XII
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, direst 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 he 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?