UTOPIAS: THEIR SIGNIFICANCE

By Dr. D. V. K. RAGHAVACHARYULU, M. A., Ph. D.

(Lecturer in English, Andhra University)

Man’s attitude to perfection has been anomalous and in-consistent throughout the ages. When attained, even perfection becomes monotonous and savourless. There is then a renewed quest for new modes of perfection. The social reality in fact is only the residue left by ebbing Utopias. We dream in terms of a living language, but wake up with all the fretful confusion of a dead dialect. And accordingly our Utopias and our Infernos, our Heavens and our Hells, change their aspect from to time.

“Oh, don’t the days seem lank and long

When all goes right and nothing goes wrong;

And isn’t your life extremely flat

With nothing to grumble at!”

Man’s progress can be measured by a proper balancing of the Utopian accounts in history of his failures and successes, his shortcomings and his noble endeavours. While Utopias explain how society can be reconstructed in order to make happiness universal and permanent, the anti-Utopias counsel caution and patience and serene gradualism in human affairs. The Wellsian Utopia became partially fulfilled in the Atomic Revolution; but when the World-State was just round the corner, mankind missed it. The satirical pictures of Huxley and Orwell narrate at length the story of the failure of Utopia. Political revolutions, bitter competition among the different Utopian concepts and designs, the progressive dilution of the Utopian ideal in practice, and the speculative manipulation of power by vested interests, have all conspired to enfeeble the community of humanism, compassion and tolerance. The Mustapha Monds and the Big Brothers have played foul against the Ideal Commonwealth, imposing their own respective formulae of social destiny on men. The majority of English Utopians are extremely distrustful of sweeping generalisations and express their faith in the balanced life, in parliamentary democracy, in the sanctity of locality and personal relations, in a healthy orthodoxy towards all moral questions. His belief in the liberal values of life, when dialectic goes to the winds, with much political verbiage and polemical shouting, makes the Englishman the most sensible and balanced of persons. The English Utopia faithfully reflects the national genius for moderation and the search for balance and harmony, in every sphere of life.

Plato who was all for the supremacy of the Laws, deprived the individual of his real importance. The individual, as he visualized, was to be a well-fitting part in the mechanism of his Republic. He derives the meaning of justice in the individual as that which in his department contributes to the strength and the stability of the State. The State, then, was to be the measure of man. During the Renaissance, man’s perfectibility was recognised and his degeneracy was attributed to the corrupting interference of the States. The mediation of society between Man and Nature created a lasting disharmony among men and it was the aim of the Utopians to recover the equilibrium. More blamed society for producing poverty, crime and war and imagined an ideal commonwealth in which the individual could fully develop his personality. Bacon placed in the hands of man the whole province of knowledge and wished him well. The Augustans grasped a certain idea of perfection and hoped to obtain felicity in plenty through the reasoned melodies of sound husbandry. The promising results of the Industrial Revolution and Colonial expansion made the Victorians imagine that their society was permanent and perfect. Victorian complacency was shaken by the onslaught of new ideas. The vision that Morris had was of a human fellowship, in which man would no more be a purely mechanical being, but was the measure of the State, while the State itself withered away into a sort of creative anarchy. There was after him, a schism between the State and the individual in Utopia. Modern technology is a powerful weapon in the hands of the political ordainers; and by practising mind-castration, mass-hypnopaedia and conditioning, one man can acquire control of the whole world and, mould it to his iron will. That is the present frightful climax of the struggle between the shrill voice of individual conscience and the stern raucous blast of conforming mass-hysteria. All the Utopians agree that the citizen of the future has to be the product of a creative environment. Revolutions tend to corrupt the State by power; and power corrupts the individuals as well. Our future society should be based on an unconditional renunciation of violence and should be the outcome of a natural evolution. There are, as Stevenson says, no cutting the Gordian Knots; one has to smilingly unravel them. The Creative Man and the Creative Society are the centres of the English Utopia.

The citizen of the future would have struck the right balance between his beliefs and actions. His education would be a drawing out of his creative sensibility in every direction. The child in Utopia is nobody’s chattel or property. He would not have to sign the ‘Charter of the Unborn’ as in Erewhon, nor is he conditioned by reflexes to obey a mythical parent, the State, as in the Brave New World. He is brought up in an atmosphere of freedom, a freedom free from the taint of all inhibitions, phobias and complexes. Growing up without fear or favour, he finds the world a fresh and safe place when he reaches adolescence. And since his mind is not pale with the sickly cast of negative thinking, he gives the ‘Yea’ to life in work as in play. When he becomes the future citizen, he brings the same trusting and healthy outlook to bear on all the issues of life. Worthy of his great heritage of freedom and fruitfulness, he will be the image of true progressiveness, which is the measure of the success of our Utopias.

Education in Utopia is not meant for slavery, but for freedom. The young man would not be an encyclopaedia of knowledge, a mere spectacled book-worm. There had been, before Utopia became a reality, a vast process of unlearning after which an infinitely fresh vista is opened up in the acquisition of knowledge. One is taught the ways of learning by oneself through wise and happy and cheerful teachers. There are no Colleges of Unreason, no Erewhonian Hypothetics for study. Along with a scientific attitude of the mind, he develops an awareness of the higher values of life. And education does not incapacitate him for practical work; by the time he comes of age, he would have learnt a craft, and perhaps an art, or at least a hobby. He faces the future with confidence and hope and with eager anticipation. Utopian education is education through freedom and it is imparted through perfectly natural and creative means. Its chief aim is to encourage young men and women to find out and pursue the lines of their several aptitudes until they attain a balanced life.

Utopian morality is based on the same principle of moderation, governed by the spirit of natural freedom, without any cramping obstacles. There will be no taboos, no prohibitions, no State-managed human stud-farms. State Eugenics is the pet idea of many Utopians; but Huxley and Orwell and Heard have demonstrated with sad lucidity what a dangerous weapon it would be in the hands of tyrants and oligarchs. Defective children will not be born in Utopia, for they are born without shame or sense of guilt; The unwanted child is unheard of as there are no secretive unions between men and women. Sexual liberalism, however would not ruin family life. Blood relationships are recognised as stronger than artificial affinities, and children would not be deprived of the charming company of their own brothers and sisters. There are no formal divorces, even as there are no strictly legal marriages. There is no sort of discrimination in favour of any sex. Men and women are free to choose what kind of work or occupation they will undertake, and the kind of life they will lead. But women shall not be unwomanly, nor men be unmanly; and neither shall be monsters.

Personal relations among individuals will be no longer guided by mercenary motives, because there is neither money nor poverty in Utopia. And all the English Utopians, except Wells and perhaps Bacon, agree that money should be abolished. Small-holdings, like a house, a private garden, and a work of art, may be permitted to be had as one’s personal possessions; but the old sense of possessiveness in men and things would have gone. This moneyless and classless State would be reached by no sanguinary upheaval or class-heroics, but through the dynamism of an economic laissez-faire, as envisaged in Lord Samuel’s Utopia. There will be no congested coketowns; no factory chimneys rear their ugly heads like thorns in the heart of Utopia’s green and mellow land. Decentralisation would have gone ahead, country invading city, and city invading country, so that ultimately the population is more evenly distributed. And the industrial centres, sprinkled everywhere throughout Utopia, would be supplied power by the arterial veins of atomic energy. Machines have become almost automatic and so there is no smoke or stench anywhere. And even agriculture would be vastly mechanised, of course, without the danger of impoverishing the good earth. Machines will be the perfect siaves, relieving man of all kinds of drudgery. There will be enough scope for manual work: tapestries, wall-papers, stained-glass, illuminated manuscripts, elaborately carved furniture and highly-wrought designs will not cease to be produced by hand. Useful work will be distinguished from useless toil. Idleness will not be frowned upon as a disease; feverish activity, on the other hand, is viewed with fearful concern. Holiday is no exceptional day in Utopia, for there is always the time and the freedom to stand and stare. “There are no bank holidays in Utopia,” says Ethel Mannin, “for the very good reason that there are no banks. There are banks of violets and primroses and wild thyme, but no unnatural banks of brick and stone and money.”

Having freed men from wasteful physical labour, science will now reconstruct the picture of the universe on a more comprehensive, systematic and hopeful basis. All the orthodox imbalances between belief and action would be eliminated. Men will not profess in the name of Jehovah and practise the cult of Satan. Nor would there be ignoble despair or pointless melancholy. The new scientific philosophy would declare the adventure of evolution as benevolent and purposive. Life is moving steadily towards higher forms: Life and Mind came out of inert matter; and mind in its turn will transcend itself and find a much nobler fulfillment in the Supermind. The Utopian ends would be positive and the means not only good but also identical with the ends themselves. A practical universal brotherhood would be established, and the nightmare of frustration and anxiety would go. And since the atmosphere of lasting fellowship has come to prevail, the vast expenditure of the State would be eliminated in the natural course. Even the fools will not contend for the forms of government, for there would be no State external to the common union of hearts. Organisation will be minimum and no one would be unwilling to help his fellowmen. The social consciousness would at every level be identical with individual liberty, and the whole setup would be a creative commonwealth. Men, women and children will move with spontaneous gaiety and radiant health. There will be the silvern tinkle of hearty, robust laughter everywhere, and fragrant-eyed enjoyment would blow like a free gale. The town has become a splendid nose-gay of associations; in the day the whole country looks like a garden of hyacinths in bloom, and at night an endless garland of lights, and at all times a crowded holiday of joy and mirth. Utopia is a glorious place–and in the heart of it the Creative Man. Such is the integral, vision of the good life afforded by our Utopians.

The Utopian novel is a form of literature, which articulates the emotions of hope and despair, even as Tragedy handles pity and terror. Hope, the element of approach, leads up to Utopias; and despair, the element of retreat, gives rise to anti-Utopias or Infernos. Winston, the hero in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is very much like the tragic hero in Shakespeare–the individual soul weighed down by error and destiny. Huxley makes Bernard-Marx speak the language of Othello in Brave New World. We admire the tragic hero, not because his experience of evil makes him more mature and responsive to the tasks of life, but because he becomes the object of a feeling of sympathy, which we all entertain for one tormented, one who is symbolic of forlorn individuality putting up a heroic fight against providential misrule. The conflict in the anti-Utopias is between the tyrant and the common man, the Inquisitor and the captive, the air-powerful and the totally helpless, the ruthlessly efficient and the dumbly acquiescing. In these works the play of evil is so exaggerated as to afford a Miserific vision, so that the Utopia presented becomes the lowest of human hells. And when in the end we recoil with horror and aversion from the vision of unmitigated evil, we are a step nearer to the genuine Utopia, the third community. There is a tragic katharsis underlying such books as the Gulliver’s Travels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ape and Essence, through the operation of which one is moved to remorse, and through the strength of a purified conscience to the knowledge of the good. Hope, in these Utopias, is made to be the fruit of a critical self- awareness, and not of pure aspiration.

In these works, again Utopia is placed in an inaccessible nook of the world. The moral they point to is obvious. If the follies of mankind were to continue at the present, in the future, too, Utopia can exist only as a buried continent, like Atlantis, or as a chance survival in its most degraded form, like Huxley’s Los Angeles, or at best as the manifestation of Divine Grace, like the Valley of the Blue Moon. As long as the disharmony between matter and spirit persists, men cannot hope to have a full share either of their own individuality, or of a fruitful social consciousness. Their only hope is to exist as oasis-builders, like Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or as the survivors of a doomed race like the Savage and the Professor of Botany in Huxley’s horror-worlds. Many Utopians have even ‘bred out of existence’ the human body, with all its imaginative complements of feeling and desire. Swift, Shelley, Shaw and Huxley have all attempted to get rid of the body in their eagerness to preserve the soul, to get man into a trance of pure Nirvana, so that he might exist as pure intelligence, much like the Eldila of C. S. Lewis. In the satirical worlds, man has no name, but only an amusing nick-name that makes him the centre of a comedy of errors.

And so, until we realise our will to create Utopia and plod our way towards achieving it, we must have a vision of evil, so that in Utopia we shall not be trouble-mongers by raising problems of crime and punishment, disease and insanity, boredom and nervous breakdown. The human predicament on our planet has for a long time been giving cause for anxiety. Wars, famines and diseases have maimed humanity throughout history; and man, while breaking old chains, has slipped into new designs of servility. New Jerusalem and Brave New World are both simultaneously involved in the human situation. Let man have the vision of both these mirror worlds and them make the choice. The modern English Utopias tell in unmistakable terms how the angels and the enemies of promise are fighting the final battle for the crown of man’s soul, that at present the odds are in favour of the latter. We have inherited a diseased planet and imperiled it further by our own pettiness and narrow-mindedness. Violent revolution, total war and hypnotised happiness, brought about by unimpeded technological advancement and increasing regimentation, do not solve our problems; nor do they achieve any tangible gains for our many-sided improvement. If we are to be saved, we must outgrow our own inhumanity through a psychological revolution and a spiritual resurgence. Humanism, self-knowledge and the realisation of the divine within ourselves are the only reliable guides to true happiness. We are at the cross-roads of a difficult and uneasy choice, not only for ourselves, but for the sake of future generations, too. The choice is dramatised in the most poignant terms by the modern Utopias. And the strength of vision needed for our guidance is afforded by these works in a symbolic manner. While old Utopias do not date, modern Utopias are no less important, for they go a long way in clearing the mists that are befogging human aspiration at the moment. They speak not only with great immediate authority, but with compelling urgency of the need for effecting a change of heart. They are our Oracle of Life. “A map of the world,” said Oscar Wilde, “that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.” Utopias may not be realisable in fact; but they make our sensate culture significant by enlarging, enriching and intensifying the meaning of life.

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