IV
Why, however, should we find it necessary to talk about utopia and the world of ideas at all? Why should we not rest secure in the bosom of the material environment, without flying off into a region apparently beyond space and time? Well, the alternative before us is not whether we shall live in the real world or dream away our time in utopia; for men are so constituted that only by a deliberate discipline—such as that followed by a Hindu ascetic or an American business man—can one or the other world be abolished from consciousness. The genuine alternative for most of us is that between an aimless utopia of escape and a purposive utopia of reconstruction. One way or the other, it seems, in a world so full of frustrations as the “real” one, we must spend a good part of our mental lives in utopia.
Nevertheless this needs a qualification. It is plain that certain types of people have no need for private utopias and that certain communities seem to be without them. The savages of the Marquesas whom Hermann Melville described seem to have had such a jolly and complete adjustment to their environment that, except for the raids of hostile tribes—and this turned out to be chiefly sport which only whetted their appetites for the feast that followed—everything needed for a good life at the South Sea level could be obtained by direct attack. The Marquesans had no need to dream of a happier existence; they had only to grab it.
At times, during childhood perhaps, life has the same sort of completeness; and without doubt there are many mature people who have manufactured out of their limitations a pretty adequate response to a narrow environment; and have let it go at that. Such people feel no need for utopia. As long as they can keep their contacts restricted, only a deliberate raid from the outside world would create such a need. They are like the sick man in the parable of the Persian poet, whose only desire was that he might desire something; and there is no particular reason to envy them. People who will not venture out into the open sea pay the penalty of never having looked into the bright eyes of danger; and at best they know but half of life. What such folk might call the good life is simply not good enough. We cannot be satisfied with a segment of existence, no matter how safely we may be adjusted to it, when with a little effort we can trace the complete circle.
But there have been few regions, few social orders, and few people in which the adjustment has not been incomplete. In the face of perpetual difficulties and obstructions—the wind and the weather and the impulses of other men and customs that have long outlived their use—there are three ways, roughly, in which a man may react. He may run away. He may try to hold his own. He may attack. Looking around at our contemporaries who have survived the war, it is fairly evident that most of them are in the first stage of panic and despair. In an interesting article on “The Dénouement of Nihilism,” Mr. Edward Townsend Booth characterized the generation born in the late eighties as suffering a complete paralysis of will, or else, “if any initiative remains to them, they emigrate to Europe or the South Sea Islands, or crawl off into some quiet corner of the United States—but most of them continue where they were stricken in a state of living death.” (The Freeman.)
Speaking more generally, running away does not always mean a physical escape, nor does an “attack” necessarily mean doing something practical “on the spot.” Let us use Dr. John Dewey’s illustration and suppose that a man is denied intercourse with his friends at a distance. One kind of reaction is for him to “imagine” meeting his friends, and going through, in fantasy, a whole ritual of meeting, repartee, and discussion. The other kind of reaction, as Dr. Dewey says, is to see what conditions must be met in order to cement distant friends, and then invent the telephone. The so-called extrovert, the type of man who has no need for utopias, will satisfy his desire by talking to the nearest human being. (“He may try to hold his own.”) But it is fairly plain that the extrovert, from the very weakness and inconstancy of his aims, is incapable of contributing anything but “good nature” to the good life of the community; and in his hands both art and invention would probably come to an end.
Now putting aside the extrovert, we find that the two remaining types of reaction have expressed themselves in all the historic utopias. It is perhaps well that we should see them first in their normal, everyday setting, before we set out to explore the ideal commonwealths of the past.
More or less, we have all had glimpses of the utopia of escape: it is raised and it collapses and it is built up again almost daily. In the midst of the clanking machinery of a paper factory I have come across a moving picture actress’s portrait, stuck upon an inoperative part of the machine; and it was not hard to reconstruct the private utopia of the man who minded the levers, or to picture the world into which he had fled from the roar and throb and muck of the machinery about him. Who has not had that utopia from the dawn of adolescence onwards—the desire to possess and be possessed by a beautiful woman?
Perhaps for the great majority of men and women that small, private Utopia is the only one for which they feel a perpetual, warm interest; and ultimately every other utopia must be translatable to them in some such intimate terms. Their conduct would tell us as much if their words did not confess it. They leave their bleak office buildings and their grimy factories, and night after night they pour into the cinema theater in order that they may live for a while in a land populated by beautiful, flirtatious women and tender, lusty men. Small wonder that the great and powerful religion founded by Muhammad puts that utopia in the very foreground of the hereafter! In a sense, this is the most elementary of utopias; for, on the interpretation of the analytical psychologist, it carries with, it the deep longing to return to and remain at rest in the mother’s womb—the one perfect environment which all the machinery and legislation of an eager world has never been able to reproduce.
In its most elemental state, this utopia of escape calls for a complete breach with the butcher, the baker, the grocer, and the real, limited, imperfect people that flutter around us. In order to make it more perfect, we eliminate the butcher and baker and transport ourselves to a self-sufficient island in the South Seas. For the most part, of course, this is an idle dream, and if we do not grow out of it, we must at any rate thrust other conditions into it; but for a good many of us, idleness without a dream is the only alternative. Out of such fantasies of bliss and perfection, which do not endure in real life even when they occasionally bloom into existence, our art and literature have very largely grown. It is hard to conceive of a social order so complete and satisfactory that it would rob us of the necessity of having recourse, from time to time, to an imaginary world in which our sufferings could be purged or our delights heightened. Even in the great idyll painted by William Morris, women are fickle and lovers are disappointed; and when the “real” world becomes a little too hard and too sullen to face, we must take refuge, if we are to recover our balance, into another world which responds more perfectly to our deeper interests and desires—the world of literature.
Once we have weathered the storm, it is dangerous to remain in the utopia of escape; for it is an enchanted island, and to remain there is to lose one’s capacity for dealing with things as they are. The girl who has felt Prince Charming’s caresses too long will be repulsed by the clumsy embraces of the young man who takes her to the theater and wonders how the deuce he is going to pay the rent if they spend more than a week on their honeymoon. Moreover, life is too easy in the utopia of escape, and too blankly perfect—there is nothing to sharpen your teeth upon. It is not for this that men have gone into the jungle to hunt beasts and have cajoled the grasses and roots to be prolific, and have defied, in little open boats, the terror of the wind and sea. Our daily diet must have more roughage in it than these daydreams will give us if we are not to become debilitated.
In the course of our journey into utopia we shall remain a little while in these utopias of escape; but we shall not bide there long. There are plenty of them, and they dot the waters of our imaginary world as the islands that Ulysses visited dotted the Aegean Sea. These utopias however belong to the department of pure literature, and in that department they occupy but a minor place. We could dispense with the whole lot of them, hag and baggage, in exchange for another Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov.
The second kind of utopia which we shall encounter is the utopia of reconstruction.
The first species represents, the analytical psychologist would tell us, a very primitive kind of thinking, in which we follow the direction of our desires without taking into account any of the limiting conditions which we should have to confront if we came back to earth and tried to realize our wishes in practical affairs. It is a vague and messy and logically inconsequent series of images which color up and fade, which excite us and leave us cold, and which—for the sake of the respect our neighbors have for our ability to add a ledger or plane a piece of wood—we had better confine to the strange box of records we call our brain.
The second type of utopia may likewise be colored by primitive desires and wishes; but these desires and wishes have come to reckon with the world in which they seek realization. The utopia of reconstruction is what its name implies: a vision of a reconstituted environment which is better adapted to the nature and aims of the human beings who dwell within it than the actual one; and not merely better adapted to their actual nature, but better fitted to their possible developments. If the first utopia leads backward into the utopian’s ego, the second leads outward—outward into the world.
By a reconstructed environment I do not mean merely a physical thing. I mean, in addition, a new set of habits, a fresh scale of values, a different net of relationships and institutions, and possibly—for almost all utopias emphasize the factor of breeding—an alteration of the physical and mental characteristics of the people chosen, through education, biological selection, and so forth. The reconstructed environment which all the genuine utopians seek to contrive is a reconstruction of both the physical world and the idolum. It is in this that the utopian distinguishes himself from the practical inventor and the industrialist. Every attempt that has been made to domesticate animals, cultivate plants, dredge rivers, dig ditches, and in modern times, apply the energy of the sun to mechanical instruments, has been an effort to reconstruct the environment; and in many cases the human advantage has been plain. It is not for the utopian to despise Prometheus who brought the fire or Franklin who captured the lightning. As Anatole France says: “Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city. … Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.”
Our physical reconstructions however have been limited; they have touched chiefly the surfaces of things. The result is that people live in a modern physical environment and carry in their minds an odd assortment of spiritual relics from almost every other age, from that of the primitive, taboo-ridden savage, to the energetic Victorian disciples of Gradgrind and Bounderby. As Mr. Hendrik van Loon pithily says: “A human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.” The problem is fundamentally a human problem. The more completely man is in control of physical nature, the more urgently we must ask ourselves what under the heavens is to move and guide and keep in hand the controller. This problem of an ideal, a goal, an end—even if the aim persist in shifting as much as the magnetic north pole—is a fundamental one to the utopian.
Except in the writings of the utopians, and this is an important point to notice in our travels through utopia, the reconstruction of the material environment and the reconstitution of the mental framework of the creatures who inhabit it, have been kept in two different compartments. One compartment is supposed to belong to the practical man; the other to the idealist. The first was something whose aims could be realized in the Here and Now; the other was postponed very largely to the sweet by-and-by. Neither the practical man nor the idealist has been willing to admit that he has been dealing with a single problem; that each has been treating the faces of a single thing as if they were separate.
Here is where the utopia of reconstruction wins hands down. It not merely pictures a whole world, but it faces every part of it at the same time. We shall not examine the classic utopias without becoming conscious of their weaknesses, their sometimes disturbing idiosyncrasies. It is important at present that we should realize their virtues; and should start on our journey without the feeling of disparagement which the word utopian usually calls up in minds that have been seduced by Macaulay’s sneer that he would rather have an acre in Middlesex than a principality in utopia.