XI
What, then, is the first step out of the present disorder? The first step, it seems to mc, is to ignore all the fake utopias and social myths that have proved either so sterile or so disastrous during the last few centuries. There is perhaps no logical reason why the myth of the national state should not be preserved; but it is a myth which has done very little, on the whole, to promote the good life, and has on the contrary done a great deal to make the good life impossible; and to continue to cling to it in the face of perpetual wars, pestilences, and spiritual devastations is the sort of fanaticism which will probably seem as blind and cruel to future generations as persecutions for Christian heresy do to the present one. On the same grounds, there are a number of other social myths, like the proletarian myth, which run so badly against the grain of reality that they cannot be preserved without ignoring a great many values which are essential to a humane existence; and on pragmatic grounds it would be fine and beneficial to drop them quickly into limbo. There is no reason to think that there will be a quick conversion from these myths: the holocaust of war has only intensified the myth of the National State; and our experience with religious myths suggests on the contrary that the forms at any rate will be preserved long after the last shred of reality has disappeared. But the sooner those who are capable of intellectual criticism abandon these particular myths, the sooner will these idola fall into the state which has been happily described as “innocuous desuetude.”
If our knowledge of human behavior counts for anything, however, we cannot put aside old myths without creating new ones. The eighteenth century agnostics very wisely realized that if they wished to maintain the values which had been created by Deism, they could not abandon God without inventing him all over again. In turning away from obsolete and disastrous social myths I do not suggest that we give up the habit of making myths; for that habit, for good or bad, seems to be ingrained in the human psyche. The nearest we can get to rationality is not to efface our myths but to attempt to infuse them with right reason, and to alter them or exchange them for other myths when they appear to work badly.
Here is where we reap the full benefit of the great utopian tradition. In turning away from the social myths that hamper us, we do not jump blindly into a blankness: we rather ally ourselves with a different order of social myth which has always been vivified and enriched by the arts and sciences.
The idolum of eutopia which we may seek to project in this or that region is not a carte blanche which anyone may fill in at his will and caprice; certain lines have already been fixed; certain spaces have already been filled. There is a consensus among all utopian writers, to begin with, that the land and natural resources belong undividedly to the community; and even when it is worked by separate people or associations, as in Utopia and Freeland the increment of the land—the economic rent—belongs to the community as a whole. There is also a pretty common notion among the utopians that, as land is a common possession, so is work a common function; and no one is let off from some sort of labor of body or mind because of any inherited privileges or dignities that he can point to. Finally, there is the almost equally common notion, among the utopians, that the perpetuation of the species leaves plenty of room for improvement, and that, as far as human knowledge and foresight are worth anything, it should be applied to propagation; so that the most reckless and ill-bred shall not burden the community with the support of their offspring while those of finer capacity are neglected or overwhelmed in numbers.
Besides these general conditions for the good life which the utopians unite to emphasize, there are certain other points in the utopian tradition of which one writer or another has given the classic statement.
With Plato we see the enormous importance of birth and education; we recognize the part good breeding, in every sense of the word, must play in the good community. Sir Thomas More makes us aware of the fact that a community becomes a community to the extent that it has shared possessions, and he suggests that the local group might develop such a common life as the old colleges of Oxford have enjoyed. When we turn to Christianopolis, we are reminded that the daily life and work of the community must be infused with the spirit of science, and that an acute practical intelligence such as we find today among the engineers need not be divorced from the practice of the humanities. Even the nineteenth century utopias have a contribution to make. They remind us by their overemphasis that all the proud and mighty idealisms in the world are so many shadows unless they are supported by the whole economic fabric—so that “eutopia” is not merely a matter of spiritual conversion, as the ancient religions taught, but of economic and geotechnic reconstruction. Finally, from James Buckingham and Ebenezer Howard we can learn the importance of converting the idolum of eutopia into plans and layouts and detailed projections, such as a townplanner might utilize; and we may suspect that a eutopia which cannot be converted into such specific plans will continue, as the saying is, to remain up in the air.
Taken together, there is a powerful impulse towards creating a good environment for the good life in the classic utopias we have examined: from one or another utopia we may draw elements which will enrich every part of the community’s life. By following the utopian tradition we shall not merely escape from the fake utopias that have dominated us: we shall return to reality. More than that, we shall return upon reality and perhaps—who can tell?—we shall recreate it!