Utopia
UTOPIAN FANTASY. By Richard Gerber. (Routledge, 16s.) 'WITH a few more cubic inches of brain for the average man and a score of years added to the span of life ... every present difficulty in the human outlook would vanish like a dream,' wrote H. G. Wells in one of his assiduous prophecies. Nowadays we are neither so naive nor so optimistic as to believe that men will ever produce an ideal society; the Utopians, never taken altogether seriously, have been relegated to the company of the less amiable cranks. Having lived through the corruption of every single ideal, con- temporary man has become something of a mistrustful pragmatist.
But one cannot deny the extraordinary fascination Utopias
exert on the imagination. In every man, and perhaps in every tenth woman, there lurks a prophet—and occasionally there is a Mr. Gerber who is able to show how faithfully the prophecies reflect the ideas, anxieties and aspirations of the times in which they have been invented. The Socratic projections of the Greeks gave way to the earthly paradises of Sir Thomas More and Francis Bacon, and these, via Samuel Butler, to the optimistic common- wealths of evolutionists and scientific humanists. Today Utopia is just around the corner—Big Brother's electronic policemen, test-tube humanity, and the blood-curdling prospect of interplane- tary warfare and beetle-headed colonists from Mars.
Our own century has been exceptionally prolific in Utopian writings. Richard Gerber lists over 250 titles written between 1901 and 1951 in England alone. Wells, Huxley, Orwell, Chesterton, Belloc, Kipling, Oliver Onions, Olaf Stapledon and Herbert Read are only a handful of the well-known authors mentioned, and Mr. Gerber's analysis clearly demonstrates not only a comprehensive Utopian imagination but also the growth of an important literary genre. But one interesting development is scarcely touched on, although it is the most revealing detail of all. I refer to the increas- ing use of the Utopian formula as a satirical method. Brave New World and 1984 are leading examples of a technique that has been liberally in use during the last thirty years and inverts the whole character of Utopianism by pursuing existing tendencies in society to a logical extreme that either exposes them to ridicule or reveals them as inherently sinister. Huxley's World Controller, the trans- cendental bureaucrat, and Orwell's Winston Smith, the diminished human being, are not, after all, fantasies but enlargements of images that already exist.
In one sense, of course, Utopia is always contemporaneous. It is the country one sees from a seat in a cinema; it is described by parliamentary candidates during a general election; it is a bank clerk dreaming of a managership, a spinster of being loved, a corporal of becoming a conquerer. A similar mechanism func- tions in the case of group societies and traditional Utopians invariably projected man in the image of their own ideal. In A Modern Utopia, Wells describes his hero as 'a little taller than I, younger looking and sounder looking; he has missed an illusion or so, and there is no scar over his eye. His training has been subtly finer than mine; he has made himself a better face than mine.' One would hardly settle on a better example of the char- acteristic optimism of the scientific humanist who believes that he is intrinsically a better man than environment has permitted him to be and that a proper use of science is the answer to every- thing. 'The plain message physical science has ... is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their end as a linotype machine, an antiseptic plant, or an electric tramcar, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value.'
It is remarkable how the emphasis has been redistributed in the past thirty years. The potentials of science have been more than fulfilled, but the Utopian writers of this mid-century no longer see it as an instrument for constructing an ideal society but as something incompatible with the condition of humanness. Mr. Gerber's analysis of contemporary English Utopian fiction in- advertently lays bare the skeleton of a moral problem.
EMANUEL LITVINOFF
Previous page
