The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ in one
fundamental aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before
Darwin quickened the thought of the world. Those were all perfect
and static States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the
forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a
healthy and simple generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in
an atmosphere of virtue and happiness, to be followed by other
virtuous, happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Gods
grew weary. Change and development were dammed back by invincible
dams for ever. But the Modern Utopia must be not static but
kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful
stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not
resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float
upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state. For one
ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an equality of
happiness safe and assured to them and their children for ever, we
have to plan “a flexible common compromise, in which a perpetually
novel succession of individualities may converge most effectually
upon a comprehensive onward development.” That is the first, most
generalised difference between a Utopia based upon modern
conceptions and all the Utopias that were written in the former
time.
Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible,
if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole
and happy world. Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed,
impossible, but most distinctly impracticable, by every scale that
reaches only between to-day and to-morrow. We are to turn our backs
for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is,
and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that
perhaps might be, to the projection of a State or city “worth
while,” to designing upon the sheet of our imaginations the picture
of a life conceivably possible, and yet better worth living than
our own. That is our present enterprise. We are going to lay down
certain necessary starting propositions, and then we shall proceed
to explore the sort of world these propositions give us....
It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is good for
awhile to be free from the carping note that must needs be audible
when we discuss our present imperfections, to release ourselves
from practical difficulties and the tangle of ways and means. It is
good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe
the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we
think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.
There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. This is to
be a holiday from politics and movements and methods. But for all
that, we must needs define certain limitations. Were we free to
have our untrammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris to
his Nowhere, we should change the nature of man and the nature of
things together; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant,
noble, perfect—wave our hands to a splendid anarchy, every man
doing as it pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world as
good in its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as the world
before the Fall. But that golden age, that perfect world, comes out
into the possibilities of space and time. In space and time the
pervading Will to Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of
aggressions. Our proposal here is upon a more practical plane at
least than that. We are to restrict ourselves first to the
limitations of human possibility as we know them in the men and
women of this world to-day, and then to all the inhumanity, all the
insubordination of nature. We are to shape our state in a world of
uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and
inimical beasts and vermin, out of men and women with like
passions, like uncertainties of mood and desire to our own. And,
moreover, we are going to accept this world of conflict, to adopt
no attitude of renunciation towards it, to face it in no ascetic
spirit, but in the mood of the Western peoples, whose purpose is to
survive and overcome. So much we adopt in common with those who
deal not in Utopias, but in the world of Here and Now.
Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian
precedents, we may take with existing fact. We assume that the tone
of public thought may be entirely different from what it is in the
present world. We permit ourselves a free hand with the mental
conflict of life, within the possibilities of the human mind as we
know it. We permit ourselves also a free hand with all the
apparatus of existence that man has, so to speak, made for himself,
with houses, roads, clothing, canals, machinery, with laws,
boundaries, conventions, and traditions, with schools, with
literature and religious organisation, with creeds and customs,
with everything, in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter.
That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian
speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and
More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future
Boston, Comte's great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's
Icaria, and Campanella's City of the Sun, are built, just as we
shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete
emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits,
from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail.
And much of the essential value of all such speculations lies in
this assumption of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human
freedom, in the undying interest of the human power of self-escape,
the power to resist the causation of the past, and to evade,
initiate, endeavour, and overcome.
