A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖

theories from those I have

read on earth, and this makes my exposition considerably more

difficult. This article upon which I base my account floated before

me in an unfamiliar, perplexing, and dream-like phraseology. Yet I

brought away an impression that here was a rightness that earthly

economists have failed to grasp. Few earthly economists have been

able to disentangle themselves from patriotisms and politics, and

their obsession has always been international trade. Here in Utopia

the World State cuts that away from beneath their feet; there are no

imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading is the

earthly economists’ initial notion, and they start from perplexing

and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because all

trading finally involves individual preferences which are

incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling really

defined standards, every economic dissertation and discussion

reminds one more strongly than the last of the game of croquet Alice

played in Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingoes and the balls

were hedgehogs and crawled away, and the hoops were soldiers and

kept getting up and walking about. But economics in Utopia must be,

it seems to me, not a theory of trading based on bad psychology, but

physics applied to problems in the theory of sociology. The general

problem of Utopian economics is to state the conditions of the most

efficient application of the steadily increasing quantities of

material energy the progress of science makes available for human

service, to the general needs of mankind. Human labour and existing

material are dealt with in relation to that. Trading and relative

wealth are merely episodical in such a scheme. The trend of the

article I read, as I understood it, was that a monetary system based

upon a relatively small amount of gold, upon which the business of

the whole world had hitherto been done, fluctuated unreasonably and

supplied no real criterion of well-being, that the nominal values of

things and enterprises had no clear and simple relation to the real

physical prosperity of the community, that the nominal wealth of

a community in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions, measured

nothing but the quantity of hope in the air, and an increase of

confidence meant an inflation of credit and a pessimistic phase a

collapse of this hallucination of possessions. The new standards,

this advocate reasoned, were to alter all that, and it seemed to me

they would.

 

I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals,

but about them clustered an elaborate mass of keen and temperate

discussion. Into the details of that discussion I will not enter

now, nor am I sure I am qualified to render the multitudinous aspect

of this complicated question at all precisely. I read the whole

thing in the course of an hour or two of rest after lunch—it was

either the second or third day of my stay in Utopia—and we were

sitting in a little inn at the end of the Lake of Uri. We had

loitered there, and I had fallen reading because of a shower of

rain…. But certainly as I read it the proposition struck me as a

singularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition opened out

to me for the first time clearly, in a comprehensive outline, the

general conception of the economic nature of the Utopian State.

 

Section 3

 

The difference between the social and economic sciences as they

exist in our world [Footnote: But see Gidding’s Principles of

Sociology, a modern and richly suggestive American work, imperfectly

appreciated by the British student. See also Walter Bagehot’s

Economic Studies.] and in this Utopia deserves perhaps a word or

so more. I write with the utmost diffidence, because upon earth

economic science has been raised to a very high level of tortuous

abstraction by the industry of its professors, and I can claim

neither a patient student’s intimacy with their productions

nor—what is more serious—anything but the most generalised

knowledge of what their Utopian equivalents have achieved. The vital

nature of economic issues to a Utopia necessitates, however, some

attempt at interpretation between the two.

 

In Utopia there is no distinct and separate science of economics.

Many problems that we should regard as economic come within the

scope of Utopian psychology. My Utopians make two divisions of the

science of psychology, first, the general psychology of individuals,

a sort of mental physiology separated by no definite line from

physiology proper, and secondly, the psychology of relationship

between individuals. This second is an exhaustive study of

the reaction of people upon each other and of all possible

relationships. It is a science of human aggregations, of all

possible family groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of

companies, associations, unions, secret and public societies,

religious groupings, of common ends and intercourse, and of the

methods of intercourse and collective decision that hold human

groups together, and finally of government and the State. The

elucidation of economic relationships, depending as it does on the

nature of the hypothesis of human aggregation actually in operation

at any time, is considered to be subordinate and subsequent to this

general science of Sociology. Political economy and economics, in

our world now, consist of a hopeless muddle of social assumptions

and preposterous psychology, and a few geographical and physical

generalisations. Its ingredients will be classified out and widely

separated in Utopian thought. On the one hand there will be the

study of physical economies, ending in the descriptive treatment of

society as an organisation for the conversion of all the available

energy in nature to the material ends of mankind—a physical

sociology which will be already at such a stage of practical

development as to be giving the world this token coinage

representing energy—and on the other there will be the study of

economic problems as problems in the division of labour, having

regard to a social organisation whose main ends are reproduction and

education in an atmosphere of personal freedom. Each of these

inquiries, working unencumbered by the other, will be continually

contributing fresh valid conclusions for the use of the practical

administrator.

 

In no region of intellectual activity will our hypothesis of freedom

from tradition be of more value in devising a Utopia than here. From

its beginning the earthly study of economics has been infertile and

unhelpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely suspected

assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade

is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that

property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is

capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most

generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of

exchange. Society was regarded as a practically unlimited number of

avaricious adult units incapable of any other subordinate groupings

than business partnerships, and the sources of competition were

assumed to be inexhaustible. Upon such quicksands rose an edifice

that aped the securities of material science, developed a technical

jargon and professed the discovery of “laws.” Our liberation from

these false presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin

and the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent than real.

The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired and altered by

indifferent builders, underpinned in places, and with a slight

change of name. “Political Economy” has been painted out, and

instead we read “Economics—under entirely new management.” Modern

Economics differs mainly from old Political Economy in having

produced no Adam Smith. The old “Political Economy” made certain

generalisations, and they were mostly wrong; new Economics evades

generalisations, and seems to lack the intellectual power to make

them. The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog

which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning

inconvenience to passers-by. Its most typical exponents display a

disposition to disavow generalisations altogether, to claim

consideration as “experts,” and to make immediate political

application of that conceded claim. Now Newton, Darwin, Dalton,

Davy, Joule, and Adam Smith did not affect this “expert”

hankey-pankey, becoming enough in a hairdresser or a fashionable

physician, but indecent in a philosopher or a man of science. In

this state of impotent expertness, however, or in some equally

unsound state, economics must struggle on—a science that is no

science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of statistics—until

either the study of the material organisation of production on the

one hand as a development of physics and geography, or the study

of social aggregation on the other, renders enduring foundations

possible.

 

Section 4

 

The older Utopias were all relatively small states; Plato’s

Republic, for example, was to be smaller than the average English

borough, and no distinction was made between the Family, the Local

Government, and the State. Plato and Campanella—for all that the

latter was a Christian priest—carried communism to its final point

and prescribed even a community of husbands and wives, an idea that

was brought at last to the test of effectual experiment in the

Oneida Community of New York State (1848-1879). This latter body did

not long survive its founder, at least as a veritable communism, by

reason of the insurgent individualism of its vigorous sons. More,

too, denied privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods, at

any rate, and so, coming to the Victorian Utopias, did Cabet. But

Cabet’s communism was one of the “free store” type, and the goods

were yours only after you had requisitioned them. That seems the

case in the “Nowhere” of Morris also. Compared with the older

writers Bellamy and Morris have a vivid sense of individual

separation, and their departure from the old homogeneity is

sufficiently marked to justify a doubt whether there will be any

more thoroughly communistic Utopias for ever.

 

A Utopia such as this present one, written in the opening of the

Twentieth Century, and after the most exhaustive discussion—nearly

a century long—between Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the one

hand, and Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of

effectual conclusion to those controversies. The two parties have so

chipped and amended each other’s initial propositions that, indeed,

except for the labels still flutteringly adhesive to the implicated

men, it is hard to choose between them. Each side established a good

many propositions, and we profit by them all. We of the succeeding

generation can see quite clearly that for the most part the heat and

zeal of these discussions arose in the confusion of a quantitative

for a qualitative question. To the onlooker, both Individualism and

Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make men

the slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State

official, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down

the intervening valley. Happily the dead past buries its dead, and

it is not our function now to adjudicate the preponderance of

victory. In the very days when our political and economic order is

becoming steadily more Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turn

more and more to a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality.

The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be static, and

this alters the general condition of the Utopian problem profoundly;

we have to provide not only for food and clothing, for order and

health, but for initiative. The factor that leads the World State

on from one phase of development to the next is the interplay of

individualities; to speak teleologically, the world exists for the

sake of and through initiative, and individuality is the method

of initiative. Each man and woman, to the extent that his or her

individuality is marked, breaks the law of precedent, transgresses

the general formula, and makes a new experiment for the direction of

the life force. It is impossible, therefore, for the State, which

represents all and is preoccupied by the average, to make effectual

experiments and intelligent innovations, and so supply the essential

substance of