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How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the Modern Age; and how they made the world over in their image.
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Now that we have ransacked the literature of ideal commonwealths for examples of the utopian vision and the utopian method, there remains another class of utopias which has still to be reckoned with, in order to make our tally complete.
All the utopias that we have dealt with so far have been filtered through an individual mind, and whereas, like any other piece of literature, they grew out of a certain age and tradition of thought, it is dangerous to overrate their importance either as mirrors of the existing order or as projectors of a new order. While again and again the dream of a utopian in one age has become the reality of the next, as O’Shaughnessy sings in his famous verses, the exact connection between the two can only be guessed at, and rarely, I suppose, can it be traced. It would be a little foolish to attempt to prove that the inventor of the modern incubator was a student of Sir Thomas More.
Up to the present the idola which have exercised the most considerable influence upon the actual life of the community are such as have been partly expressed in a hundred works and never perhaps fully expressed in one. In order to distinguish these idola from those that have occupied us till now, we should perhaps call them collective utopias or social myths. There is a considerable literature that relates to these myths in French, one of the best known works being M. George Sorel’s Reflections on Violence; and in practice it is sometimes rather hard to tell where the Utopia leaves off and the social myth begins.
The history of mankind’s social myths has still in the main to be written. There is a partial attempt at this over a limited period in Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Medieval Mind; but this is only a beginning, and other ages are almost untouched. The type of myth that concerns us here is not the pure action myth which M. Sorel has analyzed; we are rather interested in those myths which are, as it were, the ideal content of the existing order of things, myths which, by being consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend to perpetuate and perfect that order. This type of social myth approaches very closely to the classic utopia, and we could divide it, similarly, into myths of escape and myths of reconstruction. Thus the myth of political freedom, for example, as formulated by the writers of the American revolution, frequently serves as an excellent refuge for disturbed consciences when the Department of Justice or the Immigration Bureau has been a little too assiduous in its harassment of political agitators.
Unfortunately, it has become a habit to look upon our idola as particularly fine and exalted, and as representing the better side of human nature. As a matter of fact, the myths which are created in a community under religious, political, or economic influences cannot be characterized as either good or bad: their nature is defined by their capacity to help men to react creatively upon their environment and to develop a humane life. We have still to recognize that a belief in these idola is not by itself a creditable attitude. Even quite base and stupid people are frequently governed by ideals; indeed, it is the ideals that are in many cases responsible for their baseness and stupidity. Neither is the habit of responding to idola any evidence of rational thought. People respond to “ideas”—that is, to word-patterns—as they respond to the stimulus of light or heat, because they are human beings and not because they are philosophers, and they respond to projections, to idola, for the same reason, and not because they are saints. Our myths may be the outcome of rational thought and practice or not; but the response to these myths is not perhaps more than ten times in a hundred the result of following the processes of reason from beginning to end.
We must think of our idola as a sort of diffused environment or atmosphere, which differs in “chemical content” and in extension with each individual. Some of these idola have so uniformly taken possession of men’s minds in a particular age that they are as much a part of the environment a baby is born into as the furniture of his house. The sociologists who follow Émile Durkheim have called a certain part of these idola collective representations but they are wrong, I believe, when they limit these “representations” to savage or ignorant groups for they are an important part of every civilized person’s luggage. Parallel with The Story of Mankind and with The Story of Utopias, which I have just told, it would be amusing to write The story of Mankind’s Myths. This work, however, would require the scholarship and industry of another Leibniz, and all that I wish to do here is to put together the chief social myths that have played a part
