I think, is to exaggerate the demand for goods, and to cause an
enormously wasteful duplication of the apparatus of consumption. If the
limit to one’s possessions should be simply the extent of one’s purse;
if happiness is to be acquired through obtaining the comforts and
luxuries of life; if a man who possesses a single house is considered
fortunate, and a man who possesses five houses five times as fortunate;
if there are no standards of living other than the insatiable one that
has been set up in the Country House--well, then there is really no
limit to the business of getting and spending, and our lives become the
mean handiwork of coachman, cook, and groom. Our Country House will not
merely be a house: there will be a chapel, an art gallery, a theater,
a gymnasium, as François Rabelais imagined. As the common possessions
of the community dwindle, the private possessions of individuals
are multiplied; and at last, there remains no other community than
a multitude of anarchic individuals, each of whom is doing his best
to create for himself a Country House, notwithstanding the fact that
the net result of his endeavors--this is the drab tragedy and the
final thing to be said against it--is perhaps nothing better than six
inadequate rooms at the end of nowhere in a Philadelphia suburb.
The Country House, then, is the chief pattern by means of which the
mediæval order was transformed into the modern order. It does not
matter very much whether the Country House is an estate on Long Island
or a cottage in Montclair; whether it is a house in Golder’s Green
or a family manor in Devonshire: these are essentially affairs of
scale, and the underlying identity is plain enough. The idolum of the
Country House prevails even when quarters are taken up in the midst
of the metropolis. More than ever the Country House today tries to
make up by an abundance of physical goods for all that has been lost
through its divorce from the underlying community; more than ever it
attempts to be self-sufficient within the limits of suburbia. The
automobile, the phonograph, and the radio-telephone have only served to
increase this self-sufficiency; and I need not show at length how these
instrumentalities have deepened the elements of acquisitiveness and
passive, uncreative, mechanical enjoyment.
The Country House’s passionate demand for physical goods has given rise
to another institution, Coketown; and it is the idolum of Coketown, the
industrial age’s contribution to the Country House, that we have now to
consider.
8
The chief difference between the individual utopias of the nineteenth
century and the “collective representation” of Coketown is that these
individual utopias were concerned to repair certain points where
Manchester, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Elberfeld-Barmen fell short of the
ideal. In repairing these points, Bellamy and Hertzka were ready to
alter the conventional arrangements by which property and land were
held, and capital was accumulated. The final end however was the same;
and the differences are therefore more apparent than real.
If the illustrative example of the Country House is in the Abbey of
Theleme, that of Coketown is in the sharp picture of industrialism
which Charles Dickens presents in Hard Times.
Coketown, as Dickens sees it, is the quintessence of the industrial
age. It is perhaps one of the few idola of the modern world which has
no parallel in any earlier civilization that we have been able to
explore. In order to understand what Coketown brought into the world,
we must realize that before Coketown came into existence the center
of every important European city consisted of a marketplace, shadowed
over by a Cathedral, a Market Court, and a Guildhall; and frequently
there would be an adjacent university. This was the typical formation.
The various quarters of the city were subordinated to these central
institutions, and the work which was carried on within the city’s walls
was more or less concretely realized in the local community.
Coketown, on the other hand, was the outcome of other conditions and
necessities. The center of Coketown’s activity was the mill, set at
first in the open country near falling water, and then as coal was
applied to steam engines, removed to areas more accessible to the coal
fields. The factory became the new social unity; in fact it became the
only social unit; and, as Dickens sharply put it, “the jail looked like
the town hall, and the town hall like the infirmary”--and all of them
looked like the factory, a gaunt building of murky brick that once was
red or yellow. The sole object of the factory is to produce goods for
sale; and every other institution is encouraged in Coketown only to the
extent that it does not seriously interfere with this aim.
What are the outward physical aspects of Coketown? To begin with, the
city is laid out by an engineer; it is laid out with a mathematical
correctness and with a complete disregard for the amenities. If there
are hills where Coketown ought to stand, the hills are leveled; if
there are swamps, the swamps are filled; if there are lakes, the lakes
are drained away. The pattern to which Coketown’s activities are fitted
is that of the gridiron; there are no deviations and no allowances in
the working out of this plan; never will a street swerve as much as
a hair’s breadth to save a stand of trees or open up a vista. In the
matter of transportation and intercourse, the aim of Coketown is to
“get somewhere”; and it fancies that by laying down straight lines
and joining them in rectangles this aim is expedited; despite the
demonstration in every city of older growth that a radial system of
intercommunication is much more economical than the gridiron. As a
result, there is no terminus to any of the avenues of Coketown; for
they begin on a draughting board and end in infinity. It is impossible
to approach from the front the jails, hospitals, and sanatoria of which
Coketown boasts; the tendency is to run past them. So much for the
physical layout of the industrial city; what remains is obscured by
smoke.
The factory is the center of Coketown’s social life; and it is here
that the greater part of the population spend their days. At its
purest, that is to say, during the first half of the nineteenth
century, and in a great many centers to this day, the factory is
the only institution that provides anything like a social life, in
spite of the fact that the unremitting toil which accompanies its
routine reduces the graces of social intercourse to such a minimum
that drunkenness and copulation are the only amusements which the
inhabitants can engage in as a relief from their noble duty of
providing the rest of the world with necessities, comforts, luxuries,
and nullities.
The Coketown idolum has been disintegrating a little during the last
two decades, under the influence of the garden cities movement,
and I am aware that in certain departments I am celebrating a lost
cause and an abandoned idealism; but there still remain in acres and
acres of workingmen’s dwellings, such as one finds in Battersea and
Philadelphia, and in old-fashioned railway stations, and in buildings
like the Mechanics Halls of Pittsburgh and Boston, a notion of what
Coketown stood for when Coketown, the Frankenstein which had been
created by the Country House, had not been repudiated by its master.
Coketown is devoted to the production of material goods; and there
is no good in Coketown that does not derive from this aim. The only
enjoyment which those who are inured to the Coketown routine can
participate in is mechanical achievement; that is to say, activity
along industrial and commercial lines; and the only result of this
achievement is--more achievement. It follows that all the standards
of Coketown are of a quantitative kind; so many score of machines, so
many tons of gew-gaws, so many miles of piping, so many dollars of
profit. The opportunities for self-assertion and constructiveness in
such a community are practically boundless; and I can never confront
the mechanical felicities of a printing plant without realizing how
fascinating these opportunities are, and how deeply they satisfy
certain elements in our nature. The unfortunate thing about Coketown,
however, is that these are the only sort of opportunities that are
available; and work whose standards are of a qualitative sort, the work
of scholars and artists and scientists, is either frozen out of the
community by deliberate ostracism, or is hitched to the machine; the
artist, for example, being compelled to sing the praises of Coketown’s
goods or to paint the portrait of Coketown’s supreme esthetic
achievement--the Self-Made Man.
In its pristine state, Coketown is not a complete community. So it is
natural that the idolum should have provided certain additions. In the
first place, the activities of Coketown, whether they are beneficial
or wasteful, satisfy only certain elements in the human makeup; and
although much may be done by compulsory education to discipline the
younger generation to the machine, and to show them the necessity of
doing nothing which would interfere with the continued activity of the
machine--for work in Coketown, as Samuel Butler fearfully predicted
in Erewhon, is in the main simply attendance upon machinery--here
and there the igneous instincts of the workers will break through
the solidified layer of habit which the school and the factory have
produced, and the arcane energies of the population will flow either
into the Country House or into that other simulacrum of the civic life,
Broadway.
Coketown for the workaday week, the Country House for the weekend,
is the compromise that has been practically countenanced; although
the country houses of the working classes may be nothing more than
a diminutive extension of the urban slum near sea or mountain. But
it must be admitted that there is a permanent Country House and a
permanent Coketown population in the more ideal aspects of the order.
Mr. Wells in the Time Machine has given a picture of Coketown which
is perhaps a little exuberant in some of its details--the picture of
a happy and careless Country House population, living on the surface
of the earth, mid all the graces of a jolly weekend, and that of the
factory population, the Morlocks, living in the bowels of the earth and
performing the necessary industrial functions. Mr. Wells’ presentation
is a little exaggerated, however, and we must be content here with such
a plain and outright description as Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind
would approve of.
In the Coketown scheme of things, all that does not contribute to the
physical necessities of life is called a comfort; and all that does not
contribute either to comforts or necessities is called a luxury. These
three grades of good correspond to the three classes of the population:
the necessities are for the lower order of manual workers, together
with such accessory members as clerks, teachers, and minor officials;
the comforts are for the comfortable classes, that is, the small order
of merchants, bankers, and industrialists; while the luxuries are for
the aristocracy, if there is such an hereditary group, and for such as
are able to lift themselves out of the two previous orders. Chief among
the luxuries, it goes without saying, are art and literature and any of
the other permanent interests of a humane life.
Let us note what an improvement the three classes of Coketown are
upon the three classes in Plato’s Republic. The custom of limiting
the earnings of the working classes to the margin of subsistence is
singularly effective in keeping them occupied with the business of
production--as long as there is no overplus in the market to throw
them out of work--and it is thus a safeguard of efficiency and
industry which Plato, who was deplorably obtuse in these matters,
did not provide. It is likewise obvious that the life of a middle
class citizen, with plenty to eat and drink, with his life protected
by the policeman, his pocketbook protected by the insurance company,
his spiritual happiness protected by the church, his human sympathies
protected by the charity organization society, his intelligence
protected by the newspaper, and his economic privileges protected
by the State--this middle class citizen is, after all, a much more
fortunate and happy individual than those Platonic warriors whose
life was a perpetual effort to keep the edge on their bodies and
minds. As for the Guardians of the State, it is plain that Plato did
not offer them any inducement to do their work which would attract a
normal commercial man: anyone who was worth a hundred thousand dollars
a year would have thought twice before assuming leadership in Plato’s
impoverished commonwealth, whereas in Coketown he would find that
his simple ability to make money would be taken as sufficient proof
of his education, his insight, and his wisdom in every department of
life. More than that, Coketown, when all is said and done, welcomes
the artist with a cordiality that puts Plato to shame: Coketown can
afford its luxuries since, when you look at the matter squarely, a rare
painting might be worth as much as a rare postage stamp; and it is
accordingly an acceptable addition to the Coketown milieu.
Coketown has, in fact, only one question for the arts to answer: What
are they good for? If the answer can be expressed in money, the art
in question is taken to be almost as satisfactory as a device to save
labor, to increase speed, or to multiply the output.
9
There is one phenomenon still to be accounted for in the economy
of Coketown; one monumental instrument without which the wheels of
Coketown would become clogged and the very breath of Coketown be
extinguished.
I refer to the rubbish heaps.
The aim of production in Coketown is naturally more production, and it
is only by making things sufficiently shoddy to go to pieces quickly,
or by changing the fashion sufficiently often, that the machinery of
Coketown can for the most part be kept running. The rage and fury of
Coketown’s production has to be balanced off by an equal rage and
fury of consumption--continence would be fatal. As a result, nothing
in Coketown is finished or permanent or settled: these qualities are
another name for death. Coketown makes china to be broken, clothes
to be worn out, and houses to be torn down; and if something remains
over from an earlier age which made things more soundly, it is
either incarcerated in a museum, and derided as the monument of a
non-progressive age, or it is demolished as a nuisance. So powerful
is the idolum of Coketown that in the workaday world building after
building continues to meet with irreparable ruin at the hands of
barbarians from Coketown: why, I have even seen innocent little
half-timbered fifteenth century cottages whose fronts were obliterated
by a nineteenth century plasterer, in the name of progress.
The status of every family in Coketown can be told by the size of its
rubbish heap. In fact, to “make a pile” in the markets of Coketown is
ultimately to make another pile--of dust and junk and litter--on the
edge of the town where the factory district dribbles off into the open
country. So in Coketown consumption is not merely a necessity: it is a
social duty, a means of keeping “the wheels of civilization turning.”
At times there appears to be a possibility that this utopia may defeat
its purposes by producing goods at such a pace that the rubbish heaps
will fall behind the demands of the market; and while this mars the
theoretic perfection of the Coketown social organization, it is offset
by periods of war, when the market is practically inexhaustible, and
Coketown’s prosperity increases to a point at which the working classes
are on the point of becoming the comfortable classes without having had
sufficient previous training to make their contribution to the rubbish
heap--a serious pass, amidst which confusion the working classes of
Coketown might take to reducing their working days and enjoying their
leisure without sufficient consumptive effort.
This, then, is the idolum of Coketown. There are certain features in
it which need to be noticed. The first is that there is a certain
solid reality in Coketown that remains when all its pretensions
and idiocies have been incinerated. An environment that is devoted
solely to the production of material goods is obviously no sort of
environment for a good community, for life is more than a matter of
finding what we shall eat and wherewithal we shall be clothed: it is
an interaction with a whole world of landscapes, living creatures and
ideas, in comparison with which Coketown is a mere blister on the
earth’s surface. Nevertheless, with respect to the business of melting
steel and building roads and performing certain essential industrial
operations, the aims of Coketown are, up to a certain point, relevant:
we have already encountered them in Andreæ’s Christianopolis. There is
no need to dismiss the good that lies inside of industrialism because
it does not embrace the good that lies beyond it.
Up to a certain point, then, using mechanical power rather than human
power is good; so is large-scale production, so is the division of
labor and division of operation; so is rapid transportation; so is
the accurate methodology of the engineer; and so are various other
features in the modern industrial world. One might even say a word for
efficiency, as against “doing things rather more or less.” Coketown
made the horrid mistake of believing that all these things were good in
themselves. New factories, for example, drew a bigger population into
the city: Coketown did not perceive that, as Plato pointed out, beyond
a certain point the city as a social unit would cease to exist. Bigger
and better was Coketown’s motto; and it resolutely refused to see that
there was no necessary connection between these adjectives. The whole
case for and against Coketown rests upon our admission of the phrase
“up to a certain point.” Up to a certain point, industrialism is good,
especially in its modern, neotechnic, electrical phase: Coketown, on
the other hand, believes that there is no limit to the usefulness of
industrialism.
Up to a certain point--but what point? The answer is, up to the point
at which the cultivation of a humane life in a community of humane
people becomes difficult or impossible.
Men come together, says Aristotle, to live; they remain together in
order to live the good life. This determination of the good life is
the only check and balance that we can have upon Coketown; and it is
perhaps because we have been so little concerned with it that the
practical effect of the Coketown idolum has been so devastating.
“Invention and organization,” as Mr. George Santayana admirably
points out, “which ought to have increased leisure by producing
the necessaries of life with little labor, have only increased the
population, degraded labor, and diffused luxury.” William Morris
conceived that men in the future might discard many complicated
machines because they could live more happily, aye, work more happily
without them. Whether indeed a good part of modern organization and
machinery could be scrapt is perhaps a debatable question: but the
possibility of scrapping it is at least conceivable once we become more
interested in the actual result of industrialism upon the life and
happiness of the people who are part of the organization than we are in
the profits which pile up upon paper, and are finally realized in an
ever-growing rubbish heap.
10
By what means can the Country House keep Coketown working for it? The
idolum of the Country House, which was built up during the Renascence,
and the idolum of Coketown, which was formed in the early part of the
nineteenth century, are obviously two separate worlds; and in order
that each might be realized in our daily life, it was necessary that
some connecting tissue be manufactured to keep them together. This
tissue was the social myth, the collective utopia, of the National
State.
There is a sense in which we may look upon the National State as a
fact; but that great philosopher of the National State, Mazzini,
realized that the National State had continually to be willed; and
its existence lies plainly, therefore, on a different plane from the
existence of a bit of territory, a building, or a city. In fact, it is
only by the persistent projection of this utopia for the last three
or four hundred years that its existence has become credible; for all
the minute descriptions which the political historian gives to the
National State, its origins and its institutions and its people, read
a good deal like that fine story which Hans Andersen told about the
king who walked the streets naked because two rascally tailors had
persuaded him that they had woven and cut up for him a beautiful outfit
of clothes.
It will help us to appreciate this beautiful fabrication of the
National State if we turn aside for a moment and glance at the actual
world as it is known to the geographer and the anthropologist. Here are
the physical facts in defiance of which the utopia of nationalism has
been clapped together.
11
The earth that the geographer surveys is divided into five great land
masses. These land masses in turn can be broken up into a number of
natural regions, each of which has within its rough and approximate
frontiers a certain complex of soil, climate, vegetation, and, arising
out of these, certain primitive occupations which the inhabitants
of the region originally practiced and later, through the advance
of trade and invention, elaborated. Between these natural regions
there are occasionally frontiers, such as the barrier of the Pyrenees
which separates “France” from “Spain”; but these barriers have never
altogether prevented movements of population from one area to another.
In order to have a more faithful knowledge of regional groupings in
certain important areas, the reader might with profit consult Professor
Fleure’s Human Geography in Western Europe. (London: Williams and
Norgate.)
These natural regions are the groundwork of human regions; that is, the
non-political grouping of population with respect to soil, climate,
vegetation, animal life, industry and historic tradition. In each of
these human regions we find that the population does not consist of a
multitude of atomic individuals: on the contrary, when the geographer
plots houses and buildings on a topographic map, he finds that people
and houses cohere together in groups of more or less limited size,
called cities, towns, villages, hamlets. Normally, a vast amount of
intercourse takes place between these groupings; and in the Middle
Age, before the utopia of the National State had been created, the
pilgrim and the wandering scholar and the journeyman and the strolling
player could have been met with on all the highways of Europe. Under
the dispensation of the National State, however, the population, as
the German economist Buecher points out, tends to be more settled,
and we transport goods rather than people. It is important to realize
that, so far as the geographer can discover, this trade and intercourse
between local groups has been a part of Western European civilization
since Neolithic times, at least: it takes place continually between
individuals and corporate groups in one place and another, and as far
as geographical facts are concerned might more easily exist between
Dover and Calais, let us say, than between Calais and Paris.
Now the interesting thing about the utopia of the National State is
that it has only the most casual relation to the facts of geography.
Wherever it suits the purposes of the Guardians of the State, the facts
are ignored, and an artificial relation is _willed_ into existence.
The human communities which the regional sociologist recognizes do not
always coincide with those which the statesman wishes to incorporate as
“national territory,” and when this conflict occurs, the idea rather
than the reality triumphs, if necessary by brute force.
In the utopia of the National State there are no natural regions; and
the equally natural grouping of people in towns, villages and cities,
which, as Aristotle points out, is perhaps the chief distinction
between man and the other animals, is tolerated only upon the fiction
that the State hands over to these groups a portion of its omnipotent
authority, or “sovereignty” as it is called, and permits them to
exercise a corporate life. Unfortunately for this beautiful myth, which
generations of lawyers and statesmen have labored to build up, cities
existed long before states--there was a Rome on the Tiber long before
there was a Roman Imperium--and the gracious permission of the state is
simply a perfunctory seal upon the accomplished fact.