V
What sort of life arises out of this kind of industrial association, these provisions for the common use of machinery and land? It is all rather dry and colorless, a sort of picture postcard view of the Promised Land.
We are told that there are a great number of public buildings in Edendale—an administrative palace, the Central bank, the University, the Academy of Arts, three Public Libraries, four Theaters, the grand central goods warehouse, a great number of schools and other buildings. In addition, extraordinary means are taken to provide for public cleanliness, and the aqueducts in Edendale—we seem to be reading a Chamber of Commerce report!—are “almost without any equal in the world,” moreover, “they are being extended daily.” The refuse is cleaned away by a system of pneumatic sucking apparatus. The streets are entirely macadamized. Electric tramways cross them in every direction and bind the suburbs to the town. Such glimpses as we get of Edendale remind us, in fact, of a go-ahead city in California or South Africa. The utopia of Freeland is progressive enough in all conscience; for many of these mechanical devices were only vague anticipations in 1889; but it is progressive in a mechanical sense; and when we examine it carefully, people seem to live the same sort of life here as they do in a “modern” European or American city.
There are differences, of course; and I do not seek to minimize their importance: the slum proletariat has been abolished; everyone belongs to the middle class and enjoys the felicities of a high-grade clerk or an engineer or minor official. This is the peculiarity of our nineteenth century utopians: they do not so much criticize the goods of their times as demand more of them! Buckingham and Hertzka, though they differ in details, wish to extend middle class values throughout society—comfort and security and a plenitude of soap and sanitation. Even when the means they propose are revolutionary, the institutions they would erect are conceived very much in the image of current use and wont, and are unspeakably tame.
As we pass from Hertzka to Bellamy these facts glare insistently at us. The slight air of tedium that I have not been able to disguise in dealing with these utopias arises, I believe, from our excessive familiarity with their contents. Our nineteenth century utopias, if we except those of Fourier and Spence and a few more distinguished ones which we shall presently come to, do not dream of a renovated world: they keep on adding inventions to the present one. These utopias become vast reticulations of steel and red tape, until we feel that we are caught in the Nightmare of the Age of Machinery; and shall never escape. If this characterization seem unjust, I beg the reader to compare the utopias before Bacon with the utopias after Fourier, and find out how little human significance remains in the post-eighteenth century utopia when the machinery for supporting the good life is blotted out. These utopias are all machinery: the means has become the end, and the genuine problem of ends has been forgotten.