Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / A Modern Utopia Chapter 3 - Utopian Economics, Sections 1-4

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A Modern Utopia Chapter 3 - Utopian Economics, Sections 1-4 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter three of A Modern Utopia. This is a LibriVox recording.
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Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
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Speaker 1: by Daniel Todd. A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells,
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Speaker 1: Chapter three, Chapter the third Utopian economics. These modern utopians,
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Speaker 1: with the universally diffuse good manners, the universal education, the
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Speaker 1: fine freedoms we shall ascribe to them. Their world unity,
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Speaker 1: world language, world wide travelings, world wide freedom of sale
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Speaker 1: and purchase, will remain mere dream stuff, incredible even by twilight,
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Speaker 1: until we have shown that at that level the community
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Speaker 1: will still sustain itself. At any rate. The common liberty
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Speaker 1: of the utopians will not embrace the common liberty to
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Speaker 1: be unserviceable. The most perfect economy of organization still leaves
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Speaker 1: the fact untouched that all order and security in a
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Speaker 1: state rests on the certainty of getting work done. How
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Speaker 1: will the work of this planet be done? What will
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Speaker 1: be the economics of a modern utopia? Now? In the
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Speaker 1: first place, a state so vast and complex as this
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Speaker 1: world utopia, and with so migratory a people will need
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Speaker 1: some handy symbol to check the distribution of services and commodities.
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Speaker 1: Almost certainly they will need to have money. They will
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Speaker 1: have money. And it is not inconceivable that, for all
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Speaker 1: his sorrowful thoughts are botanist, with his trained observation, his
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Speaker 1: habit of looking at little things upon the ground, would
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Speaker 1: be the one to see and pick up the coin
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Speaker 1: that has fallen from some wayfarer's pocket. This in our
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Speaker 1: first hour or so before we reach the inn. In
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Speaker 1: the userine tal, you figure us upon the high Gotthard
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Speaker 1: road heads together over the little disk that contrives to
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Speaker 1: tell us so much of this strange world. It is
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Speaker 1: I imagine of gold, and it will be a convenient
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Speaker 1: accident if it is sufficient to make us solvent for
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Speaker 1: a day or so, until we are a little more
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Speaker 1: informed of the economic system into which we have come.
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Speaker 1: It is moreover, of a fair round size, and the
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Speaker 1: inscription declares it one lion equal to twaindy bronze crosses.
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Speaker 1: Unless the ratio of metals is very different. Here, this
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Speaker 1: latter must be a token coin, and therefore legal tender
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Speaker 1: for but a small amount. That would be a pain
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Speaker 1: and pleasure to mister Wordsworth Donisthorpe if he were to
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Speaker 1: chance to join us. For once he planned a utopian
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Speaker 1: coinage footnote a system of measures by Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and
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Speaker 1: the words lion and cross are his. But a token
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Speaker 1: coinage and legal tender he cannot abide. They make him argue,
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Speaker 1: and being in utopia that unfamiliar Twindy suggests at once
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Speaker 1: we have come upon that most utopian of all things,
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Speaker 1: A duodecimal system of counting. My author's privilege of details
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Speaker 1: serves me here. This lion is distinctly a beautiful coin,
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Speaker 1: admirably made, with its value in fine clear letters circling
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Speaker 1: the obbs side and a head thereon of Newton as
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Speaker 1: I live, one detects American influence here each year, as
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Speaker 1: we shall find, each denomination of coins celebrates asentinery. The
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Speaker 1: reverse shows the universal goddess of the utopian coinage, peace,
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Speaker 1: as a beautiful woman reading with a child out of
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Speaker 1: a great book, and behind them are stars and an
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Speaker 1: hourglass halfway run. Very human. These utopians, after all, are not,
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Speaker 1: by any means above the obvious in their symbolism. So
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Speaker 1: for the first time we learn definitely of the world state,
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Speaker 1: and we get our first clear hint too that there
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Speaker 1: is an end to kings. But our coin raises other issues. Also.
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Speaker 1: It would seem that this utopia has no simple community
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Speaker 1: of goods, that there is at any rate a restriction
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Speaker 1: upon what one may take, a need for evidences of
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Speaker 1: equivalent value, a limitation to human credit. It dates so
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Speaker 1: much of this present utopia of ours dates those former
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Speaker 1: utopists were bitterly against gold. You will recall the undignified
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Speaker 1: use Sir Thomas More would have us put it to,
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Speaker 1: and how there was no money at all in the
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Speaker 1: Republic of Plato, and in that later community for which
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Speaker 1: he wrote his laws, an iron coinage of austere appearance
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Speaker 1: and doubtful efficacy. It may be these great gentlemen were
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Speaker 1: a little hasty with a complicated difficulty, and not a
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Speaker 1: little unjust to a highly respectable element. Gold is abused
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Speaker 1: and made into vessels of dishonor, and abolished from ideal society,
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Speaker 1: as though it were the cause instead of the instrument
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Speaker 1: of human baseness. But indeed there is nothing bad in gold.
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Speaker 1: Making gold into vessels of dishonor and banishing it from
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Speaker 1: the state is punishing the hatchet for the murderous crime money.
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Speaker 1: Did you but use it right is a good thing
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Speaker 1: in life, a necessary thing in civilized human life, as complicated,
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Speaker 1: indeed for its purposes, but as natural a growth as
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Speaker 1: the bones in a man's wrist. And I do not
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Speaker 1: see how one can imagine anything at all worthy of
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Speaker 1: being called a civilization without it. It is the water
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Speaker 1: of the body social It distributes and receives, and renders
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Speaker 1: growth and assimilation and movement and recovery possible. It is
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Speaker 1: the reconciliation of human interdependence with liberty. What other device
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Speaker 1: will give a man so great a freedom, with so
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Speaker 1: strong an inducement to effort. The economic history of the
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Speaker 1: world where it is not the history of the theory
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Speaker 1: of property, is very largely the record of the abuse
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Speaker 1: not so much of money as of credit devices to
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Speaker 1: supplement money to amplify the scope of this most precious invention,
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Speaker 1: And no device of labour credits footnote Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards,
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Speaker 1: Chapter ten or three, demand of commodities from a central
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Speaker 1: store footnote More's Utopia and Cabet's Ecaria, or the like,
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Speaker 1: has ever been suggested that does not give ten thousand
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Speaker 1: times more scope for that inherent moral dross in man
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Speaker 1: that must be reckoned. Within any sane utopia we may
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Speaker 1: design and plan. Heaven knows where progress may not end.
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Speaker 1: But at any rate, this developing state into which we
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Speaker 1: two men have fallen, this twentieth century utopia, has still
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Speaker 1: not passed beyond money and the use of coins. Two. Now,
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Speaker 1: if this utopian world is to be in some degree
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Speaker 1: parallel to contemporary thought, it must have been concerned. It
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Speaker 1: may still be concerned with many unsettled problems of currency,
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Speaker 1: and with the problems that center about a standard of value.
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Speaker 1: Gold is perhaps, of all material substances, the best adapted
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Speaker 1: to the monetary purpose. But even at that best, it
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Speaker 1: falls far short of any imaginable ideal. It undergoes spasmodic
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Speaker 1: and irregular cheapening through new discoveries of gold, and at
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Speaker 1: any time it may undergo very extensive and sudden disastrous
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Speaker 1: depreciation through the discovery of some way of transmuting less
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Speaker 1: valuable elements. This liability to such depreciations introduces an undesirable
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Speaker 1: speculative element into the relations of debtor and creditor, When
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Speaker 1: on one hand, there is for a time a check
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Speaker 1: in the increase of available stores of gold, or an
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Speaker 1: increase in the energy applied to social purposes, or a
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Speaker 1: checking of public security that would impede the free exchange
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Speaker 1: of credit and necessate a more frequent production of gold.
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Speaker 1: In evidence, then there comes an undue appreciation of money
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Speaker 1: as against the general commodities of life, and an automatic
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Speaker 1: impoverishment of the citizens in general as against the creditor class.
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Speaker 1: The common people are mortgaged in the bondage of debt,
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Speaker 1: and on the other hand, an unexpected spate of goal
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Speaker 1: production and the discovery of a single nugget ats Biggert
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Speaker 1: Saint pause. Let us say, a quite possible thing would
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Speaker 1: result in a sort of jail delivery of debtors and
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Speaker 1: a financial earthquake. It has been suggested by an ingenious
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Speaker 1: thinker that it is possible to use as a standard
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Speaker 1: of monetary value no substance whatever, but instead force, and
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Speaker 1: that value might be measured in units of energy. An
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Speaker 1: excellent development this in theory, at any rate, of the
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Speaker 1: general idea of the modern state as kinetic and not static.
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Speaker 1: It throws the old eye idea of the social order
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Speaker 1: and the new into the sharpest antithesis. The old order
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Speaker 1: is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled
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Speaker 1: by men of substance, the new of enterprises and interests
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Speaker 1: led by men of power. Now I glance at this
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Speaker 1: matter in the most incidental manner as a man may
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Speaker 1: skim through a specialist exposition in a popular magazine. You
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Speaker 1: must figure me therefore, finding from a casual periodical paper
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Speaker 1: in our inn, with a certain surprise at not having
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Speaker 1: anticipated as much the utopian self of that same ingenious person,
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Speaker 1: quite conspicuously a leader of thought and engaged in organizing
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Speaker 1: the discussion of the currency changes Utopia has under consideration.
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Speaker 1: The article, as it presents itself to me, contains a
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Speaker 1: complete and lucid, though occasionally rather technical, explanation of his
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Speaker 1: newest proposals. They have been published, it seems, for general criticism,
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Speaker 1: and one gathers that in the modern Utopia, the administration
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Speaker 1: presents the most elaborately detailed schemes of any proposed alteration
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Speaker 1: in law or custom, some time before any measure is
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Speaker 1: taken to carry into effect, and the possibilities of every
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Speaker 1: detail are acutely criticized, flaws anticipated, side issues raised, and
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Speaker 1: the whole minutely tested and find down by a planetful
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Speaker 1: of critic before the actual process of legislation begins. The
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Speaker 1: explanation of these proposals involves an anticipatory glance at the
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Speaker 1: local administration of modern utopia. To any one who has
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Speaker 1: watched the development of technical science during the last decade
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Speaker 1: or so, there will be no shock in the idea
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Speaker 1: that a general consolidation of a great number of common
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Speaker 1: public services over areas of considerable size is now not
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Speaker 1: only practicable but very desirable. In a little while, heating
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Speaker 1: and lighting, and the supply of power for domestic and
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Speaker 1: industrial purposes, and for urban and interurban communications will all
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Speaker 1: be managed electrically from common generating stations, And the trend
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Speaker 1: of political and social speculation points decidedly to the conclusion that,
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Speaker 1: so soon as it passes out of the experimental stage,
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Speaker 1: the supply of electrical energy, just like drainage and the
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Speaker 1: supply of water, will fall to the local authority. Moreover,
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Speaker 1: the local authority will be the universal landowner. Upon that point,
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Speaker 1: so extreme an individualist as Herbert Spencer was in agreement
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Speaker 1: with the socialist in utopia, we conclude that whatever other
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Speaker 1: types of property may exist, all natural sources of force,
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Speaker 1: and indeed all strictly natural products coal, water, power, and
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Speaker 1: the like, are inaliably vested in the local authorities, which,
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Speaker 1: in order to secure the maximum of convenience and administrative efficiency,
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Speaker 1: will probably control areas as large as sometimes half of England.
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Speaker 1: They will generate electricity by water power, by combustion, by
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Speaker 1: wind or tide, or whatever other natural force is available,
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Speaker 1: and this electricity will be devoted, some of it to
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Speaker 1: the authority's lighting and other public works, some of it
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Speaker 1: as a subsidy to the World State authority, which controls
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Speaker 1: the high roads, the Great Railways, the inns, and other
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Speaker 1: apparatus of world communication. And the rest will pass on
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Speaker 1: to private individuals or to distributing companies at a uniform
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Speaker 1: fixed rate for private lighting and heating, for machinery and
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Speaker 1: industrial applications of all sorts. Such an arrangement of affairs
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Speaker 1: will necessarily involve a vast amount of bookkeeping between the
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Speaker 1: various authorities, the World State government, and the customers, and
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Speaker 1: this bookkeeping will naturally be done most conveniently in units
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Speaker 1: of physical energy. It is not incredible that the assessment
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Speaker 1: of the various local administrations for the central World Government
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Speaker 1: will be already calculated upon the estimated total of energy
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Speaker 1: periodically available in each locality, and booked and spoken of
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Speaker 1: in these physical units. Accounts between central and local governments
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Speaker 1: could be kept in these terms. Moreover, one may imagine
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Speaker 1: utopian local authorities making contracts in which payment would be
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Speaker 1: no longer in coinage upon the gold basis, but in
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Speaker 1: notes good for so many thousands of millions of units
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Speaker 1: of energy at one or other of the generating stations. Now,
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Speaker 1: the problems of economic theory will have undergone an enormous
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Speaker 1: clarification if, instead of measuring in fluctuating money values, the
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Speaker 1: same scale of energy units can be extended to their discussion.
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Speaker 1: If in fact, the idea of trade could be entirely
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Speaker 1: eliminated in my utopia. At any rate this has been done,
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Speaker 1: the production and distribution of common commodities have been expressed
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Speaker 1: as a problem in the conversion of energy, And the
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Speaker 1: scheme that Utopia was now discussing was the application of
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Speaker 1: this idea of energy as a standard of value to
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Speaker 1: the entire utopian coinage. Everyone of those giant local authorities
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Speaker 1: was to be free to issue energy notes against the
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Speaker 1: security of its surplus of saleable available energy, and to
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Speaker 1: make all its contracts for payment in those notes up
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Speaker 1: to a certain maximum defined by the amount of energy
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Speaker 1: produced and disposed of in that locality in the previous year.
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Speaker 1: This power of issue was to be renewed just as
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Speaker 1: rapidly as the notes came in for redemption. In a
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Speaker 1: world without boundaries, with a population largely migratory and emancipated
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Speaker 1: from locality, the price of the energy notes of these
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Speaker 1: various local bodies would constantly tend to be uniform, because
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Speaker 1: employment would constantly shift into the areas where energy was cheap. Accordingly,
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Speaker 1: the price of so many millions of units of energy
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Speaker 1: at any particular moment in coins of the gold currency
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Speaker 1: would be approximately the same throughout the world. It was
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Speaker 1: proposed to select some particular day when the economic atmosphere
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Speaker 1: was distinctly equable, and to declare a fixed ratio between
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Speaker 1: the gold coinage and the energy notes, each gold lion
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Speaker 1: and each line of credit represent presenting exactly the number
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Speaker 1: of energy units it could buy on that day. The
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Speaker 1: old gold coinage was at once to seize to be
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Speaker 1: legal tender beyond certain defined limits, except to the central government,
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Speaker 1: which would not reissue it as it came in. It was,
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Speaker 1: in fact to become a temporary token coinage, a token
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Speaker 1: coinage of full value for the day of conversion at
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Speaker 1: any rate, if not afterwards under the new standard of energy,
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Speaker 1: and to be replaceable by an ordinary token coinage. As
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Speaker 1: time went on. The old computation by lions and the
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Speaker 1: value of the small change of daily life were therefore
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Speaker 1: to suffer no disturbance whatever. The economists of Utopia, as
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Speaker 1: I apprehended them, had a different method and an a
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Speaker 1: different system of theories from those I read on Earth,
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Speaker 1: and this makes my exposition considerably more difficult. This article
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Speaker 1: upon which I base my account floated before me in
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Speaker 1: an unfamiliar, perplexing and dreamlike phraseology. Yet I brought away
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Speaker 1: an impression that here was a rightness that earthly economists
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Speaker 1: have failed to grasp. Few earthly economists have been able
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Speaker 1: to disentangle themselves from patriotisms and politics, and their obsession
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Speaker 1: has always been international trade. Here in Utopia, the world
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Speaker 1: state cuts that away from beneath their feet. There are
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Speaker 1: no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all. Trading
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Speaker 1: is the earthly economist's initial notion, and they start from
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Speaker 1: perplexing and insoluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because of
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Speaker 1: all trading. Finally, involves in individual preferences, which are incalculable
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Speaker 1: and unique. Nowhere do they seem to be handling the
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Speaker 1: really defined standards. Every economic dissertation and discussion reminds one
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Speaker 1: more strongly than the last of the game of croque
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Speaker 1: alice played in Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingos, and
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Speaker 1: the balls were hedgehogs and crawled away, and hoops were
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Speaker 1: soldiers and kept getting up and walking about. But economics
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Speaker 1: in utopia must be, it seems to me, not a
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Speaker 1: theory of trading based on bad psychology, but physics applied
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Speaker 1: to problems in the theory of sociology. The general problem
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Speaker 1: of utopian economics is to state the conditions of the
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Speaker 1: most efficient application of the steadily increasing quantities of material
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Speaker 1: energy the progress of science makes available for human service
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Speaker 1: to the general needs of mankind. Human labour and existing
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Speaker 1: material are dealt with in relation to that. Trading and
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Speaker 1: relative wealth are merely episodical in such a scheme. The
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Speaker 1: trend of the article I read as I understood it
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Speaker 1: was that a monetary system based upon a relatively small
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Speaker 1: amount of gold, upon which the business of the whole
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Speaker 1: world had hitherto been done fluctuated unreasonably, and supplied no
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Speaker 1: real criterion of well being. That the nominal values of
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Speaker 1: things and enterprises had no clear and simil relation to
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Speaker 1: the real physical prosperity of the community. That the nominal
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Speaker 1: wealth of a community in millions of pounds or dollars
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Speaker 1: on lions measures nothing but the quantity of hope in
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Speaker 1: the air, And an increase of confidence meant an inflation
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Speaker 1: of credit and a pessimistic phase, a collapse of the
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Speaker 1: hallucination of possessions. The new standards, this advocate reasoned, were
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Speaker 1: to alter all that, and it seemed to me they would.
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Speaker 1: I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable proposals,
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Speaker 1: but about them clustered an elaborate mass of keen and
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Speaker 1: temperate discussion. Into the details of that discussion I will
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Speaker 1: not enter now, Nor am I sure I am qualified
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Speaker 1: to render the multitudinous aspect of this complicated question at all. Precisely,
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Speaker 1: I read the whole thing in the course of an
23:58
Speaker 1: hour or two of rest after lunch. It was either
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Speaker 1: the second or third day of my stay in Utopia,
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Speaker 1: and we were sitting in a little inn at the
24:08
Speaker 1: end of the lake of Yuri. We had loitered there,
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Speaker 1: and I had fallen reading because of a shower of rain.
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Speaker 1: But certainly, as I read it, the proposition struck me
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Speaker 1: as a singularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition
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Speaker 1: opened out to me for the first time clearly in
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Speaker 1: a comprehensive outline the general conception of the economic nature
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Speaker 1: of the utopian state. Chapter three, The difference between the
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Speaker 1: social and economic science as they exist in our world footnote,
24:51
Speaker 1: but see Gidding's Principles of Sociology, a modern and richly
24:55
Speaker 1: suggested American work imperfectly appreciated by the is student. See
25:02
Speaker 1: also Walter Baghart's Economic Studies. And in this utopia deserves
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Speaker 1: perhaps a word or so more. I write with the
25:11
Speaker 1: utmost diffidence, because upon Earth economic science has been raised
25:17
Speaker 1: to a very high level of tortuous abstraction by the
25:21
Speaker 1: industry of its professors, and I can claim neither a
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Speaker 1: patient student's intimacy with their productions, nor what is more serious,
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Speaker 1: anything but the most generalized knowledge of what their utopian
25:38
Speaker 1: equivalents have achieved. The vital nature of economic issues to
25:43
Speaker 1: a utopia necessitates, However, some attempts at interpretation between the two.
25:51
Speaker 1: In utopia, there is no distinct and separate science of economics.
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Speaker 1: Many problems that we should regard economic come within the
26:02
Speaker 1: scope of utopian psychology. My Utopians make two divisions of
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Speaker 1: the science of psychology, first the general psychology of individuals,
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Speaker 1: a sort of mental physiology separated by no definite line
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Speaker 1: from physiology proper, And secondly, the psychology of relationships between individuals.
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Speaker 1: This second is an exhaustive study of the reaction of
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Speaker 1: people upon each other and of all possible relationships. It
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Speaker 1: is a science of human aggregations, of possible family groupings,
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Speaker 1: of neighbours and neighborhood, of companies, associations, unions, secret and
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Speaker 1: public societies, religious groupings and common ends, and intercourse, and
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Speaker 1: of the methods of intercourse and collective decision that hold
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Speaker 1: human groups together. And finally, of government and the state.
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Speaker 1: The elucidation of economic relationships, depending as it does on
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Speaker 1: the nature of the hypothesis of human aggregation actually in
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Speaker 1: operation at any time, is considered to be subordinate and
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Speaker 1: subsequent to this. General science of sociology, political economy, and
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Speaker 1: economics in our world now consists of a hopeless muddle
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Speaker 1: of social assumptions and preposterous psychology, and a few geographical
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Speaker 1: and physical generalizations. Its ingredients will be classified out and
27:49
Speaker 1: widely separated. In utopian thought. On the one hand, there
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Speaker 1: will be a study of physical economies, ending in the
27:59
Speaker 1: disas descriptive treatment of society as an organization for the
28:05
Speaker 1: conversion of all the available energy in nature to the
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Speaker 1: material ends of mankind, a physical sociology which will be
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Speaker 1: already at such a stage of practical development as to
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Speaker 1: be giving the world this token coinage representing energy. And
28:25
Speaker 1: on the other there will be the study of economic
28:28
Speaker 1: problems as problems in the division of labour, having regard
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Speaker 1: to a social organization whose main ends are reproduction and
28:38
Speaker 1: education in an atmosphere of personal freedom. Each of these inquiries,
28:46
Speaker 1: working unencumbered by the other, will be continually contributing fresh,
28:52
Speaker 1: valid conclusions for the use of the practical administrator. In
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Speaker 1: no region of intellectual activity will our hypothesis of freedom
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Speaker 1: from tradition be of more value in devising a utopia
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Speaker 1: than here. From its beginning, the earthly study of economics
29:13
Speaker 1: has been infertile and unhelpful because of the mass of
29:18
Speaker 1: unanalyzed and scarcely suspected assumption upon which it rested. The
29:27
Speaker 1: facts were ignored, that trade is a byproduct and not
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Speaker 1: an essential factor in social life. That property is a
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Speaker 1: plastic and fluctuating convention. That value is capable of impersonal
29:41
Speaker 1: treatment only in the case of the most generalized requirements.
29:47
Speaker 1: Wealth was measured by the standards of exchange. Society was
29:53
Speaker 1: regarded as a practically unlimited number of avarigious adult units,
30:00
Speaker 1: incapable of any other subordinate groupings than business partnerships, and
30:07
Speaker 1: the sources of competition were assumed to be inexhaustible. Upon
30:13
Speaker 1: such quicksands rose an edifice that aped the securities of
30:18
Speaker 1: material science, developed a technical jargon, and professed the discovery
30:24
Speaker 1: of laws. Our liberation from these false presumptions, through the
30:30
Speaker 1: rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin and the activities of the socialists,
30:36
Speaker 1: is more apparent than real. The old edifice oppresses us,
30:41
Speaker 1: still repaired and altered by indifferent builders, underpinned in places,
30:48
Speaker 1: and with a slight change of name, Political economy has
30:54
Speaker 1: been painted out, and instead we read economics under entirely
30:59
Speaker 1: new management. Modern economics differs mainly from old political economy
31:05
Speaker 1: in having produced no Adam Smith. The old political economy
31:10
Speaker 1: made certain generalizations, and they were mostly wrong. New economics
31:16
Speaker 1: evades generalizations and seems to lack the intellectual power to
31:22
Speaker 1: make them. The science hangs like a gathering fog in
31:27
Speaker 1: a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere,
31:32
Speaker 1: an incidental unmeaning inconvenience to passers by. Its most typical
31:38
Speaker 1: exponents display a disposition to disavow generalizations altogether, to claim
31:46
Speaker 1: consideration as experts, and to make immediate political application of
31:51
Speaker 1: that conceded claim. Now Newton, Darwin, Dalton, Davy, Jewel, and
31:58
Speaker 1: Adam Smith did not affect this expert hanky panky, becoming
32:04
Speaker 1: enough in a hair dresser or a fashionable physician, but
32:09
Speaker 1: indecent in a philosopher or a man of science. In
32:14
Speaker 1: this state of impotent expertness, however, or in some equally
32:18
Speaker 1: unsound state, economics must struggle on a science that is
32:24
Speaker 1: no science, a floundering law, wallowing in a mud of statistics,
32:30
Speaker 1: until either the study of the material organization of production
32:36
Speaker 1: on the one hand, as a development of physics and geography,
32:40
Speaker 1: or the study of social aggregation on the other renders
32:45
Speaker 1: enduring foundations possible. Chapter four. The old utopias were all
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Speaker 1: relatively small state. Plato's republic, for example, was to be
32:56
Speaker 1: smaller than the average English borough, and no distinction was
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Speaker 1: made between the family, the local government, and the state.
33:06
Speaker 1: Plato and Campanella, for all that the latter was a
33:11
Speaker 1: Christian priest, carried communism to its final point and prescribed
33:17
Speaker 1: even a community of husbands and wives, an idea that
33:22
Speaker 1: was brought at last to the test of effectual experiment
33:26
Speaker 1: in the Oneida community of New York State eighteen forty
33:30
Speaker 1: eight eighteen seventy nine. This latter body did not long
33:35
Speaker 1: survive its founder, at least as a veritable communism, by
33:41
Speaker 1: reason of the insurgent individualism of its vigorous sons. More too,
33:48
Speaker 1: denied privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods at
33:53
Speaker 1: any rate, and so coming to the Victorian utopias de
33:57
Speaker 1: cabe but Cabet's communism was one of the free store type,
34:02
Speaker 1: and the goods were yours only after you had requisitioned them.
34:08
Speaker 1: That seems the case in the nowhere of Morris. Also,
34:11
Speaker 1: compared with the older writers, Bellamy and Morris have a
34:16
Speaker 1: vivid sense of individual separation, and their departure from the
34:22
Speaker 1: old homogeneity is sufficiently marked to justify a doubt whether
34:29
Speaker 1: there will be any more thoroughly communist utopias forever. A
34:36
Speaker 1: utopia such as this present one, written in the opening
34:40
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, and after the most exhaustive discussion
34:45
Speaker 1: nearly a century long between communist and socialistic ideas on
34:49
Speaker 1: the one hand and individualism on the other, emerges upon
34:55
Speaker 1: a sort of effectual conclusion to those controversies. The two
35:01
Speaker 1: parties have so chipped and amended each other's initial propositions that, indeed,
35:07
Speaker 1: except for the labels still fluttering adhesive to the implicated men,
35:12
Speaker 1: it is hard to choose between them. Each side established
35:16
Speaker 1: a good many propositions, and we profit by them. All.
35:21
Speaker 1: We of the succeeding generation can see quite clearly that
35:25
Speaker 1: for the most part, the heat and zeal of these
35:28
Speaker 1: discussions arose in the confusion of a quantitative for a
35:33
Speaker 1: qualitative question. To the onlooker, both individualism and socialism are
35:41
Speaker 1: in the absolute absurdities. The one would make men the
35:46
Speaker 1: slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves
35:51
Speaker 1: of the state official. And the way of sanity runs,
35:56
Speaker 1: perhaps even sinuously down the intervening valley. Happily the dead
36:02
Speaker 1: past buries its dead, and it is not our function
36:06
Speaker 1: now to adjudicate the preponderance of victory. In the very days,
36:13
Speaker 1: when our political and economic order is becoming steadily more socialistic,
36:19
Speaker 1: our ideals of intercourse turn more and more to a
36:23
Speaker 1: fuller recognition of the claims of individuality. The state is
36:29
Speaker 1: to be progressive, it is no longer to be static,
36:33
Speaker 1: and this alters the general condition of the utopian problem profoundly.
36:39
Speaker 1: We have to provide not only for food and clothing,
36:44
Speaker 1: for order and health, but for initiative. The factor that
36:48
Speaker 1: leads the world's state on from one phase of development
36:52
Speaker 1: to the next is the interplay of individualities. To speak teleologically,
37:00
Speaker 1: the world exists for the sake of and through initiative,
37:05
Speaker 1: and individuality is the method of initiative. Each man and woman,
37:12
Speaker 1: to the extent that his or her individuality is marked,
37:18
Speaker 1: breaks the law of precedent, transgresses the general formula, and
37:23
Speaker 1: makes a new experiment for the direction of the life force.
37:29
Speaker 1: It is impossible, therefore for the stake, which represents all
37:33
Speaker 1: and is preoccupied by the average, to make effectual experiments
37:39
Speaker 1: and intelligent innovations, and so supply the essential substance of life.
37:47
Speaker 1: As against the individual, the state represents the species. In
37:52
Speaker 1: the case of the utopian world state, it absolutely represents
37:57
Speaker 1: the species. The individual emerges from the species, makes his experiment,
38:04
Speaker 1: and either fails, dies and comes to an end, or
38:09
Speaker 1: succeeds and impresses himself in offspring in consequences and results intellectual, material,
38:17
Speaker 1: and moral upon the world. Biologically, the species is the
38:22
Speaker 1: accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since
38:27
Speaker 1: the beginning, and the world state of the modern utopist will,
38:32
Speaker 1: in its economic aspect, be a compendion of established economic
38:38
Speaker 1: experience about which individual enterprise will be continually experimenting, either
38:46
Speaker 1: to fail and pass or to succeed and at last
38:50
Speaker 1: become incorporated with the undying organism of the world's state.
38:56
Speaker 1: This organism is the universal rule, the common restriction, the
39:02
Speaker 1: rising level platform on which individualities stand. The world state,
39:08
Speaker 1: in this ideal, presents itself as the sole landowner of
39:12
Speaker 1: the earth, with the great local governments. I have adumbrated
39:17
Speaker 1: the local municipalities holding, as it were, feudally under it
39:22
Speaker 1: as landlords. The state or these subordinates hold all the
39:28
Speaker 1: sources of energy, and either directly or through its tenants,
39:33
Speaker 1: farmers and agents, develops these sources and renders the energy
39:38
Speaker 1: available for the work of life. It or its tenants
39:43
Speaker 1: will produce food and so human energy, and the exploitation
39:48
Speaker 1: of coal and electric power, and the powers of wind
39:52
Speaker 1: and wave and water will be within its right. It
39:56
Speaker 1: will pour out this energy by assignment and lee, and
40:00
Speaker 1: acquiresance and what not upon its individual citizens. It will
40:05
Speaker 1: maintain order, maintain roads, maintain a cheap and efficient administration
40:12
Speaker 1: of justice. Maintain cheap and rapid locomotion, and be the
40:17
Speaker 1: common carrier of the planet. Convey and distribute labour, control,
40:23
Speaker 1: let or administer all natural productions. Pay for and secure
40:28
Speaker 1: healthy births and a healthy and vigorous new generation. Maintain
40:33
Speaker 1: the public health, coin money and sustain standards of measurements.
40:38
Speaker 1: Subsidize research and reward such commercially unprofitable undertakings as benefit
40:45
Speaker 1: the community as a whole. Subsidize when needful chairs of
40:49
Speaker 1: criticism and authors and publication, and collect and distribute information.
40:55
Speaker 1: The energy developed and the employment afforded by the state
41:00
Speaker 1: will descend like walker that the sun has sucked out
41:03
Speaker 1: of the sea to fall upon a mountain range, and
41:07
Speaker 1: back to the sea again. It will come at last,
41:11
Speaker 1: debouching in ground rent and royalty and license fees, in
41:15
Speaker 1: the fees of travelers, and profit upon carrying, and coinage,
41:20
Speaker 1: and the like, in death, duty, transferred, tax, legacy, and forfeiture.
41:27
Speaker 1: Returning to the sea, between the clouds and the sea,
41:31
Speaker 1: it will run as a river system down through a
41:34
Speaker 1: great region of individual enterprise and interplay, whose freedom it
41:39
Speaker 1: will sustain. In that immediate region between the kindred heights
41:44
Speaker 1: and deeps, those beginnings and promises will arise that are
41:48
Speaker 1: the essential significance, the essential substance of life. From our
41:55
Speaker 1: human point of view, the mountains and sea are for
41:58
Speaker 1: the habitable lands that lie between. So likewise, the state
42:03
Speaker 1: is for individualities. The state is for individuals. The law
42:09
Speaker 1: is for freedoms. The world is for experiment, experience, and change.
42:15
Speaker 1: These are fundamental beliefs upon which a modern utopia must go.
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Speaker 1: End of Chapter three, Utopian Economics, Sections one to four.
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Speaker 1: Recording by Daniel Todd