Instead of recognizing natural regions and natural groups of people, the utopia of nationalism establishes, by the surveyor’s line, a certain realm called national territory, and makes all the inhabitants of this territory the members of a single, indivisible group, the nation, which is supposed to be prior in claim and superior in power to all other groups. This is the only social formation that is officially recognized within the national utopia. What is common to all the inhabitants of this territory is thought to be of far greater importance than any of the things that bind men together in particular civic or industrial groups.
Let us look at this world of national utopias. The contrast between the politician’s map and the geographer’s would be little less than amazing were our eyes not used to it, and were we not taught in modern times to look upon it as inevitable. Instead of the natural grouping of land masses and regions, one finds a multitude of quite arbitrary lines: boundaries like those that separate Canada and the United States or Belgium and the Netherlands are just as frequent as the natural frontier of sea that surrounds England. Sometimes these national territories are big, and sometimes they are little; but the bigness of empires like those of France, England, or the United States is not due to any essential identity of interests between the sundry communities of these empires, but to the fact that they are forcibly held together by a political government. National lines, in other words, continue to exist only as long as the inhabitants continue to act in terms of them; are ready to pay their taxes to support customs bureaus, immigration offices, frontier patrols, and educational systems; and are prepared, in the last extremity, to lay down their lives to prevent other groups from crossing these imaginary lines without permission.
The chief concern of the national utopia is the support of the central government, for the government is the guardian of territory and privilege. The principal business of that government is to keep the territory properly defined, and to increase its limits, when possible, so as to make the taxable area larger. By stressing the importance of these concerns, and constantly playing up the dangers of rivalry from other national utopias, the State builds a bridge between the Country House and Coketown, and persuades the workers in Coketown that they have more in common with the classes that exploit them than they have in common with other groups within a more limited community. It would seem that this reconciliation of Coketown and the Country House is little less than miraculous, even as an ideal; and perhaps it would be interesting to examine a little more carefully the apparatus by which this is effected.
XII
The chief instrument of the National State is Megalopolis, its biggest city, the place where the idolum of the National Utopia was first created, and where it is perpetually willed into existence.
In order to grasp the quintessential character of Megalopolis we must shut our eyes to the palpable earth, with its mantle of vegetation and its tent of clouds, and conceive what might be made of the human landscape if it could be entirely fabricated out of paper; for the ultimate aim of the Megalopolis is to conduct the whole of human life and intercourse through the medium of paper.
The early life of a young citizen in Megalopolis is spent in acquiring the tools by which paper may be used. The names of these tools are writing, reading, and arithmetic; and once upon a time these constituted the main elements in every Megalopolitan’s education. There was, however, a good deal of dissatisfaction, on paper, against this somewhat barren curriculum, and so at a fairly early date in the history of Megalopolis, various other subjects, such as literature, science, gymnastics, and manual training were added to the curriculum—on paper. It is indeed possible for a Megalopolitan student to know the atomic formula of clay without ever having seen it in the raw earth, to handle pine wood in the workshop without having walked through a pine forest, and to go through the masterpieces of poetic literature without having experienced a single emotion which would prepare him to appreciate anything different from one of the influential Megalopolitan magazines, Smutty Stories, but as long as his hours of attendance can be recorded on paper, and as long as he can give a satisfactory account of his studies on an examination paper, his preparation for life is practically complete; and so he is graduated with a paper certificate of education into the industries of Coketown, or into the multitudinous bureaus of Megalopolis itself.
The end of this period of paper tutelage is but a prelude to its continuation in another form; for the religious care of paper is the Megalopolitan’s life work. The daily newspaper, the ledger, the card index are the means by which he now makes contact with life, whilst the fiction magazine and the illustrated paper are the means by which he escapes from it. 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
