The Story of Utopias quotes

In the midst of the tepid and halfhearted discussions that continue to arise out of prohibition laws and strikes and “peace” conferences let us break in with the injunction to talk about fundamentals—consider Utopia!

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 that belief kept the sailors of the medieval world from wandering out of sight of land as effectively as would a string of gunboats or floating mines.

An idea is a solid fact, a theory is a solid fact, a superstition is a solid fact as long as people continue to regulate their actions in terms of the idea, theory, or superstition

; and it is none the less solid because it is conveyed as an image or a breath of sound.

But if the physical environment is the earth, the world of ideas corresponds to the heavens.

We sleep under the light of stars that have long since ceased to exist, and we pattern our behavior by ideas which have no reality as soon as we cease to credit them.

Whilst it holds together this world of ideas—this idolum—is almost as sound, almost as real, almost as inescapable as the bricks of our houses or the asphalt beneath our feet.

… adjustment to their environment that, except for the raids of hostile tribes—and this turned out to be chiefly sport which only whetted their appetites for the feast that followed—everything needed for a good life at the South Sea level could be obtained by direct attack.

The Marquesans had no need to dream of a happier existence; they had only to grab it.

At times, during childhood perhaps, life has the same sort of completeness; and without doubt there are many mature people who have manufactured out of their limitations a pretty adequate response to a narrow environment; and have let it go at that.

They are like the sick man in the parable of the Persian poet, whose only desire was that he might desire something; and there is no particular reason to envy them.

People who will not venture out into the open sea pay the penalty of never having looked into the bright eyes of danger; and at best they know but half of life.

What such folk might call the good life is simply not good enough. We cannot be satisfied with a segment of existence, no matter how safely we may be adjusted to it, when with a little effort we can trace the complete circle.

It is not for this that men have gone into the jungle to hunt beasts and have cajoled the grasses and roots to be prolific, and have defied, in little open boats, the terror of the wind and sea.

Our daily diet must have more roughage in it than these daydreams will give us if we are not to become debilitated.

In the course of our journey into utopia we shall remain a little while in these utopias of escape; but we shall not bide there long.

As Mr. Hendrik van Loon pithily says:

“A human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.”

The problem is fundamentally a human problem. The more completely man is in control of physical nature, the more urgently we must ask ourselves what under the heavens is to move and guide and keep in hand the controller.

… within the imagination of a dry little Austrian economist, have had more influence upon the lives of our contemporaries than the Etruscan people who once dwelt in Italy, although the Etruscans belong to what we call the real world, and the Freelanders and Icarians inhabited—Nowhere.

Nowhere may be an imaginary country, but News from Nowhere is real news.

The world of ideas, beliefs, fantasies, projections, is (I must emphasize again) just as real whilst it is acted upon as the post which Dr. Johnson kicked in order to demonstrate that it was solid.

and so no doubt we shall never live in utopia; but without the magnetic needle we should not be able to travel intelligently at all. It is absurd to dispose of utopia by saying that it exists only on paper.

The answer to this is: precisely the same thing may be said of the architect’s plans for a house, and houses are none the worse for it.

We must lose our sense of remoteness and severity in setting out on this exploration of ideal commonwealths, as some of the fine minds of the past have pictured them.

our utopias have been pitifully weak and inadequate; and if they have not exercised enough practical influence upon the course of affairs, it is because, as Viola Paget says in Gospels of Anarchy, they were simply not good enough.

We travel through utopia only in order to get beyond utopia

: if we leave the domains of history when we enter the gates of Plato’s Republic, we do so in order to reenter more effectively the dusty midday traffic of the contemporary world.

Plato pictured a community living a sane, continent, athletic, clear-eyed life; a community that would be always, so to say, within bounds. There is a horror of laxity and easy living in his Republic. His society was stripped for action.

The fragrance that permeates his picture of the good life is not the heavy fragrance of rose-petals and incense falling upon languorous couches: it is the fragrance of the morning grass, and the scent of crushed mint or marjoram beneath the feet.

How big is Plato’s community, how are the people divided, what are their relations? Now that we have discussed the lay out of the land, and have inquired into the physical basis of this utopia, we are ready to turn our attention to the people;

The supreme virtue in the commonwealth is justice; namely, the due apportionment of work or function under the rule of “a place for every man and every man in his place.”

Has any such society ever come into existence? Do not too hastily answer No. The ideal in Plato’s mind is carried out point for point in the organization of a modern symphony orchestra.

Now Plato was not unaware that there were other formulas for happiness. He expressly points out however that in founding the Republic he does not wish to make any single person or group happier beyond the rest;

What is the business of the Guardian? How does Plato’s ideal statesman differ from Julius Caesar or Mr. Theodore Roosevelt?

The business of the Guardian is to manufacture liberty.

The petty laws, regulations, and reforms with which the ordinary statesman occupies himself had nothing to do, in Plato’s mind, with the essential business of the ruler.

It is interesting to note that on two subjects which More is mightily concerned to rectify in his own country—crime and war—he establishes conditions which are pretty far from being ideal or humane in his Utopia.

Æ has well said that a man becomes the image of the thing he hates.

Everything that Raphael brings up against the government of England in the Introduction to Utopia could be brought with almost equal force, I believe, against the very country which is to serve as a standard.

in short, to grasp the living reality and spurn the shadow—this is the substance of the Utopian way of life. Power and wealth and dignity and fame are abstractions; and men cannot live by abstractions alone.

In this Utopia of the New World every man has the opportunity to be a man because no one else has the opportunity to be a monster.

Here, too, the chief end of man is that he should grow to the fullest stature of his species.

“People who house vanity … can never live spaciously enough. They burden others and are burdened themselves, and no one measures their necessities, nay even their comforts, easily otherwise than by an unbearable and unmovable mass.

Oh, only those persons are rich who have all of which they have real need, who admit nothing else, merely because it is possible to have it in abundance.

”

it is not the custom to keep slaves. Since everyone takes his part in the common work, there is not more than four hours’ work to be done per day.

“They are rich because they want nothing; poor because they possess nothing; and consequently they are not slaves to circumstances, but circumstances serve them.”

The other point upon which Campanella’s observation is remarkably keen is his explanation of the relation of private property and the private household to the commonwealth. Thus:

If this characterization seem unjust, I beg the reader to compare the utopias before Bacon with the utopias after Fourier, and find out how little human significance remains in the post-eighteenth century utopia when the machinery for supporting the good life is blotted out.

These utopias are all machinery: the means has become the end, and the genuine problem of ends has been forgotten.

The uniformity that irks us in modern life and that makes people who have some remnant of free initiative in their makeup chafe in the civil service, to say nothing of the army, is extended to the last degree in Icaria.

Napoleon’s conception of a nation in arms is dominant; only now it is a nation in overalls.

Our Icarian’s father and mother were married after a six-month interval of courtship. Since they took advantage of the institution at the earliest moment permitted by law, he was twenty and she was eighteen.

Are brutality and lust forever wiped out? Not at all. In sudden passion even murders occur, no matter how good and helpful the social order; but instead of compounding murder with an additional murder, the guilty person is left to his own remorse.

Use and wont are more powerful than law, and the whole guild that earns its living from the frictions and dissidences of our social life has dropped into limbo.

By the same token, the game of the ins and the outs, which we call political government, has disappeared;

Such activities as remain in the Country House—the pursuit of game, for instance—rest upon imitating in play activities which once had a vital use or prepared for some vital function, as a child’s playing with a doll is a preparation for motherhood.

The Country House ideal is that of a completely functionless existence; or at best, an existence in which all the functions that properly belong to a civilized man shall be carried on by functionaries.

Since this ideal cannot be realized in the actual world, for the reason that it is completely at odds with man’s biological inheritance, it is necessary in the Country House utopia to fill in by play and sport an otherwise desirable vacuity.

The insatiability of the Country House to possess art is only equalled by its inability to create it.

In the Country House, the arts are not married to the community, but are kept for its pleasure.

Let there be no confusion as to either the facts or the ideal we are examining.

… Greek statuary knows, and the rapacious imperialistic habit of looting the physical objects of art which has been the essence of the Country House method in modern times, even as it seems to have been a couple of thousand years ago in the Roman villa.

A genuine culture will borrow steadily from other cultures; but it will go to them as the bee goes to the flower for pollen, and not as the beekeeper goes to the hive for honey.

There is a creative borrowing and a possessive borrowing; and the Country House has in the main limited itself to possessive borrowing. The Country House ideal, in fact, is limitless possession:

and the notion of working and gambling to acquire multifarious goods took the place of that earlier ideal which Henry Adams so sympathetically described in Mt. St. Michel and Chartres.

Thus the good life, as I have said elsewhere, was the Goods Life: it could be purchased.

If the whole community no longer offered the conditions for this life, one might filch what one wanted from the general store, and try to monopolize for self or family all that was needed for a good life in the community.

Coketown can afford its luxuries since, when you look at the matter squarely, a rare painting might be worth as much as a rare postage stamp; and it is accordingly an acceptable addition to the Coketown milieu.

Coketown has, in fact, only one question for the arts to answer: What are they good for?

If the answer can be expressed in money, the art in question is taken to be almost as satisfactory as a device to save labor, to increase speed, or to multiply the output.

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.

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.

In fact, to “make a pile” in the markets of Coketown is ultimately to make another pile—of dust and junk and litter—on the edge of the town where the factory district dribbles off into the open country.

New factories, for example, drew a bigger population into the city: Coketown did not perceive that, as Plato pointed out, beyond a certain point the city as a social unit would cease to exist.

Bigger and better was Coketown’s motto; and it resolutely refused to see that there was no necessary connection between these adjectives.

The whole case for and against Coketown rests upon our admission of the phrase “up to a certain point.” Up to a certain point, industrialism is good, especially in its modern, neotechnic, electrical phase:

Through the translucent form of paper known as celluloid, it has been possible to do away on the stage with flesh-and-blood people; and therefore the drama of life, as the Megalopolitan story writers tell it, can be enacted at one remove from actuality.

Instead of his travelling, the world moves before the Megalopolitan, on paper; instead of his venturing forth on the highways of the world, adventure comes to him, on paper; instead of his getting him a mate, his bliss may be all but consummated⁠—on paper.

In fact, so accustomed does the Megalopolitan become to experiencing all his emotions on paper that he can be entertained by the representation of a static bowl of flowers on a moving picture screen;

The total result of these standards and uniformities is that what was originally a fiction in time becomes a fact.

Whereas the inhabitants of the national utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education and propaganda, as similar as telegraph poles along a road.

It is not a little to the credit of Megalopolis that the National Utopia has pragmatically justified itself. It has created the sort of mental environment on paper which is necessary to a smooth adjustment of Coketown and the Country House.

I hazard the judgment that Socialism, Prohibition, Proportional Representation, and the various other abstract “isms” are the fetishes of the partisan: they are attempts to make some particular instrument or function of the community stand for the whole.

It is doubtless much easier to filch a handkerchief than to win a girl.

By the same token, it is easier to concentrate on the use of liquor or the ownership of machinery and land than upon the totality of a community’s activities. It is easier indeed; but it is fatal;

as Mr. H. G. Wells satirically pictured in Boon, it would still have to take its chances with the wild asses of the devil that human weakness, apathy, greed, lust for power, might release.

Walt Whitman said of Carlyle that behind the tally of his work and genius stood the stomach, and gave a sort of casting vote.

So one may say of every social movement, that behind the tally of its theoretic background and its concrete programs stand human beings—hale and sick, neurotic and stable, well-intentioned and malicious—and give the casting vote.

The conceptions of human life that our reforming groups have had have been pretty thin and unsatisfying. Any adequate conception of a new social order would, it seems to me, include the scenery, the actors, and the play.

It is a mark of our immaturity that we never seem able to get beyond the scene shifting.

Our social theorists, in so far as they consider the actors at all, are inclined to treat them as mechanical puppets.

Whether our partisanism consists in being first and foremost an American or first and foremost a Theosophist, it tends to limit the world with which we may have commerce and so impoverishes the personality.

The person who insists upon being a hundred percent American has by that very emphasis become something less than half a man.

By fastening attention upon a segment of the world, the partisan creates a segment of a personality. It is these segments or sects that any movement which aims at a general good in the community must contend against.

The person who insists upon being a hundred percent American has by that very emphasis become something less than half a man.

By fastening attention upon a segment of the world, the partisan creates a segment of a personality.

It is these segments or sects that any movement which aims at a general good in the community must contend against.

Unless we can weave a new pattern for our lives the outlook for our civilization is almost as dismal as Herr Spengler finds it in Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

Our choice is not between eutopia and the world as it is, but between eutopia and nothing⁠—or rather, nothingness.

Other civilizations have proved inimical to the good life and have failed and past away; and there is nothing but our own will-to-eutopia to prevent us from following them.

In the “Phaedrus” Socrates had expressed the humanist outlook of literature by saying: “Trees and fields, you know, cannot teach me anything, but men in the city can.”

The shortest way of describing the attitude of science is to say that it resolutely turned its back on men in the city and devoted itself to the trees and fields and stars and the rest of brute nature.

If it paid attention to men at all it saw them—if we may abuse an old quotation—as trees walking. Socrates had said: Know thyself. The scientist said: Know the world that lies outside man’s dominion.

… the vast modern improvement in our physical arrangements in view, it must occur to almost anyone that a permanent advance in social life depends upon a much more thorough and realistic acquaintance with the facts than the social sciences have yet been able to provide.

Before an army moves over the land it is well for it to have moved in someone’s mind over a topographic map.

Lacking such maps, all our day to day improvements have been wasteful sallies into eutopia, proceeding without order, without a sufficient equipment, and without any general plan.

It seems to me, then, that in the cultivation of the sciences a definite hierarchy of values must be established which shall have some relation to the essential needs of the community.

The independence of science from human values is a gross superstition

: the desire for order, for security, for esthetically satisfactory patterns—along with the desire for fame or the favor of princes—have all played their parts in the development of science.

If the science that it possesses has not helped to found a eutopia, it has at any rate provided the foundations for a kakotopia, or bad place: in short, for a hell.

Indeed scientific knowledge has not merely heightened the possibilities of life in the modern world: it has lowered the depths.

When science is not touched by a sense of values it works—as it fairly consistently has worked during the past century—towards a complete dehumanization of the social order.

The needed reorientation of science is important; but by itself it is not enough.

Knowledge is a tool rather than a motor

; and if we know the world without being able to react upon it, we are guilty of that aimless pragmatism which consists of devising all sorts of ingenious machines and being quite incapable of subordinating them to any coherent and attractive pattern.

Samuel Shipman, when they do not attain the higher level of comic cuts; the younger generation thrills to the type of beauty which Mr. Penryhn Stanlaws sets before its gaze. The notion that the common man despises art is absurd.

The common man worships art and lives by it; and when good art is not available he takes the second best or the tenth best or the hundredth best.

The success of Mr. Eugene O’Neill, perhaps the one playwright of any girth who has contributed to the American stage, proves that the only way that people can be kept away from good art is by not providing it.