The Flight from Reality: 5. The Utopian Vision; C. Carson

5. The Utopian Vision CLARENCE B. CARSON ... I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any, misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased an hundredfold,. and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this mo ment, except ignorance, to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.! -ROBERT OWEN, 1816 THE CONNECTION between VISIons of utopia and reformers may not be apparent to everyone. Utopians are often thought of as quaint characters who lived and wrote sometime in the past, somewhat impractical but harmless fellows. If they were literary figures in their own right, or if they had a pleasing style, excerpts from their works crop up in anthologies of literature, and whole books are sometimes reprinted. But they are not generally credited with 1 Quoted in W. H. G. Armitage, Heavens Below (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 77.

Dr. Carson is Professor of American History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. Among his earlier writings in THE FREEMAN were his series on The Fateful Turn and The American Tradition, both of which are now available as books. 20 having had much to do with what has happened. The matter is quite otherwise, in fact. Hardly a reform proposal has been made in the twentieth cen tury which did not have anteced ents in utopian literature of the nineteenth century or earlier. As one writer points out, in the ear lier period "utopists were antici pating the 'welfare state,' the na tionalization of industries, 'so cialized' medicine and health pro grams, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and numerous other such proposals .... " 2 More specifically, one historian points out that Robert Owen, an 2 Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick, The Quest for Utopia (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), p. 16.

1965 THE UTOPIAN VISION 21 early nineteenth century utopian, had a considerable impact upon historical development. "Owen ... was influential in bringing to pass the first labor legislation, the Brit ish Factory Acts in 1819.... The cooperative buying societies a mong the poorer folk ... are also the direct outgrowth of Owen's experiments of New Lanark. He was one of the pioneers of the trade union movement, and laid down the first plans for labor bureaus on the national scale."s This writer goes on to give similar examples for many other utopians. Utopias are articulated visions of a perfect society. They are prod ucts of the imagination of their authors, neither existing any where at the time they are de scribed nor ever having existed anywhere. They are futuristic in orientation, though there is often an admixture of a return to felici ty which man once enjoyed before corruption. Even so, their realiza tion is to come at some future time, or at least that is the im plication and hope. Even so, the "role of utopias in social thought . . . is not analogous to that of blueprint to house. Such a mis conception makes them of little importance, for as such they have hardly entered the stream of hu3 Joyce O. Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought (New York: Macmil lan, 1923), p.282.

man history at all. Instead, utopias more nearly play the part of the idealized picture of the completed house which precedes the drawing of the blueprint. Utopias are the best societies which their authors can imagine, distant goals toward which their creators would have us move, unhampered in their con ception by gross obstacles and dif ficulties." 4 The Vision and the Means The construction of a utopia, then, is an elemental flight from reality. The author who does so must, by the nature of his task, \vithdraw from concrete reality, must envision something which does not exist. Insofar as he ne glects to take into account the nature of man and the universe, as most· modern utopians have, he is engaged in a full-fledged flight from reality. The role of utopian thought in the development of meliorist reform is this: Utopians provided the vision of the perfect society toward which meliorist re form is supposed to move. Quite often, they also described the means which might be used to achieve utopia and ways of doing things in the perfect society. Uto pia is the end; meliorist reform is the means. Utopias have served as 4 Clarence B. Carson, "Their Young Men Dream No Dreams," Spiritual Life, IX (Spring 1963), 32.

22 THE FREEMAN February the visionary and imaginary flight which has preceded the actual flight. The fact that twentieth century reformers have usually disavowed any particular utopian hopes must not be permitted to obscure the actual connection. The vagueness of the goals of contemporary re formers are not even to be pitted against any particularized version of utopia. This would tend to disci pline reformers to some limited extent, though this may not be the reason for the avoidance of embracing a utopia. Nonetheless, a vague generalized vision of utopia does impel reformers to their exertions. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this vision is of a utopia that "is altogether pleasant and enticing. It is of a place and time where suffering and privation have been banished, where the inhabitants are secure from the ravages of disease and unemployment, where all men have enough of the good things of life ... , where education and environment have banished the baser things and men have willingly and gladly turned to the finer things of life, where one may speed in a carefree manner down the highway of life with no fear of a collision along the way." 5 5 The Fateful Turn (Irvington-on Hudson, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1963), p. 178.

Sir Thomas More and Company The content for a vision which has become progressively more vague was provided in luxuriant detail by nineteenth century utopians. Before utopian thought could enter the life stream of that social thought which is believed to have relevance to actuali ty, a trans formation had to take place. Such a transformation had taken place for many of those in intellectual circles by the early nineteenth century. It has already been de scribed as the cutting loose from reality. Uninhibited rationalism became abstract rationalism; the imagination was cut loose frum the fetters of reason; men turned their eyes away from the nature of things, from an enduring real ity, from metaphysical or eternal realms, to focus their attention upon change and development. In these circumstances, they could not only envision utopias with the utmost freedom but also actually begin to believe in them as pos sibilities.

The literary genera which we refer to as utopias was not new to the nineteenth century, of course. The name itself adorned a work of Sir Thomas More, a book which was published in the early sixteenth century. But More's book was modeled upon one of much more ancient vintage, Plato's 1965 THE UTOPIAN VISION 23 Republic. It should be noted, though, that Plato's good society differed significantly from most modern utopias. Plato did not envision the transformation of hu man nature; he took men as they are and proposed to build a good society for them. This would in volve, as he saw, a rather rigorous regimentation, and he did not shrink from these implications. Hence, the meaning of Plato's Re public for those who prefer liberty (whether he could be numbered among them or not) is clear; it is a cautionary tale, showing the consequences of trying to institute the good society. There were other utopias written in the classical period, but the genera disappeared for the Middle Ages and did not reappear until More's work.

Following More, there were a good many utopian writers from the sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries - what historians are likely to call the early modern period. They include Francis Ba con's New Atlantis, Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, James Harrington's Oceana, Fene lon's Telemachus, Andrae Valenti's Christianopolis, and Robert Fil mer's Patriarcha. These utopias have mainly an academic interest. That is, they constitute an histori cal background for the utopianism which came to inform meliorist re form but they entered into the stream of social thought at the time, little, if at all. They did con tain many of the ideas which went into later utopias. Indeed, More's work contained what can now be recognized as most of the staple ingredients of utopian literature. Utopias almost invariably have two sorts of ma terials: a critique of conditions contemporary with the work being written, and a vision of the per fect society. More's book has both.

Moreover, the good society is pic tured as a communistic one. Pri vate property is an evil to be rooted out, a theme which runs the gamut of utopian literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. More said, I am persuaded, that till property is taken away there can be no equi table or just distribution of things, nor can the world be happily gov erned: for as long as that is main tained, the greatest and the far best part of mankind will be still op pressed with a load of cares and anxieties. 6 The great change that will be wrought by the abolition of prop erty is described: In all places it is visible, that while people talk of a common wealth, every man seeks his own wealth; but there, where no man has any property, all men zealously pur6 Quoted in HertZler, Ope cit., pp. 132 33.

24 THE FREEMAN February sue the good of the public: and, in deed, it is no wonder to see men act so differently; for in other common wealths every man knows that un less he provides for himself, how flourishing soever the common wealth may be, he must die of hun ger; so that he sees the necessity of preferring his own concerns to the public; but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the p~blic stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribu tion, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties. . . . 7 The chances are good that More was engaging in superb irony throughout much of this work, that at most it is only an exercise of the fancy. In any event, later writers have presented such fancies with deadly, and deaden ing, seriousness.

Most of the utopian ideas ap pear to have been suggested dur ing this early period, but we had best not stop to explore them. A considerable change had come over utopian literature by the nine teenth century. Indeed, this cen tury was the century of utopians, par excellence. Many intellectuals turned their attention to describ7 Ibid., p. 135. ing perfect societies and offering programs for realizing them. There were utopian socialists, communitarians, anarchists, "sci entific" socialists, syndicalists, and perfectionists. There was a great deal of enthusiasm for utopian projects, and men began actually to try to put them into effect. Utopian Communities The first considerable effort along this line was the communi tarian movement. In general, the idea in founding communities was for a group to separate itself from the corrupting influence of the "world" and arrive at perfection in isolation from contaminating influences. There were a great many such communities at tempted. Some were religious in orientation, for there was a great deal of religious enthusiasm in the first half of the nineteenth ceno tury. Others were secular in origin and aims. But whether religious or secular they were usually com munistic, that is, they proposed to labor for the common good and share equally, or at least accord ing to need, in the goods produced.

America was a popular place to locate such experiments, since they needed physical isolation and' considerable tolerance from politi cal authorities. Some of the more famous of the American communi ties were Brook Farm, New Har1965 THE UTOPIAN VISION 25 mony, North American Phalanx, Amana, Oneida, Nashoba, Fruit lands, Icaria, and the religious communities of the Shakers and Rappites. Two examples of such communi ties will suffice. One of the most famous was the one located on the banks of the Wabash river in Indiana; it was called New Har mony. New Harmony was the brain child, and purse child, of Robert Owen, a wealthy Scottish manufacturer. Owen's idea was to found self-"sufficient villages. As one writer describes his utopia: He saw the world made up of vil lages, rid of the capitalist and free from that private property which was completely incompatible with social .well-being, producing solely for the collective good. . . . Briefly stated, he recommended ... that colonies of workers should be formed on the cooperative principle. These colonies or villages of cooperation with a population varying from 500 to 2000 souls ... were to be engaged in both agriculture and manufactur ing; they were to be housed in great quadrangles located in the midst of each colony, containing the common dormitories, common kitchen and dining rooms, common schools, li brary, reading rooms; guest rooms, etc .... All were to work at suitable tasks according to their ability ....

These villages were to be joined together in a great federation which would replace the old world of the "capitalistic system with its poverty and misery, its injus tice and inequality, its falsehood and deception; and all were to be united in brotherly cooperative effort." 8 In Owen's most ambitious at tempt to put his ideas into effect, the community of New Harmony, he was confronted by continual difficulties for the short time that he continued the effort. Splinter groups of dissenters were continu ally forming and moving off else where. There were complaints about those who ate but did not work. Since decisions were to be made democratically, all work and other activity was frequently stopped for discussions and votes. Some. complained that Owen was profiteering from the sale of land, though he sold the land on credit or gave leases for ten thousand years. "Money had been officially abolished but in every lane and alley the Harmonists privately traded and bargained and bickered over cash."9 "There was trouble over liquor. Prohibition was de creed, but everywhere people were drunk, supplied by sly bootlegging members."lo In short, before its 8 Ibid., pp. 219-20.

9 Everett Webber, Escape to Utopia (New York: Hastings House, 1959), p. 151. 10 Ibid., p. 147.

26 THE FREEMAN February hasty demise New Harmony had witnessed some of the classic ills accompanying efforts to make over men. The Oneida Community, found ed and watched over for many years by John Humphrey Noyes, carried communal sharing to what most would probably consider its logical extreme. To be-specific, in this community they practiced what was called complex marriage. That is, each adult who was a full fledged member of the community might be considered married to every other such adult of the op posite sex. Noyes was a religious leader, and the strange beliefs of the community were a part of the religion he taught. He believed in the possibility of perfection here and now, and those who had ar rived at perfection no longer lived under the old dispensation. In anticipation of the Kingdom of Heaven - which was the name bestowed upon the first establish ment begun by Noyes - he wrote: When the will of God is done . . .

there will be no marriage .. The mar riage supper of the lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quar reling, have no place there, for the same reason as that which forbids the guests ata thanksgiving dinner to claim each his separate dish, and quarrel with the rest for his rights. In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be.... 11 Though the community lasted for a longer period than most such undertakings, it did eventual ly break up. One writer points out that young people went away to college and came more and more "to desire the marriage customs of the world where people were al lowed to fall in love and not re quired to cultivate a specious en joyment at seeing their loved ones bandied through a wide circle of holy hands." 12 Utopian Socialism A second, and related, develop ment in utopian thought in the first half of the nineteenth cen tury was the setting forth of what has been called utopian socialism.

The theory of modern socialism was developed in this period by those whom Marx scornfully dubbed utopians. They were most ly French, and included Morelly, Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ca bet, and Blanc. Fourier and Cabet developed theories, and attempted to apply them in communities. Fourier's dream may serve as an example of these, though they differed con siderably one from another. "In 11 Ibid., pp. 375-76. 12 Ibid., p. 405.

1965 THE UTOPIAN VISION 27 brief, Fourier proposed to elimi nate wasteful competition, and oppressive government, by orga nizing self-sufficient and mainly agricultural units of produc tion."13 These units he called Phalansteres. They would, he thought, solve the problems of production, and each person would be guaranteed a basic standard of living. "Along with this expand ing production, will go an educa tional revolution .... It will raise mankind to perfection in body and mind. . . . Our present teachers slaves to abstractions - know how to produce Neros; we know how to turn potential Neros into men like Gods." 14 Mankind was made for perfec tion and harmony, according to Fourier, not discord and competi tion. His system would achieve the true end of man. "This economic and educational revolution, by housing the population in self supporting, autonomous and self conducted luxury hotels, in which all the occupants would work and play in ind ustrious harmony, would solve the problems of pov erty, war, and wickedness."15All that he needed to get this plan un derway, he believed, was to find 13 John BowIe, Politics and Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, A Galaxy Book, 1964), p. 142.

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 143. a wealthy patron who would fi nance it, and he waited expectantly through his later years for such a benefactor. Several important changes in utopian literature occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth cen tury. For one thing, there was ap parently a great increase' in the number of such. works produc,ed. One book lists the better known ones, mainly in English or Eng lish translation, for the period 1850-1950. This indicates a great concentration of production of such literature from about 1883 to 1912. Only six works are listed from 1850 to 1883; whereas, there are seventy-four works from 1883 to 1912, seven for 1894 alone."16 The Shift from Local Groups to a Worldwide Organization Another development was the shift from the conception of utopian communities to dreams of worldwide organization. As one account has it, "it was: to become rapidly and increasingly apparent that the utopian community was so unrealistic that it could provide no more than a setting for fantasy or satire. Modern utopia must be a state, and indeed it was already beginning to be evident that mod ern utopia must be the world." By some kind of metamorphosis, "the 16 See Negley and Patrick, op. cit., pp. 19-22.

28 THE FREEMAN February economic ideal of utopia, through a kind of economic necessity, be comes the ideal of theworld."17 A third development was the organization of movements to act not in isolated communities but within societies at large, the at tempt to make utopia scientific (as in Comte and Marx), and the development of programs and plans for the realization of the good society, no longer cast in the guise of utopia. In short, men were preparing to achieve utopia in society at large. Steps were be ing taken to translate utopian visions into reformist measures in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Ingl'J!dients of Utopia It may be well, at this point, to sum up and indicate the main strains which went into utopian thought. Utopia was concocted out of a compound of some of man's deepest longings, longings for felicity, harmony, order, peace, security, and repose. Utopian vi sions have had appeal because they embraced remnants of myth ology, relics of religious hopes (quite often transposed), immem orial prejudices, along with no tions borrowed from scientific theories. Some of the ingredients of this compound are worth dwel ling upon.

17 Ibid., pp. 582-83. The IIGo/den Age ll Myth One of the strains that has frequently been woven into the fabric of utopia, or at least evoked by it, is the myth of the Golden Age. This myth appears to have had virtually universal appeal, and even extensive and intensive in doctrination in progressivism in contemporary society does not ap pear to have completely succeeded in exorcising .it. The Golden Age myth locates the time of felicity and harmony in the past. The variations on the particular locale range from the recent past to the Garden of Eden. At its deepest, the Golden Age myth is of a time before man had lost harmony with nature, or with God. In theological terms, it could refer to the time before man be came a moral being, a time before all the travail, tension, and un palatable choices entailed in being moral. In pagan terms, it could re fer to the time when man was simply an animal, guided and liv ing by instinct rather than thought. There have, of course, been many efforts to account for the appeal of the Golden Age myth. Some see it simply as a result of the tendency to romanti cize that which lives only in mem ory, others as the· effort to return to the womb, and so forth.

At any rate, elements from the Golden Age myth crop up in much 1965 THE UTOPIAN VISION 29 of utopian literature. Utopias quite often have strenuous criti cisms of recent social and economic trends, criticisms of everything from the enclosure movement of an earlier time to industrialism in the nineteenth century. It is easy to see that the communi tarian ideas owe much to a ro manticizing of the medieval manor. Robert Owen even wanted to abolish the plow and return to the spade. "The spade," he said, "wherever there is sufficient soil, opens it to a depth that allows the water to pass freely below the bed of the seed or plant .... " Whereas, the plow is a "mere sur face implement, and extremely de fective in principle." 18 Utopians quite often want to be rid of money - the source of the hated cash nexus - and return to primi tive barter and exchange. The appeal of many of their plans is the appeal of the return to prim eval simplicity and felicity.

Heaven on Earth A second ingredient in utopia, quite often sublimated and trans posed in it, is millennialism. Chris tian eschatology places the Golden Age at the end of time rather than at the beginning (or in addition to placing it at the beginning) . Whether this Golden Age is to be for eternity in a transcendental 18 Quoted in BowIe, op. cit., pp. 148-49. Heaven or for a thousand years upon a transformed earth (or that both shall be) has long been a mat ter for controversy. Of course, utopians have used only the con ception of a heaven on earth. For some of them, the Kingdom of God became a kingdom to be made here on earth. In utopian thought, however, millennialism was divorced large ly from its religious content, hu manized, and the vision of heaven quite often became the vision of a materialistic ear,thly paradise. The dictatorship of the proletariat of Marx and Engels does not ap pear to share much in common with the Kingdom which John saw descending to earth in his vision recorded in the Book of Revelations, but Marx turned more than Hegel upside down (or right side up, as he claimed), and his is indeed an apocalyptic vision of the ushering in of the Golden Age.

In short, millennialism was quite often subsumed into utopian thought, placing the Gold en Age in the future, and subtly appealing to deep religious hopes. Progressivism By the latter part of the nine teenth century, however, millen nialism was being domesticated and secularized as progressivism. Progressivism was a third ingre30 THE FREEMAN February dient of utopianism. This state ment needs modifying; progres sivism was a late comer to the scene. Earlier utopias could not have used it. Thus, its major func tion became a mode for the achievement of utopia. Progres sivism, as it is relevant to utopian ism, was born out of technological progress by historical inevitabil ity, evolution being the midwife. The flight from reality owes much of its believability both to evolu tionary theories and technological progress. These, in turn, made the realization of utopia appear pos sible. It is not strange that any one viewing the course of inven tion and industrial development in the modern era should be struck by the great possibilities of hu man ingenuity.

At any rate, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described a state of earthly bliss and devised a theory to make its coming histori cally inevitable. The tools they worked with were technological change, the theory of evolution, and a theory of historical change. By so doing, they associated prog ress with the realization of utopia, and, for those who have sought utopia by way of reform, unwit tingly associated progress with re form - a wholly gratuitous con nection, one might add. Reformers in the twentieth century have got maximum mileage out of the supposed connection between reform and progress. The Static Society A fourth strain in utopianism is the implied vision of life with out tension. To put it another way, though not the way a utopian would describe it, utopia is a land where stasis or absolute stability has been achieved. This does not appear to be compatible with pro gressi vism, any more than pro gressivism is compatible with a Golden Age in the past. But these are logical objections to nonlogical flights of fancy. Consistency is a requirement of dialectical reason, and it must be remembered that Kant had already cut the ground from under such reason.

In the real world, one may be lieve that change, development, even progress, are the products of tension. But in utopia one can have the products of capital without capitalism, the products of inven tion without the incentives to invention, the advantages of free dom without the corollary dis advantages of responsibility, and so on. Why raise difficult questions about the mode of progress with out tensions, without frustrations, without incentives? At any rate, utopia will be a land without ten sions, without that which produces crime, war, and other disorders. There will be no jealousy, no self1965 THE UTOPIAN VISION 31 ishness, no competition, and no abrasiveness in relationships. Perhaps this is an overstate ment of the case. Some utopians did envisage the continued pres ence of some dissidents. Let us take a look at what one utopian Chauncey Thomas in The Crystal Button - proposed to do with such people. They are to be kept in hos pitals, of course. Why hospitals?

Because they are morally de ranged. The explanation contin ues: "Morally deranged?" "Yes, I believe you used to apply the term 'prison' to the institution used for the confinement of moral patients." "They are convicts, then? But why are these associated with your hospi tals ?" "Why not? They constitute a part, though happily a small part of the patients that come under the same management and treatment. We simply treat them as persons who are morally deformed or ailing." 19 Judging by this insight into what utopia will be like, we may be nearer to it than some have thought! Environmentalism and Anarchism A fifth ingredient of utopia has usually been environmentalism. 19 Quoted in Negley and Patrick, Ope cit., pp. 88-89. This has provided utopians with an explanation of sorts for the im perfections which they readily ob served and vigorously denounced. If man is perfect or periectible, if there is no ingrained obstacle within him that would prevent the perfect society, why, one might ask, does perfection not prevail?

One historian explains the utopian view, particularly the utopian so cialist view, in the following man ner: One and all believed that with proper environment man would be actually perfect. He was naturally good, but existing environment with its overwhelming imperfections and maladjustments destined him to evil and woe. 20 The correction of the environ ment, and the education of men, would remove these obstacles to perfection. The Rubicon for such explanations, of course, is how to make an account of why things have not always been perfect. A heady strain in much of nine teenth century utopian thought, particularly that of socialists, was anarchism. Marx proclaimed that the state would wither away. Marx was in a line extending from Godwin and Proudhon through Kropotkin and Sorel. Those utopian socialists who abominated the state and govern20 Hertzler, Ope cit., p. 222.