THE QUEST FOR UTOPIAS

Waikato Times, Volume 91, Issue 14134, 11 August 1919, Page 8

THE QUEST FOR UTOPIAS

SOME HISTORIC IDEAS. PLATO, .MORE, AND OTHERS. (The efforts of the Bolshevists, I.W.W.'s, and other anarchial groups of that kidney, to create by clraslic methods Utopias suitable to their class desires, together with the milder, mure intelligible, and quite sane labours of various reformers Lo make the old world a little better place to live in without making it altogether unrecognisable, attach more than casual interest to Mr Richard Le Galliene's review, in "Miinsey's Magazine," of the attempts of certain historic idealists Lo achieve the same end in much earlier times). Plato's Republic. Plato's "Republic" was the earliest attempt at putting on paper a pattern commonwealth. The scheme was an exceedingly arbitrary one, and, like most subsequent Utopias, it 'began by not merely leaving out, but discountenancing the individualism of human nature. Yet the sterner and most inhuman of its conditions had already been succeessfully embodied in the military state of Sparta, and its communism—not merely of land and goods, but also of women and children —was to be tried out in a great many subsequent social experiments. The Stale —or rather the city, for Plato was thinking in terms of a small community—was to be the uni't, t'.ie individual man or woman merely a contributory fraction of that unit, and Christ's counsel to "love thy neighbour as thyself" was to he put in daily practice by 'the citizen's of Plato's republic. "That city,, then," he says, "is best conducted in which the largest proportion of citizens apply the words 'mine' and 'not mine' similarly to the same objects; or, in other words, that city which comes nearest to the condition of an individual man. Then will not our citizens toe remarkable for sharing in the same interest, which they will call 'mine'; and having this common interest, will they not thereby possess in a remarkable degree a community in pleasure and pain?" But Plato's republic was essentially aristocratic. The aim of its citizens was to be the attainment of wisdom. Hard and disagreeable work was to be done by slaves, nor did the citizens soil their fingers by trade. That was left to "strangers." No one could own money or precious metals, and none hut the guardians, or magistrates, and the auxiliaries or soldiers, might possess land, and that only collectively. These auxiliaries, however, came nearest to being a privileged class, and there is one quaint provision—which would seem to have been generously revived for the benefit of our recent heroes—that the distinguished soldier should have the right to "kiss and be kissed by all" —"no one whom he has a mind to kiss shall be permitted to refuse him the satisfaction." Sip Thomas Mope's "Utopia."

While Plato's "Republic" has exercised an influence on all subsequent political and social dreamers, the book which fixed the 'type, and has given a generic name to all such ideal reconstructions of society was the "Utopia'' of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), the famous English scholar and statesman chancellor, friend and victim of Henry VIII. More was a leading figure among the remarkable group of "humanists" which first embodied in England 'the influences of 'the "new learning" of the Italian renaissance. He was a young man when the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and Columbus ' were stirring the imaginations of his sea-going countrymen. The hero of his romance, one Ralph Hythloday, purports to have sailed with Vespucci, but, having been separated from him by the chances of 'the sea, had found refuge in a hitherto undiscovered island of the western ocean named Utopia. The island was inhabited by 'so happy a people, living under so perfect a system of government, that Hythloday, on his return, is moved to describe their state for 'the benefit of his less happy fellows. The book was written in Latin, under the editorship of More's bosom friend, Erasmus, and was published :n Louvain in 151 G. It attracted much attention, and during 'the next few years it was 'translated into Italian, Dutch, and German; but no English version of it appeared until affer More's death. Under the semblance of a fanciful narrative, it was too pointed an arraignment of English social conditions to have pleased tiie King—at least in the vulgar tongue. Henry VIII, who was a good Latinisl himself, seems to have tolerated it in the obscurity of a language where it was safe from -the common people, and both Erasmus and More were favourites of his, till More refused to recognise him as head of tiie English Church—a refusal which cost him the King's friendship and his own life. The word Utopia is made up of two Greek words meaning "nowhere.' Rabelais was soon 'to adopt it into his fantastic geography in 'the same sense, and such recent Utopias as William Morris's "News from Nowhere" and Butler's "Erewhon" (an anagram for "nowhere"), merely translated in'.o English. There is a good reason for its immediate influence on its time, and for the hold which it has ever since retained as Hie outstanding classic of its kind; for its fantastic notions were blended with much common sense and sound criticism of contemporary abuses, and it is vitalised throughout with a warm and enlightened humanity. The astonishing modernity of many of its attitudes make it as live a book to-day as when it was published, and 'the case of the poor agains't the oppressive rich lias never been stated with more force and sympathy. Profiteers of Three Centuries Ago.

More wrble at a time when the great landowners of England were sowing - the seeds of all subsequent agrarian unrest 'by unlawfully enclosing in their domains vast tracts of land which had hitherto (belonged to the people in common, those wide "commons"—hence the word—where the poorest cottar or artisan might pasture his cow or a few sheep, and thus eke out his other earnings. The rich even tore down homesteads for the purpose of these enclosures, whioh they cither turned into "chases" and hunting preserves, or into pastures fur sheep-raising, a business which they undertook on a kirgc scale, and in :t manner identical with the latter-day profiteer. Suppose the stieep should incrense ever so much, this price is not likely to fall. As they are not pressed to sell them sooner than they have a mind to it, so 'they never do it till they have raised the price as high as possible. The result of these iniquitous enclosures was that a Hood of landless men was loosed upon the country, and these, unable to find sufficient work, "destitute of service, either starve for hunger or turn manfully thieves; for what," More fearlessly adds, "would you have them to do?" The punishment for the smallest theft in those days, and for centuries after, was usually death—a judicial crime to

which More is indignantly awake, though the general, consciousness was to remain dead to the inhumanity till the nineteenth century. There are dreadful punishments

enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which very man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it. They managed such matters belter in Utopia, lie said. There was no private properly, either of land or cf goods, nor was anyone idle there, but everyone worked —a six T hour day—for the common benefit, and all shared alike in the products, according to their needs. More's Views on Labour.

Here is a passage which in its feariess classification of 'the idlers of his own lime, ami in the distinction drawn between useful and useless labour, :s characteristic of the general thought of the book, and explains the prophetic hold it was 'to have on subsequent generations. First, women generally do little, who are half of mankind; and if some few women are diligent, their husbands are idle. Then consider t'ie great company of idle priests, and of those that are called religious men; add to these all rich men, chiefly those I hat have estates inland, who are called noblemen and gentlemen, together with their families, made up of idle persons that are kept more for shY>w than use; add to these all those stro:ig ami lusty beggars that go about pretending some disease in excuse for iheir begging; and upon the whole account you will find that the number of those by whose labour mankind,is supplied is much less than you perhaps imagined.

Then consider how few of <ih6se that work are employed in labours that are of real service; for we who measure all things toy money give rise lo many trades that are tooth vain and superfluous, and serve only to support riot and luxury. For if -those who work were employed only in suoh things as 'the conveniences of life require, there would toe such an abundance of them that the prices of them would sink that tradesmen could not be maintained toy their gains. If nil those who labour about useless 'things were set to more profitable employments, and if all they that languish out their lives in sloth and idleness, every one of "whom consumes as much as any two of the men that are at work, were forced to labour, you may easily imagine that a small proportion of time would serve for doing all that is cither necessary, proiitable, or pleasant to mankind, especially while pleasure is kept within its due bounds." "Pleasure kept within its due bounds"—not justice or wisdom, as with Plato—was our being's end and aim, according to the Utopians:

"They reckon that all our actions and even all our virtues terminate in pleasure, as in our chief end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state, either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight, a pleasure." Health, according to More, was the best pleasure, and the basis of ail others—"that which results from an undisturbed and vigorous constitution of body when life and active -spirits seem to actuate every part. This lively health, when entirely free from all mixture of pain, of itself gives an inward pleasure, independent of all external objects of delight." More evidently meant the same thing as his nineteenth century disciple, William Morris. The reward of labour is life. is that not enough? Many things which usually "men miscall delight," were laughed at, or despised, in Utopia. Hunting, for example, was "turned over to the butchers," who, by 'the way, were "slaves"—that is, men condemned to servitude for crimes. The Utopians "look on the desire of the bloodshed, even of toeasts, as a mark of a mind that is already corrupted with cruelty, or that at least by the frequent returns of so brutal a pleasure must degenerate into it." Soma Strange Utopian Notions.

That gold and silver should toe robbed of their power to corrupt and divide, the Utopians used them only for the basest and humblest purposes, for homely household conveniences, and for the fetters of slaves. Diamonds and other precious stones were given to children to play with, and luxury in dress was regarded as folly.

How should any value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread? For how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than a fleece of a sheep, and that sheep was a sheep still for all its wearing it. Thus, when an embassy from a foreign State, thinking lo overawe the simple Utopians with its splendour, came in rich garments and decked with jewels, the very children, who had outgrown such playthings, called to their mothers and cried out:

"See that great fool that wears pearls and gems, as if he were yet a child."

"Hold your peace," their mothers answered. "This, I believe, is one of tile ambassador's fools."

There were no lawyers among the Utopians, "for Ihey consider them ;<s a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters, and to wrest the laws"; nor did they believe in war or standing armies, yet, for self-pro-tection, a certain mlltary training was incumbent upon all, including the women, as witli Plato. But More will have none of Plato's community of women. Marriage among the Utopians is j monogamous institution, as among Christians, but eugenics ware to some degree considered in their quaint match-making. Euthanasia, also was suggested, but not enforced, for the incurably sick or wearily aged. The State would provide men with painless suicide, if so desired; the priests and magistrates exhorting them as to the painful uselcssncss of continued existence.

Among other anticipations of mo'.lernity we come on incubators for chickens:

"They breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a very curious manncc: for the hens do not sit and hutch them, but a vast number of eggs is laid in a gentle and equal heal in order to be hatched." And the sum of it all is that in Utopia "there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, nunc in necessity, and though no man lias anything, yet they are all rich; for whs I can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, lYee from anxieties, neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife?" As to the machinery of this happy State, it is simple and without novelty, being run toy a system of el.'(dive magistracies, presided over by ,-i prince, also elected—"for life, unless he is removed upon suspicion of some design to enslave the people." Bacon's Paradise of Science. The "New Atlantis" of laud Bacon was the next famous attempt:—■ To build a shadowy isle of bliss Midst the beating of the steely sea Where tossed about all hearts of men, must be.

The legend of that lost continent from which the Atlantic Ocean takes its name not only haunted the dreaais of antiquity, 'but has found supporters among modern geologists. There, H was fabled, were the Klysian Fields of the happy and lordly dead —one of t'ie many paradises or habitats of the golden age Willi which mankind from time immemorial lias placed its weary heart; such as the Welsh Avalon, the Irish Toi-na-Ug and St. Brendcn's Isle, the Portugese ise of Seven Cities, and the Greek Isles of the BlestBacon's "New Atlantis" has merely a literary and academic value. Its author had little or nothing of More's humanity, and, as with most other creators of ideal commonwealths, be created it in his own image. As Plato had constructed his republic for philosophers, Bacon constructed his for men of science.

"The end of our foundation," be says, "is the knowledge of causes, ami secret motion of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of ail tilings possible." As with Ooethe, "light, and more light," was to be the desideratum of his dream-world. "But thus you see we maintain a trade," he says, "not for gold, silver, or jewels, not for silks nor for spices, nor for any commodity or matter, but only for Cod's first creation, light; to have light, I say, of the growth of ail parts of the world." It was an ideal which the twentieth century will certainly not gainsay, and the "New Atlantis" concludes with a list of scientific "departments" which have a fascinating suggeslivencss, and something of the prophetic quality which belongs always to a brain in advance of its time. Thus, doubtless, Mr Burbank has long ago been interested in the department "to make divers new plants, differing from the vulgar, and to make one tree or plant turn into another." Robert Owen and New Harmony. It is to the credit of the famous Manchester man, Bobert Owen (17711858), that though born in an age peculiarly Utopian, after the fashion of John of Lcyden, lie was not troubled with temperamental notions. His virtues and vices were those of his native city:—that is, those of one ol the earliest captains of industry. 'He was perhaps the first of those captains to disguise an industrial tyranny under the aspect of ' a social organisation. Had he lived now his workshops would be adorned with quotations from Rousseau and Helvetius, or their modern equivalents. As it was, those writers had inspired him to build up a capitalislc industry—the continuation of a famous thread manufactory. which he was 'called upon to manage at twenty, and ended, of course, by owning.

Owen had began life as the son of a village labourer, and continued it as a Utopian philosopher with ample means, whose work, like that of most such Utopians, consisted in seeing- that others worked. This son of a village labourer—proletarian, as lie would nowadays be called—had devised a system by which he could check idleness in his mill with a glance of his eye:

Over each loom there hangs a square of -wood, each side of which is painted a different colour, black, blue, yellow and while. If the workman has misconducted himself on the preceding day, the colour which is expensed to view is black; if he has conducted himself well it is white. Owen by walking through the workshop, sees at a glance upon the telegraph the condition of eacli of the employees.

This was Robert Owen's idea 01 a Utopia—for himself, however, it seemed to his workmen. The idea is not unfamiliar to-day, but it was novel enough between 1771 and 1858 lo have encouraged him to finance his expensive "New Harmony" experiment in Indiana, the failure of which, with a loss of 200,000 dollars, did nothing to enlighten him. Owen's ideas, running parallel with those of Fourier, with the help of Morelly, were to send Cabet (17S81856), on his "Voyage en Icarie." America was the country chosen for trying out these Anglo-French dreams. Since America made a success of its isolated self, it has been hard for Europe to leave it alone. Every sort of experiment, religious and political,, has been tried upon it. It has indeed seemed virgin soil to every form of half-toaked idealism and cynical quackery. No more significance evidence of the robustness of its constitution is to be found than its survival after the application of almost every known philosophic nostrum. Fourier and his Phalansteries. Probably the most methodically crack-brained of all Utopians was Charles Fourier of Besancon (17721837). A brilliant scholar, he seeais to have been possessed by a positive disease of "order" and "harmony," a mania for mathematical patterns, numbers, measurements, classifications, and so forth. The rhythmic precision of music and the punctual ordering and inter-relation of the stars, tne grouping of natural species in flowers and animals, obsessed him to such a degree that he came to conceive of human beings as naturally falling into classes according to their correspondences or "passions," or whieh lie considered twelve as fundamental:

Three "actuating" passions (the alternating, emulative, and composite) bring the live "sensitive" passions" (touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smell) into harmony with the four "affective" passions (love, friendship, ambition, and familism or paternity). Eighteen hundred persons wore needed to constitute such a harmony, to which lie gave the name of "phalanx" ; and though nowadays his idsas read like midsummer madness, they found men sucli as Charles A. Dana, George Ripley, William Ellery Chaining, and Albert Brisbane to lake them seriously. Brisbane was the most enthusiastic of -the American disciples of Fourier, and no fewer than forty phalansteries, as the communal organisations of Hie Fourierites were called, were founded between 1840 and 1850. They all ended in bankruptcy and laughter. Even Mr Morris Hillquit has confessed that these Fourier experiments, like the similar experiments of Cabet's Icarians in Texas (1848), were failures. The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noycs in is 18, proved the most long-lived of any of them, its cohesion being perhaps accounted for toy its religious enthusiasm. Fur thirty years it nourished as a Perfectionist organisation, and it still survives, though it lias suffered a sea change into a merely commercial company for tile manufacture of silverware. The Brook Farm Experiment. The most famous American experiment of this sort was that refreshingly innocent enterprise, Brook Farm, which Hawthorne has somewhat too condescendingly immortalised in "The Blithcdalc Romance," and over which, from time to time, Emerson spread iiis benedictory smile. The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was organised on September 29, IS-il, with George Ripley, Minor Pratt, and Charles A. Dana as its leading and responsible spirits. Emerson, with that bold which, for all his transcendentalism, ne always kept on reality—on

real estate, in this case—and with his characteristic gentle 'badinage, had answered Ripley's invitation to become a Brook farmer by saying that "investments in Concord were securer than they were likely to be at Brook Kami." it is well to remember, in. reading Emerson, that he was a very typical son of New England. For that reason, perhaps, his philosophy grows every day more potenl and authoritative, so strangely combining common sense with Platonic and Brahmanisiic moonshine; for when Emerson hitched his waggon to a star, he did not fovget tile waggon. The failure of all Utopias whatsoever has come, and will come, of the simple fact that they are dealing with humanity, and that humanity invincibly resists being crushed into a formula. The best thing about humanity is its constant surprise, its accident of doing something unexpectedly ideal in :1s large, free way. It has an oceanic manner of dealing with those who would control its great tides. It realises, among other things, that when certain millions of individuals are asked altruistically to give up their personal prepossessions for the common good, to' subscribe to some doctrine of "the one for all," should they support the demand, they would only be ministering to the egoism >of a few individuals masquerading as the State. Such men—men like Robert Owen or Charles Fourier —ask nothing but to rule over their fellows, to gratify not so much an unselfish dream of social amelioration, but. an old-fashioned determination for the sceptre and the whip hand. Human egoism is still the controlling factor in human affairs, and king and capitalist no more obstruct the realisation of Utopian dreams and hopes than the Labour leader, who, for the moment, seems to be taking the universe too arrogantly in hand. Perhaps the conclusion of the whole matter will prove, as Campanella said at, the end of his "City of the Sun":

"Ah, well, God gives all in His good time. They astrologisc 100 much."