A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗
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The property of a parent in his children, and of a husband in his
wife, seems to be undergoing a steadily increasing qualification in
the world of to-day, but the discussion of the Utopian state of
affairs in regard to such property may be better reserved until
marriage becomes our topic. Suffice it here to remark, that the
increasing control of a child’s welfare and upbringing by the
community, and the growing disposition to limit and tax inheritance
are complementary aspects of the general tendency to regard the
welfare and free intraplay of future generations no longer as the
concern of parents and altruistic individuals, but as the
predominant issue of statesmanship, and the duty and moral meaning
of the world community as a whole.
Section 6
From the conception of mechanical force as coming in from Nature to
the service of man, a conception the Utopian proposal of a coinage
based on energy units would emphasise, arise profound contrasts
between the modern and the classical Utopias. Except for a meagre
use of water power for milling, and the wind for sailing—so meagre
in the latter case that the classical world never contrived to do
without the galley slave—and a certain restricted help from oxen in
ploughing, and from horses in locomotion, all the energy that
sustained the old-fashioned State was derived from the muscular
exertion of toiling men. They ran their world by hand. Continual
bodily labour was a condition of social existence. It is only with
the coming of coal burning, of abundant iron and steel, and of
scientific knowledge that this condition has been changed. To-day,
I suppose, if it were possible to indicate, in units of energy,
the grand total of work upon which the social fabric of the
United States or England rests, it would be found that a vastly
preponderating moiety is derived from non-human sources, from coal
and liquid fuel, and explosives and wind and water. There is every
indication of a steady increase in this proportion of mechanical
energy, in this emancipation of men from the necessity of physical
labour. There appears no limit to the invasion of life by the
machine.
Now it is only in the last three hundred years that any human being
seems to have anticipated this. It stimulates the imagination to
remark how entirely it was overlooked as a modifying cause in human
development. [Footnote: It is interesting to note how little even
Bacon seems to see of this, in his New Atlantis.] Plato clearly had
no ideas about machines at all as a force affecting social
organisation. There was nothing in his world to suggest them to him.
I suppose there arose no invention, no new mechanical appliance or
method of the slightest social importance through all his length of
years. He never thought of a State that did not rely for its force
upon human muscle, just as he never thought of a State that was not
primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. Political and moral
inventions he saw enough of and to spare, and in that direction he
still stimulates the imagination. But in regard to all material
possibilities he deadens rather than stimulates. [Footnote: The lost
Utopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, but unless
Aristotle misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of all
Utopias to be more or less misread, the inventions contemplated were
political devices.] An infinitude of nonsense about the Greek mind
would never have been written if the distinctive intellectual and
artistic quality of Plato’s time, its extraordinarily clear
definition of certain material conditions as absolutely permanent,
coupled with its politico-social instability, had been borne in
mind. The food of the Greek imagination was the very antithesis of
our own nourishment. We are educated by our circumstances to think
no revolution in appliances and economic organisation incredible,
our minds play freely about possibilities that would have struck the
men of the Academy as outrageous extravagance, and it is in regard
to politico-social expedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta,
for all the evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us
than a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been to
Socrates.
By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced the tradition of
Utopias without machinery, a tradition we find Morris still loyally
following, except for certain mechanical barges and such-like toys,
in his News from Nowhere. There are some foreshadowings of
mechanical possibilities in the New Atlantis, but it is only in the
nineteenth century that Utopias appeared in which the fact is
clearly recognised that the social fabric rests no longer upon human
labour. It was, I believe, Cabet [Footnote: Cabet, Voyage en Icarie,
1848.] who first in a Utopian work insisted upon the escape of man
from irksome labours through the use of machinery. He is the great
primitive of modern Utopias, and Bellamy is his American equivalent.
Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas), [Footnote: Aristotle’s
Politics, Bk. II., Ch. VIII.] or at least class distinctions
involving unavoidable labour in the lower class, have been
assumed—as Plato does, and as Bacon in the New Atlantis probably
intended to do (More gave his Utopians bondsmen sans phrase for
their most disagreeable toil); or there is—as in Morris and the
outright Return-to-Nature Utopians—a bold make-believe that all
toil may be made a joy, and with that a levelling down of all
society to an equal participation in labour. But indeed this is
against all the observed behaviour of mankind. It needed the
Olympian unworldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the
shareholding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to imagine
as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin’s auspices was a joy at Oxford
no doubt, and a distinction, and it still remains a distinction; it
proved the least contagious of practices. And Hawthorne did not find
bodily toil anything more than the curse the Bible says it is, at
Brook Farm. [Footnote: The Blythedale Experiment, and see also his
Notebook.]
If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually disguised,
and the very people who tell us that, hesitate to suggest more than
a beautiful ease in the endless day of Heaven. A certain amount of
bodily or mental exercise, a considerable amount of doing things
under the direction of one’s free imagination is quite another
matter. Artistic production, for example, when it is at its best,
when a man is freely obeying himself, and not troubling to please
others, is really not toil at all. It is quite a different thing
digging potatoes, as boys say, “for a lark,” and digging them
because otherwise you will starve, digging them day after day as a
dull, unavoidable imperative. The essence of toil is that
imperative, and the fact that the attention must cramp itself to
the work in hand—that it excludes freedom, and not that it involves
fatigue. So long as anything but a quasi-savage life depended upon
toil, so long was it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but
struggle to confer just as much of this blessing as possible upon
one another. But now that the new conditions physical science is
bringing about, not only dispense with man as a source of energy but
supply the hope that all routine work may be made automatic, it is
becoming conceivable that presently there may be no need for anyone
to toil habitually at all; that a labouring class—that is to say,
a class of workers without personal initiative—will become
unnecessary to the world of men.
The plain message physical science has for the world at large is
this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as
well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic
operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the
present moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the
smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now
makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough
for everyone alive. Science stands, a too competent servant, behind
her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and
remedies they are too stupid to use. [Footnote: See that most
suggestive little book, Twentieth Century Inventions, by Mr. George
Sutherland.] And on its material side a modern Utopia must needs
present these gifts as taken, and show a world that is really
abolishing the need of labour, abolishing the last base reason for
anyone’s servitude or inferiority.
Section 7
The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile class will make
itself felt in every detail of the inn that will shelter us, of the
bedrooms we shall occupy. You conceive my awakening to all these
things on the morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute or
so with my nose peeping over the coverlet, agreeably and gently
coming awake, and with some vague nightmare of sitting at a common
table with an unavoidable dustman in green and gold called Boffin,
[Footnote: Vide William Morris’s News from Nowhere.] fading out of
my mind. Then I should start up. You figure my apprehensive,
startled inspection of my chamber. “Where am I?” that classic
phrase, recurs. Then I perceive quite clearly that I am in bed in
Utopia.
Utopia! The word is enough to bring anyone out of bed, to the
nearest window, but thence I see no more than the great mountain
mass behind the inn, a very terrestrial looking mountain mass. I
return to the contrivances about me, and make my examination as I
dress, pausing garment in hand to hover over first this thing of
interest and then that.
The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple; not by any
means cheaply equipped, but designed to economise the labour of
redding and repair just as much as is possible. It is beautifully
proportioned, and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth.
There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by that until I find a
thermometer beside six switches on the wall. Above this switch-board
is a brief instruction: one switch warms the floor, which is not
carpeted, but covered by a substance like soft oilcloth; one warms
the mattress (which is of metal with resistance coils threaded to
and fro in it); and the others warm the wall in various degrees,
each directing current through a separate system of resistances. The
casement does not open, but above, flush with the ceiling, a
noiseless rapid fan pumps air out of the room. The air enters by a
Tobin shaft. There is a recess dressing-room, equipped with a bath
and all that is necessary to one’s toilette, and the water, one
remarks, is warmed, if one desires it warm, by passing it through an
electrically heated spiral of tubing. A cake of soap drops out of a
store machine on the turn of a handle, and when you have done with
it, you drop that and your soiled towels and so forth, which also
are given you by machines, into a little box, through the bottom of
which they drop at once, and sail down a smooth shaft. A little
notice tells you the price of your room, and you gather the price is
doubled if you do not leave the toilette as you found it. Beside the
bed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over the pillow, is a
little clock, its face flush with the wall. The room has no corners
to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and the
apartment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes of a
mechanical sweeper. The door frames and window frames are of metal,
rounded and impervious to draught. You are politely requested to
turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and
forthwith the frame turns up into
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