A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or
brutalising surroundings that gave their gifts no scope, did in
Utopia encounter happier chances, and take up the development and
application of social theory—from the time of the first Utopists in
a steady onward progress down to the present hour. [Footnote: One
might assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four-fifths
of the Greek literature now lost to the world, there perished,
neglected, some book of elementary significance, some earlier
Novum Organum, that in Utopia survived to achieve the profoundest
consequences.] The differences of condition, therefore, had widened
with each successive year. Jesus Christ had been born into a liberal
and progressive Roman Empire that spread from the Arctic Ocean
to the Bight of Benin, and was to know no Decline and Fall,
and Mahomet, instead of embodying the dense prejudices of Arab
ignorance, opened his eyes upon an intellectual horizon already
nearly as wide as the world.
And through this empire the flow of thought, the flow of intention,
poured always more abundantly. There were wars, but they were
conclusive wars that established new and more permanent relations,
that swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay; there
were prejudices tempered to an ordered criticism, and hatreds that
merged at last in tolerant reactions. It was several hundred years
ago that the great organisation of the samurai came into its present
form. And it was this organisation’s widely sustained activities
that had shaped and established the World State in Utopia.
This organisation of the samurai was a quite deliberate invention.
It arose in the course of social and political troubles and
complications, analogous to those of our own time on earth, and was,
indeed, the last of a number of political and religious experiments
dating back to the first dawn of philosophical state-craft in
Greece. That hasty despair of specialisation for government that
gave our poor world individualism, democratic liberalism, and
anarchism, and that curious disregard of the fund of enthusiasm and
self-sacrifice in men, which is the fundamental weakness of worldly
economics, do not appear in the history of Utopian thought. All
that history is pervaded with the recognition of the fact
that self-seeking is no more the whole of human life than the
satisfaction of hunger; that it is an essential of a man’s existence
no doubt, and that under stress of evil circumstances it may as
entirely obsess him as would the food hunt during famine, but that
life may pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and effort.
Every sane person consists of possibilities beyond the unavoidable
needs, is capable of disinterested feeling, even if it amounts only
to enthusiasm for a sport or an industrial employment well done,
for an art, or for a locality or class. In our world now, as in
the Utopian past, this impersonal energy of a man goes out into
religious emotion and work, into patriotic effort, into artistic
enthusiasms, into games and amateur employments, and an enormous
proportion of the whole world’s fund of effort wastes itself in
religious and political misunderstandings and conflicts, and in
unsatisfying amusements and unproductive occupations. In a modern
Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection; in Utopia there
must also be friction, conflicts and waste, but the waste will
be enormously less than in our world. And the co-ordination of
activities this relatively smaller waste will measure, will be the
achieved end for which the order of the samurai was first devised.
Inevitably such an order must have first arisen among a clash of
social forces and political systems as a revolutionary organisation.
It must have set before itself the attainment of some such Utopian
ideal as this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal imperfection,
realise. At first it may have directed itself to research and
discussion, to the elaboration of its ideal, to the discussion of a
plan of campaign, but at some stage it must have assumed a more
militant organisation, and have prevailed against and assimilated
the pre-existing political organisations, and to all intents and
purposes have become this present synthesised World State. Traces of
that militancy would, therefore, pervade it still, and a campaigning
quality—no longer against specific disorders, but against universal
human weaknesses, and the inanimate forces that trouble man—still
remain as its essential quality.
“Something of this kind,” I should tell my double, “had arisen in
our thought”—I jerk my head back to indicate an infinitely distant
planet—“just before I came upon these explorations. The idea had
reached me, for example, of something to be called a New Republic,
which was to be in fact an organisation for revolution something
after the fashion of your samurai, as I understand them—only most
of the organisation and the rule of life still remained to be
invented. All sorts of people were thinking of something in that way
about the time of my coming. The idea, as it reached me, was pretty
crude in several respects. It ignored the high possibility of a
synthesis of languages in the future; it came from a literary man,
who wrote only English, and, as I read him—he was a little vague in
his proposals—it was to be a purely English-speaking movement. And
his ideas were coloured too much by the peculiar opportunism of his
time; he seemed to have more than half an eye for a prince or a
millionaire of genius; he seemed looking here and there for support
and the structural elements of a party. Still, the idea of a
comprehensive movement of disillusioned and illuminated men behind
the shams and patriotisms, the spites and personalities of the
ostensible world was there.”
I added some particulars.
“Our movement had something of that spirit in the beginning,” said
my Utopian double. “But while your men seem to be thinking
disconnectedly, and upon a very narrow and fragmentary basis of
accumulated conclusions, ours had a fairly comprehensive science of
human association, and a very careful analysis of the failures of
preceding beginnings to draw upon. After all, your world must be as
full as ours was of the wreckage and decay of previous attempts;
churches, aristocracies, orders, cults….”
“Only at present we seem to have lost heart altogether, and now
there are no new religions, no new orders, no new cults—no
beginnings any more.”
“But that’s only a resting phase, perhaps. You were saying–-”
“Oh!—let that distressful planet alone for a time! Tell me how you
manage in Utopia.”
Section 2
The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not base
their schemes upon the classification of men into labour and
capital, the landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like. They
esteemed these as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to
statesmanship, and they looked for some practical and real
classification upon which to base organisation. [Footnote: In that
they seem to have profited by a more searching criticism of early
social and political speculations than our earth has yet undertaken.
The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just the
same primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenth
century—they began with the assumption that the general conditions
of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.] But, on the other
hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because
practically homogeneous, which underlies modern democratic methods
and all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to
the Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other
than provisional classifications, since every being is regarded as
finally unique, but for political and social purposes things have
long rested upon a classification of temperaments, which attends
mainly to differences in the range and quality and character of the
individual imagination.
This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served its
purpose to determine the broad lines of political organisation; it
was so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within
two or even three of its classes. But that was met by giving the
correlated organisation a compensatory looseness of play. Four main
classes of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the
Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are
supposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latter
are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They
are not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any
class by special breeding, simply because the intricate interplay
of heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes to
which people drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until
differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and woman) must
establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract
classification by his own quality, choice, and development….
The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a
wide range of types, but they agree in possessing imaginations that
range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to
bring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and
recognition. The scope and direction of the imaginative excursion
may vary very greatly. It may be the invention of something new or
the discovery of something hitherto unperceived. When the invention
or discovery is primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of
Poietic mind; when it is not so, we have the true scientific man.
The range of discovery may be narrowed as it is in the art of
Whistler or the science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide
extent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific
inquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher.
To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type, reacted upon by
circumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by human thought
and feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good or
beautiful, entered life through the poietic inspirations of man.
Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future must
come also through men of this same type, and it is a primary
essential to our modern idea of an abundant secular progress that
these activities should be unhampered and stimulated.
The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merging
insensibly along the boundary into the less representative
constituents of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a more
restricted range of imagination. Their imaginations do not range
beyond the known, experienced, and accepted, though within these
limits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly than members of
the former group. They are often very clever and capable people, but
they do not do, and they do not desire to do, new things. The more
vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable people in
the world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthy
than the Poietic types. They live,—while the Poietics are always
something of experimentalists with life. The characteristics of
either of these two classes may be associated with a good or bad
physique, with excessive or defective energy, with exceptional
keenness of the senses in some determinate direction or such-like
“bent,” and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may display
an imagination of restricted or of the most universal range. But a
fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that ideal
our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the
“Normal” human being. The very definition of the Poietic class
involves a certain abnormality.
The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this Kinetic class
according to the quality of their imaginative preferences, the Dan
and Beersheba, as it were, of this division. At one end is the
mainly intellectual, unoriginal type, which, with energy of
personality, makes an admirable judge or administrator and without
it an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, or common
scholar, or common scientific man; while at the other end
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