The Story of Utopias

Man walks with his feet on the ground and his head in the air; and the history of what has happened on earth⁠—the history of cities and armies and of all the things that have had body and form⁠—is only one-half the Story of Mankind.

In every age, the external scenery in which the human drama has been framed has remained pretty much the same. There have been fluctuations in climate and changes in terrain; and at times a great civilization, like that of the Mayas in Central America, has arisen where now only a thick net of jungle remains; but the hills around Jerusalem are the hills that David saw; and during the historic period the drowning of a city in the Netherlands or the rise of a shifting bank of real estate along the coast of New Jersey is little more than the wearing off of the paint or a crack in the plaster. What we call the material world constantly changes, it goes without saying: mountains are stripped of trees and become wastes, deserts are plowed with water and become gardens. The main outlines, however, hold their own remarkably well; and we could have travelled better in Roman days with a modern map than with the best chart Ptolemy could have offered us.

If the world in which men live were the world as it is known to the physical geographer, we should have a pretty simple time of it.

In the introduction to More’s Utopia one gets a vivid impression of the forces that were stirring men’s minds out of the sluggish routine into which they had settled. The man who is supposed to describe the commonwealth of Utopia is a Portuguese scholar, learned in Greek. He has left his family possessions with his kinsmen and has gone adventuring for other continents with Americus Vesputius. This Raphael Hythloday is the sort of sunburnt sailor one could probably have encountered in Bristol or Cadiz or Antwerp almost any day during the late part of the fifteenth century. He has abandoned Aristotle, whom the schoolmen had butchered and had made pemmican of, and through his conquest of Greek he has come into possession of that new learning which stems back to Plato; and his brain is teeming with the criticisms and suggestions of a strange, pagan philosophy. Moreover, he has been abroad to the Americas or the Indies, and he is ready to tell all who will listen of a strange land on the other side of the world, where, as Sterne said of France, “they do things better.” No institution is too fantastic but that it might exist⁠—on the other side of the world. No way of life is too reasonable but that a philosophical population might follow it⁠—on the other side of the world. Conceive of the world of ideas which Greek literature had just opened up coming headlong against the new lands which the magnetic compass had given men the courage to explore, and utopia, as a fresh conception of the good life, becomes a throbbing possibility.

There is one phenomenon still to be accounted for in the economy of Coketown; one monumental instrument without which the wheels of Coketown would become clogged and the very breath of Coketown be extinguished.

I refer to the rubbish heaps.

The aim of production in Coketown is naturally more production, and it is only by making things sufficiently shoddy to go to pieces quickly, or by changing the fashion sufficiently often, that the machinery of Coketown can for the most part be kept running. The rage and fury of Coketown’s production has to be balanced off by an equal rage and fury of consumption⁠—continence would be fatal. As a result, nothing in Coketown is finished or permanent or settled: these qualities are another name for death. Coketown makes china to be broken, clothes to be worn out, and houses to be torn down; and if something remains over from an earlier age which made things more soundly, it is either incarcerated in a museum, and derided as the monument of a non-progressive age, or it is demolished as a nuisance. (So powerful is the idolum of Coketown that in the workaday world building after building continues to meet with irreparable ruin at the hands of barbarians from Coketown: why, I have even seen innocent little half-timbered fifteenth century cottages whose fronts were obliterated by a nineteenth century plasterer, in the name of progress.)

The status of every family in Coketown can be told by the size of its rubbish heap.