Our own generation drew the logical conclusion of the Napoleonic premises.

Behold the map of Europe and see how well we have wrought. For alas! this world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

It encourages us in our efforts. Sometimes the light is hidden by the clouds and for a moment we may lose our way. Then the faint light once more breaks through the darkness and we press forward with new courage.

And when life is dull and meaningless (the main curse of all existence) we find consolation in the fact that a hundred years from now, our children shall reach the shore for which we were bound when we ourselves left the bridge and were lowered to the peaceful bottom of the ocean.

And now the sun has gone down and a chill wind blows from Kebnekaise, where the wild geese of little Nils Holgersson live amidst the endless silence of the eternal snow. Soon the top shall be hidden in the mist and I shall have to find my way back by the noise of the steam shovels, plying their elephantine trade at the foot of the first terrace.

The mountain of my fairy story once more will be the profitable investment of a Company of Ironmongers.

But that does not matter.

Lewis Mumford, for whom I am writing this, will understand what I mean.

And I shall be content.

Hendrick Willem Van Loon

Kiruna, Lapland

14 Sept., 1922.

Acknowledgments

The first outline of this book dates back ten years; and since then I have woven it and rewoven it in my mind. The actual work of composition was started by a suggestion from Mr. Van Wyck Brooks; and without Mr. Brooks’ encouragement I should perhaps never have begun or carried through the task. The general background of ideas has been heavily colored by my contacts with Professor Patrick Geddes, through his books and by correspondence; and I owe a debt to him I have not always been able to acknowledge in direct reference or in quotation marks. I take the opportunity here to express the hearty gratitude which might otherwise have been conveyed in the more archaic form of a dedication.

In the revision of the MS. I have been blessed with the generous advice and criticism of a number of friends; in particular, Mr. Clarence Britten, Mr. Herbert Feis, Mr. Geroid Robinson, and Miss Sophia Wittenberg, each of whom performed a unique service. To Messrs. Victor Branford and Alexander Farquharson of the Sociological Society of Great Britain I am indebted for many pertinent suggestions. My thanks are also due to the editors of The Freeman for permission to use extracts from two articles: “Towards a Humanist Synthesis” and “Beauty and the Picturesque.” Finally, Mr. Hendrik van Loon’s friendly interest calls for a departing beam of gratitude.

Lewis Mumford

New York City,

July, 1922.

The Story of Utopias

Ideal Commonwealths and Social Myths

I

How the will-to-utopia causes men to live in two worlds, and how, therefore, we reread the Story of Utopias—the other half of the Story of Mankind.

I

Utopia has long been another name for the unreal and the impossible. We have set utopia over against the world. As a matter of fact, it is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live. The more that men react upon their environment and make it over after a human pattern, the more continuously do they live in utopia; but when there is a breach between the world of affairs and the overworld of utopia, we become conscious of the part that the will-to-utopia has played in our lives, and we see our utopia as a separate reality.

It is the separate reality of utopia that we are going to explore in the course of this book—Utopia as a world by itself, divided into ideal commonwealths, with all its communities clustered into proud cities, aiming bravely at the good life.

This discussion of ideal commonwealths gets its form and its color from the time in which it is written. Plato’s Republic dates from the period of social disintegration which followed the Peloponnesian War; and some of its mordant courage is probably derived from the hopelessness of conditions that came under Plato’s eye. It was in the midst of a similar period of disorder and violence that Sir Thomas More laid the foundations for his imaginary commonwealth: Utopia was the bridge by which he sought to span the gap between the old order of the Middle Age, and the new interests and institutions of the Renaissance.

In presenting this history and criticism of utopias we are perhaps being pulled by the same interests that led Plato and More onwards, for it is only after the storm that we dare to look for the rainbow. Our fall into a chasm of disillusion has stimulated us to discuss in a more thorough way the ultimate goods, the basic aims, the whole conception of the “good life” by which, in modern times, we have been guided. In the midst of the tepid and halfhearted discussions that continue to arise out of prohibition laws and strikes and “peace” conferences let us break in with the injunction to talk about fundamentals—consider Utopia!

II

Man walks with his feet on the ground and his head in the air; and the history of what has happened on earth—the history of cities and armies and of all the things that have had body and form—is only one-half the Story of Mankind.

In every age, the external scenery in which the human drama has been framed has remained pretty much the same. There have been fluctuations in climate and changes in terrain; and at times a great civilization, like that of the Mayas in Central America, has arisen where now only a thick net of jungle remains; but the hills around Jerusalem are the hills that David saw; and during the historic period the drowning of a city in the Netherlands or the rise of a shifting bank of real estate along the coast of New Jersey is little more than the wearing off of the paint or a crack in the plaster. What we call the material world constantly changes, it goes without saying: mountains are stripped of trees and become wastes, deserts are plowed with water and become gardens. The main outlines, however, hold their own remarkably well; and we could have travelled better in Roman days with a modern map than with the best chart Ptolemy could have offered us.

If the world in which men live were the world as it is known to the physical geographer, we should have a pretty simple time of it. We might follow Whitman’s advice, and live as the animals, and stop whining for all time about our sins and imperfections.

What makes human history such an uncertain and fascinating story is that man lived in two worlds—the world within and the world without—and the world within men’s heads has undergone transformations which have disintegrated material things with the power and rapidity of radium. I shall take the liberty of calling this inner world our idolum (idoʻlum) or world of ideas. The word “ideas” is not used here precisely in the ordinary sense. I use it rather to stand for what the philosophers would call the subjective world, what the theologians would perhaps call the spiritual world; and I mean to include in it all the philosophies, fantasies, rationalizations, projections, images, and opinions in terms of which people pattern their behavior. This world of ideas, in the case of scientific truths, for example, sometimes has a rough correspondence with what people call the world; but it is important to note that it has contours of its own which are quite independent of the material environment.

Now the physical world is a definite, inescapable thing. Its limits are narrow and obvious. On occasion, if your impulse is sufficiently strong, you can leave the land for the sea, or go from a warm climate into a cool one; but you cannot cut yourself off from the physical environment without terminating your life. For good or ill, you must breathe air, eat food, drink water; and the penalties for refusing to meet these conditions are inexorable. Only a lunatic would refuse to recognize this physical environment; it is the substratum of our daily lives.

But if the physical environment is the earth, the world of ideas corresponds to the heavens. We sleep under the light of stars that have long since ceased to exist, and we pattern our behavior by ideas which have no reality as soon as we cease to credit them. Whilst it holds together this world of ideas—this idolum—is almost as sound, almost as real, almost as inescapable as the bricks of our houses or the asphalt beneath our feet. The “belief” that the world was flat was once upon a time more important than the “fact” that it was round; and that belief kept the sailors of the medieval world from wandering out of sight of land as effectively as would a string of gunboats or floating mines. An idea is a solid fact, a theory is a solid fact, a superstition is a solid fact as long as people continue to regulate their actions in terms of the idea, theory, or superstition; and it is none the less solid because it is conveyed as an image or a breath of sound.

III

This world of ideas serves many purposes. Two of them bear heavily upon our investigation of utopia. On one hand the pseudo-environment or idolum is a substitute for the external world; it is a sort of house of refuge to which we flee when our contacts with “hard facts” become too complicated to carry through or too rough to face. On the other hand, it is by means of the idolum that the facts of the everyday world are brought together and assorted and sifted, and a new sort of reality is projected back again upon the external world. One of these functions is escape or compensation; it seeks an immediate release from the difficulties or frustrations of our lot. The other attempts to provide a condition for our release in the future. The utopias that correspond to these two functions I shall call the utopias of escape and the utopias of reconstruction. The first leaves the external world the way it is; the second seeks to change it so that one may have intercourse with it on one’s own terms. In one we build impossible castles in the air; in the other we consult a surveyor and an architect and a mason and proceed to build a house which meets our essential needs; as well as houses made of stone and mortar are capable of meeting them.

IV

Why, however, should we find it necessary to talk about utopia and the world of ideas at all? Why should we not rest secure in the bosom of the material environment, without flying off into a region apparently beyond space and time? Well, the alternative before us is not whether we shall live in the real world or dream away our time in utopia; for men are so constituted that only by a deliberate discipline—such as that followed by a Hindu ascetic or an American business man—can one or the other world be abolished from consciousness. The genuine alternative for most of us is that between an aimless utopia of escape and a purposive utopia of reconstruction. One way or the other, it seems, in a world so full of frustrations as the “real” one, we must spend a good part of our mental lives in utopia.

Nevertheless this needs a qualification. It is plain that certain types of people have no need for private utopias and that certain communities seem to be without them. The savages of the Marquesas whom Hermann Melville described seem to have had such a jolly and complete adjustment to their environment that, except for the raids of hostile tribes—and this turned out to be chiefly sport which only whetted their appetites for the feast that followed—everything needed for a good life at the South Sea level could be obtained by direct attack. The Marquesans had no need to dream of a happier existence; they had only to grab it.

At times, during childhood perhaps, life has the same sort of completeness; and without doubt there are many mature people who have manufactured out of their limitations a pretty adequate response to a narrow environment; and have let it go at that. Such people feel no need for utopia. As long as they can keep their contacts restricted, only a deliberate raid from the outside world would create such a need. They are like the sick man in the parable of the Persian poet, whose only desire was that he might desire something; and there is no particular reason to envy them. People who will not venture out into the open sea pay the penalty of never having looked into the bright eyes of danger; and at best they know but half of life. What such folk might call the good life is simply not good enough. We cannot be satisfied with a segment of existence, no matter how safely we may be adjusted to it, when with a little effort we can trace the complete circle.

But there have been few regions, few social orders, and few people in which the adjustment has not been incomplete. In the face of perpetual difficulties and obstructions—the wind and the weather and the impulses of other men and customs that have long outlived their use—there are three ways, roughly, in which a man may react. He may run away. He may try to hold his own. He may attack. Looking around at our contemporaries who have survived the war, it is fairly evident that most of them are in the first stage of panic and despair. In an interesting article on “The Dénouement of Nihilism,” Mr. Edward Townsend Booth characterized the generation born in the late eighties as suffering a complete paralysis of will, or else, “if any initiative remains to them, they emigrate to Europe or the South Sea Islands, or crawl off into some quiet corner of the United States—but most of them continue where they were stricken in a state of living death.” (The Freeman.)