the utopia of nationalism establishes, by the surveyor’s line, a
certain realm called national territory, and makes all the inhabitants
of this territory the members of a single, indivisible group, the
nation, which is supposed to be prior in claim and superior in power
to all other groups. This is the only social formation that is
officially recognized within the national utopia. What is common to
all the inhabitants of this territory is thought to be of far greater
importance than any of the things that bind men together in particular
civic or industrial groups.
Let us look at this world of national utopias. The contrast between
the politician’s map and the geographer’s would be little less than
amazing were our eyes not used to it, and were we not taught in modern
times to look upon it as inevitable. Instead of the natural grouping
of land masses and regions, one finds a multitude of quite arbitrary
lines: boundaries like those that separate Canada and the United States
or Belgium and the Netherlands are just as frequent as the natural
frontier of sea that surrounds England. Sometimes these national
territories are big, and sometimes they are little; but the bigness of
empires like those of France, England, or the United States is not due
to any essential identity of interests between the sundry communities
of these empires, but to the fact that they are forcibly held together
by a political government. National lines, in other words, continue to
exist only as long as the inhabitants continue to act in terms of them;
are ready to pay their taxes to support customs bureaux, immigration
offices, frontier patrols, and educational systems; and are prepared,
in the last extremity, to lay down their lives to prevent other groups
from crossing these imaginary lines without permission.
The chief concern of the national utopia is the support of the central
government, for the government is the guardian of territory and
privilege. The principal business of that government is to keep the
territory properly defined, and to increase its limits, when possible,
so as to make the taxable area larger. By stressing the importance of
these concerns, and constantly playing up the dangers of rivalry from
other national utopias, the State builds a bridge between the Country
House and Coketown, and persuades the workers in Coketown that they
have more in common with the classes that exploit them than they have
in common with other groups within a more limited community. It would
seem that this reconciliation of Coketown and the Country House is
little less than miraculous, even as an ideal; and perhaps it would be
interesting to examine a little more carefully the apparatus by which
this is effected.
12
The chief instrument of the National State is Megalopolis, its biggest
city, the place where the idolum of the National Utopia was first
created, and where it is perpetually willed into existence.
In order to grasp the quintessential character of Megalopolis we must
shut our eyes to the palpable earth, with its mantle of vegetation
and its tent of clouds, and conceive what might be made of the human
landscape if it could be entirely fabricated out of paper; for the
ultimate aim of the Megalopolis is to conduct the whole of human life
and intercourse through the medium of paper.
The early life of a young citizen in Megalopolis is spent in acquiring
the tools by which paper may be used. The names of these tools
are writing, reading, and arithmetic; and once upon a time these
constituted the main elements in every Megalopolitan’s education.
There was, however, a good deal of dissatisfaction, on paper,
against this somewhat barren curriculum, and so at a fairly early
date in the history of Megalopolis, various other subjects, such as
literature, science, gymnastics, and manual training were added to
the curriculum--on paper. It is indeed possible for a Megalopolitan
student to know the atomic formula of clay without ever having seen it
in the raw earth, to handle pine wood in the workshop without having
walked through a pine forest, and to go through the masterpieces of
poetic literature without having experienced a single emotion which
would prepare him to appreciate anything different from one of the
influential Megalopolitan magazines, “Smutty Stories”, but as long as
his hours of attendance can be recorded on paper, and as long as he can
give a satisfactory account of his studies on an examination paper, his
preparation for life is practically complete; and so he is graduated
with a paper certificate of education into the industries of Coketown,
or into the multitudinous bureaus of Megalopolis itself.
The end of this period of paper tutelage is but a prelude to its
continuation in another form; for the religious care of paper is
the Megalopolitan’s life work. The daily newspaper, the ledger, the
card index are the means by which he now makes contact with life,
whilst the fiction magazine and the illustrated paper are the means
by which he escapes from it. Through the translucent form of paper
known as celluloid, it has been possible to do away on the stage
with flesh-and-blood people; and therefore the drama of life, as the
Megalopolitan story writers tell it, can be enacted at one remove
from actuality. Instead of his travelling, the world moves before the
Megalopolitan, on paper; instead of his venturing forth on the highways
of the world, adventure comes to him, on paper; instead of his getting
him a mate, his bliss may be all but consummated--on paper. In fact,
so accustomed does the Megalopolitan become to experiencing all his
emotions on paper that he can be entertained by the representation of
a static bowl of flowers on a moving picture screen; while his cockney
ignorance of nature is so vast that a certain vaudeville performer,
seeking to amuse him by imitating the calls of birds and beasts, finds
it wise to have moving pictures taken of the rooster, the dog, and the
cat, in order to give his mimicries reality in minds destitute of any
personal image.
The notion of direct action, direct intercourse, direct association,
is a foreign one to Megalopolis. If any action is to be taken by the
whole community, or by any group in it, it is necessary to carry it
through the Megalopolitan parliament, and have it established on paper,
after innumerable people, who have no genuine concern in the matter,
have committed their views about it to paper. If any intercourse is
to be carried on, it must be largely conducted on paper; and if that
medium is not directly available, subsidiary instruments, like the
telephone, are used. The chief form of association in Megalopolis is
that by political party, and it is through the political party that the
Megalopolitan expresses his views, on paper, as to what is necessary
to amend the paper constitution or promote the welfare of the paper
community; albeit he realizes that the promises made by political
parties are written on what Megalopolitans in their more cynical
moments call “non-negotiable” paper, and will probably never pass into
currency.
By its traffic in Coketown’s multifarious goods and by its command over
certain kinds of paper known as mortgages or securities, Megalopolis
ensures a supply of real foods and real staples from the countryside.
Through incessant production of books, magazines, newspapers,
boilerplate features, and syndicated matter, Megalopolis ensures that
the idolum of the National Utopia shall be kept alive in the minds of
the underlying inhabitants of the country. Finally, by the devices of
“national education” and “national advertising” all the inhabitants
of the National Utopia are persuaded that the good life is that which
is lived, on paper, in the capital city; and that an approximation to
this life can be achieved only by eating the food, dressing in the
clothes, holding the opinions, and purchasing the goods which are
offered for sale by Megalopolis. So the chief aim of every other city
in the National Utopia is to become like Megalopolis; its chief hope
is to grow as big as Megalopolis; its boast is that it is another
Megalopolis. When the denizens of Megalopolis dream of a better world,
it is only a paper perfection of that National Utopia which Edward
Bellamy looked forward to in Looking Backward.
Working in connection with the Machine Process of Coketown, the
Megalopolis erects a standard of life which can be expressed in
commercial terms, on paper, even if it does not offer any tangible
satisfaction in goods and services and perfections. The chief boast
of this standard is its uniformity; that is, its equal applicability
to every person in the community without respect to his history, his
circumstances, his needs, his actual rewards. Hence such goods as
Megalopolis creates in profusion are for the most part in the line of
plumbing and sanitary devices which, if they do not exactly heighten
the joy of living, at any rate make the routine of Megalopolitan life a
little less formidable.
The total result of these standards and uniformities is that what was
originally a fiction in time becomes a fact. Whereas the inhabitants of
the national utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees
in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education
and propaganda, as similar as telegraph poles along a road. It is
not a little to the credit of Megalopolis that the National Utopia
has pragmatically justified itself. It has created the sort of mental
environment on paper which is necessary to a smooth adjustment of
Coketown and the Country House. What is Megalopolis, in fact, but a
paper purgatory which serves as a medium through which the fallen sons
of Coketown, the producer’s hell, may finally attain the high bliss of
the Country House, the consumer’s Heaven?
13
It should be plain that in describing the National Utopia and
Megalopolis I have been trying to outline what Plato would call the
pure form. It is equally clear, I trust, that the pure form is an
idolum to which any existing national state or metropolis approximates
only so far as the idolum does not conflict too grossly with the
real men and women, the real communities, the real regions, the real
workaday occupations which continue, despite the reign of these idola,
to exist, and to occupy our main attention. Formal education has not
altogether taken the place of vital education; loyalty to the state
has not altogether succeeded as a substitute for deeper allegiances
and affiliations: occasionally, here and there, people meet each other
face to face, they eat real food, dig in real earth, smell real flowers
instead of coal tar perfumes that arise from paper bouquets, and embark
quite madly on real love affairs. It is true that these realities are
a disturbing influence: they are always threatening to undermine the
idola which the politicians and journalists and academic handymen
unite so valiantly to build up; but there they are--and even the most
stubborn idealist cannot help himself from occasionally confronting the
world that he denies!
If you and I were perfect citizens of Megalopolis, we should never
let anything come between us and our loyalty to the State: when the
State called for our taxes, we should never think regretfully of the
amusements we must forego in order to pay them; when the State demanded
that we go to war, nothing like the claims of a family or an occupation
or a moral conviction would ever step between us and our national duty.
By the same token, we should never eat any other food than that which
had been nationally advertized, and never buy anything direct from
the producer when we might buy it from a third person in Megalopolis;
we should never read any literature that is not produced in our own
country, never desire any other climate than our own country can
boast, and never seek to find in any other culture, remote in space or
time, the things which we seem to miss in our own environment. If only
this utopia of nationalism could be realized completely it would be
self-sufficient; and there would be nothing on earth, in heaven, or in
the waters over the earth which did not bear the authentic trademark of
Megalopolis.
14
The picture of the National Utopia that I have drawn is perhaps a
little too black to stand out clearly; and I must now add a few high
lights for definition.
As in Coketown, there was a point up to which efficiency in mechanical
production was a good thing, so in the national utopia there is a
point up to which uniformity is a good thing. The National State
seems historically to have arisen in some part through the relief
which the people of the Middle Age experienced in being able to travel
under the protection of the King’s law along the King’s highway, and
their discovery that common laws and customs, common weights and
measures, were on the whole an advantage over a multitude of senseless
irregularities which continued to exist in particular neighborhoods.
It was a distinct triumph for the good life when the men of London and
the men of Edinburgh, let us say, realized that they had something in
common as citizens of a single country, and emphasized the likenesses
which bound them as men rather than the antagonisms that separated them
as cities. If the National State erected barriers of trade against
other countries, it at any rate broke down barriers that had long
existed in even more limited regions, and that have long continued to
exist in certain cities in Italy and France. So much is to the good.
But uniformity is not a good in itself. It is a good only in so far
as it promotes association and social intercourse. In breaking down
minor barriers, the State created major ones, and it created national
uniformities in regions where they were meaningless. Moreover,
nationalism is inimical to cultural unity, and it perpetuates
irrelevant conflicts in the Kingdom of the Spirit where there should
be neither slave nor free, neither white nor black, neither citizen
nor outlander. As a matter of fact, the two great international
cultural vehicles of the Middle Age--the Latin Language and the Roman
Church--were broken down by the propagation of a National Language,
that spoken at the National Capital, and a National Church, that which
was subservient to the State; and nothing that nationalism has done
since has repaired this loss. On one hand, the idolum of the National
State is too narrow, because the world of culture is man’s common
inheritance, and not the mere segment of it which is called “national
literature” or “national science.” And on the other hand, the idolum
is too big, for the reason that there is no bond except a paper one
between men who are as far apart as Bermondsey and Bombay, or New York
and San Francisco. The temporal community, as Auguste Comte finely
pointed out, is local, restricted, and multiform; this is its essential
nature and limitation. The spiritual community is universal. It was a
great cultural misdemeanor when the National Utopia, in its extension
as imperialism, sought to make the spiritual community restricted and
the temporal community universal; and it is this heresy to the good
life which makes all the pretensions of the national utopia so shabby
and insincere.
15
If Coketown and the Country House and the National Utopia had
remained on paper, they would doubtless be entertaining and edifying
contributions to our literature. Unfortunately, these social myths
have been potent; they have given a pattern to our lives; and they are
the source of a great many evils that threaten, like stinking weeds,
to choke the good life in our communities. It is not because these
myths are utopias that I have been criticizing them so assiduously; it
is rather because they continue to work such wholesale damage. Hence
it has seemed worth while to point out that they are on pretty much
the same level of reality as the Republic or Christianopolis. We may
perhaps approach our social institutions a little more courageously
when we realize how completely we ourselves have created them; and how,
without our perpetual “will to believe” they would vanish like smoke in
the wind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the
partisans.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make
life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained,
without working a change upon human nature. The working of this
change has been one of the chief preoccupations of religion; but no
one can pretend that it has met, during the historic period, with any
overwhelming success. In the eighteenth century men became impatient
with the ministrations of institutional religion, and sought to effect
an improvement in the common life by a different method--by improving
the political, economic, and social mechanisms of society.
Up to this time the only method that had seemed feasible for improving
the technique of social organization was the mandate of law. Although
Aristotle, for instance, predicted that slavery would come to an end
on the condition that the shuttle should weave by itself and the lyre
play without human hand, no one in the Greek community of his time saw
very much likelihood of improvement through mechanical inventions or
wholesale innovations in agriculture; and no one, apparently, concerned
himself seriously with the mechanical side of affairs.
It was the same during the Middle Age. If the men of that time were
not exuberantly happy over their civilization, they had the dogmatic
conviction that nothing very satisfactory could come of a race that had
inherited the curse of Adam--a race whose only salvation could come
when its individuals were purged one by one of sin, and delivered,
by the intercession of the saints and the grace of God, into a more
benignly constituted afterworld. One might relieve the pressure a
little if the shoe pinched, perhaps, but scarcely anyone dreamed of
travelling in seven-league boots, or of establishing an Arcadia in
which boots could be dispensed with. It was foolish to look for a more
perfect society in a world that was rife with imperfect men.
The Renascence, as we have seen, changed all this. Presently a school
of philosophers followed on the heels of the utopians who devoted
themselves to preparing fairly minute plans and specifications for the
social order. In the beginning, these plans were devoted to politics
and criminal reform, like those of Rousseau, Beccaria, Bentham,
Jefferson, Godwin, and the eighteenth century reformers generally;
in the nineteenth century the main accent was economic, and a number
of movements arose which could be traced back to the semi-scientific
investigations of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Proudhon, Malthus, Marx, and
perhaps half a dozen other thinkers of outstanding importance, among
whom we should perhaps include such latter day figures as Mill,
Spencer, and Henry George.
All of these thinkers have in one way or another influenced our
thoughts and deflected our actions; and if one adds to this galaxy the
reforming elements which remained in the churches and the missionary
brotherhoods and the philanthropic organizations, we can observe,
growing up in the nineteenth century, a multitude of partisan
organizations and movements, each of which is strenuously bent on
realizing its private and partisan utopia. It is these private and
partisan utopias that I purpose to make a slight reckoning with in the
present chapter; but the field is such a huge and formidable one that I
shall limit my criticism in the main to those that attempted to effect
a change in the economic order.
2
For all the activities that men engage in we have separate words. This
is a great misfortune; for in using these words we tend to believe
that each action takes place in a separate compartment. Instead of
beginning with a whole man interacting in a whole community, we are
likely to consider only a partial man in a partial community, and by a
mental sleight of hand, before we know it, we have let the part stand
for the whole. It is this sort of abstraction, I believe, that has been
responsible for a good deal of fallacious thinking with regard to the
place of industry in the community. The economists seem to have made
the error first by talking of a creature whom they called the Economic
Man, a creature who had no instincts but those of construction and
acquisition, no habits but of working and saving, and no other ultimate
purpose than to become such a captain of industry as would make him a
candidate for the biographic sketches of Mr. Samuel Smiles, and his
present successors in the newspapers and popular magazines.
Now this Economic Man was the embodiment of honest labor and rapacious
greed. Out of the better quality, Karl Marx painted the picture of
the faithful laborer in Coketown whose masters swindled him out of
the “surplus value” he produced; out of the worse quality classical
economists like Ricardo painted an equally entrancing picture of the
beneficent capitalist, through whose foresight, organizing ability,
and boldness business could be conducted on a scale a simpler age had
scarcely dreamed of. It was out of these conceptions, as they were
elaborated and rationalized in books like Porter’s Progress of the
Nineteenth Century and Marx’s Capital, that there grew up the notion
that the only fundamental problem in the modern world was the labor
problem--the problem as to who should control industry, who should
profit by its advances, and who should own the complicated instruments
by which it was conducted.
Our business here is not to examine the various programs that were
offered during the last century in answer to these problems; merely
to catalog them with the barest explanation of their purpose would be
an imposing task, were it not for the fact that it has been neatly
done for us by Mr. Savel Zimand. It is enough to see here the common
element in capitalism, copartnery, State Socialism, Guild Socialism,
Co-operation, Communism, Syndicalism, the One Big Union, Trades
Unionism, and the like; whether these movements represent actual facts,
like capitalism, copartnery, or trades unionism, or whether they are
simply projections, like Syndicalism and the One Big Union.
If our excursion through the classic utopias has been of any use, it
must have shown us how pathetic is this notion that the key to a good
society rests simply on the ownership and control of the industrial
plant of the community. Is it any less absurd when we confess that
most of the movements which were founded upon this assumption were
actuated by generous and humane motives, and that Francis Place, the
tailor of Charing Cross, who believed in a radical application of
laissez faire principles, was just as sincere a believer in the common
weal as Karl Marx, who predicted a dictatorship of the proletariat?
If a great many of these programs have had the notion that industrial
machinery, under socialism or guildism or co-operation was to be used
for the common benefit, what was lacking was any common notion as to
what the common benefit was.