A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) đź“–
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the individual imagination, and partly by the reek of ideas that
chances to be in the air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly
both in their innate and their acquired disposition towards this
sort of larger body or that, to which their social reference can be
made. The “natural” social reference of a man is probably to some
rather vaguely conceived tribe, as the “natural” social reference of
a dog is to a pack. But just as the social reference of a dog may be
educated until the reference to a pack is completely replaced by a
reference to an owner, so on his higher plane of educability the
social reference of the civilised man undergoes the most remarkable
transformations. But the power and scope of his imagination and the
need he has of response sets limits to this process. A highly
intellectualised mature mind may refer for its data very
consistently to ideas of a higher being so remote and indefinable as
God, so comprehensive as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in
things. I write “may,” but I doubt if this exaltation of reference
is ever permanently sustained. Comte, in his Positive Polity,
exposes his soul with great freedom, and the curious may trace how,
while he professes and quite honestly intends to refer himself
always to his “Greater Being” Humanity, he narrows constantly to his
projected “Western Republic” of civilised men, and quite frequently
to the minute indefinite body of Positivist subscribers. And the
history of the Christian Church, with its development of orders and
cults, sects and dissents, the history of fashionable society with
its cliques and sets and every political history with its cabals and
inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that goes on in the minds of
men to adjust themselves to a body larger indeed than themselves,
but which still does not strain and escape their imaginative
grasp.
The statesman, both for himself and others, must recognise this
inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity for real and imaginary
aggregations to sustain men in their practical service of the order
of the world. He must be a sociologist; he must study the whole
science of aggregations in relation to that World State to which his
reason and his maturest thought direct him. He must lend himself to
the development of aggregatory ideas that favour the civilising
process, and he must do his best to promote the disintegration of
aggregations and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that keep men
narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one against another.
He will, of course, know that few men are even rudely consistent in
such matters, that the same man in different moods and on different
occasions, is capable of referring himself in perfect good faith,
not only to different, but to contradictory larger beings, and that
the more important thing about an aggregatory idea from the State
maker’s point of view is not so much what it explicitly involves as
what it implicitly repudiates. The natural man does not feel he is
aggregating at all, unless he aggregates _against something. He
refers himself to the tribe; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite
inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the tribe. The
tribe is always at least defensively hostile and usually actively
hostile to humanity beyond the aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would
seem, is inseparable from the aggregatory idea; it is a necessity of
the human mind. When we think of the class A as desirable, we think
of Not-A as undesirable. The two things are as inevitably connected
as the tendons of our hands, so that when we flatten down our little
fingers on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not,
comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may remark, all gods
that are worshipped emotionally, are tribal gods, and every attempt
to universalise the idea of God trails dualism and the devil after
it as a moral necessity.
When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition of terrestrial
sociology permits, into the aggregatory ideas that seem to satisfy
men, we find a remarkable complex, a disorderly complex, in the
minds of nearly all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all
sorts of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon surfaces
of my botanist’s mind. He has a strong feeling for systematic
botanists as against plant physiologists, whom he regards as lewd
and evil scoundrels in this relation, but he has a strong feeling
for all botanists, and, indeed, all biologists, as against
physicists, and those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he
regards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded scoundrels in this
relation; but he has a strong feeling for all who profess what is
called Science as against psychologists, sociologists, philosophers,
and literary men, whom he regards as wild, foolish, immoral
scoundrels in this relation; but he has a strong feeling for all
educated men as against the working man, whom he regards as a
cheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoundrel in this
relation; but so soon as the working man is comprehended together
with those others, as Englishmen—which includes, in this case, I
may remark, the Scottish and Welsh—he holds them superior to all
other sorts of European, whom he regards, &c….
Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and rearrangements
of the sympathies one of the chief vices of human thought, due to
its obsession by classificatory suggestions. [Footnote: See Chapter
the First, section 5, and the Appendix.] The necessity for marking
our classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessive
contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it
with implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat of
irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way;
there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at
once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of
seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a
certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair
have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy
persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all
Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all
curly-haired people are good-natured; all hunchbacks are energetic
and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisations
have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by
great numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class is
one’s own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which
one refers one’s own activities, then the disposition to divide all
qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one’s own
class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.
It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard all such
generalisations with suspicion; it is part of the training of the
Utopist and statesman, and all good statesmen are Utopists, to
mingle something very like animosity with that suspicion. For crude
classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all
organised human life.
Section 2
Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like minor
aggregations, concerned for the most part with details and minor
aspects of life, one finds among the civilised peoples of the world
certain broad types of aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, the
national ideas, ideas which, in their perfection, require a
uniformity of physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common
religion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and thought,
and a compact organisation acting with complete external unity. Like
the Gothic cathedral, the national idea is never found complete with
all its parts; but one has in Russia, with her insistence on
political and religious orthodoxy, something approaching it pretty
closely, and again in the inland and typical provinces of China,
where even a strange pattern of hat arouses hostility. We had it in
vigorous struggle to exist in England under the earlier Georges in
the minds of those who supported the Established Church. The idea of
the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained in thought,
with all the usual exaggeration of implication, that no one laughs
at talk about Swedish painting or American literature. And I will
confess and point out that my own detachment from these delusions is
so imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage I have
committed myself to a short assertion of the exceptionally noble
quality of the English imagination. [Footnote: Chapter the Seventh,
section 6.] I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about
English superiority which I should reject indignantly were the
application bluntly personal, and I am ever ready to believe the
scenery of England, the poetry of England, even the decoration and
music of England, in some mystic and impregnable way, the best. This
habit of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those
in which one has a personal interest, is in the very constitution of
man’s mind. It is part of the defect of that instrument. We may
watch against it and prevent it doing any great injustices, or
leading us into follies, but to eradicate it is an altogether
different matter. There it is, to be reckoned with, like the coccyx,
the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix. And a too consistent
attack on it may lead simply to its inversion, to a vindictively
pro-foreigner attitude that is equally unwise.
The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very often across the
boundaries of national ideas and in conflict with them, are
religious ideas. In Western Europe true national ideas only emerged
to their present hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation
had liberated men from the great tradition of a Latin-speaking
Christendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic Church has sustained as
its modification of the old Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule
of the pontifex maximus. There was, and there remains to this day, a
profound disregard of local dialect and race in the Roman Catholic
tradition, which has made that Church a persistently disintegrating
influence in national life. Equally spacious and equally regardless
of tongues and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking religion of
Mahomet. Both Christendom and Islam are indeed on their secular
sides imperfect realisations of a Utopian World State. But the
secular side was the weaker side of these cults; they produced no
sufficiently great statesmen to realise their spiritual forces, and
it is not in Rome under pontifical rule, nor in Munster under the
Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas a Kempis and Saint Augustin’s City
of God that we must seek for the Utopias of Christianity.
In the last hundred years a novel development of material forces,
and especially of means of communication, has done very much to
break up the isolations in which nationality perfected its
prejudices and so to render possible the extension and consolidation
of such a world-wide culture as mediaeval Christendom and Islam
foreshadowed. The first onset of these expansive developments has
been marked in the world of mind by an expansion of political
ideals—Comte’s “Western Republic” (1848) was the first Utopia that
involved the synthesis of numerous States—by the development of
“Imperialisms” in the place of national policies, and by the search
for a basis for wider political unions in racial traditions and
linguistic affinities. Anglo-Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the like
are such synthetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency
of progressive thought was at one with the older Christian tradition
which ignored “race,” and the aim of the expansive liberalism
movement, so far as it had a clear aim, was to Europeanise the
world, to extend the franchise to negroes, put Polynesians into
trousers, and train the teeming myriads of India to appreciate the
exquisite lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some
absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not let the fact
that the middle Victorians counted Scott, the suffrage and
pantaloons among the
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