live in common barracks, and in order to avoid paying attention to
private affairs, instead of minding the good of the whole community,
no one is allowed to “possess any substance privately, unless there
be a great necessity for it”; next, Plato continues, none shall have
any dwelling or storehouse into which whoever inclines may not enter;
and as for necessaries, they shall be only such as brave and temperate
warriors may require, and as they are supported by other citizens, they
shall receive such a reward of their guardianship as to have neither an
overplus nor a deficit at the end of the year. They shall have public
meals, as in encampments, and live in common. They are to refrain from
using gold and silver, as all the gold and silver they require is in
their souls.
All these regulations, of course, are for the purpose of keeping the
Guardians disinterested. Plato believed that the majority of people
did not know how to mind public business; for it seemed to him that
the ordering of a community’s life required a measure of science
which the common man could not possibly possess. Indeed, in a city
of a thousand men he did not see the possibility of getting as many
as fifty men who would be sufficiently well versed in what we should
today call sociology to deal intelligently with public affairs--for
there would scarcely be that many first-rate draughts players. At the
same time, if the government is to be entrusted to a few, the few
must be genuinely disinterested. If they possessed lands and houses
and money in a private way they would become landlords and farmers
instead of Guardians; they would be hateful masters instead of allies
of the citizens; and so “hating and being hated, plotting and being
plotted against, more afraid of the enemies within than the enemies
without, they would drag themselves and the rest of the state to speedy
destruction.”
It remains to take a glance at the manhood and later life of the
Guardians.
As young men, the Guardians belong to the auxiliaries; and since
they are not permitted to perform any of the manual arts--for skill
in any of the trades tended to make a man warped and one-sided, like
the symbolic blacksmith god, Hephæstos--their physical edge was
maintained by the unceasing discipline of the gymnasium and “military”
expeditions. I put military in quotation marks, because a greater part
of the warriors’ time is spent not in war but in preparation for war;
and it is plain that Plato looked upon war as an unnecessary evil, for
it arose out of the unjust state; and therefore he must have resorted
to warlike discipline for the educational values he found in it. From
thirty-five to fifty the potential Guardians undertake practical
activities, commanding armies and gaining experience of life. After
fifty, those who are qualified devote themselves to philosophy: out of
their experience and their inner reflection they figure the essential
nature of the good community; and on occasion each guardian abandons
divine philosophy for a while, takes his turn at the helm of the state,
and trains his successors.
10
What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman
differ from Julius Cæsar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt?
The business of the Guardian is to manufacture liberty. The petty laws,
regulations, and reforms with which the ordinary statesman occupies
himself had nothing to do, in Plato’s mind, with the essential business
of the ruler. So Plato expressly foregoes making laws to regulate
marketing, the affairs of industry, graft, bribery, theft, and so
forth; and he leaves these matters with the curt indication that men
can be left to themselves to devise on a voluntary basis the rules
of the game for the different occupations; and that it is not the
business of the Guardian to meddle in such matters. In a well-founded
state, a great number of minor maladjustments would simply fall
out of existence; whilst in any other state, all the tinkering and
reforming in the world is quite powerless to amend its organic defects.
Those make-believe statesmen who try their hand at legislation and
“are always fancying that by reforming they will make an end of the
dishonesties and rascalities of mankind,” do not know that in reality
they are trying to cut away the heads of a hydra.
The real concern of the Guardians is with the essential constitution of
the state. The means that they employ to perfect this constitution are
breeding, vocational selection, and education. “If once a republic is
set a-going, it proceeds happily, increasing as a circle. And whilst
good education and nurture are preserved, they produce good geniuses;
and good geniuses, partaking of such education, produce still better
than the former, as well in other respects, as with reference to
propagation, as in the case of other animals.” All the activities of
the Republic are to be patterned after the utopia which the Guardians
see with their inward eye. So gradually the community becomes a living
unity; and it exhibits the health of that which is organically sound.
11
What do we miss when we look around this utopia of Plato’s? Contacts
with the outside world? We may take them for granted. Downy beds,
Corinthian girls, luxurious furniture? We can well spare them. The
opportunity for a satisfactory intellectual and physical life? No: both
of these are here.
What Plato has left out are the poets, dramatists, and painters.
Literature and music, in order to contribute to the noble education
of the Guardians, are both severely restricted in theme and in
treatment. Plato has his limitations; and here is the principal one:
Plato distrusted the emotional life, and whilst he was prepared to do
full homage to man’s obvious sensualities, he feared the emotions as
a tight-rope walker fears the wind; for they threatened his balance.
In one significant passage he classifies “love” with disease and
drunkenness, as a vulgar misfortune; and though he was ready to permit
the active expression of the emotions, as in the dance or the sexual
act, he treated the mere play upon the feelings, without active
participation, as a form of intemperance. Hence a great deal of music
and dramatic mimicry was taboo. Foreign as this doctrine sounds to
the modern reader, there is perhaps more than a grain of sense in it:
William James used to teach that no one should passively experience an
emotion at a concert or a play without trying to express that emotion
actively as soon as he could make the opportunity. At any rate, let us
leave this problem which Plato opens up with a free mind; and note here
in passing that in the utopia of William Morris novels drop naturally
out of existence because life is too active an ecstasy to be fed with
the pathetic, the maudlin, and the diseased.
12
As we leave this little city of Plato’s, nestling in the hills, and
as the thin, didactic voice of Plato, who has been perpetually at our
elbows, dies away from our ears--what impression do we finally carry
away?
In the fields, men are perhaps plowing the land for the autumn sowing;
on the terraces, a band of men, women, and children are plucking the
olives carefully from the trees, one by one; in the gymnasium on the
top of the Acropolis, men and youths are exercising, and as they
practice with the javelin now and then it catches the sun and glints
into our eye; apart from these groups, in a shaded walk that overlooks
the city, a Guardian is pacing back and forth, talking in quick,
earnest tones with his pupils.
These are occupations which, crudely or elaborately, men have always
engaged in; and here in the Republic they engage in them still. What
has changed? What has profoundly changed is not the things that men do,
but the relations they bear to one another in doing them. In Plato’s
community, servitude and compulsion and avarice and indolence are
gone. Men mind their business for the sake of living well, in just
relations to the whole community of which they are a part. They live,
in the strictest sense, according to nature; and because no one can
enjoy a private privilege, each man can grow to his full stature and
enter into every heritage of his citizenship. When Plato says no to the
institutions and ways of life that men have blindly fostered, his eyes
are open, and he is facing the light.
CHAPTER THREE
How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas
More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the New
World.
CHAPTER THREE
1
There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir
Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia
seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus
looks back into a mythical past; Cicero’s essay on the state is a
negligible work; and St. Augustine’s City of God is chiefly remarkable
for a brilliant journalistic attack upon the old order of Rome which
reminds one of the contemporary diatribes of Maximilian Harden. Except
for these works there is, as far as I can discover, scarcely any other
piece of writing which even hints at utopia except as utopia may refer
to a dim golden age in the past when all men were virtuous and happy.
But while utopia dropt out of literature, it did not drop out of men’s
minds; and the utopia of the first fifteen hundred years after Christ
is transplanted to the sky, and called the Kingdom of Heaven. It is
distinctly a utopia of escape. The world as men find it is full of
sin and trouble. Nothing can be done about it except to repent of the
sin and find refuge from the trouble in the life after the grave. So
the utopia of Christianity is fixed and settled: one can enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven if a passport has been granted, but one can do
nothing to create or mold this heaven. Change and struggle and ambition
and amelioration belong to the wicked world, and bring no final
satisfaction. Happiness lies not in the deed, but in having a secure
credit in the final balance of accounts--happiness, in other words,
lies in the ultimate compensation. This world of fading empires and
dilapidated cities is no home except for the violent and the “worldly.”
If the idea of utopia loses its practical hold during this period,
the will-to-utopia remains; and the rise of the monastic system and
the attempts of the great popes from Hildebrand onward to establish a
universal empire under the shield of the church show that, as always,
there was a breach between the ideas which people carried in their
heads and the things which actual circumstances and going institutions
compelled them to do. There is no need to consider these partial,
institutional utopias until we get down to the nineteenth century. What
concerns us now is that the Kingdom of Heaven, as a utopia of escape,
ceased to hold men’s allegiance when they discovered other channels and
other possibilities.
The shift from a heavenly utopia to a worldly one came during that
period of change and uneasiness which characterized the decline of the
Middle Age. Its first expression is the “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More,
the great chancellor who served under Henry VIII.
2
In the introduction to More’s “Utopia” one gets a vivid impression of
the forces that were stirring men’s minds out of the sluggish routine
into which they had settled. The man who is supposed to describe the
commonwealth of Utopia is a Portuguese scholar, learned in Greek.
He has left his family possessions with his kinsmen and has gone
adventuring for other continents with Americus Vesputius. This Raphael
Hythloday is the sort of sunburnt sailor one could probably have
encountered in Bristol or Cadiz or Antwerp almost any day during the
late part of the fifteenth century. He has abandoned Aristotle, whom
the schoolmen had butchered and had made pemmican of, and through his
conquest of Greek he has come into possession of that new learning
which stems back to Plato; and his brain is teeming with the criticisms
and suggestions of a strange, pagan philosophy. Moreover, he has been
abroad to the Americas or the Indies, and he is ready to tell all who
will listen of a strange land on the other side of the world, where, as
Sterne said of France, “they do things better.” No institution is too
fantastic but that it might exist--on the other side of the world. No
way of life is too reasonable but that a philosophical population might
follow it--on the other side of the world. Conceive of the world of
ideas which Greek literature had just opened up coming headlong against
the new lands which the magnetic compass had given men the courage to
explore, and utopia, as a fresh conception of the good life, becomes a
throbbing possibility.
3
In setting out for Utopia Sir Thomas More left behind a scene which in
its political violence and economic maladjustment looks queerly like
our own. Indeed, there are a good many passages which need only have a
few names altered and the language itself cast into modern English in
order to serve as editorial comment for a radical weekly review.
Consider this man Raphael Hythloday, this errant member of the
intelligentzia. Life as he knows it in the Europe of his day no
longer has a hold upon him. The rich are fattening upon the poor;
land is being gathered into big parcels, at least in England; and
turned over into sheep runs. The people who used to cultivate the land
are compelled to leave their few acres and are thrown on their own
resources. Soldiers who have returned from the wars can find nothing
to do; disabled veterans and people accustomed to live as pensioners
on the more prosperous have become destitute. Extravagant luxury grows
on one hand; misery on the other. Those who are poor, beg; those who
are proud, steal; and for their pains the thieves and the vagrants are
tried and sentenced to the gibbet, where by dozens they hang before the
eyes of the market crowds.
Just as today, people complain that the laws are not strict enough or
that they are not enforced; and everyone stubbornly refuses to look at
the matter through Raphael Hythloday’s eyes and to see that the robbery
and violence which are abroad are not a cause of bad times but a result
of them.
What can a man of intelligence do in such a world?
More’s friend, Peter Giles, who is represented as the sponsor for
Raphael, wonders why a man of Raphael’s talent does not enter into the
service of the king--in short, go in for politics. Raphael answers
that he does not wish to be enslaved; and he cannot try to fetch
happiness on terms so abhorrent to his disposition, for “most princes
apply themselves more to the affairs of war than to the useful arts of
peace, and are more set on acquiring new kingdoms right or wrong than
on governing those they possess.” There is no use trying to tell them
about the wiser institutions of the Utopians: if they could not refute
your arguments they would say that the old ways were good enough for
their ancestors and are good enough for them, even though they have
willingly let go of all the genuinely good things that might have been
inherited from the past.
So much for the help an intelligent man might give on domestic
problems. As for international affairs, it is a mess of chicane and
intrigue and brigandage. While so many people of influence are advising
preparedness and “how to carry on the war,” what chance would a poor
intellectual like Hythloday have if he stood up and said that the
government should withdraw their armies from foreign parts and try
to improve conditions at home, instead of oppressing the people with
taxes and spilling their blood without bringing them a single blessed
advantage, whilst their manners are being corrupted by a long war, and
their laws fall into contempt, with robbery and murder on every hand.
More, through the tongue of Raphael Hythloday, is painting a picture of
the life he sees about him; but in it we seem to see every feature of
our own national countenance.
This unhonored and disoriented intellectual is the very emblem of some
of our best spirits today. Rack and ruin have gone too far to admit
of any sort of repair except that which proceeds from the bottom up;
and so Hythloday freely admits that “as long as there is any property,
and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think
that a nation can be governed either justly or happily; not justly,
because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor
happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even these
are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be absolutely
miserable.” In short, says Hythloday, there is no salvation except
through following the practices of the Utopians.
So the new world of exploration brings us within sight of a new world
of ideas, and the beloved community, whose seed Plato had sought to
implant in men’s minds, springs up again, after a fallow period of
almost two thousand years. What sort of country is it?
4
Geographically viewed, the island of Utopia exists only in More’s
imagination. All that we can say of it is that it is two hundred miles
broad, shaped something like a crescent, with an entrance into its
great bay which lends itself to defence. There are fifty-four cities
in the island; the nearest is twenty-four miles from its neighbor, and
the farthest is not more than a day’s march distant. The chief town,
Amaurot, is situated very nearly in the center; and each city has
jurisdiction over the land for twenty miles around; so that here again
we find the city-region as the unit of political life.
5
The economic base of this commonwealth is agriculture, and no one is
ignorant of the art. Here and there over the countryside are great
farm-houses, equipt for carrying on agricultural operations. While
those who are well-adapted for rural life are free to live in the open
country the whole year round, other workers are sent by turns from the
city to take part in the farm-labor. Every farmstead or “family” holds
no less than forty men and women. Each year twenty of this family come
back to town after two years in the country; and in their place another
twenty is sent out from the town, so that they may learn the country
work from those who have had at least a year’s experience.
Agricultural economics is so well advanced that the countryside knows
exactly how much food is needed by the whole city-region; but the
Utopians sow and breed more abundantly than they need, in order that
their neighbors may have the overplus. Poultry-raising is also highly
advanced. The Utopians “breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a
very curious manner; for the hens do not sit and hatch them, but vast
numbers of eggs are laid in a gentle and equal heat, in order to be
hatched”--in short, they have discovered the incubator!
During the harvest season the country magistrates inform the city
magistrates how many extra hands are needed for reaping; a draft of
city workers is made, and the work is commonly done in short order.
While every man, woman, and child knows how to cultivate the soil,
since each has learned partly in school and partly by practice, every
person also has some “peculiar trade to which he applies himself,
such as the manufacture of wool or flax, masonry, smith’s work or
carpenter’s work”; and no trade is held in special esteem above the
others. (That is a great jump from the Republic where the mechanic arts
are considered base and servile in nature!) The same trade usually
passes down from father to son, since each family follows its own
special occupation; but a man whose genius lies another way may be
adopted into a family which plies another trade; and if after he has
learnt that trade, he wishes still to master another, this change is
brought about in the same manner. “When he has learned both, he follows
that which he likes best, unless the public has more occasion for the
other.”
The chief and almost the only business of the magistrates is to see
that no one lives in idleness. This does not mean that the Utopians
wear themselves out with “perpetual toil from morning to night, as if
they were beasts of burden,” for they appoint eight hours for sleep and
six for work, and the rest of the day is left to each man’s discretion.
They are able to cut down the length of time needed for work, without
our so-called labor saving machinery, by using the services of classes
which in More’s time were given for the most part to idleness--princes,
rich men, healthy beggars, and the like. The only exception to this
rule of labor is with the magistrates--who are not in the habit of
taking advantage of it--and the students, who upon proving their
ability are released from mechanical operations. If there is too great
a surplus of labor, men are sent out to repair the highways; but
when no public undertaking is to be performed, the hours of work are
lessened.
6
So much for the daily industrial life of the Utopians. How are the
goods distributed?
Between the city and the country there is a monthly exchange of goods.
This occasion is made a festival, and the country people come into
town and take back for themselves the goods which the townspeople have
made; and the magistrates “take care to see it given to them.” In back
of this direct interchange of goods between town and country, between
household and household, there are doubtless regulations; and it is
simply our misfortune that Raphael Hythloday did not think it necessary
to go into them. Within the cities, we must add, there are storehouses
where a daily market takes place.
As with the business of production, the family is the unit of
distribution; and the city is composed of these units, rather than of
a multitude of isolated individuals. “Every city is divided into four
equal parts, and in the middle of each there is a marketplace; what is
brought hither, and manufactured by the several families, is carried
from thence to houses appointed for that purpose, in which all things
of a sort are laid by themselves; and thither every father goes and
takes whatever he or his family stand in need of, without either paying
for it or leaving anything in exchange. There is no reason for giving
denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among
them; and there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs;
they have no inducements to do this, since they are sure they shall
always be supplied.”
More goes on to explain this direct system of exchange, and to justify
it. “It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals
either greedy or ravenous, but besides fear, there is in man a pride
that makes him fancy it a particular glory to excel others in pomp and
excess. But by the laws of the Utopians there is no room for this. Near
these markets are others for all sorts of provisions, where there are
not only herbs, fruits, and bread, but also fish, fowl, and cattle.
There are also, without their towns, places appointed near some running
water for killing their beasts, and for washing away their filth.”
In addition to the monthly apportionment of goods by the local
magistrates, the great council which meets at Amaurot once a year
undertakes to examine the production of each region, and those regions
that suffer from a scarcity of goods are supplied out of the surplus
of other regions, “so that indeed the whole island is, as it were, one
family.”
Taking it all together, there is pretty much the same standard of
well-being that we found in the Republic. More recognizes the instinct
for self-assertion and the exhibitionist element in man’s makeup; but
he does not pander to it. The precious metals are held in contempt:
gold is used to make chamberpots and chains for slaves; pearls are
given to children who glory in them and enjoy them while they are young
and are as much ashamed to use them afterwards as they are of their
puppets and other toys. Gaudy clothes and jewelry are likewise out of
fashion in Utopia. The shopkeepers of Bond Street and Fifth Avenue
would break their hearts here; for it is impossible to spend money or
to spend other people’s labor on articles which lend themselves solely
to conspicuous display, and are otherwise neither useful nor beautiful.
Contrast More’s Utopia with St. John’s vision of heaven, and the
worldly Utopia seems quite naked and austere. Two hundred years later,
in Penn’s city of Philadelphia, we might have fancied that we were
walking about the streets of Amaurot.
7
The town life of the Utopians, as I have explained, rests upon rural
foundations; there is such a mixture of town and country as Peter
Kropotkin sought to realize in his sketch of “Fields, Factories, and
Workshops.” Let us conjure up the town of Amaurot and see in what sort
of environment the townspeople spend their days. Our Utopian city,
alas! reminds us somewhat of its rivals in latter-day America; for
Raphael tells us that he who knows one of their towns knows all of them.