The borderline, if there is one, is very thin, between utopianism and social engineering. One is a disposition of the mind, the other is its application to reality. (Let us not confuse, though, the genuine, idealistic, kind of social engineering with its modern-day manipulative variety, where the engineer’s motives are by no means utopian…)
A remarkable event took place in 1920, when the great utopian H. G. Wells met the great social engineer V. I. Lenin in the Kremlin and had a fascinating conversation with him, regrettably, only partially “transposed” by Wells to literature, under the title Russia in the Shadows. There is one incredible paragraph in that book, however, which I'd like to quote here, as most significantly pertaining to our subject:
“…For, Lenin, who, like a good orthodox Marxist, denounces all “Utopians,” has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport, and industrial power… Projects for such an electrification are in process of development in Holland, and they have been discussed in England, and in those densely-populated and industrially highly-developed centres one can imagine them as successful, economical, and altogether beneficial. But their application to Russia is an altogether greater strain upon the constructive imagination. I cannot see anything of the sort happening in this dark crystal of Russia, but this little man at the Kremlin can; he sees the decaying railways replaced by a new electric transport, sees new roadways spreading throughout the land, sees a new and happier Communist industrialism arising again. While I talked to him he almost persuaded me to share his vision.”
Ironic, isn’t it, that Wells is telling us with a straight face that a good orthodox Marxist should denounce all Utopians, despite the fact that Marxist “eschatology” which I previously compared to Christian eschatology, has been one of the most notorious utopian dreams of mankind, ever since Marx restated the Bible…
Having said all this, let me confess that the subject of this particular entry is not Wells’ meeting with Lenin (which will be taking front and center in my yet to be posted entry Russia In The Shadows), but, as the title directly suggests, his rather little-known, and undeservedly so, 1905 book A Modern Utopia.
With H. G. Wells we are returning to the genre of utopian literature, not only by the title of his fantasy and by his own admission in the first chapter, which I am quoting from below. His is a… deliberate utopia. Its citizens are well aware that their place is not some static fantasy designed to fulfill the creative wishes of its author, but a work in progress, where people realize that theirs is not a perfect place, but they are intent on pushing it by their common effort in the right direction. (It must be obvious from this that Wells and Lenin were indeed birds of a feather!)
Thus it’s not Wells’ flight of imagination that interests me the most in his book, but his underlying principle, which represents a new method in utopian literature, and, in this sense, is of much greater importance than anything else that he has to offer in social innovations or futuristic predictions.
So here is the key passage from Wells’ A Modern Utopia, which my reader is advised to read with attention:
“…The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Gods grew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static, but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state, but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays, we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build not citadels, but ships of state. For one ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness assured to them and their children forever, we have to plan “a flexible common compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of individualities may converge effectually upon a comprehensive onward development.” That is the first, most generalized difference between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former time.”
What I also find fascinating in Wells’ approach is his honest admission that the creation of an utopia on the ruins of the past necessarily requires an emancipation from national culture, history, tradition, etc.---
“That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More’s Utopia, Howells’ implicit Altruria, and Bellamy’s future Boston, Comte’s great Western Republic, Hertzka’s Freeland, Cabet’s Icaria, and Campanella’s City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate, endeavor, and overcome.”
Thanks to Wells, we can now pinpoint the fatal flaw of all utopias: their artificiality and disconnect from all living cultures. Once again, I am reminded of those adventurous linguists, trying to improve on the existing languages by creating a perfect language for human communication, free from the defects characteristic of human languages, which makes it… inhuman.
(All of this now leads us to our final very intriguing question. If Lenin, with whom we started this entry, was a utopian of sorts, how come that Russia would allow him to become a social engineer, and to apply it to her national destiny? The answer ought to be clear from everything I have already written on this subject. Lenin was of course an exceptional man, but he was by no means a trailblazer. Russia chose him to lead the stage of transition from the Tsarist Empire to the Soviet Empire. Not surprisingly, Lenin’s vision corresponded to the two necessary ideas Russia had for some time been ripe for: totalitarianism and Christian communism. The Tsarist Empire had been opposed to both, and it was only Lenin’s Bolshevism that could usher them in: one in practice, the other as a national idea. Thus Lenin’s presumed utopianism was in fact the real thing, within the Russian context.)
Footnote: Wells here alludes to several utopian works, some of them needing no introduction and discussed by me already elsewhere, but others needing a short note of explanation, although not compelling enough to warrant separate entries.---
Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) was a French utopian socialist who wrote his 1840 Icarie with a blueprint of the society he wanted to build, and later tried to build, unsuccessfully, moving to America in 1848.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American author whose utopian novel A Traveler from Altruria is a critique of American obsession with money and other lures of greedy capitalism.
Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American socialist, whose best-known novel Looking Backward tells the story of a nineteenth century Boston man who wakes up in a socialist utopia in the year 2000.
And finally, Hungarian-Austrian journalist Theodor Hertzka’s (1845-1924) utopian novel Freiland is built upon the same premises as Bellamy’s novel, for which he was dubbed, unflatteringly, in my view, “Austrian Bellamy.”
(Separately from these, Wells also alludes to Auguste Comte whom we have discussed in the sociological-philosophical context, and not as a utopian. In his major work Système de Politique Positive he advances the idea of a unification of several Western European nations into a nineteenth century version of the European Union, which he does as a positivist political philosopher, rather than a utopian fantast, which, of course, sets him apart from the wishful thinking bunch, discussed in this section.)
A remarkable event took place in 1920, when the great utopian H. G. Wells met the great social engineer V. I. Lenin in the Kremlin and had a fascinating conversation with him, regrettably, only partially “transposed” by Wells to literature, under the title Russia in the Shadows. There is one incredible paragraph in that book, however, which I'd like to quote here, as most significantly pertaining to our subject:
“…For, Lenin, who, like a good orthodox Marxist, denounces all “Utopians,” has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport, and industrial power… Projects for such an electrification are in process of development in Holland, and they have been discussed in England, and in those densely-populated and industrially highly-developed centres one can imagine them as successful, economical, and altogether beneficial. But their application to Russia is an altogether greater strain upon the constructive imagination. I cannot see anything of the sort happening in this dark crystal of Russia, but this little man at the Kremlin can; he sees the decaying railways replaced by a new electric transport, sees new roadways spreading throughout the land, sees a new and happier Communist industrialism arising again. While I talked to him he almost persuaded me to share his vision.”
Ironic, isn’t it, that Wells is telling us with a straight face that a good orthodox Marxist should denounce all Utopians, despite the fact that Marxist “eschatology” which I previously compared to Christian eschatology, has been one of the most notorious utopian dreams of mankind, ever since Marx restated the Bible…
Having said all this, let me confess that the subject of this particular entry is not Wells’ meeting with Lenin (which will be taking front and center in my yet to be posted entry Russia In The Shadows), but, as the title directly suggests, his rather little-known, and undeservedly so, 1905 book A Modern Utopia.
With H. G. Wells we are returning to the genre of utopian literature, not only by the title of his fantasy and by his own admission in the first chapter, which I am quoting from below. His is a… deliberate utopia. Its citizens are well aware that their place is not some static fantasy designed to fulfill the creative wishes of its author, but a work in progress, where people realize that theirs is not a perfect place, but they are intent on pushing it by their common effort in the right direction. (It must be obvious from this that Wells and Lenin were indeed birds of a feather!)
Thus it’s not Wells’ flight of imagination that interests me the most in his book, but his underlying principle, which represents a new method in utopian literature, and, in this sense, is of much greater importance than anything else that he has to offer in social innovations or futuristic predictions.
So here is the key passage from Wells’ A Modern Utopia, which my reader is advised to read with attention:
“…The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Gods grew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static, but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state, but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays, we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build not citadels, but ships of state. For one ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an equality of happiness assured to them and their children forever, we have to plan “a flexible common compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of individualities may converge effectually upon a comprehensive onward development.” That is the first, most generalized difference between a Utopia based upon modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former time.”
What I also find fascinating in Wells’ approach is his honest admission that the creation of an utopia on the ruins of the past necessarily requires an emancipation from national culture, history, tradition, etc.---
“That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More’s Utopia, Howells’ implicit Altruria, and Bellamy’s future Boston, Comte’s great Western Republic, Hertzka’s Freeland, Cabet’s Icaria, and Campanella’s City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail. And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in this assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human freedom, in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade, initiate, endeavor, and overcome.”
Thanks to Wells, we can now pinpoint the fatal flaw of all utopias: their artificiality and disconnect from all living cultures. Once again, I am reminded of those adventurous linguists, trying to improve on the existing languages by creating a perfect language for human communication, free from the defects characteristic of human languages, which makes it… inhuman.
(All of this now leads us to our final very intriguing question. If Lenin, with whom we started this entry, was a utopian of sorts, how come that Russia would allow him to become a social engineer, and to apply it to her national destiny? The answer ought to be clear from everything I have already written on this subject. Lenin was of course an exceptional man, but he was by no means a trailblazer. Russia chose him to lead the stage of transition from the Tsarist Empire to the Soviet Empire. Not surprisingly, Lenin’s vision corresponded to the two necessary ideas Russia had for some time been ripe for: totalitarianism and Christian communism. The Tsarist Empire had been opposed to both, and it was only Lenin’s Bolshevism that could usher them in: one in practice, the other as a national idea. Thus Lenin’s presumed utopianism was in fact the real thing, within the Russian context.)
Footnote: Wells here alludes to several utopian works, some of them needing no introduction and discussed by me already elsewhere, but others needing a short note of explanation, although not compelling enough to warrant separate entries.---
Etienne Cabet (1788-1856) was a French utopian socialist who wrote his 1840 Icarie with a blueprint of the society he wanted to build, and later tried to build, unsuccessfully, moving to America in 1848.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American author whose utopian novel A Traveler from Altruria is a critique of American obsession with money and other lures of greedy capitalism.
Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American socialist, whose best-known novel Looking Backward tells the story of a nineteenth century Boston man who wakes up in a socialist utopia in the year 2000.
And finally, Hungarian-Austrian journalist Theodor Hertzka’s (1845-1924) utopian novel Freiland is built upon the same premises as Bellamy’s novel, for which he was dubbed, unflatteringly, in my view, “Austrian Bellamy.”
(Separately from these, Wells also alludes to Auguste Comte whom we have discussed in the sociological-philosophical context, and not as a utopian. In his major work Système de Politique Positive he advances the idea of a unification of several Western European nations into a nineteenth century version of the European Union, which he does as a positivist political philosopher, rather than a utopian fantast, which, of course, sets him apart from the wishful thinking bunch, discussed in this section.)
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