Literary utopias

Celesteville, the perfect utopia

A recent issue of The New Yorker has a review of The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy by Michael Robertson (Princeton UP). I write "literary" utopias in the title of the post, for the book does not concern utopias that actually came into existence, such as Sointula itself. With an important exception -- Thomas More's Utopia (1516) -- utopia was until the 19th century mainly "conceptual," with lots of blueprints. One sees the beginnings of such blueprints in the Renaissance, but it was not until the 19th century that utopian communities, with real people living and working in them, that they moved from the conceptual realm and took up life throughout the American and indeed Canadian lands. W.H. comes close to pinpointing the problem with utopias. According to Adam Gopnik in his review of Robertson's book, Auden held that “a utopia ...  was dangerously shaped by a false idea of common good, which meant pretending that everyone wanted the same thing.”

Besides the blueprints and theses, several writers have written novels portraying life in a place where the utopian good reigns. Of the four that Robertson treats, I have read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), both very influential in their time. Both novels are set in the future, but the novels reflect the different attitudes of the authors toward industrialization.  Bellamy, an American, was writing at a moment when the United States was revving up to become a world power thanks to its growing industrial capacity. In his novel, the main character goes to sleep at the end of the 19th century and awakens in the year 2000 to find the U.S. transformed into a socialist utopia through the power of industry. Morris, an Englishman, wrote his novel in response to Bellamy and set his future utopia in an agrarian England restored, as Gopnik writes, to “pastoral purity” lacking all signs of industry and commerce. Gopnik sums up the different results as follows: “Bellamy was chiefly prescient about Amazon Prime,” while “Morris wanted social justice in the form of flowered wallpaper.”

William Morris's Arts and Crafts wallpaper

Gopnik notes two aspects of Thomas More's formula that Bellamy and Morris adopted: the importance of artisanal works over mental work; and a sexual egalitarianism at odds with the the habits and inclinations of the writers themselves. As for the first, Gopnik adds: “thinking people are told by a thinking person to stop thinking.” One thing he neglects to add is that the account is by a first-person narrator who has been there and come back to tell the tale.

Here are some features of Bellamy's new society: The nation itself now owns, manages, and distributes all capital and all goods and services. The citizens, men and women, are organized on the principle of universal military service into an industrial army that produces all of the nation's goods. Every citizen begins working at twenty-one and retires at forty-five. It is a cradle-to-grave social system, without any need for money. Instead, each year the nation's wealth is divided evenly, and each citizen is issued a credit card for his share to purchase the goods and services he desires. There are no political parties and no corrupt public officials. Not to forget that women are liberated from housework because of technical improvements, not really spelled out. There are also drugs for sleeping.

This perfect society has come into being without bloodshed, simply by abolishing private property. Bellamy appears not to imagine that there would be conflicts of interest interfering with the common good. He gives no attention to the possibility of bureaucratic stupidity or malfunctioning. He simply believes that if you remove private property, everything will be solved. As Gopnik points out, however, it is an exceedingly regimented society, ultimately brutal: "What is chilling in Bellamy is how much of the totalitarian imagination is already in place in his work, and how alluring it can seem."

Morris was a real Marxist, but one reacting against Bellamy's technological socialism. Though News from Nowhere takes place 200 years in the future, this is an idealized Middle Ages, in which people travel by boats, which they row themselves, up a very clean Thames. There is no industrial army: People make what they need for themselves and for others. Englishmen and women of the future are astounded when our time traveler asks to pay for something. There are no schools and no encouragement of reading in children, who instead learn by doing.

Just for fun, let me mention some of things from Thomas More's utopia that have come to be:

Before getting married, you are allowed to see your partner naked. Divorce is allowed for a married couple who "do not well agree." You are under constant surveillance. Utopians eat in public. This is really part of the focus on eliminating the private sphere — but it basically means people eat out. All the time. Euthanasia is supported and even encouraged.