A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells (best color ebook reader txt) 📗

children covers.

[Footnote: It cannot be made too clear that though the control of

morality is outside the law the State must maintain a general

decorum, a systematic suppression of powerful and moving examples,

and of incitations and temptations of the young and inexperienced,

and to that extent it will, of course, in a sense, exercise a

control over morals. But this will be only part of a wider law to

safeguard the tender mind. For example, lying advertisements, and

the like, when they lean towards adolescent interests, will

encounter a specially disagreeable disposition in the law, over and

above the treatment of their general dishonesty.] Change of function

is one of the ruling facts in life, the sac that was in our remotest

ancestors a swimming bladder is now a lung, and the State which was

once, perhaps, no more than the jealous and tyrannous will of the

strongest male in the herd, the instrument of justice and equality.

The State intervenes now only where there is want of harmony between

individuals—individuals who exist or who may presently come into

existence.

 

Section 6

 

It must be reiterated that our reasoning still leaves Utopian

marriage an institution with wide possibilities of variation. We

have tried to give effect to the ideal of a virtual equality, an

equality of spirit between men and women, and in doing so we have

overridden the accepted opinion of the great majority of mankind.

Probably the first writer to do as much was Plato. His argument in

support of this innovation upon natural human feeling was thin

enough—a mere analogy to illustrate the spirit of his propositions;

it was his creative instinct that determined him. In the atmosphere

of such speculations as this, Plato looms very large indeed, and in

view of what we owe to him, it seems reasonable that we should

hesitate before dismissing as a thing prohibited and evil, a type of

marriage that he made almost the central feature in the organisation

of the ruling class, at least, of his ideal State. He was persuaded

that the narrow monogamic family is apt to become illiberal and

anti-social, to withdraw the imagination and energies of the citizen

from the services of the community as a whole, and the Roman

Catholic Church has so far endorsed and substantiated his opinion as

to forbid family relations to its priests and significant servants.

He conceived of a poetic devotion to the public idea, a devotion of

which the mind of Aristotle, as his criticisms of Plato show, was

incapable, as a substitute for the warm and tender but illiberal

emotions of the home. But while the Church made the alternative to

family ties celibacy [Footnote: The warm imagination of Campanella,

that quaint Calabrian monastic, fired by Plato, reversed this aspect

of the Church.] and participation in an organisation, Plato was far

more in accordance with modern ideas in perceiving the disadvantage

that would result from precluding the nobler types of character from

offspring. He sought a way to achieve progeny, therefore, without

the narrow concentration of the sympathies about the home, and he

found it in a multiple marriage in which every member of the

governing class was considered to be married to all the others. But

the detailed operation of this system he put tentatively and very

obscurely. His suggestions have the experimental inconsistency of an

enquiring man. He left many things altogether open, and it is unfair

to him to adopt Aristotle’s forensic method and deal with his

discussion as though it was a fully-worked-out project. It is clear

that Plato intended every member of his governing class to be so

“changed at birth” as to leave paternity untraceable; mothers were

not to know their children, nor children their parents, but there is

nothing to forbid the supposition that he intended these people to

select and adhere to congenial mates within the great family.

Aristotle’s assertion that the Platonic republic left no scope for

the virtue of continence shows that he had jumped to just the same

conclusions a contemporary London errand boy, hovering a little

shamefacedly over Jowett in a public library, might be expected to

reach.

 

Aristotle obscures Plato’s intention, it may be accidentally, by

speaking of his marriage institution as a community of wives. When

reading Plato he could not or would not escape reading in his own

conception of the natural ascendency of men, his idea of property in

women and children. But as Plato intended women to be conventionally

equal to men, this phrase belies him altogether; community of

husbands and wives would be truer to his proposal. Aristotle

condemns Plato as roundly as any commercial room would condemn him

to-day, and in much the same spirit; he asserts rather than proves

that such a grouping is against the nature of man. He wanted to have

women property just as he wanted to have slaves property, he did not

care to ask why, and it distressed his conception of convenience

extremely to imagine any other arrangement. It is no doubt true that

the natural instinct of either sex is exclusive of participators in

intimacy during a period of intimacy, but it was probably Aristotle

who gave Plato an offensive interpretation in this matter. No one

would freely submit to such a condition of affairs as multiple

marriage carried out, in the spirit of the Aristotelian

interpretation, to an obscene completeness, but that is all the more

reason why the modern Utopia should not refuse a grouped marriage to

three or more freely consenting persons. There is no sense in

prohibiting institutions which no sane people could ever want to

abuse. It is claimed—though the full facts are difficult to

ascertain—that a group marriage of over two hundred persons was

successfully organised by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida Creek.

[Footnote: See John H. Noyes’s History of American Socialisms and

his writings generally. The bare facts of this and the other

American experiments are given, together with more recent matter, by

Morris Hillquirt, in The History of Socialism in the United States.]

It is fairly certain in the latter case that there was no

“promiscuity,” and that the members mated for variable periods, and

often for life, within the group. The documents are reasonably clear

upon that point. This Oneida community was, in fact, a league of two

hundred persons to regard their children as “common.” Choice and

preference were not abolished in the community, though in some cases

they were set aside—just as they are by many parents under our

present conditions. There seems to have been a premature attempt at

“stirpiculture,” at what Mr. Francis Galton now calls “Eugenics,” in

the mating of the members, and there was also a limitation of

offspring. Beyond these points the inner secrets of the community do

not appear to be very profound; its atmosphere was almost

commonplace, it was made up of very ordinary people. There is no

doubt that it had a career of exceptional success throughout the

whole lifetime of its founder, and it broke down with the advent of

a new generation, with the onset of theological differences, and the

loss of its guiding intelligence. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, it has

been said by one of the ablest children of the experiment, is too

individualistic for communism. It is possible to regard the

temporary success of this complex family as a strange accident, as

the wonderful exploit of what was certainly a very exceptional man.

Its final disintegration into frankly monogamic couples—it is still

a prosperous business association—may be taken as an experimental

verification of Aristotle’s common-sense psychology, and was

probably merely the public acknowledgment of conditions already

practically established.

 

Out of respect for Plato we cannot ignore this possibility of

multiple marriage altogether in our Utopian theorising, but even if

we leave this possibility open we are still bound to regard it as a

thing so likely to be rare as not to come at all under our direct

observation during our Utopian journeyings. But in one sense, of

course, in the sense that the State guarantees care and support for

all properly born children, our entire Utopia is to be regarded as a

comprehensive marriage group. [Footnote: The Thelema of Rabelais,

with its principle of “Fay ce que vouldras” within the limits of the

order, is probably intended to suggest a Platonic complex marriage

after the fashion of our interpretation.]

 

It must be remembered that a modern Utopia must differ from the

Utopias of any preceding age in being world-wide; it is not,

therefore, to be the development of any special race or type of

culture, as Plato’s developed an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More,

Tudor England. The modern Utopia is to be, before all things,

synthetic. Politically and socially, as linguistically, we must

suppose it a synthesis; politically it will be a synthesis of once

widely different forms of government; socially and morally, a

synthesis of a great variety of domestic traditions and ethical

habits. Into the modern Utopia there must have entered the mental

tendencies and origins that give our own world the polygamy of the

Zulus and of Utah, the polyandry of Tibet, the latitudes of

experiment permitted in the United States, and the divorceless

wedlock of Comte. The tendency of all synthetic processes in matters

of law and custom is to reduce and simplify the compulsory canon, to

admit alternatives and freedoms; what were laws before become

traditions of feeling and style, and in no matter will this be more

apparent than in questions affecting the relations of the sexes.