised Land lying just across the
terrible bulwark of stupidity and superstition, which a thousand years
of clerical selfishness had erected for its own protection and safety.
There followed a mighty battle to crush the infamy of ignorance and
bring about an era of well-balanced reason.
Unfortunately, a few enthusiasts carried the matter a trifle too far.
Napoleon, realist-in-chief of all time, brought the world back to the
common ground of solid facts.
Our own generation drew the logical conclusion of the Napoleonic
premises.
Behold the map of Europe and see how well we have wrought.
For alas! this world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It
does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making
consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or
fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the
distant future.
[Illustration]
It encourages us in our efforts. Sometimes the light is hidden by the
clouds and for a moment we may lose our way. Then the faint light once
more breaks through the darkness and we press forward with new courage.
And when life is dull and meaningless (the main curse of all existence)
we find consolation in the fact that a hundred years from now, our
children shall reach the shore for which we were bound when we
ourselves left the bridge and were lowered to the peaceful bottom of
the ocean.
[Illustration]
And now the sun has gone down and a chill wind blows from Kebnekajse,
where the wild geese of little Nils Holgerson live amidst the endless
silence of the eternal snow. Soon the top shall be hidden in the mist
and I shall have to find my way back by the noise of the steam shovels,
plying their elephantine trade at the foot of the first terrace.
The mountain of my fairy story once more will be the profitable
investment of a Company of Iron-mongers.
But that does not matter.
Lewis Mumford, for whom I am writing this, will understand what I mean.
And I shall be content.
[Illustration:
Hendrik Willem van Loon
]
Kiruna, Lapland,
14 Sept., 1922.
CHAPTER ONE
How the will-to-utopia causes men to live in two worlds, and how,
therefore, we re-read the Story of Utopias--the other half of
the Story of Mankind.
THE STORY OF UTOPIAS
CHAPTER ONE
1
Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We
have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our
utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions
that people dream of are those in which they finally live. The more
that men react upon their environment and make it over after a human
pattern, the more continuously do they live in utopia; but when there
is a breach between the world of affairs and the overworld of utopia,
we become conscious of the part that the will-to-utopia has played in
our lives, and we see our utopia as a separate reality.
It is the separate reality of utopia that we are going to explore in
the course of this book--Utopia as a world by itself, divided into
ideal commonwealths, with all its communities clustered into proud
cities, aiming bravely at the good life.
This discussion of ideal commonwealths gets its form and its color from
the time in which it is written. Plato’s Republic dates from the period
of social disintegration which followed the Peloponnesian War; and
some of its mordant courage is probably derived from the hopelessness
of conditions that came under Plato’s eye. It was in the midst of a
similar period of disorder and violence that Sir Thomas More laid the
foundations for his imaginary commonwealth: Utopia was the bridge by
which he sought to span the gap between the old order of the Middle
Age, and the new interests and institutions of the Renascence.
In presenting this history and criticism of utopias we are perhaps
being pulled by the same interests that led Plato and More onwards, for
it is only after the storm that we dare to look for the rainbow. Our
fall into a chasm of disillusion has stimulated us to discuss in a more
thorough way the ultimate goods, the basic aims, the whole conception
of the “good life” by which, in modern times, we have been guided. In
the midst of the tepid and half-hearted discussions that continue to
arise out of prohibition laws and strikes and “peace” conferences let
us break in with the injunction to talk about fundamentals--consider
Utopia!
2
Man walks with his feet on the ground and his head in the air; and the
history of what has happened on earth--the history of cities and armies
and of all the things that have had body and form--is only one-half the
Story of Mankind.
In every age, the external scenery in which the human drama has been
framed has remained pretty much the same. There have been fluctuations
in climate and changes in terrain; and at times a great civilization,
like that of the Mayas in Central America, has arisen where now only
a thick net of jungle remains; but the hills around Jerusalem are the
hills that David saw; and during the historic period the drowning
of a city in the Netherlands or the rise of a shifting bank of real
estate along the coast of New Jersey is little more than the wearing
off of the paint or a crack in the plaster. What we call the material
world constantly changes, it goes without saying: mountains are stript
of trees and become wastes, deserts are plowed with water and become
gardens. The main outlines, however, hold their own remarkably well;
and we could have travelled better in Roman days with a modern map than
with the best chart Ptolemy could have offered us.
If the world in which men live were the world as it is known to the
physical geographer, we should have a pretty simple time of it. We
might follow Whitman’s advice, and live as the animals, and stop
whining for all time about our sins and imperfections.
What makes human history such an uncertain and fascinating story
is that man lives in two worlds--the world within and the world
without--and the world within men’s heads has undergone transformations
which have disintegrated material things with the power and rapidity
of radium. I shall take the liberty of calling this inner world our
idolum (ido′lum) or world of ideas. The word “ideas” is not used here
precisely in the ordinary sense. I use it rather to stand for what the
philosophers would call the subjective world, what the theologians
would perhaps call the spiritual world; and I mean to include in it all
the philosophies, fantasies, rationalizations, projections, images, and
opinions in terms of which people pattern their behavior. This world
of ideas, in the case of scientific truths, for example, sometimes
has a rough correspondence with what people call the world; but it
is important to note that it has contours of its own which are quite
independent of the material environment.
Now the physical world is a definite, inescapable thing. Its limits
are narrow and obvious. On occasion, if your impulse is sufficiently
strong, you can leave the land for the sea, or go from a warm climate
into a cool one; but you cannot cut yourself off from the physical
environment without terminating your life. For good or ill, you must
breathe air, eat food, drink water; and the penalties for refusing to
meet these conditions are inexorable. Only a lunatic would refuse to
recognize this physical environment; it is the substratum of our daily
lives.
But if the physical environment is the earth, the world of ideas
corresponds to the heavens. We sleep under the light of stars that
have long since ceased to exist, and we pattern our behavior by ideas
which have no reality as soon as we cease to credit them. Whilst it
holds together this world of ideas--this idolum--is almost as sound,
almost as real, almost as inescapable as the bricks of our houses or
the asphalt beneath our feet. The “belief” that the world was flat was
once upon a time more important than the “fact” that it was round;
and that belief kept the sailors of the medieval world from wandering
out of sight of land as effectively as would a string of gun-boats or
floating mines. An idea is a solid fact, a theory is a solid fact, a
superstition is a solid fact as long as people continue to regulate
their actions in terms of the idea, theory, or superstition; and it is
none the less solid because it is conveyed as an image or a breath of
sound.
3
This world of ideas serves many purposes. Two of them bear heavily upon
our investigation of utopia. On one hand the pseudo-environment or
idolum is a substitute for the external world; it is a sort of house of
refuge to which we flee when our contacts with “hard facts” become too
complicated to carry through or too rough to face. On the other hand,
it is by means of the idolum that the facts of the everyday world are
brought together and assorted and sifted, and a new sort of reality is
projected back again upon the external world. One of these functions
is escape or compensation; it seeks an immediate release from the
difficulties or frustrations of our lot. The other attempts to provide
a condition for our release in the future. The utopias that correspond
to these two functions I shall call the utopias of escape and the
utopias of reconstruction. The first leaves the external world the way
it is; the second seeks to change it so that one may have intercourse
with it on one’s own terms. In one we build impossible castles in the
air; in the other we consult a surveyor and an architect and a mason
and proceed to build a house which meets our essential needs; as well
as houses made of stone and mortar are capable of meeting them.
4
Why, however, should we find it necessary to talk about utopia and the
world of ideas at all? Why should we not rest secure in the bosom of
the material environment, without flying off into a region apparently
beyond space and time? Well, the alternative before us is not whether
we shall live in the real world or dream away our time in utopia; for
men are so constituted that only by a deliberate discipline--such as
that followed by a Hindu ascetic or an American business man--can
one or the other world be abolished from consciousness. The genuine
alternative for most of us is that between an aimless utopia of escape
and a purposive utopia of reconstruction. One way or the other, it
seems, in a world so full of frustrations as the “real” one, we must
spend a good part of our mental lives in utopia.
Nevertheless this needs a qualification. It is plain that certain
types of people have no need for private utopias and that certain
communities seem to be without them. The savages of the Marquesas whom
Hermann Melville described seem to have had such a jolly and complete
adjustment to their environment that, except for the raids of hostile
tribes--and this turned out to be chiefly sport which only whetted
their appetites for the feast that followed--everything needed for a
good life at the South Sea level could be obtained by direct attack.
The Marquesans had no need to dream of a happier existence; they had
only to grab it.
At times, during childhood perhaps, life has the same sort of
completeness; and without doubt there are many mature people who have
manufactured out of their limitations a pretty adequate response to a
narrow environment; and have let it go at that. Such people feel no
need for utopia. As long as they can keep their contacts restricted,
only a deliberate raid from the outside world would create such a
need. They are like the sick man in the parable of the Persian poet,
whose only desire was that he might desire something; and there is no
particular reason to envy them. People who will not venture out into
the open sea pay the penalty of never having looked into the bright
eyes of danger; and at best they know but half of life. What such
folk might call the good life is simply not good enough. We cannot be
satisfied with a segment of existence, no matter how safely we may be
adjusted to it, when with a little effort we can trace the complete
circle.
But there have been few regions, few social orders, and few people
in which the adjustment has not been incomplete. In the face of
perpetual difficulties and obstructions--the wind and the weather
and the impulses of other men and customs that have long outlived
their use--there are three ways, roughly, in which a man may react.
He may run away. He may try to hold his own. He may attack. Looking
around at our contemporaries who have survived the war, it is fairly
evident that most of them are in the first stage of panic and despair.
In an interesting article on The Dénouement of Nihilism, Mr. Edward
Townsend Booth characterized the generation born in the late eighties
as suffering a complete paralysis of will, or else, “if any initiative
remains to them, they emigrate to Europe or the South Sea Islands, or
crawl off into some quiet corner of the United States--but most of them
continue where they were stricken in a state of living death.”
Speaking more generally, running away does not always mean a physical
escape, nor does an “attack” necessarily mean doing something practical
“on the spot.” Let us use Dr. John Dewey’s illustration and suppose
that a man is denied intercourse with his friends at a distance. One
kind of reaction is for him to “imagine” meeting his friends, and
going through, in fantasy, a whole ritual of meeting, repartee, and
discussion. The other kind of reaction, as Dr. Dewey says, is to see
what conditions must be met in order to cement distant friends, and
then invent the telephone. The so-called extrovert, the type of man
who has no need for utopias, will satisfy his desire by talking to the
nearest human being. (“He may try to hold his own.”) But it is fairly
plain that the extrovert, from the very weakness and inconstancy of his
aims, is incapable of contributing anything but “good nature” to the
good life of the community; and in his hands both art and invention
would probably come to an end.
Now putting aside the extrovert, we find that the two remaining types
of reaction have expressed themselves in all the historic utopias. It
is perhaps well that we should see them first in their normal, everyday
setting, before we set out to explore the ideal commonwealths of the
past.
More or less, we have all had glimpses of the utopia of escape: it is
raised and it collapses and it is built up again almost daily. In the
midst of the clanking machinery of a paper factory I have come across
a moving picture actress’s portrait, stuck upon an inoperative part of
the machine; and it was not hard to reconstruct the private utopia of
the wretch who minded the levers, or to picture the world into which
he had fled from the roar and throb and muck of the machinery about
him. What man has not had this utopia from the dawn of adolescence
onwards--the desire to possess and be possessed by a beautiful woman?
Perhaps for the great majority of men and women that small, private
Utopia is the only one for which they feel a perpetual, warm interest;
and ultimately every other utopia must be translatable to them in some
such intimate terms. Their conduct would tell us as much if their
words did not confess it. They leave their bleak office buildings and
their grimy factories, and night after night they pour into the cinema
theater in order that they may live for a while in a land populated by
beautiful, flirtatious women and tender, lusty men. Small wonder that
the great and powerful religion founded by Mahomet puts that utopia
in the very foreground of the hereafter! In a sense, this is the most
elementary of utopias; for, on the interpretation of the analytical
psychologist, it carries with it the deep longing to return to and
remain at rest in the mother’s womb--the one perfect environment which
all the machinery and legislation of an eager world has never been able
to reproduce.
In its most elemental state, this utopia of escape calls for a complete
breach with the butcher, the baker, the grocer, and the real, limited,
imperfect people that flutter around us. In order to make it more
perfect, we eliminate the butcher and baker and transport ourselves
to a self-sufficient island in the South Seas. For the most part, of
course, this is an idle dream, and if we do not grow out of it, we must
at any rate thrust other conditions into it; but for a good many of us,
idleness without a dream is the only alternative. Out of such fantasies
of bliss and perfection, which do not endure in real life even when
they occasionally bloom into existence, our art and literature have
very largely grown. It is hard to conceive of a social order so
complete and satisfactory that it would rob us of the necessity of
having recourse, from time to time, to an imaginary world in which our
sufferings could be purged or our delights heightened. Even in the
great idyll painted by William Morris, women are fickle and lovers
are disappointed; and when the “real” world becomes a little too hard
and too sullen to face, we must take refuge, if we are to recover our
balance, into another world which responds more perfectly to our deeper
interests and desires--the world of literature.
Once we have weathered the storm, it is dangerous to remain in the
utopia of escape; for it is an enchanted island, and to remain there
is to lose one’s capacity for dealing with things as they are. The
girl who has felt Prince Charming’s caresses too long will be repulsed
by the clumsy embraces of the young man who takes her to the theater
and wonders how the deuce he is going to pay the rent if they spend
more than a week on their honeymoon. Moreover, life is too easy in the
utopia of escape, and too blankly perfect--there is nothing to sharpen
your teeth upon. It is not for this that men have gone into the jungle
to hunt beasts and have cajoled the grasses and roots to be prolific,
and have defied, in little open boats, the terror of the wind and sea.
Our daily diet must have more roughage in it than these daydreams will
give us if we are not to become debilitated.
In the course of our journey into utopia we shall remain a little
while in these utopias of escape; but we shall not bide there long.
There are plenty of them, and they dot the waters of our imaginary
world as the islands that Ulysses visited dotted the Ægean Sea. These
utopias however belong to the department of pure literature, and in
that department they occupy but a minor place. We could dispense with
the whole lot of them, bag and baggage, in exchange for another Anna
Karenin or The Brothers Karamazov.
5
The second kind of utopia which we shall encounter is the utopia of
reconstruction.
The first species represents, the analytical psychologist would tell
us, a very primitive kind of thinking, in which we follow the direction
of our desires without taking into account any of the limiting
conditions which we should have to confront if we came back to earth
and tried to realize our wishes in practical affairs. It is a vague and
messy and logically inconsequent series of images which color up and
fade, which excite us and leave us cold, and which--for the sake of the
respect our neighbors have for our ability to add a ledger or plane a
piece of wood--we had better confine to the strange box of records we
call our brain.
The second type of utopia may likewise be colored by primitive desires
and wishes; but these desires and wishes have come to reckon with the
world in which they seek realization. The utopia of reconstruction is
what its name implies: a vision of a reconstituted environment which
is better adapted to the nature and aims of the human beings who dwell
within it than the actual one; and not merely better adapted to their
actual nature, but better fitted to their possible developments. If the
first utopia leads backward into the utopian’s ego, the second leads
outward--outward into the world.
By a reconstructed environment I do not mean merely a physical thing.
I mean, in addition, a new set of habits, a fresh scale of values, a
different net of relationships and institutions, and possibly--for
almost all utopias emphasize the factor of breeding--an alteration of
the physical and mental characteristics of the people chosen, through
education, biological selection, and so forth. The reconstructed
environment which all the genuine utopians seek to contrive is a
reconstruction of both the physical world and the idolum. It is in this
that the utopian distinguishes himself from the practical inventor and
the industrialist. Every attempt that has been made to domesticate
animals, cultivate plants, dredge rivers, dig ditches, and in modern
times, apply the energy of the sun to mechanical instruments, has
been an effort to reconstruct the environment; and in many cases the
human advantage has been plain. It is not for the utopian to despise
Prometheus who brought the fire or Franklin who captured the lightning.
As Anatole France says: “Without the Utopians of other times, men would
still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced
the lines of the first city.... Out of generous dreams come beneficial
realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into
a better future.”
Our physical reconstructions however have been limited; they have
touched chiefly the surfaces of things. The result is that people
live in a modern physical environment and carry in their minds an odd
assortment of spiritual relics from almost every other age, from that
of the primitive, taboo-ridden savage, to the energetic Victorian
disciples of Gradgrind and Bounderby. As Mr. Hendrik van Loon pithily
says: “A human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman
driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of
a sixteenth century tradesman.” The problem is fundamentally a human
problem. The more completely man is in control of physical nature, the
more urgently we must ask ourselves what under the heavens is to move
and guide and keep in hand the controller. This problem of an ideal,
a goal, an end--even if the aim persist in shifting as much as the
magnetic north pole--is a fundamental one to the utopian.
Except in the writings of the utopians, and this is an important point
to notice in our travels through utopia, the reconstruction of the
material environment and the reconstitution of the mental framework
of the creatures who inhabit it, have been kept in two different
compartments. One compartment is supposed to belong to the practical
man; the other to the idealist. The first was something whose aims
could be realized in the Here and Now; the other was postponed very
largely to the sweet by-and-bye. Neither the practical man nor the
idealist has been willing to admit that he has been dealing with a
single problem; that each has been treating the faces of a single thing
as if they were separate.
Here is where the utopia of reconstruction wins hands down. It not
merely pictures a whole world, but it faces every part of it at
the same time. We shall not examine the classic utopias without
becoming conscious of their weaknesses, their sometimes disturbing
idiosyncrasies. It is important at present that we should realize
their virtues; and should start on our journey without the feeling of
disparagement which the word utopian usually calls up in minds that
have been seduced by Macaulay’s sneer that he would rather have an acre
in Middlesex than a principality in utopia.
6
Finally, be convinced about the reality of utopia. All that has
happened in what we call human history--unless it has left a building
or a book or some other record of itself--is just as remote and in
a sense just as mythical as the mysterious island which Raphael
Hythloday, scholar and sailor, described to Sir Thomas More. A good
part of human history is even more insubstantial: the Icarians who
lived only in the mind of Étienne Cabet, or the Freelanders who
dwelt within the imagination of a dry little Austrian economist,
have had more influence upon the lives of our contemporaries than
the Etruscan people who once dwelt in Italy, although the Etruscans
belong to what we call the real world, and the Freelanders and Icarians
inhabited--Nowhere.
Nowhere may be an imaginary country, but News from Nowhere is real
news. The world of ideas, beliefs, fantasies, projections, is (I must
emphasize again) just as real whilst it is acted upon as the post
which Dr. Johnson kicked in order to demonstrate that it was solid.
The man who wholly respects the rights of property is kept out of his
neighbor’s field perhaps even more effectively than the man who is
merely forbidden entrance by a no-trespass sign. In sum, we cannot
ignore our utopias. They exist in the same way that north and south
exist; if we are not familiar with their classical statements we at
least know them as they spring to life each day in our own minds. We
can never reach the points of the compass; and so no doubt we shall
never live in utopia; but without the magnetic needle we should not
be able to travel intelligently at all. It is absurd to dispose of
utopia by saying that it exists only on paper. The answer to this is:
precisely the same thing may be said of the architect’s plans for a
house, and houses are none the worse for it.
We must lose our sense of remoteness and severity in setting out on
this exploration of ideal commonwealths, as some of the fine minds of
the past have pictured them. Our ideals are not something that we can
set apart from the main facts of our existence, as our grandmothers
sometimes set the cold, bleak, and usually moldy parlor apart from the
living rooms of the house: on the contrary, the things we dream of tend
consciously or unconsciously to work themselves out in the pattern
of our daily lives. Our utopias are just as human and warm and jolly
as the world out of which they are born. Looking out from the top of
a high tenement, over the housetops of Manhattan, I can see a pale
tower with its golden pinnacle gleaming through the soft morning haze;
and for a moment all the harsh and ugly lines in the landscape have
disappeared. So in looking at our utopias. We need not abandon the real
world in order to enter these realizable worlds; for it is out of the
first that the second are always coming.
Finally, an anticipation and a warning. In our journey through the
utopias of the past we shall not rest content when we have traversed
the whole territory between Plato and the latest modern writer. If
the story of utopia throws any light upon the story of mankind it is
this: our utopias have been pitifully weak and inadequate; and if
they have not exercised enough practical influence upon the course of
affairs, it is because, as Viola Paget says in Gospels of Anarchy,
they were simply not good enough. We travel through utopia only in
order to get beyond utopia: if we leave the domains of history when
we enter the gates of Plato’s Republic, we do so in order to re-enter
more effectively the dusty midday traffic of the contemporary world. So
our study of the classic utopias will be followed by an examination of
certain social myths and partial utopias that have played an important
part in the affairs of the Western World during the last few centuries.
In the end, I promise, I shall make no attempt to present another
utopia; it will be enough to survey the foundations upon which others
may build.
In the meanwhile, our ship is about to set sail; and we shall not heave
anchor again until we reach the coasts of Utopia.
CHAPTER TWO
How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just round
the corner. How Plato, in the Republic, is chiefly concerned
with what will hold the ideal city together.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their
camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world,
there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have been
uppermost in the minds of a good many men. Just as the wide expanse of
unsettled territory in America caused the people of eighteenth century
Europe to think of building a civilization in which the errors and
vices and superstitions of the old world might be left behind, so the
sparsely settled coasts of Italy, Sicily, and the Ægean Islands, and
the shores of the Black Sea, must have given men the hope of being able
to turn over a fresh page.
Those years between six hundred and three hundred B.C. were
city-building years for the parent cities of Greece. The city of
Miletus is supposed to have begotten some three hundred cities,
and many of its fellows were possibly not less fruitful. Since new
cities could be founded there was plenty of chance for variation and
experiment; and those who dreamed of a more, generous social order
could set their hands and wits to making a better start “from the
bottom up.”
Of all the plans and reconstruction programs that must have been
put forward during these centuries, only a scant handful remains.
Aristotle tells us about an ideal state designed by one, Phaleas, who
believed like Mr. Bernard Shaw in a complete equality of property; and
from Aristotle, too, we learn of another utopia which was described
by the great architect, city planner, and sociologist--Hippodamus.
Hippodamus was one of the first city planners known to history, and
he achieved fame in the ancient world by designing cities on the
somewhat monotonous checkerboard design we know so well in America. He
realized, apparently, that a city was something more than a collection
of houses, streets, markets, and temples; and so, whilst he was putting
the physical town to rights, he concerned himself with the more basic
problem of the social order. If it adds at all to our sense of reality
in going through utopia, let me confess that it is ultimately through
the inspiration and example of another Hippodamus--Patrick Geddes, the
town planner for Jerusalem and many other cities--that this book about
utopias came to be written. In many ways the distance between Geddes
and Aristotle or Hippodamus seems much less than that which separates
Geddes and Herbert Spencer.
When we look at the utopias that Phaleas and Hippodamus and Aristotle
have left us, and compare them with the Republic of Plato, the
differences between them melt into insignificance and their likenesses
are apparent. It is for this reason that I shall confine our
examination of the Greek utopia to that which Plato set forth in the
Republic, and qualified and broadened in The Laws, The Statesman, and
Critias.
2
Plato’s Republic dates roughly from the time of that long and
disastrous war which Athens fought with Sparta. In the course of
such a war, amid the bombast that patriotic citizens give way to, the
people who keep their senses are bound to get pretty well acquainted
with their enemy. If you will take the trouble to examine Plutarch’s
account of the Laws of Lycurgus and Mr. Alfred Zimmern’s magnificent
description of the Greek Commonwealth you will see how Sparta and
Athens form the web and woof of the Republic--only it is an ideal
Sparta and an ideal Athens that Plato has in mind.
It is well to remember that Plato wrote in the midst of defeat; a
great part of his region, Attica, had been devastated and burned; and
he must have felt that makeshift and reform were quite futile when
a Peloponnesian war could make the bottom drop out of his world. To
Plato an ill-designed ship of state required more than the science of
navigation to pull it through stormy waters: if it was in danger of
perpetually foundering, it seemed high time to go back to the shipyards
and inquire into the principles upon which it had been put together.
In such a mood, I suggest parenthetically, we today will turn again to
fundamentals.
3
In describing his ideal community Plato, like a trained workman, begins
with his physical foundations. So far from putting his utopia in a
mythical island of Avilion, where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow,
it is plain that Plato was referring repeatedly to the soil in which
Athens was planted, and to the economic life which grew out of that
soil. Since he was speaking to his own countrymen, he could let a good
many things pass for common knowledge which we, as strangers, must
look into more carefully in order to have a firmer sense of his utopian
realities. Let it be understood that in discussing the physical side of
the Republic, I am drawing from Aristotle as well as Plato, and from
such modern Greek scholars as Messrs. Zimmern, Myres, and Murray.
Nowadays when we talk about a state we think of an expanse of
territory, to begin with, so broad that we should in most cases be
unable to see all its boundaries if we rose five miles above the
ground on a clear day. Even if the country is a little one, like the
Netherlands or Belgium, it is likely to have possessions that are
thousands of miles away; and we think of these distant possessions and
of the homeland as part and parcel of the state. There is scarcely
any conceivable way in which a Dutchman in Rotterdam, let us say,
possesses the Island of Java: he does not live on the island, he is
not acquainted with the inhabitants, he does not share their ideas
or customs. His interest in Java, if he have an interest at all, is
an interest in sugar, coffee, taxes, or missions. His state is not a
commonwealth in the sense that it is a common possession.
To the Greek of Plato’s time, on the contrary, the commonwealth
was something he actively shared with his fellow citizens. It was
a definite parcel of land whose limits he could probably see from
any convenient hilltop; and those who lived within those limits had
common gods to worship, common theaters and gymnasia, and a multitude
of common interests that could be satisfied only by their working
together, playing together, thinking together. Plato could probably not
have conceived of a community with civilized pretensions in which the
population was distributed at the rate of ten per square mile; and if
he visited such a territory he would surely have said that the people
were barbarians--men whose way of living unfitted them for the graces
and duties of citizenship.
Geographically speaking, then, the ideal commonwealth was a
city-region; that is, a city which was surrounded by enough land to
supply the greater part of the food needed by the inhabitants; and
placed convenient to the sea.
Let us stand on a high hill and take a look at this city-region; the
sort of view that Plato himself might have obtained on some clear
spring morning when he climbed to the top of the Acropolis and looked
down on the sleeping city, with the green fields and sear upland
pastures on one side, and the sun glinting on the distant waters of the
sea a few miles away.
It is a mountainous region, this Greece, and within a short distance
from mountain top to sea there was compressed as many different kinds
of agricultural and industrial life as one could single out in going
down the Hudson valley from the Adirondack Mountains to New York
Harbor. As the basis for his ideal city, whether Plato knew it or not,
he had an “ideal” section of land in his mind--what the geographer
calls the “valley section.” He could not have gotten the various groups
which were to be combined in his city, had they been settled in the
beginning on a section of land like the coastal plain of New Jersey.
It was peculiarly in Greece that such a variety of occupations could
come together within a small area, beginning at the summit of the
valley section with the evergreen trees and the woodcutter, going down
the slope to the herdsman and his flock of goats at pasture, along
the valley bottom to the cultivator and his crops, until at length one
reaches the river’s mouth where the fisher pushes out to sea in his
boat and the trader comes in with goods from other lands.
The great civilizations of the world have been nourished in such valley
sections. We think of the river Nile and Alexandria; the Tiber and
Rome, the Seine and Paris; and so on. It is interesting that our first
great utopia should have had an “ideal” section of territory as its
base.
4
In the economic foundations of the Republic, we look in vain for
a recognition of the labor problem. Now the labor problem is a
fundamental difficulty in our modern life; and it seems on the surface
that Plato is a little highbrow and remote in the ease with which he
gets over it. When we look more closely into the matter, however, and
see the way in which men got their living in the “morning lands”--as
the Germans call them--we shall find that the reason Plato does not
offer a solution is that he was not, indeed, confronted by a problem.
Given a valley section which has not been ruthlessly stript of trees;
given the arts of agriculture and herding; given a climate without
dangerous extremes of heat and cold; given the opportunity to found new
colonies when the old city-region is over-populated--and it is only by
an exercise of ingenuity that a labor problem could be invented. A man
might become a slave by military capture; he did not become a slave
by being compelled, under threat of starvation, to tend a machine.
The problem of getting a living was answered by nature as long as men
were willing to put up with nature’s conditions; and the groundwork
of Plato’s utopia, accordingly, is the simple agricultural life, the
growing of wheat, barley, olives, and grapes, which had been fairly
well mastered before he arrived on the scene. As long as the soil was
not washed away and devitalized, the problem was not a hard one; and
in order to solve it, Plato had only to provide that there should be
enough territory to grow food on, and that the inhabitants must not let
their wants exceed the bounties of nature.
Plato describes the foundations of his community with a few simple
and masterly touches. Those who feel that there is something a little
inhuman in his conception of the good life, when he is discussing the
education and duties of the ruling classes, may well consider the
picture that he paints for us here.
Plato’s society arises out of the needs of mankind; because none of us
is self-sufficing and all have many wants; and since there are many
wants, many kinds of people must supply them. When all these helpers
and partners and co-operators are gathered together in a city the body
of inhabitants is termed a state; and so its members work and exchange
goods with one another for their mutual advantage--the herdsman gets
barley for his cheese and so on down to the complicated interchanges
that occur in the city. What sort of physical life will arise out of
this in the region that Plato describes?
Well, the people will “produce corn and wine and clothes and shoes
and build houses for themselves.... They will work in summer commonly
stript and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod.
They will feed on barley and wheat, baking the wheat and kneading the
flour, making noble puddings and loaves; these they will serve up on
a mat of reeds or clean leaves; themselves reclining the while upon
beds of yew or myrtle boughs. And they and their children will feast,
drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their
heads, and having the praises of the gods on their lips, living in
sweet society, and having a care that their families do not exceed
their means; for they will have an eye to poverty or war.”