It would seem that we are at an impasse. Even if I have absurdly exaggerated the futility of the reformers and revolutionaries, their lack of any fundamental program and their inability to conceive an essential reorientation in modern society, come out pretty plainly. If our analysis did not prove this, the atmosphere of disillusion which we breathe today, and which permeates every branch of literature, would tell as much. In so far as we have accepted the modern social order we are in ruin; and the next war that now threatens will, if it actually comes to pass, only carry the ruin a little further. In so far as we have pinned our hopes to current movements for reconstruction or revolution, our plans are sickly and debilitated. In fact, the only genuine signs of life seem to be in regions like Ireland, Denmark, India, and China, which have stood outside the movement of industrial civilization and have retained the values of an order which elsewhere has been undermined and almost destroyed. It is not a pretty situation to face; and small wonder that we are so slow and so reluctant to face it. Whichever way we look, bankruptcy seems to threaten us.
It is time we endeavored to cash in the paper roubles of the partisan. If our civilization is to hold together we must place its intellectual currency on a new basis; we must exchange our abstract idealisms, our abstract programs, our paperized pursuit of happiness for some of the golden coinage of life, even though we cannot have our gold without mixing it with baser metals.
XII
How the half-worlds go, and how eutopia may come; and what we need before we can build Jerusalem in any green and pleasant land.
I
The sort of thinking that has created our utopias has placed desire above reality; and so their chief fulfillment has been in the realm of fantasy. This is true of the classic utopias that we have surveyed, and it is true—though not perhaps quite so apparent—of the partial utopias that were formulated by the various reconstruction movements during the last century.
While the classic utopias have so far been nearer to reality that they have projected a whole community, living and working and mating and spanning the gamut of man’s activity, their projections have nevertheless been literally up in the air, since they did not usually arise out of any real environment or attempt to meet the conditions that this environment presented. This defect has been suggested by the very name of Utopia, for as Professor Patrick Geddes points out, Sir Thomas More was an inveterate punster, and Utopia is a mock-name for either Outopia, which means no-place, or Eutopia—the good place.
It is time to bring our utopian idola and our everyday world into contact; indeed, it is high time, for the idola that have so far served us are now disintegrating so rapidly that our mental world will soon be as empty of useful furniture as a deserted house, while wholesale dilapidation and ruin threaten the institutions that once seemed permanent. 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.
If this dissipation of Western Civilization is to cease, the first step in reconstruction is to make over our inner world, and to give our knowledge and our projections a new foundation. The problem of realizing the potential powers of the community—which is the fundamental problem of eutopian reconstruction—is not simply a matter of economics or eugenics or ethics as the various specialist thinkers and their political followers have emphasized. Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other: idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet “the happiness of man on earth” depends upon their combination.
If we are to build up genuine eutopias, instead of permitting ourselves to pattern our behavior in terms of fake utopias like Coketown, the Country House, the National State, and all the other partial and inadequate myths to which we have given allegiance, we must examine anew the idola which will assist us in reconstituting our environment. So we are forced to consider the place of science and art in our social life, and to discuss what must be done in
