College, Boston, December 26, 2000.” In that preface the work is
presented as an avowed romance which will enable the readers of 2000
to realize the gaps that separate them from their ancestors, and to
value the prodigious “moral and material” transformation that has taken
place in a few generations. Julius West is a person whom our Shawmut
historian invents, to bridge the gap between the two eras. Julius West,
a young man of wealth, sensitive to the ignominy of his position, and
feeling that, as a “rich man living among the poor, an educated man
among the uneducated,” he “was like one living in isolation among a
jealous and alien race.” In order to overcome his insomnia West sleeps
in a vaulted room in the foundations of his house, and gets put to
sleep by a hypnotist; and so by a dramatic oversight he hibernates for
113 years, and awakens among strange faces. Needless to say, West has
a love affair in the old world which is carried on in the new, through
a descendant of the girl he meant to marry; and it is equally needless
to observe that he reawakens to the world of 1887 as soon as the
institutions of 2000 have been described and the love affair has been
resolved.
Let us take West’s muzziness, his amazement, and his sense of isolation
for granted, and follow him as he explores his new environment.
5
If Plato cavalierly disposes of the labor problem of the Republic by
permitting things to remain pretty much as they were, Bellamy makes
the solution of labor organization and the distribution of wealth the
key to every other institution in his utopia.
In the United States of 1887 the growing organization of labor and the
aggregation of capital into trusts were the two chief economic factors:
Dr. Leete, Julius West’s host, pictures how this aggregation and
combination were continued until, by a mere shift of gears, “the epoch
of trusts had ended in The Great Trust.” In a word, “the people of the
United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business,
just as one hundred years before they had assumed the conduct of their
own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the
same grounds that they had organized for political purposes.” Was there
any violence in this transition? Ah no! everything had been prepared
beforehand by public opinion, the great corporations had gradually
trained everybody into an acceptance of large-scale organization, and
the final step of merging all the big corporations into a national
corporation occurred without a jar. With the assumption by the nation
of the mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and capital in
general, all the difficulties of labor vanished, for every citizen
became by virtue of his citizenship an employee of the government, and
was distributed according to the needs of industry.
In 2000 “the labor army” is not a figure of speech: it is an army
indeed, for the nation is a single industrial unit, and the principle
upon which the working force is recruited is universal compulsory
industrial service. After a man’s education has been completed in the
common school system, which extends straight through college, he must
first serve a term of three years in an unclassified labor army, which
performs all the rough and menial tasks of the community. When this
period is over, he is permitted to offer himself as a recruit in any of
the trades or professions which may be declared open by the government,
and can train for his calling up to the age of thirty, in the national
schools and institutes. In order to attract people into occupations
where they are needed, the hours are reduced and, for the dangerous
trades, volunteers are called for. There are however no discriminations
in pay. Every person is credited with a sum of four thousand dollars
per annum at the National Bank, a sum which he receives because of his
needs as a man and not because of his capacity as a worker. Instead
of being rewarded for giving the full measure of his energies and
abilities, a man is penalized if he fails to do so. It is possible
to shift from one branch of the service to another, under certain
restrictions, even as in the navy one can change one’s rating and
apply for service on a different ship or station, but except for the
possibility of retiring on a half-income at the age of thirty-three,
everyone must remain at work until he is forty-five.
To this rule there is one exception; and we may note ironically that
it is made in favor of the writer’s guild. If a man produces a book he
may name his own royalties, and live as long from this income as the
sale will allow; and if he wishes to start a newspaper or a magazine,
and can get credit from a sufficient number of other people to support
his enterprise, there is nothing to prevent him from remitting service
to the amount his guarantors are ready to deduct from their personal
income. In other words, a man must “either by literary, artistic,
or inventive productiveness indemnify the nation for the loss of his
services, or must get a sufficient number of people to contribute to
such an indemnity.” This is the one open hole in our militarized,
industrial utopia; and I think it is the most acceptable feature in the
whole system. A community organized as a single unit, directed by a
general staff at Washington, and perpetually exhibiting a herd complex
which every institution would naturally reinforce, might not be a very
genial shelter for the soul of an artist; but if it were, this means of
support would doubtless be fair and excellent for the encouragement of
the arts.
To go back to our army. The entire field of production and distribution
is divided into ten great departments, each representing a group of
allied industries; and each particular industry is in turn represented
by a subordinate bureau, which has a complete record of the plant and
the force under its control, of the present product, and of the means
of increasing it. The estimates of the distributive department, after
adoption by the administration, are sent as mandates to the ten great
departments, which allot them to the subordinate bureaux, representing
the particular industries, and these set the men at work.... “After the
necessary contingents have been detailed for the various industries,
the amount of labor left for other employment is expended in creating
fixed capital, such as buildings, machinery, engineering works, and so
forth.”
In order to safeguard the consumer from the caprices of the
administration, a new article must be produced as soon as a certain
guaranteed demand for it has been established by popular petition,
whilst an old article must be continued to be produced as long as
there are customers for it, provision being made that the price rise in
accordance with the greater cost of production per unit.
Now the general of this industrial army is the president of the United
States. He is chosen from among the corps commanders; and it is
provided that every officer in the army, from the president down to
the sergeant, must work his way up from the grade of common laborer.
The chief peculiarity of this system consists in the way in which the
voting is done. The voters are all honorary members of the guild to
which they belong; that is, men who are over forty-five years old;
this applies not merely to the ten lieutenant generals, but to the
commander-in-chief, who is not eligible for the presidency until he
has been a certain number of years out of office. The president is
elected by vote of all the men of the nation who are not connected
with the industrial army; for any other method, Bellamy thinks,
would be prejudicial to discipline. There are various names for this
practice: one of them is gerontocracy, or government by the aged; and
another, more familiar, is “alumni control.” When we recollect that
the hardships of military service look rather mild and pleasant to
the man who has been mustered out, I doubt if the youngsters in the
industrial army would stand much chance of having their lot improved
if the initiative for a change had to come from the alumni. Yet we
know what even the formation of a worker’s shop committee would be
in an industrial army: it would be mutiny. As for criticism of the
administration, that would be treason; admiration for the practices of
another country would be disloyalty; and advocacy of a change in the
method of industry would be sedition.
True: corruption and bribe-taking and all the dirty scandals that
we associate today with a financial oligarchy would be wiped out
in utopia; but this merely means that the defects of the old order
would disappear along with its virtues. What would remain would be
the defects that arise when a nation is in arms, and when there is
no escape, by travel or mental withdrawal, from its institutions; in
short, the defects of a state of war. To call this a peaceful community
is absurd: one might as well call a battleship a pleasure-craft because
a modern one possesses a band and shows motion pictures to the crew.
The organization of this utopia is an organization for war; and the
one rule that such a community would not tolerate is “live and let
live.” If this is the peace that “industrial preparedness” ensures it
is scarcely worth having. Any community that liked this state of life
would scarcely need the constant exhortation of the recruiting sergeant
or the final compulsion of a conscription act.
6
The great part of Looking Backward is a discussion of this perfected
form of industrial organization; the manner in which it is worked;
and the effects of complete economic equality in doing away with the
necessity for the greater part of the legal machinery of the present
day, since crimes with an economic motive would almost, according to
Bellamy, be unthinkable. Here and there however we have glimpses of the
social life of this new age.
First of all, there floats before our eyes the picture of a vast body
of superannuated persons, who for the most part spend their time in
a sort of country-club existence. They can travel, because the other
countries in the world are likewise nationalized, and by a simple
system of book-keeping foreign credit for goods and personal services
can be transferred from one country to another; and they can take up
special vocations and hobbies during their superannuated years; but
it is equally plain that their work has not done very much to foster
intellectual or emotional maturity, since in relation to the citizens
the state exists as a “Great White Father”; and there is good reason
perhaps for the great interest in sport which characterizes Bellamy’s
utopia. Games are organized, apparently, upon lines of industrial guild
rivalry; just as one has sports nowadays between rival battleship
squadrons perhaps; for “if bread is the first necessity of life,
recreation is a second, and the nation caters for both.” The demand
for bread and circuses, our guide explains, is recognized in the year
2000 as a wholly reasonable one. Both work and play are external to the
citizen’s inner trends and interests; and we should not be surprised
if an infantile element predominated in the character of this happy
republic.
This externalism, this impersonality, seems to characterize the whole
scene. We follow Julius West and his new love, Edith, into a modern
shop, where everything is displayed by sample, and an order for goods
is sent to a central warehouse, and along with undoubted economies
of space and time, we note that there is an almost complete absence
of personal contacts or relationships: more than ever the worker has
become a cog in the machine, more than ever he deals with a thin,
barren, abstract world of paper notations, more than ever his desire
for social contacts is dammed up; and so, more than ever, there must be
occasion in this new age for stimulants and socialities beside which
the roller coasters of Coney Island and the promiscuities of a modern
dance hall would be insipid things. Bellamy does not show us what these
compensatory institutions would be: but he has invented a high-powered
engine of repression, and he does not fool us when he conceals the
safety-valve. Unless there is a safety-valve his universal army, under
a rigorous discipline for twenty-four years, is bound to blow up the
works. We can guess when we read the cheap illustrated papers, when we
go to the movies, when we watch the behavior of the crowds on Broadway,
what this twenty-first century Utopia would be like--it would be all
that a modern city is, exaggerated. In The New Society, Dr. Walter
Rathenau drew a picture of a socialized modern society, moving along
its present path without any change in its aims and ideals; and that
nightmare of his must be added to Bellamy’s dream in order to define it.
It is the same with every other institution. There is a big communal
restaurant in which each family of the neighborhood has a private room;
this is the place where the principal meal is ordered by the family,
and served by young conscript waiters. Am I at fault if I point out
that this universal hostelry is a little too elaborate and mechanical;
that there is more promise of a genuine utopia in Plato’s olives and
cheese and beans, simply served, than in the “perfection of catering
and cooking” which the new age boasts. So one could go down the line
and enumerate the mechanical marvels which take the place of a fully
humanized life; marvels like the telephone concerts and sermons which
astoundingly anticipate by thirty-odd years the radio broadcasting
service which is now a prevalent mania in America. Are these things, as
Aristotle would have said, the material bases of the good life, or are
they substitutes for the good life? There may have been some doubt as
to the answer in Bellamy’s time; but I think there need not be any at
present. In so far as these instruments are consonant with humanized
purposes they are good; in so far as they are irrelevant they are so
much rubbish--idiotic rubbish. A free public library is a good thing;
but a free public library devoted exclusively to distributing the
novels of Gene Stratton Porter and the uplift books of Mr. Orison Swett
Marden would not contribute so much as a useful platitude towards a
vivid and stimulating society.
There is no escaping the problem of ends and the problem of ends, if
I may be permitted a pun, belongs at the beginning. Subordinate to
humanized ends, machinery and organization--yes, complicated machinery
and organization--have undoubtedly a useful contribution to make
towards a good community; unsubordinated, or subordinated only to
the engineer’s conceptions of an efficient industrial equipment and
personnel, the most innocent machine may be as humanly devastating
as a Lewis gun. All this Bellamy overlooked in Looking Backward, and
yet--something remains.
What remains in Looking Backward is the honest passion that inspired
the man; the play of generous impulses; the insistence that there
is no fun for an ordinarily imaginative person in dining with Dives
whilst Lazarus hangs around the table. Bellamy wanted everyone to
be equally educated, so that everyone might be his companion; he
wanted everyone to be decently fed and sheltered; he wanted to take
his share in the dirty work and to see that accidents of wealth did
not keep other people from taking theirs. He wanted private life to
be simple and public life to be splendid. He wanted men and women
to mate with each other without permitting this relationship to be
compromised by obligations to a father, a mother, or the butcher,
the baker, and the grocer. He wanted the generous, the just, and the
tender-hearted to be as well endowed as the cold-hearted, the greedy,
and the self-seeking. He pleaded for an absence of artificiality and
restraint in the relations of the sexes; for such a candor as has
perhaps come into fashion again--thank heaven!--today, a candor which
permits women physical freedom in dress, and a spiritual freedom in
exhibiting their love, and giving it freely. All this is to the good.
I do not question Bellamy’s fine motives; I question only the outlets
he imagined for them. There is a breach between Bellamy’s conception of
the good life and the structure he erected to shelter it. This breach
is due, I believe, to an over-emphasis of the part that wholesale
mechanical organization, directed by a handful of people, would play
in such a reconstruction. If Bellamy sometimes exaggerated the bad in
modern society, with its muddle of competitive privileges, he likewise
overestimated the good that it contained; and he was more than fair to
the present order of things when he made the future so closely in its
image.
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.
CHAPTER NINE
1
It would be a pretty sad thing if the Utopias of the nineteenth century
were all of a piece with those of Buckingham and Bellamy. In general we
may say that all the utopias of reconstruction had a deadly sameness
of purpose and a depressing singleness of interest; and although they
saw society whole, they saw the problem of reconstructing society
as a simple problem of industrial reorganization. Fortunately, the
utopias of escape have something to contribute which the utopias of
reconstruction lack; and if William Morris, for example, seems too
remote from Manchester and Minneapolis to be of any use, he is by that
token a little nearer the essential human realities: he knows that
the chief dignity of man lies not in what he consumes but in what he
creates, and that the Manchester ideal is--devastatingly consumptive.
Before I go into these utopias of escape, I wish to point out the
strange way in which the three utopias we shall examine return as
it were upon their classic models, each of the returns being, it is
fairly plain, without the consciousness of the writer. Mr. W. H. Hudson
returns upon More; and in A Crystal Age the farmstead and the family
is the ultimate unit of social life. In News from Nowhere the city of
workers, such as Andreæ dreamed of, comes again into being; and in
A Modern Utopia, with its order of Samurai, we are ruled once more
by a highly disciplined class of Platonic guardians. Mr. Hudson is a
naturalist with a deep sympathy for the rural life of England; William
Morris was a craftsman who knew what the English town was like before
it had been blighted by industrialism; and with both of these men we
feel close to the essential life of man and the essential occupations.
2
As the clouded vision of the traveller to the Crystal Age clears, he
finds himself received in a great Country House, which is inhabited
by a large group of men and women who till the land and perform the
simple operations of weaving and stonecutting and the like. All over
the world, one gathers, these great country houses dot the landscape.
Each of them is no weekend center of social life but a permanent home;
indeed their permanence is almost past believing; for in each house
traditions are carried back thousands of years. The great cities and
the complicated metropolitan customs that they produced have long been
wiped away, as one might wipe away mold. The world has been stabilized;
the itch for getting and spending has disappeared. Our traveller must
bind himself to work for a whole year in order to pay for the garments
his house-mates weave for him, garments whose texture and cut have a
classic turn.
This household, I say, is the social unit of the Crystal Age: the
house-father administers the laws and customs, and he dispenses the
punishment of seclusion when the visitor trespasses upon the code of
the house. The house-mates work together, eat together, play together,
and listen together to the music of a mechanical instrument called
the musical sphere. At night they sleep in separate little cubicles
which can be opened to the night air. The horses and dogs of the
Crystal Age have a degree of intelligence which our common breeds do
not possess, so that the horses all but harness themselves to the
plow, and the dog teaches the traveller when to leave off working the
animals. Each household has not merely its laws and traditions: it has
its literature; its written history; and the very girl with whom the
traveller falls in love bears a resemblance to the sculptured face of
an unhappy house-mother who lived and suffered in the immemorial past.
These houses, these families, these social relations are built for
endurance. What is the secret of their strength?
The secret of our Crystal Age Utopia is the secret of the beehive: a
queen bee. The Crystallites have done away with the difficulties of
mating by appointing one woman, in every house, to be the house-mother,
the woman whose capital duty is to carry on the family: the entire
burden of each generation falls upon her shoulders, and in return for
the sacrifice she is treated with the respect due to divinity, like
the young man who was chosen in the Kingdom of Montezuma, as the tales
have it, to represent the chief deity until at the end of a year he
was disembowelled. The wish of a house-mother is a command; the word
of the house-mother is law. For a year before her retirement as mother
she is put into communion with the sacred books of the house, and has
at her command a store of knowledge which the rest of the hive are not
permitted to share. It is she who keeps burning the fires of life.
For all except the house-mother sex is a matter of purely physical
appearance. The Crystallites, if we may speak irreverently, are
“content with a vegetable love--which would certainly not suit me”
nor, it appears, did it suit our traveller to the Crystal Age, when he
discovers that his passion could never be reciprocated by his beloved,
even if she so far transgressed the laws of the household as to give
way to him. Against the appearance of passion and all the mortal
griefs that it carries with it, the house-mother possesses a remedy.
When in the murk of despair our traveller turns to her for advice and
consolation, she gives him a phial of liquid. He drinks it in the
belief that it will make him as free from passion as his house-mates;
and he is not deceived; for--he dies.
The social life of the household is not to be wrecked by the storms
and stresses of the individual’s passions. The engines of life are no
longer dangerous: the fuel has been taken away! A “chill moonlight
felicity” is all that remains.
3
There are times when one may look upon the whole adventure of civilized
life as a sort of Odyssey of domestication; and in this mood the
Crystal Age marks a terminus upon that particular aspect of the
adventure. To the objection that this sort of utopia requires that we
change human nature, the answer, in terms of modern biology, is that
there is no apparent scientific reason why certain elements in human
nature should not be selected and brought to the front, or why certain
others should not be reduced in importance and eliminated. So, for
all practical purposes, there is no apparent reason why human nature
should not be changed, or why we should not be prepared to believe
that in times past it has been changed--communities which selectively
bred for pugnacity and aggression committing suicide and opening the
way for communities which socially selected other traits that made
for survival. It is possible that in times past man has done a great
deal to domesticate himself and fit himself for harmonious social
life; and a utopia which rests upon the notion that there should be a
certain direction in our breeding is not altogether luny; indeed, is
nowadays less so than ever before, for the reason that it is possible
to separate romantic love from physical procreation without, as the
Athenians did, resorting to homosexuality.
If A Crystal Age opens our minds to these possibilities it is not to
be counted purely as a romance; in spite of the fact that as a romance
it has passages that rival Green Mansions. Between the individual
households and common marriages, the utopia of the beehive is a third
alternative which possibly remains to be explored.
4