The English Utopia. A L Morton 1952
I can say this of Naseby, That when I saw the Enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men, to seek how to order our battle: the General having commanded me to order all the Horse, I could not (riding alone about my business), but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would, by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance; and God did it. – Cromwell, Letters
‘Tomorrow’, said Gumbril at last meditatively.
‘Tomorrow’, Mrs Viveash interrupted him, ‘will be as awful as today.’ – Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay
The writers we have had to consider so far have contented themselves with a single Utopia, or if not, have at least, like Swift, confined their Utopias within a single volume: this cannot, alas, be said of HG Wells. Of the hundred or so books with which he is credited a considerable proportion are utopias, or have at least a partly utopian character; so many are they, indeed, that it would be impossible to discuss them all. The main works which I should like to put in here as evidence are When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, republished 1921 as The Sleeper Awakes), The First Men in the Moon (1901), A Modern Utopia (1905), The New Machiavelli (1911), The World Set Free (1914), Men Like Gods (1922), Things to Come (1935, film treatment of The Shape of Things to Come, 1933), and Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945). These books may be taken as a fair sample of the work of forty years.
The very fact that he found it necessary to write so many utopias suggests that Wells was never able to convince himself with any of them, and this was clearly the case. He spent his life in a permanent state of having second thoughts about everything, of mistaking prejudices for principles, and, lacking any scientific understanding of society, he was for ever running up blind alleys, isolating, and so distorting, one facet or another, giving a ‘socialist’, ‘progressive’, gloss to some scrap of bourgeois pseudo-science – neo-Malthusianism, Keynesian full-employment economics, Jungian-type psychology and the like. He made a whole series of guesses about the future, each guess ostensibly scientific, and each, by its difference from all the others, exposing its own pretensions to science.
To explore this jungle of empiricism would need, not a single chapter, but a whole book, and I do not intend to attempt any such exploration. Instead I shall adopt a method rather different from that followed hitherto, and attempt to discuss this series of books as a whole, to ignore the differences and concentrate on the main common features running through them, on what seems to be permanent and really characteristic in Wells’ thought. I shall therefore not attempt to deal with the separate utopias in their details or their fictional framework, though it is important to remember that Wells, more than almost any of the writers discussed in this book, was a professional novelist with a high level of technical competence.
Wells came to intellectual maturity, and his writings took as definite as shape as they were capable of, in the period of the growth of imperialism, and, finally, in that short first stage of imperialism before 1914 opened the general crisis of capitalism. That is to say, he was born in the Victorian world of muddle, of irrational survivals, of petty competition and small-shopkeeper economy, and grew into a world in which these things became more and more obviously survivals and anomalies. He regarded himself, intermittently, as a socialist, but his socialism derived from Saint-Simon, Comte and Bellamy rather than from Marx and Morris. He could see the faults of the old capitalism, and naively supposed that he could persuade it to transform itself, shedding its absurdities and becoming clear, sweet and reasonable. What was at fault was not so much capitalism as the imperfections that had accompanied its early stages and the feudal survivals from which it had not entirely freed itself.
The hero of The New Machiavelli declared, the period being around 1902:
‘Muddle’, said I, ‘is the enemy.’ That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle that had just given us the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial countryside, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember myself quoting Kipling:
“All along o’ dirtiness, all along o’ mess,
"All along o’ doin’ things rather-more-or-less.”
‘We build the state’, we said over and over again. ‘That is what we are for – servants of the new reorganisation!’
And, a little later:
I had one constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better ordered than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling state out of my world’s confusions.
So socialism was basically a matter of helping capitalism to emerge from its infantile mess, and at the end of the road shone the Wellsian Utopia, a sterilised, hygienic, cellophane world where everything appeared to have been just polished by all the most advertised brands.
In this he was not alone. Like all the Fabians, he saw socialism not as a new category but as a form of social hygiene: the world needed tidying. One of the favourite Fabian illustrations of the waste and absurdity of capitalism was the fact that six milkmen might often be observed in one street when the job could be done just as efficiently by one. No doubt this is true, and no doubt socialism would end such waste, but what the Fabians failed to see was that monopoly could equally easily end it without either housewife or milkman being a penny the better, and, very possibly, being considerably the worse, for the change. Chesterton was not exaggerating too wildly when he wrote of:
Mr Sidney Webb, also, who said that the future would see a continuously increasing order and neatness in the life of the people, and his poor friend Fipps, who went mad and ran about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever there were not the same number on both sides.
To Wells, to all the Fabians, there was something terribly impressive about imperialism, about its power, its smoothness, its order, its science, its ideal of a world subdued and organised, its headlong technical advance. If only the Kings of this new world would call in the Philosophers... Failing that, the Philosophers must somehow attach themselves to the Kings, must permeate and persuade, must get their hands on the controls when the Kings were looking another way – or – at the least – write innumerable essays and tracts showing how it might be done. It was as a pamphleteer rather than as a permeator that Wells excelled.
If he broke with the Fabian Society it was not because he disagreed with their fundamental attitude. He was a Fabian who wanted to furnish Fabianism with a fervour, an exciting quality, an appearance of imaginative depth which it was not in its nature to possess. What he succeeded in doing was to vulgarise it. The Fabian belief in socialism as a form of hygiene sits ill with sentiment and emotional uplift, and Wells is always at a loss when he tries to explain what his Utopias are for. Like imperialism they have no purpose greater than themselves, and it is characteristic that just as imperialism is bent on subduing the whole world, the super-imperialist Utopias of Wells can offer nothing better than the conquest of the universe. The Samurai of A Modern Utopia recalls how, in a moment of supreme exaltation: ‘I remember that one night I sat up and told the rascal stars very earnestly how they should not escape me in the end.’ There is hardly a single one of the Wellsian Utopias in which the theme of interplanetary or interstellar navigation does not appear in some form or another.
While, on the face of things, imperialism certainly was impressive, at least till 1914, the working-class movement was anything but impressive to men like the Fabians. It was raw, confused, sectarian, emotional and, in short, a company of poor ignorant men. None of them had the Cromwellian eye to see that with this poor company lay the future and the bringing to naught of the things that are, which is the reason why, though many of them were far cleverer people than Cromwell, they won no victories. Wells had his full share in this lack of faith. In The New Machiavelli he expresses it in his picture of Chris Robinson (Keir Hardie?), the working-class socialist leader:
I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!
Clearly socialism could not come from the rough, ignorant, narrow workers, led by such men as Robinson. They were incapable of appreciating the logical beauty of the Wellsian Utopia, which had no place for them or for anything they might become.
Frederick Barnet in The World Set Free meets unemployed workers and finds them unresponsive:
I tried to talk to these discontented men, but it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of patience and the larger scheme, they answered, ‘But we shall all be dead’ – and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own mind, that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.
In The World Set Free the Utopian world state is finally established, after a devastating war, by an international conference of Kings and Presidents, with a few scientists and writers thrown in for good measure.
This certainty that however Utopia may be realised it will not be through the working class, colours Wells’ whole outlook from his first books to his last. Not only are the workers rejected as a positive historical force, but there is an active, if often half-suppressed, fear and hatred which assumes curious forms. When workers appear in his books they are uncouth, stunted and often deformed, as in the extreme case of the Selenites in The First Men in the Moon. They live underground, away from the sun and air, as in The Time Machine or When the Sleeper Wakes. Often the same feeling is expressed symbolically as in the famous metaphor in Kipps of men crawling along a drainpipe till they die. In one of the later Utopias, Men Like Gods, a random sample of English people are projected into a Utopian planet by some scientific hocus-pocus, and in this sample the working class is ‘represented’ by two utterly demoralised chauffeurs who are even more out of place there than the selection of ruling-class types who accompany them. Wells might argue that their behaviour is quite in keeping with probability – what he has to explain is why he selected just these to stand for the working class.
Along with this fear and hatred went a dislike of Marx and Marxism. Wells, who had never troubled to understand Marxism, seldom missed an opportunity to sneer at it. To one who saw socialism largely as a matter of one milkman instead of six, Marx’s conception of history, his analysis of the class structure of society, his belief that socialism meant the victory of the working class, could not be acceptable. All his life Wells spent in a vain effort to concoct some rival theory which would hold water. Since, as we have said, his socialism was not a new category but merely a more effective form, it was possible to imagine it combined or diluted with all sorts of non-socialist forms. A Modern Utopia, which is his most classical utopian essay, and seems to embody most nearly what he regarded as practical for the fairly near future, describes a mixed economy based largely on the ideas of Hertzka’s Freeland, an economy in which private enterprise still operates in a framework of the public ownership of land, transport and essential services. With this went machinery for ensuring full employment by starting schemes of public works to absorb surplus labour.
His rejection of Marx forced him more and more to turn away from reality. In place of the clear concept of class, based on production relationships, Wells invented, with some help from Jung, a classification based on psychological types. In A Modern Utopia the people are divided into four ‘classes of mind’, the Poetic, the Kinetic, the Dull and the Base. Much later in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932) a somewhat different division is made, into ‘persona’ – the Peasant, the Autocrat and the Priest. Since these classifications are completely unrelated to actual life, it is perfectly easy to invent two, or, indeed, any number of them, all equally plausible and all equally meaningless.
Further, these classifications are static, they claim to describe something found equally in every kind of society and so leave no room for the conception of change arising from the self-movement and contradictions of actual society. Yet Wells knew that the world does change, more, he really believed in the necessity and possibility of Utopia. And since Utopia could not be, as it was for Morris, the outcome of the workers’ struggle, he was driven to endless shifts to explain convincingly How the Change Came. This he did in all sorts of ways. In The World Set Free it was due to Princes whose eyes had been opened. In Things to Come to an open conspiracy, ‘Wings across the World’, of airmen and technicians. In A Modern Utopia to another open conspiracy of a self-selected aristocracy, the Samurai, ‘priests’ in the Wellsian sense, determined to serve the world whether it would or no. In Men Like Gods the process is envisaged more vaguely as a general and gradual enlightenment:
The impression given Mr Barnstaple was not of one of those violent changes which our world has learned to call revolutions, but of an increase of light, a dawn of new ideas, in which the things of the old order went on for a time with diminishing vigour until people began as a matter of common sense to do the new things in the place of the old.
There is, in fact, a different road to every Wellsian Utopia, but all have this in common, that Utopia is imposed on the brutal and reluctant masses by an enlightened minority. Wells never decided how this minority was to be found or of whom it should consist. Sometimes it was a lay-priesthood, the Samurai, drawn from the more educated classes and bound by a ‘rule’ in the medieval sense of that word. At other times he looked for it among the men of science, at others among the engineers, technicians and administrators that were being created in such numbers to serve monopoly capital. And, in his later years, he seemed more and more to look for saviours from among the most efficient and ‘enlightened’ capitalists, the Fords and Rockefellers, the Morrises and the Monds. He shared to the full the illusions common during the great American boom of the late 1920s and learnt little or nothing from the slump of 1929.
His distrust of the workers is linked closely with his dislike of democracy: however much his Utopias differ they are all anti-democratic. Having established their Utopia, the minority of the elect continue to run it autocratically if benevolently. At no point is there any suggestion that the gap between minority and mass could ever be closed, and this is natural, since the gap reflects not class differences which must end in a classless society, but arbitrary and absolute differences of psychological type, inborn and everlasting.
Wells accepted Plato’s concept of a specialised society, in which everyone does perfectly the one job for which he is fitted by nature and training, a society therefore of degree. In The First Men in the Moon this is carried to an extent which Wells perhaps did not consciously approve:
In the moon every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should he?’ Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end. They check any incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage his mathematical bias with a perfect psychological skill. His brain grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential part of him.
Whether or not we are invited to admire the Selenites, they merely carry to its logical extreme what is implicit in all Wells’ thought, and it is a logic which leads us to the kind of world shown in Huxley’s Brave New World or Joseph O'Neill’s Land Under England.
In this specialist society, government is also a job for the specialist. Wells, like Plato, thought that the cobbler should stick to his last and surrender himself to those who know best what is good for him, to the Samurai and the Open Conspirators. Attempts have been made to suggest a parallel between the Samurai and the Communist Party: such attempts ignore the essential difference that the Samurai separate themselves from the masses on which they impose their will, while the Communists remain a part of the class which they lead.
The specialised Wellsian Utopia is the antithesis of socialism, which regards man as a flexible and many-sided being, capable of a full understanding of his world and of controlling it. Wells, accepting imperialism as a basis, only wished to humanise it: imperialism makes man into an ever more specialised instrument, and such he remains in Wells’ Utopias, however beautifully contrived and finely tempered he may be allowed to become.
Wells, in any case, placed very definite limits upon what man might become. We have seen how Morris in News From Nowhere chose to emphasise the transformation of human nature: in Wells’ Utopias everything changes except man – from A Modern Utopia to Things to Come men are surrounded by every kind of mechanical marvel and continue to talk and act like turnips. For him there is something permanent and unalterable in human nature, and the unchanging part of man is the essential part. Utopian man, he says:
... would have different habits, different traditions, different knowledge, different ideas, different clothing and different appliances, but, except for all that [my italics], he would be the same man. We very distinctly provided at the outset that the modern Utopia must have people inherently the same as those in the world.
And, ‘whatever we do, man will remain a competitive creature’.
Consequently:
... it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is ‘poor’ all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles – in another man’s cast-off clothing, and with an infinity of hat-touching – on the verge of rural unemployment?
In his Utopia, it would appear, such people are to be produced in as great, or almost as great, numbers as in our own world, and Wells, regarding this as inevitable, has no solution except bourgeois eugenics. In A Modern Utopia he grumbles like any Dean Inge about the way the poor breed, and a whole machinery exists to prevent the ‘inferior types’ from reproducing themselves:
... here one may insist that Utopia will control the increase of its population. Without the determination and ability to limit that increase, as well as to stimulate it whenever it is necessary, no Utopia is possible. That was clearly demonstrated by Malthus for all time.
Wells was a believer in progress, for a whole generation he was regarded in England as the leading apostle of progress, his books are crammed full of the surprising things which he thought might happen to us – yet at the bottom things remain the same, because the progress is purely quantitative, something external to man. Beyond that he could not go and that is why his books, though some of them had a certain usefulness in their day, have a thinness, a vulgarity and a vagueness which reveals itself at critical points in a cluster of generalities trailing off into a string of dots:
Science is no longer our servant. We know it for something greater than our little individual selves. It is the awakening mind of the race, and in a little while – in a little while – I wish indeed I could watch for that little while, now that the curtain has risen...
For Wells the curtain was always rising but the play never began.
He could not see the play because the play was the struggle of classes, and to see it involved the recognition of the class struggle as the motive-force of historic change. He was born into an especially depressed section of the lower middle class: very early he rejected the outlook of that class, and his swift success as a writer carried him out of it economically on to the fringe of the ruling class. But he never lost one of its most marked peculiarities, the fear of the mass of the workers from which it feels itself separated by so narrow a gulf. This fear takes two forms, fear of slipping down into the ‘lower world’, and fear of an invasion from that world, an invasion of barbarians levelling all before them.
That fear remained with Wells all his life. He might pity the workers, he might want to brighten their lives, but he could never see them as anything but a destructive force which must be led and controlled and, if necessary, coerced. In that interesting early book, When the Sleeper Wakes, which has a curious and distorted reflection of the class struggle and in which the idea of revolution is not entirely rejected, the workers are exploited and rebellious, but can only revolt under the leadership of a powerful section of the upper class, and the hero of the book, the Sleeper who wakes to find himself the owner of the earth, fights the battle of the workers in isolation as a champion coming to them from the outside. In none of his other books will they play any serious part whatsoever.
Below the crudely confident belief in progress, in the capacity of imperialism to shed its defects and transform the world into Utopia, there lay always a deeper pessimism. The Samurai were long in coming, perhaps the Samurai might not come in time. The world, which Wells always saw as a class of difficult small boys to be lectured at and instructed, grew less and less attentive. Even at the beginning these doubts appear unexpectedly, as in A Modern Utopia when the hero admits:
At present we seem to have lost heart altogether, and now there are no new religions, no new orders, no new cults – no beginnings anymore.
This was in 1905, at the moment when, in Russia, a new revolutionary epoch was already opening.
But this was not the kind of beginning for which Wells was looking, or was, indeed, capable of seeing, and the advance of socialism after 1917 and the growth of a world revolutionary movement did not comfort him. He grew more and more angry, more and more surprised that his good advice was never taken. In Men Like Gods Utopia is removed to a future so distant that it has virtually no relation to existing realities. He can discern no visible link between the present and the future in which, as an article of faith, he still professes belief.
In his very last book Mind at the End of Its Tether even this distant hope was abandoned:
The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.
It seems a strange end to so many years of brisk and buoyant prophesying, yet the end is implicit in the beginning. Wells had many admirable qualities, courage, shrewdness, energy and even generosity when his prejudices were not touched, but with them all he turned his back upon the future, and not all his gifts could enable him to grow the eyes in the back of his head which would have been needed to enable him to see things as they really were. His obscure perception of what was happening found expression, perhaps, in a belief that to survive man must become something which he, Wells, could no longer recognise as man.
Perhaps the title of this last book should be Fabianism at the End of Its Tether, for Fabianism, inglorious as its history has been, is in a sense the last attempt to provide capitalism with a forward-looking body of ideas. After Wells there are not, and, I think, cannot be, any more Fabian Utopias, or any Utopias at all of a positive character. The form retains its popularity but its use is negative, to convey satire or despair or the degeneration of certain types of intellectual in the last stage of capitalism. The positive answer to Wells was given first in 1917, and, in a different way, some twenty years later, when the two greatest Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, repudiated their whole past by calling their study of the USSR, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation.
Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill opens in the dim, sub-Fabian England of 1984, an England in which everything seemed to have reached a full stop, an England which:
... believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said ‘All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change we must change slowly and safely, as the animals change. Natural revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction in favour of tails.
And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished almost to a point. The people could have swept the few remaining policemen away in ten minutes: they did not do so because they did not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.
Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing. England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one. Some one of the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.
In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet.
The whole world was drab, uniform and cosmopolitan: the methods of Fabianism had been successfully applied, but Chesterton did not believe that the result would be quite what they had expected, certainly it would not be the swift-moving, brightly polished Utopia of Wells: whatever might succeed, the Wellsian attempt to make Fabianism exciting must fail.
The King was, in fact, chosen by lot, and in 1984 the lot fell upon one Auberon Quin, a youngish man who was then possibly the only humourist still living. As a vast public practical joke he issued a decree that all London boroughs were to take on the trimmings of the Middle Ages, provosts, heralds, town guards in splendid costumes armed with halberds, city gates, tocsin, curfew and the rest of it. In due time, also by lot, the Provost-ship of Notting Hill fell to Adam Wayne, a romantic who took the King’s ‘Charter of the Cities’ entirely seriously, and when the neighbouring boroughs wanted to drive an arterial road through Notting Hill, he stood upon the rights given him by the Charter and refused to let it pass. In the war that followed, Notting Hill triumphed against fantastic odds by a combination of luck and military genius. And in doing so, and because of the passions that the war aroused, the King’s joke was transformed into a reality, not only for Wayne and the Notting Hillers, but also for their opponents. Life became colourful, romantic and intensely local, and, though the dominance of Notting Hill was ended twenty years later in a great battle fought in Kensington Gardens, the effects of its victory and dominance remained.
Now all this is confused enough. On one level it is excellent fooling at the expense of Wells and the Fabians. On another, it is clear that Chesterton understood no more than they did what was really happening in the world. The England of his last chapters, after the victory of Notting Hill, has a superficial likeness to that of News From Nowhere: with this difference, that the likeness only touches the most ornamental parts of the superstructure. Chesterton, if he thought about the matter at all, thought that this could be changed arbitrarily at will without any change in the basis. It is not merely that the book is a fantasy: fantasy is, within limits, a perfectly justifiable literary form, but to be effective it must have a valid relation to reality, one must be able to say, granting these assumptions, whatever they may be, the rest follows logically. A world where anything may happen can have no value for us.
In Chesterton’s books, even in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is the best of them, we often do feel this, because the thing which Chesterton wishes to happen is inherently impossible. He was a bourgeois radical who hated imperialism and fought it according to his powers, but always in the name of the past, inspired by the dream of a return to the small, the local and the peculiar. Wells had accepted imperialism, Chesterton ran away from it, neither could grasp the dialectic of its transformation into socialism.
For Chesterton the result was that his opposition was undirected and futile and very quickly petered out into a non-stop acrobatic turn. Yet his indignation was real enough, and in 1904, at the outset of his career as a writer, it comes over very clearly in the pages of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, giving it a positive power that few of his later books share. This indignation is given an appropriate form, a sharpness of expression, the vividness of something actually seen, by the genesis of the book. Chesterton tells us in his Autobiography what is in any case obvious enough from the pages of the book itself, that it was based on the tales he liked to tell himself as a boy, walking among the streets of west London: it has all the boy’s delight in the clear-cut and the uncompromising, and some of the richness of a tale long carried in the heart. It was the young Chesterton who was Adam Wayne planning the defence of Notting Hill.
At any rate, when he wanted a frame to hold his diatribe against imperialism, against the Fabianism which glorified it, and the cosmopolitanism which was its natural accompaniment, this was ready to his hand. When we remember that he was writing in the years immediately following the Boer War, of which he had been among the strongest opponents, its point and force can be appreciated. Nowhere is this clearer than in the splendid scene in which Wayne confronts the King and the Provosts who are planning the road which would mean an end to the independence of Notting Hill: the King says:
‘You have come, my Lord, about Pump Street?’
‘About the city of Notting Hill’, answered Wayne, proudly. ‘Of which Pump Street is a living and rejoicing part.’
‘Not a very large part’, said Barker, contemptuously.
‘That which is large enough for the rich to covet’, said Wayne, drawing up his head, ‘is large enough for the poor to defend.’
The King slapped both his legs and waved his feet for a second in the air.
‘Every respectable person in Notting Hill’, cut in Buck with his cold, coarse voice, ‘is for us and against you. I have plenty of friends in Notting Hill.’
‘Your friends are those who have taken your gold for other men’s hearthstones, my Lord Buck’, said Provost Wayne. ‘I can well believe they are your friends.’
‘They've never sold dirty toys, anyhow’, said Buck, laughing shortly.
‘They've sold dirtier things’, said Wayne calmly; ‘they have sold themselves.’
For all his confusions, which were many and which finally destroyed him, Chesterton at this time saw two things clearly enough. The first was that the dull bureaucratic Utopia of the Fabians, and the bright mechanical Utopia of Wells which was but a special form of it, merely reflected and glorified the reality of the imperialism which he hated. He had had the most recent proof of this in the Fabian support of the Boer War, on the ground that the Boers were inefficient and out-of-date and ought to be absorbed into the modern and efficient Empire. The second was that all these people were wrong in supposing that the world was entering an age of drabness and compromise. He believed that on the contrary it was entering a revolutionary and therefore an heroic age. That the revolution which he expected was quite different from the revolution which took place, and that he failed to see in that revolution when it came the thing he had foreseen, is true enough, but less important than the essential rightness of his intuition. As Wayne put it before his last battle:
When I was young I remember in the old dreary days, wiseacres used to write books about how trains would go faster, and all the world would be one empire, and tramcars go to the moon. And even as a child I used to say to myself, ‘Far more likely that we shall go on the crusades again or worship the gods of the city.’ And so it has been.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill was the first blast against the Fabian Utopia. EM Forster in The Machine Stops (written about 1912, but first published in book form in The Eternal Moment, 1928), and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), attack from a different angle. The Utopia of Wells is capitalist society which has miraculously overcome its contradictions, because the socialism of Wells is utopian socialism developing undialectically not as a negation but as a mere continuation of bourgeois society. Marxists cannot accept such a future as possible, any more than could Chesterton, but if it was possible would still reject it as odious. Wells regarded it as both possible and desirable. Forster and Huxley, accepting it as possible, rejected it as intolerable, though for quite different reasons.
The sterilised, cellophane world of Wells moved Huxley to loathing and contempt, but Forster to pity and terror. This is partly because Forster is more humane, sensitive and genuinely civilised, but also partly because it was more possible in 1932 than in 1912 to see the horror of such a world carried to its logical conclusions.
‘It is good’, wrote Lowes Dickinson of The Machine Stops, ‘that someone should take the Wells – Shaw prophecies and turn them inside out.’ This Forster certainly does. He describes a world state in the distant future in which man has gone deep underground, the entire surface of the earth having been abandoned. Each individual lives alone in an identical room, from which he can be in television contact with every other individual throughout the world. No work has to be done, since every need, synthetic food, synthetic clothing and synthetic culture is provided by ‘the Machine’ upon the pressure of the appropriate button. On the rare occasions on which they leave their rooms moving platforms and huge, swift airships are there to carry them. Their minds have become passive and receptive, their bodies torpid and feeble. The whole earth is a unity linked by ‘the Machine’, which has long passed beyond human control and is on the way to being worshipped as a superhuman force:
‘The Machine’, they exclaimed, ‘feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.’
In much the same spirit, and without any apparent ironic intention, Wells makes one of the characters in The World Set Free boast that, ‘Science is no longer our servant.’
And just as the hero in A Modern Utopia notes with approval the absence of windows in the express train which carries him from Switzerland to London, the leading character in The Machine Stops, Vashti, in a flight across the world to visit her son Kuno, can find nothing to interest her on the surface of the earth:
At midday she took a second glance at the earth. The airship was crossing another range of mountains, but she could see little, owing to clouds. Masses of black rock hovered below her, and merged indistinctly into grey. Their shapes were fantastic; one of them resembled a prostrate man.
‘No ideas here’, murmured Vashti, and hid the Caucasus behind a metal blind.
In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula.
She repeated, ‘No ideas here’, and hid Greece behind a metal blind.
In the end comes catastrophe, swift and complete, ‘as it was in days of Noë’. The Machine stops, and with its stopping, food, light and air fail and the entombed millions die. In the darkness Vashti and Kuno meet, and before the end he tells her of his visit to the upper air and of his discovery there of a remnant upon the earth who will make a new beginning. In this moment the truth about their civilisation becomes clear to them:
They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward.
Here, it seems to me, Forster occupies a position midway between those of Morris and Huxley. All three reject ‘modern civilisation’ as Morris used sometimes to call it. But Morris, though at times he may have accepted the possibility of catastrophe, had also grasped the dialectics of change. He understood the two-sided nature of capitalism, that while it corrupts, it also creates the class which can transcend it. For Forster and Huxley the corruption alone is apparent, or at best is overwhelmingly preponderant. But Forster, unlike Huxley, never despairs of humanity. He believes in human fallibility, where Huxley believes in human wickedness, in original sin. So that while Forster believes man capable of a temporary loss of direction, Huxley does not believe him capable of finding his way at all – unless by divine Grace, and he is more than doubtful if Grace will be given. Forster perhaps believes that man is now lost, that a period of retreat and disaster is inevitable, which may be the reason for his relative silence, but always he holds firm to the conviction that something will be saved and a new start made, and that in the end man will triumph.
For Forster ‘Man is the measure’, but for Huxley human life is meaningless unless it can be evaluated in terms of something outside itself. In Brave New World he attacks the idea of Humanism while appearing only to describe a society whose sole objects are stability and happiness in the lowest and most mechanical sense of that word. A society based upon Humanism is, for him, necessarily evil. Happiness without Grace can be secured only at the price of subordinating the individual, of distorting him to fit a desired pattern. Huxley is unable to understand that a socialist society is a form of movement in which each individual is able to reach his highest potentialities in his relation to other individuals, and not a universal and glorified Butlin’s Holiday Camp.
In Brave New World the distortion of the individual is total, taking place before birth, or rather before decanting, since normal birth has long been abandoned. Out of his bottle Huxley produces at will Samurai or low-grade morons, incapable of thought and therefore of boredom. For all alike, from Alpha to Moron, there is a prescribed routine, at a suitable level, of work, games, promiscuity and Soma, a drug with ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects’.
Into this world comes a young man reared by accident upon Shakespeare and myths in an Indian Reservation in Mexico. He reacts violently against its machine-like order and demands as his birth-right the right to be unhappy:
‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact’, said Mustapha Mond, ‘you're claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right, then’, said the Savage defiantly, ‘I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all’, said the Savage at last.
All this is quite logical and unanswerable if you accept the mechanistic postulates which Huxley, for all his air of scornful superiority, shares with Wells. If you accept the idea that man is essentially unchanging, that social stability can only be preserved by conditioning everyone for one special job and making sure that he does it, that happiness consists in being mechanically fitted for this job as a ball fits a socket and being drugged with mechanical amusements during your leisure hours, that freedom is ignorance and a blind surrender to natural forces, then clearly there are no alternatives except the Brave New World and a hopeless barbarism. In this situation the choice of most of us would, I think, be that of the Savage. Huxley clearly intends us to regard this as his own preference, but it is difficult to be convinced of the sincerity of one who, with the world before him, has chosen to leave England to settle in Hollywood, the place which perhaps most exactly anticipates the life described in Brave New World.
Wells, too, seems to feel that some such choice now faces mankind. In Mind at the End of Its Tether he writes:
Man must go steeply up or down, and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he comes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether.
And Huxley, in Ape and Essence, of which something must be said in the final section, has described with unpleasing relish the descent into barbarism which he thinks cannot be long delayed.
Yet in fact these postulates only need to be clearly stated to be exposed as self-evidently false, and in practice they are being shown daily to be false before our eyes, in that third of the world which is now building socialism upon quite different postulates. It is the fact of the building of socialism which gives us standards by which both Wells and his critics can be judged and which places our understanding of Utopia upon a quite new footing. As Nowhere becomes Somewhere the News we receive from it cannot but change.
The plight of the latter-day Utopians is neatly stated in the passage from Nicholas Berdiaeff with which Huxley prefaces Brave New World:
Utopias seem very much more realisable than we had formerly supposed. And now we find ourselves face to face with a question which is painful in quite a new way: how can we avoid their actual realisation? ... Utopias are capable of realisation. Life moves towards Utopia. And perhaps a new age is beginning in which the intellectuals and the cultured class will dream of methods of avoiding Utopia and of returning to a society that is not Utopian, that is less ‘perfect’ and more free.
For Berdiaeff, for Huxley, for the class which they represent, tomorrow is not merely ‘as awful as today'; tomorrow is infinitely worse, tomorrow is unthinkable. And so, in this last phase, this era of the general crisis and impending overthrow of capitalism, Utopia changes its character.
For the greater part of the time covered by this book the bourgeoisie was a proud and advancing class, growing strong within the framework of feudalism, aiming at state power, winning state power, and, finally, exercising state power. They have looked forward with confidence, and Utopia was what their best representatives, those who, on the whole, were able to see beyond the narrower class interests and identify the advance of the bourgeoisie with the advance of humanity, saw at the end of the road. It was a vision that was hopeful even if not always complacent – even if some of the Utopians could see that the pledges of the bourgeois revolution were not being honoured, they were confident that with a little good advice, a little push along the right road, all would be well.
Partial exceptions, like Blake, there certainly were, but on the whole it was not till the last decades of the nineteenth century that the general picture changed. Then at last the rise of a new class, menacing, indispensable, could not be ignored. It began to be clear that Utopia, if it was ever to be realised, was to be the outcome of a workers’ revolution that was still to come, not the last chapter completing the bourgeois revolution. Hence the alarm of Greg, of Donnelly, of Bramah. In the last two sections we have traced the process further: we have seen the reaction against the crude optimism of Wells, and, perhaps even more significantly, we have seen how Wells in his old age retreated from his own early optimism.
And so, in a sense, we have come to the end of the history of the English Utopia: on the one hand the bourgeoisie who see in their own future the future of civilisation cannot now contemplate that future with anything but despair, on the other, the working class and their allies who are actually fighting to win or to build socialism are seldom inclined to construct imaginary pictures of a future that is shaping itself under their hands. Yet the utopian form has too strong a hold over men’s minds to be so easily abandoned, and during the last decades it has been used for a variety of purposes, all very different from those of the classical utopias of the past.
To this, as to so many generalisations, there appears one exception, An Unknown Land by Lord Samuel, published in 1942, but ‘planned and largely written before the war’. Here, indeed, we have, in the form of a sequel to Bacon’s New Atlantis, [1] something that has quite the air of a utopia in the traditional style, so much so that it suggests an academic exercise rather than a serious original work. And Samuel, like the Liberal Party of which he is the acknowledged theoretician and philosopher, is himself something of a survival in these days.
As might be expected in a sequel to New Atlantis, great emphasis is placed upon the advance of science and invention, and upon education. But the most immediately striking thing is that when the Liberal philosopher has to construct an ideal economy, the one which he is forced to adopt is based on the classic Marxist formula ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. [2] Samuel’s Utopia, like Mores, is a classless, communist society, and it is at least to his credit that he abandons all the clumsy devices to which Bellamy, Hertzka or Wells were driven to construct a plausible Utopia on any other basis.
It would be too much to expect in addition that Bensalem should have reached the classless society by way of class struggle or revolution. On the contrary, class struggle had little place in Bensal history, and their views upon revolution were identical with those of an English Whig of the twentieth century:
The essence of a revolution is violence; it may seek moral or humane ends, but, by using means that are immoral and cruel, it pushes those ends farther away. Nor is it ever true to say that ‘things cannot be worse than they are’. They always can, and they often become so. Misery breeds revolution, and revolution breeds fresh miseries.
The Bensal social system, therefore:
... was not established suddenly, through some revolutionary upheaval, it grew up during centuries; but under the stimulus of suturisation, the last hundred years has seen a more rapid advance than ever before.
Suturisation, an operation by which the skulls and consequently the natural capacities of the children were enlarged, is presented, in fact, as the operative miracle producing social change. This is typical of the latest phase of utopianism. Unless the class struggle is recognised as the means of changing society, that change must always come from something outside – from a Prince, as in the earlier Utopias, from abstract reason or some unexplained change of heart, or from some creative miracle, and, since the decay of religious faith has made it difficult for us to accept miracles in the sense of a supernatural intervention in human affairs, the modern utopian writers turn to science in the hope that it will provide. This tendency we have seen clearly in Wells, and it can be found in another form in Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, which turns on the possibility of men who are willing to live for three hundred years.
Whatever form it takes, it is in practice an affirmation that society cannot be changed without some physical, biological change in man, and this is brought out by Samuel in another way. Just as Wells in Men Like Gods represented the working class by two chauffeurs who reject the Utopian way of life even more emphatically than their ‘betters’, so here, the crew of the ship on which Samuel’s hero reaches Utopia are drawn as complete political illiterates, accepting without question the crudest bourgeois economic and social ideas and rejecting with an instant and unanimous horror the classless utopian society of Bensalem. It is clear that Samuel, like Wells, never for a moment regards the workers as a positive political force.
As if all this were not enough to make it clear that his ‘communism’ has nothing in common with that of Marx or Lenin, Samuel adds a little farce in the form of a visit to a group of small islands lying off the Bensal coast whose way of life reflects that of the main European countries as he sees them. Upon one of these islands, Ulmia:
A theorist arose, with a creed that purported to be simple, logical and based on a comprehensive survey of the facts of history; but which was in fact complicated, muddle-headed and partial to the last degree. Justifying themselves by this theory, a few violent men carried out the revolution, and East Island became ‘The Union of Logical Materialist Idealists’.
So far as I could understand it, the theory seemed to be based on a strange doctrine that human societies are simply the products of economic factors, and that the whole history of mankind is nothing more than variations on a single theme – the production and consumption of things. Holding these ideas the people had taken materialism as their creed and Tools as their emblem; their national badge was a Pitchfork crossed by a Saw, with the motto ‘Things Rule Men’.
The theory, Lamon said to me, insisted upon a state of society that was classless and equalitarian. ‘Our own system in Bensalem’, he said, ‘is also of that order. But while that has been built up over a period of centuries, on the principle of raising the whole population to the standard reached by the highest, the equality here was brought about by the much simpler, and much quicker, method of bringing everyone down to the standard of the lowest.’
Satire has always been recognised as a legitimate weapon of the utopian writer, and Marxism and the USSR are as legitimate targets for satire as any others, but it is hardly satire to attach to anything a string of qualities and beliefs which it does not possess. And, while misrepresentation of Marxism is fairly common, it is a little surprising to find a writer of Samuel’s eminence so ignorant of its most elementary principles, or so little concerned to state them fairly, as these paragraphs show him to be. The book as a whole, giving with one hand and taking away with the other, and coming to the conclusion that what is needed in Britain is, broadly speaking, a slightly more rapid advance along the road now being followed, has an air of weariness and banality, fully reflecting the dead end which Liberal thought has now reached.
Such as it is, however, it is the only utopia of recent years with any pretensions to a positive character. Some other works may be passed over with the barest mention. There are, first, the large class of quite ephemeral books which make use of the utopian form as the scaffolding for a work of fiction whose main purpose is to entertain: their only importance is as evidence of the continued popularity of this form. Typical of such books, at different levels, are Orphan Island (1924) by Rose Macaulay, Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton, and They Found Atlantis (1936) by Dennis Wheatley. Of these the most respectable is Orphan Island, a lively fantasy of a community growing from the shipwreck on a Pacific island in 1855 of a number of orphan children under the charge of a pious and strong-minded maiden lady. Its rediscovery after seventy years gives scope for entertaining if superficial satire upon aspects both of Victorian and contemporary English life, and the appeal of the Utopian and the desert island fantasies are cunningly exploited in combination.
Another group, which, while having a certain utopian character, is hardly within the scope of this book, is the ‘scientific’ fantasy of the future. Here there is an immense field, rising from the American pulp fiction which leaves Wells far behind in its furious exploration of interstellar space, to such serious works as Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1921), JBS Haldane’s The Last Judgement (1927) and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930).
The growth of fascism in the 1920s and the creation of a broad anti-fascist unity had also its utopian reflection. Two avowedly anti-fascist negative utopias, written as a warning of what the world might become if fascism triumphed, are Joseph O'Neill’s Land Under England (1935) and Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night (1937).
In Swastika Night the whole world is divided between a German and a Japanese Empire, equal in power and identical in policy and methods. In the German Empire, with which the book deals, all the existing tendencies of fascism are developed to their logical conclusion. Around the worship of Hitler a complete hierarchical society has been elaborated:
As a woman is above a worm,
So is a man above a woman.
As a man is above a woman,
So is a Nazi above any foreign Hitlerian.
As a Nazi is above a foreign Hitlerian,
So is a Knight above a Nazi.
As a Knight is above a Nazi,
So is Der Fuehrer (whom may Hitler Bless)
Above all Knights.
Women are entirely degraded, and men, even if German Nazis, are illiterate serfs, violence and brutality characterise all relationships, race superiority has become an absolute principle.
Most interesting, perhaps, is a point afterwards elaborated by George Orwell, the complete obliteration of the past – all history, all literature, all ancient monuments have been swept away, so that nothing can remain to remind men of a civilised past before the coming of fascism, and so, perhaps, form centres of resistance. Around this is developed the book’s simple plot, of an old Knight in whose family there exists a tradition of secret nonconformity, and who has preserved the sole remaining record of the ancient days. This he hands on to an Englishman, and, we are to infer, from this knowledge may grow an opposition which will ultimately destroy fascism. Despite this hope, the general effect is negative and depressing – we are shown fascism as something to be feared, we are not shown how it may be fought.
The same is true of Land Under England, a book on a much higher technical level. Here we have, not a direct description of fascism, but a kind of allegory. The hero, exploring the Roman Wall, discovers a way down into a dark underworld, where, among monsters and fungi, survive descendants of Romans who escaped there at the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Faced with madness and disintegration by the horror of perpetual night, these people had evolved a society in which individual consciousness and even speech had disappeared, in which the Roman qualities of discipline and obedience had been carried to a degree in which no one had any life except as a function of the state. Every action, every thought, that was not needed by the state had not merely disappeared but had become psychologically impossible.
The analogy with contemporary fascism is only hinted at in the text, but it is emphasised in a Foreword contributed by AE, who writes:
The highest form satire can take is to assume the apotheosis of the policy satirised and make our shuddering humanity recoil from the spectacle of the complete realisation of its own ideals. And this is what Joseph O'Neill has done in imagining a state where the unity of obliterated individualism is complete, where the Master, or Hitler, of his Utopia, has a selfless humanity completely malleable to his will; and we recoil from the vision of that perfection of mechanised humanity, as if we had peered into one of the lowest of human hells.
In nearly all these books the main note is that of retreat – retreat into fantasy, into an unscientific exploitation of ‘science’, into gloom for the sake of gloom. In nearly all of them there is the abandonment of the belief that a just and decent society is possible and can grow out of existing society. More recently this retreat has become a rout and in such books as Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) we have the frankest reaction, a determination to resist the ‘actual realisation’ of Utopia, a deep conviction that we must cling to all existing institutions, however corrupt, since any change can only be for the worse.
It is perhaps unfair to couple with such degraded books Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1935), yet in this brilliant, innocent romance the retreat from the complex reality of the contemporary world is already strongly marked. Read describes two Utopian, simplified, finite and abstracted worlds – one a tiny South American republic in the early part of the nineteenth century, the other under the ground. Into this latter world he tries to convey some of the knowledge of the upper earth, but he finds that this is impossible:
His evidence was of no more value than that of a man who has woken from a vivid dream. His dream was real but it was unique.
In fact, it is the uniqueness of Read’s dream, its total lack of relation to any of our experience, which robs it of reality. The world he describes resembles in some ways the last part of Back to Methuselah: after a period of youthful play and sexual freedom its people graduate by stages to work of a simple kind, to intellectual pleasures, and finally to solitary contemplation ending in death, after which their bodies are preserved for ever in a crystallised state. It is the simplicity of the crystal towards which everything in this world strives, and it is in the collection, the arrangement and the contemplation of crystals, and the ringing of changes upon sets of crystal gongs, that their pleasures and their philosophy alike revolve. Shaw, in Back to Methuselah, diagnosed in advance the state of mind which The Green Child reveals:
Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer subjects of thought, they find in the conception of crystals and magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness found by mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality.
Read, like his hero, longs for order and beauty. He hopes to find these, first, in the pastoral simplicity of his South American Utopia, but fails, and, following the significant image of the stream flowing backward to its source, discovers them finally in an unhuman race to whom death is the highest form of being. It is the same vision as that which he expressed much earlier in one of his poems:
New children must be born of gods in a deathless land, where the
uneroded rocks bound clear from cool
glassy tarns, and where no flaw is in mind or flesh.
Sense and image they must refashion – they will not recreate
love: love ends in hate; they will not use
words: words lie.
It is a vision that holds little hope for the future, but it is not an ignoble vision like those of Huxley and Orwell. Ape and Essence is not so much a recantation as a complement of Brave New World. In that book the capitalist world had carried itself to a triumphant climax of servile prosperity: today Huxley prefers to back the other horse and describe it destroying itself in a third World War, fought to a finish with every sort of atomic and bacteriological weapon. It is in the postwar ruin that his scene is set. Here, in Los Angeles, a handful of savages, degraded, disease-ridden, ‘as rude as barbarism, but lacking both the hope and the pleasure of barbarism’, exist parasitically upon the corpse of civilisation, using books for fuel and plundering graves for clothes. A ship from New Zealand, which, by its geographical position had alone escaped destruction, appears off the coast, and a New Zealand biologist falls into the hands of the barbarians.
He finds that Belial is now god, since evil has finally triumphed, and this remnant of humanity pays him propitiatory rites in a hopeless attempt to stave off annihilation. The Arch-Vicar of Belial explains to his visitor how it all happened:
It began with machines and the first grain ships from the New World. Food for the hungry and a burden lifted from men’s shoulders...
But Belial knew that feeding means breeding. In the old days when people made love they merely increased the infantile mortality rate and lowered the expectation of life...
Yes, Belial foresaw it all – the passage from hunger to imported food, from imported food to booming population and from booming population back to hunger again. Back to hunger. The New Hunger, the Higher Hunger... the hunger that is the cause of total wars and the total wars that are the cause of yet more hunger...
Progress and Nationalism – those were the two great ideas He put into their heads. Progress – the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another... Nationalism – the theory that the state you happen to be subject to is the only true god.
Two things stand out: Huxley’s firm persuasion of the folly and wickedness of mankind, and his malthusiasm (to use a new word coined by James Fyfe in The Modern Quarterly). [3] This is no new belief with him: twenty years earlier in Antic Hay he had declaimed about:
The way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them creeping about the face of the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go, ruining everything. It’s the people I object to...
With populations that in Europe alone expand by millions every year, no political foresight is possible. A few years of this mere bestial propagation will suffice to make nonsense of the wisest schemes of today – or would suffice if any wise schemes were being matured at present.
It is this combination of malthusiasm and hatred which is most characteristic and makes Ape and Essence so like a fictionised version of Vogt’s The Road to Survival. Huxley sees disaster ahead not because of the false policies of capitalism, not because of any mistakes which might be corrected, but because men are maggots and deserve disaster if only as punishment for their presumption, because ‘these wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature’.
The very idea of progress, of a world better than that we now know, being absurd, the practical conclusion is obvious – that we must avoid all attempts at change, must accept every existing injustice and misery lest in trying to put them right we upset the ‘equilibrium of Nature’, must allow Malthus’ natural checks once more to operate and so, perhaps, escape the worst of the disasters which Huxley describes with something unpleasantly like relish. It is significant that he never indulges in a general diatribe without adding a specific sneer directed against Communism and the Soviet Union, and not less significant that Ape and Essence has been so widely praised in the United States.
It might be thought that this book represented the lowest depths to which the new genre of anti-utopias could fall, but the publication a year later of Nineteen Eighty-Four robbed it of even that distinction. Here we are introduced to a world divided among three ‘communist’ states which exist in a condition of permanent war, permanent scarcity, permanent purges and permanent slavery. The ‘hero’ of the book is employed in the Ministry of Truth, whose task it is not only to deceive the people about what is actually happening, but continually to recreate the past so that it is impossible to discover the truth about anything that has ever happened. For these purposes a new language ‘Double Talk’ is being evolved, in which ‘Thought Crime’, that is to say any idea not in line with the policy of the state at any given moment, will become impossible. This goal has not yet been reached, and the hero does fall into ‘Thought Crime’ as well as into ‘Sex Crime’, that is to say into love or a rather shoddy substitute for it. It is worth noting that in Orwell’s world compulsory chastity plays the same role as compulsory promiscuity in Brave New World – the object in each case being to prevent normal sexual feeling, and so to degrade sex that it cannot afford any basis for individuality.
As a consequence of their crimes the hero and his mistress fall into the hands of the Ministry of Love, where he undergoes months of torture, lovingly described by Orwell in great detail, and is finally released an empty shell, completely broken and stripped of any trace of humanity. The whole account, like Ape and Essence, is tricked out with a pretence of philosophic discussion, but as an intellectual attack on Marxism it is beneath contempt. What Orwell does do with great skill is to play upon the lowest fears and prejudices engendered by bourgeois society in dissolution. His object is not to argue a case but to induce an irrational conviction in the minds of his readers that any attempt to realise socialism must lead to a world of corruption, torture and insecurity. To accomplish this no slander is too gross, no device too filthy: Nineteen Eighty-Four is, for this country at least, the last word to date in counter-revolutionary apologetics.
This would be a sordid ending to a splendid story if it were indeed the end. But of course it is not. The very degeneracy of such books as Ape and Essence and Nineteen Eighty-Four is in itself a symptom of the approach to a new stage. Such books are an acknowledgement by the defenders of bourgeois society that they have now nothing left to defend, of the inability of that society to provide any prospect of life for the people, let alone any hope of advance. In this sense they should be called anti-utopias rather than utopias, since the essence of the classical utopias of the past was a belief that by satire, by criticism or by holding up an example to be followed, they could help to change the world. In this they have had a positive part to play, they have stimulated thought, led men to criticise and fight against abuses, taught them that poverty and oppression were not a part of a natural order of things which must be endured.
Nor is this all. We can see today in the building of socialism a transformation of man and of nature on a scale never before attempted. The fantasies of Cokaygne, the projects of Bacon, the anticipations of Ernest Jones are in effect being translated into facts in the plans which are now beginning to change the face and the climate of the USSR and other socialist countries. Writing of only one aspect of these plans Professor Bernal has said:
This irrigation and afforestation is an over-all plan covering the whole of the dry areas of the Soviet Union, ranging from absolute desert to very dry sandy steppe, and steppe liable to drought. The total area involved is something like two million square miles, twice the size of Western Europe, or two-thirds the area of the United States. This whole area is being transformed by three simultaneous and complementary operations – an afforestation scheme, a hydro-electric and navigation canal scheme and an irrigation and soil-conservation scheme. Though separately administered these form part of one coherent plan.
This realisation of Utopia through the power of the working class, which the Huxleys and Orwells find so terrifying, is the vindication of the belief that has lain at the roots of all the great utopian writings of the past, the belief in the capacity and the splendid future of mankind.
Today the long and honoured stream of utopian writers has entered and made a noble contribution to the great river of the movement for socialism. Today millions are convinced that Utopia, not in the sense of a perfect and therefore unchanging society, but of a society alive and moving toward ever new victories, is to be had if men are ready to fight for it. Human knowledge, human activity, science in the service of the people not of the monopolists and war-makers, are leading to a world which, while it will not correspond to the desires of More, of Bacon, of Morris, or of the unknown poets who dreamed of the Land of Cokaygne, will have been enriched by all of them and by the many others who have made their contribution to that undefinable but ever living and growing reality which I have called the English Utopia.
1. See Part III, Chapter I.
2. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm >.
3. ‘The Malthusian ideas do not die. On the contrary they go from bad to worse. Their latest exponent, Vogt, in his book The Road to Survival, expounds the notion that not only is the rate of increase of food supplies limited, but there is a limit beyond which they cannot increase at all. Vogt’s enthusiasm for war, pestilence and famine as factors limiting the growth of human populations deserves a special name for which I propose the word malthusiasm.’ (The Modern Quarterly, Volume 6, no 3, p 201)