A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖
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general activity. In some way they must have put the more
immediate objects of desire into a secondary place, and that means
renunciation. They must be effectual in action and persistent in
will, and that means discipline. But in the modern world in which
progress advances without limits, it will be evident that whatever
common creed or formula they have must be of the simplest sort;
that whatever organisation they have must be as mobile and flexible
as a thing alive. All this follows inevitably from the general
propositions of our Utopian dream. When we made those, we bound
ourselves helplessly to come to this….
The botanist would nod an abstracted assent.
I should cease to talk. I should direct my mind to the confused mass
of memories three days in Utopia will have given us. Besides the
personalities with whom we have come into actual contact, our
various hosts, our foreman and work-fellows, the blond man, the
public officials and so on, there will be a great multitude of
other impressions. There will be many bright snapshots of little
children, for example, of girls and women and men, seen in shops and
offices and streets, on quays, at windows and by the wayside, people
riding hither and thither and walking to and fro. A very human crowd
it has seemed to me. But among them were there any who might be
thought of as having a wider interest than the others, who seemed in
any way detached from the rest by a purpose that passed beyond the
seen?
Then suddenly I recall that clean-shaven man who talked with us for
a little while in the public office at Wassen, the man who reminded
me of my boyish conception of a Knight Templar, and with him come
momentary impressions of other lithe and serious-looking people
dressed after the same manner, words and phrases we have read in
such scraps of Utopian reading as have come our way, and expressions
that fell from the loose mouth of the man with the blond
hair….
Women in a Modern Utopia
Section 1
But though I have come to a point where the problem of a Utopia has
resolved itself very simply into the problem of government and
direction, I find I have not brought the botanist with me. Frankly
he cannot think so steadily onward as I can. I feel to think, he
thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range,
because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape
ourselves. In general terms, at least, I understand him, but
he does not understand me in any way at all. He thinks me an
incomprehensible brute because his obsession is merely one of my
incidental interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to be
explicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most transitory
digression, he evades me and is back at himself again. He may have a
personal liking for me, though I doubt it, but also he hates me
pretty distinctly, because of this bias he cannot understand. My
philosophical insistence that things shall be reasonable and hang
together, that what can be explained shall be explained, and that
what can be done by calculation and certain methods shall not be
left to chance, he loathes. He just wants adventurously to feel. He
wants to feel the sunset, and he thinks that on the whole he would
feel it better if he had not been taught the sun was about
ninety-two million miles away. He wants to feel free and strong, and
he would rather feel so than be so. He does not want to accomplish
great things, but to have dazzling things occur to him. He does not
know that there are feelings also up in the clear air of the
philosophic mountains, in the long ascents of effort and design. He
does not know that thought itself is only a finer sort of feeling
than his—good hock to the mixed gin, porter and treacle of his
emotions, a perception of similitudes and oppositions that carries
even thrills. And naturally he broods on the source of all his most
copious feelings and emotions, women, and particularly upon the
woman who has most made him feel. He forces me also to that.
Our position is unfortunate for me. Our return to the Utopian
equivalent of Lucerne revives in him all the melancholy distresses
that so preoccupied him when first we were transferred to this
better planet. One day, while we are still waiting there for the
public office to decide about us, he broaches the matter. It is
early evening, and we are walking beside the lake after our simple
dinner. “About here,” he says, “the quays would run and all those
big hotels would be along here, looking out on the lake. It’s so
strange to have seen them so recently, and now not to see them at
all…. Where have they gone?”
“Vanished by hypothesis.”
“What?”
“Oh! They’re there still. It’s we that have come hither.”
“Of course. I forgot. But still–- You know, there was an avenue of
little trees along this quay with seats, and she was sitting looking
out upon the lake…. I hadn’t seen her for ten years.”
He looks about him still a little perplexed. “Now we are here,” he
says, “it seems as though that meeting and the talk we had must have
been a dream.”
He falls musing.
Presently he says: “I knew her at once. I saw her in profile. But,
you know, I didn’t speak to her directly. I walked past her seat and
on for a little way, trying to control myself…. Then I turned back
and sat down beside her, very quietly. She looked up at me.
Everything came back—everything. For a moment or so I felt I was
going to cry….”
That seems to give him a sort of satisfaction even in the
reminiscence.
“We talked for a time just like casual acquaintances—about the view
and the weather, and things like that.”
He muses again.
“In Utopia everything would have been different,” I say.
“I suppose it would.”
He goes on before I can say anything more.
“Then, you know, there was a pause. I had a sort of intuition that
the moment was coming. So I think had she. You may scoff, of course,
at these intuitions–-”
I don’t, as a matter of fact. Instead, I swear secretly. Always this
sort of man keeps up the pretence of highly distinguished and
remarkable mental processes, whereas—have not I, in my own
composition, the whole diapason of emotional fool? Is not the
suppression of these notes my perpetual effort, my undying despair?
And then, am I to be accused of poverty?
But to his story.
“She said, quite abruptly, ‘I am not happy,’ and I told her, ‘I knew
that the instant I saw you.’ Then, you know, she began to talk to me
very quietly, very frankly, about everything. It was only afterwards
I began to feel just what it meant, her talking to me like that.”
I cannot listen to this!
“Don’t you understand,” I cry, “that we are in Utopia. She may be
bound unhappily upon earth and you may be bound, but not here. Here
I think it will be different. Here the laws that control all these
things will be humane and just. So that all you said and did, over
there, does not signify here—does not signify here!”
He looks up for a moment at my face, and then carelessly at my
wonderful new world.
“Yes,” he says, without interest, with something of the tone of an
abstracted elder speaking to a child, “I dare say it will be all
very fine here.” And he lapses, thwarted from his confidences, into
musing.
There is something almost dignified in this withdrawal into himself.
For a moment I entertain an illusion that really I am unworthy to
hear the impalpable inconclusiveness of what he said to her and of
what she said to him.
I am snubbed. I am also amazed to find myself snubbed. I become
breathless with indignation. We walk along side by side, but now
profoundly estranged.
I regard the facade of the Utopian public offices of Lucerne—I had
meant to call his attention to some of the architectural features of
these—with a changed eye, with all the spirit gone out of my
vision. I wish I had never brought this introspective carcass, this
mental ingrate, with me.
I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had no power to
leave him behind…. I wonder and I wonder. The old Utopists never
had to encumber themselves with this sort of man.
Section 2
How would things be “different” in the Modern Utopia? After all it
is time we faced the riddle of the problems of marriage and
motherhood….
The Modern Utopia is not only to be a sound and happy World State,
but it is to be one progressing from good to better. But as Malthus
[Footnote: Essay on the Principles of Population.] demonstrated for
all time, a State whose population continues to increase in
obedience to unchecked instinct, can progress only from bad to
worse. From the view of human comfort and happiness, the increase of
population that occurs at each advance in human security is the
greatest evil of life. The way of Nature is for every species to
increase nearly to its possible maximum of numbers, and then to
improve through the pressure of that maximum against its limiting
conditions by the crushing and killing of all the feebler
individuals. The way of Nature has also been the way of humanity so
far, and except when a temporary alleviation is obtained through an
expansion of the general stock of sustenance by invention or
discovery, the amount of starvation and of the physical misery of
privation in the world, must vary almost exactly with the excess of
the actual birth-rate over that required to sustain population at a
number compatible with a universal contentment. Neither has Nature
evolved, nor has man so far put into operation, any device by which
paying this price of progress, this misery of a multitude of starved
and unsuccessful lives can be evaded. A mere indiscriminating
restriction of the birth-rate—an end practically attained in the
homely, old-fashioned civilisation of China by female infanticide,
involves not only the cessation of distresses but stagnation, and
the minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won at
too great a sacrifice. Progress depends essentially on competitive
selection, and that we may not escape.
But it is a conceivable and possible thing that this margin of
futile struggling, pain and discomfort and death might be reduced to
nearly nothing without checking physical and mental evolution, with
indeed an acceleration of physical and mental evolution, by
preventing the birth of those who would in the unrestricted
interplay of natural forces be born to suffer and fail. The method
of Nature “red in tooth and claw” is to degrade, thwart, torture,
and kill the weakest and least adapted members of every species in
existence in each generation, and so keep the specific average
rising; the ideal of a scientific civilisation is to prevent those
weaklings being born. There is no other way of evading Nature’s
punishment of sorrow. The struggle for life among the beasts and
uncivilised men means misery and death for the inferior individuals,
misery and death in order that they may not increase and multiply;
in the civilised State it is now clearly possible to make the
conditions of life tolerable for every living creature, provided the
inferiors can be prevented
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