XIV
The picture of the National Utopia that I have drawn is perhaps a little too black to stand out clearly; and I must now add a few high lights for definition.
As in Coketown, there was a point up to which efficiency in mechanical production was a good thing, so in the national utopia there is a point up to which uniformity is a good thing. The National State seems historically to have arisen in some part through the relief which the people of the Middle Age experienced in being able to travel under the protection of the King’s law along the King’s highway, and their discovery that common laws and customs, common weights and measures, were on the whole an advantage over a multitude of senseless irregularities which continued to exist in particular neighborhoods. It was a distinct triumph for the good life when the men of London and the men of Edinburgh, let us say, realized that they had something in common as citizens of a single country, and emphasized the likenesses which bound them as men rather than the antagonisms that separated them as cities. If the National State erected barriers of trade against other countries, it at any rate broke down barriers that had long existed in even more limited regions, and that have long continued to exist in certain cities in Italy and France. So much is to the good.
But uniformity is not a good in itself. It is a good only in so far as it promotes association and social intercourse. In breaking down minor barriers, the State created major ones, and it created national uniformities in regions where they were meaningless. Moreover, nationalism is inimical to cultural unity, and it perpetuates irrelevant conflicts in the Kingdom of the Spirit where there should be neither slave nor free, neither white nor black, neither citizen nor outlander. As a matter of fact, the two great international cultural vehicles of the Middle Age—the Latin Language and the Roman Church—were broken down by the propagation of a National Language, that spoken at the National Capital, and a National Church, that which was subservient to the State; and nothing that nationalism has done since has repaired this loss. On one hand, the idolum of the National State is too narrow, because the world of culture is man’s common inheritance, and not the mere segment of it which is called “national literature” or “national science.” And on the other hand, the idolum is too big, for the reason that there is no bond except a paper one between men who are as far apart as Bermondsey and Bombay, or New York and San Francisco. The temporal community, as Auguste Comte finely pointed out, is local, restricted, and multiform; this is its essential nature and limitation. The spiritual community is universal. It was a great cultural misdemeanor when the National Utopia, in its extension as imperialism, sought to make the spiritual community restricted and the temporal community universal; and it is this heresy to the good life which makes all the pretensions of the national utopia so shabby and insincere.
XV
If Coketown and the Country House and the National Utopia had remained on paper, they would doubtless be entertaining and edifying contributions to our literature. Unfortunately, these social myths have been potent; they have given a pattern to our lives; and they are the source of a great many evils that threaten, like stinking weeds, to choke the good life in our communities. It is not because these myths are utopias that I have been criticizing them so assiduously; it is rather because they continue to work such wholesale damage. Hence it has seemed worth while to point out that they are on pretty much the same level of reality as the Republic or Christianopolis. We may perhaps approach our social institutions a little more courageously when we realize how completely we ourselves have created them; and how, without our perpetual “will to believe” they would vanish like smoke in the wind.
XI
How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the partisans.
I
There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained, without working a change upon human nature. The working of this change has been one of the chief preoccupations of religion; but no one can pretend that it has met, during the historic period, with any overwhelming success. In the eighteenth century men became impatient with the ministrations of institutional religion, and sought to effect an improvement in the common life by a different method—by improving the political, economic, and social mechanisms of society.
Up to this time the only method that had seemed feasible for improving the technique of social organization was the mandate of law. Although Aristotle, for instance, predicted that slavery would come to an end on the condition that the shuttle should weave by itself and the lyre play without human hand, no one in the Greek community of his time saw very much likelihood of improvement through mechanical inventions or wholesale innovations in agriculture; and no one, apparently, concerned himself seriously with the mechanical side of affairs.
It was
