Through the paralysis of the arts and sciences our contemporary programs for revolution and reform have done very little to lift our heads over the disorderly and bedraggled environments in which we conduct our daily business. This failure to create a common pattern for the good life in each region has made such excellent efforts as the garden city movement seem weak and ineffectual when we place them alongside the towns that medieval civilization, which had such a common pattern, created. Without the common background of eutopian idola, all our efforts at rehabilitation—the new architecture, the garden city movement, the electrification of industry, the organization of great industrial guilds such as the Building Trades have achieved in England and the garment workers seem on the point of effecting in America—without these common idola, I say, all our practical efforts are spotty and inconsecutive and incomplete. It was not, let us remember, by any legislative device that the cities of the industrial age were monotonously patterned in the image of Coketown. It was rather because everyone within these horrid centers accepted the same values and pursued the same ends—as they were projected by economists like Ricardo, industrialists like Stephenson, and lyric poets like Samuel Smiles—that the plans of the jerrybuilder and the engineer expressed to perfection the brutality and social disharmony of the community. The same process that gave us Coketown can, when our world of ideas is transformed, give us something better than Coketown.
The chief use of the classic utopias that we have surveyed is to suggest that the same methods which are used by the utopian thinkers to project an ideal community on paper may be employed, in a practical way, to develop a better community on earth. The weakness of the utopian thinkers consisted in the assumption that the dreams and projects of any single man might be realized in society at large. From the bitter frustration of Fourier, Cabet, Hertzka, and even John Ruskin those who are in search of the beloved community may well take a warning. Where the critics of the utopian method were, I believe, wrong was in holding that the business of projecting prouder worlds was a futile and footling pastime. These anti-utopian critics overlooked the fact that one of the main factors that condition any future are the attitudes and beliefs which people have in relation to that future—that, as Mr. John Dewey would say, in any judgment of practice one’s belief in a hypothesis is one of the things that affect its realization.
When we have projected the pattern of an ideal community and tend to warp our conduct in conformity with that pattern, we overcome the momentum of actual institutions. In feeling free to project new patterns, in holding that human beings can will a change in their institutions and habits of life, the utopians were, I believe, on solid ground; and the utopian philosophies were a great improvement over the more nebulous religious and ethical systems of the past in that they saw the necessity for giving their ideals form and life. In fact, it has been in the pictures of ideal commonwealths such as Plato’s that the “ideal” and the “actual” have met.
It is true that the pure utopians have overlooked the fact that every institution has a momentum of its own: its speed may be quickened or reduced, it may be switched on another track, as the Roman Church during the Reformation was switched from the main line of civilization to a subsidiary route; and at times, in the catastrophe of war or revolution, an institution may jump the track altogether and be wrecked. The critical problem for the eutopian, the problem of the transition from one set of institutions to another, from one way of life to another, was overlooked. Plato’s Republic, for example, was a fairly attractive place; but one wonders in what Greek city in the Fourth Century BC the transition could have taken place. A transition implies not merely a goal but a starting point: if we are to move the world, as Archimedes threatened to with his lever, we must have some ground to stand on. It is only by paying attention to the limitations of each region, and by allowing for the driving force of history, that we can make the earth come to terms with man’s idola. This is perhaps the most difficult lesson that the eutopian must learn.
XI
What, then, is the first step out of the present disorder? The first step, it seems to mc, is to ignore all the fake utopias and social myths that have proved either so sterile or so disastrous during the last few centuries. There is perhaps no logical reason why the myth of the national state should not be preserved; but it is a myth which has done very little, on the whole, to promote the good life, and has on the contrary done a great deal to make the good life impossible; and to continue to cling to it in the face of perpetual wars, pestilences, and spiritual devastations is the sort of fanaticism which will probably seem as blind and cruel to future generations as persecutions for Christian heresy do to the present one. On the same grounds, there are a number of other social myths, like the proletarian myth, which run so badly against the grain of reality that they cannot be preserved without ignoring a great many values which are essential to a humane existence; and on pragmatic grounds it would be fine and beneficial to drop them quickly into limbo. There is no reason to think that there will be a quick conversion from these myths: the holocaust of war has only intensified the myth
