A Modern Utopia

Some thoughts about the super-obscure "Modern Utopia," by HG Wells. This is almost free (99 cents) from Kindle. It's well worth reading for the money, and I encourage people to give it a look.

For one thing, it's a literary tour de force - a totally unique way of dealing with a subject. HG sets a task for himself that's worth noting for those of us who "live in our heads". Thinking about Utopia is a special kind of meditation. What would be a perfect world? HG takes due note of other efforts going all the way back to Plato's Republic and Thomas Mores' Utopia.

HG says you need to jump into this perfect world yourself and imagine this world to be populated by people you recognize as humans like yourself and people unlike yourself. Perhaps imagine a Utopia that doesn't boil down to a world governed by people like you according to your values. Given HG's example, I have found this to be good advice - even a roadmap to encourage us to think in this way - perhaps to examine our own assumptions about what would happen in the perfect world we imagine.

HG actually jumps into his Utopia with a friend who completely rejects the project. The friend wants to imagine an alternate world where his own personal life turns out better. He cares not about the details. Now, is it really possible to imagine a perfect world that doesn't fix your own issues? For example, in my perfect world, I'm a lot younger with all my bad decisions rolled back.

HG has made me think about a lot of stuff - the litmus test for decent literature. Here are a few things worth turning over ...

• HG feels that the only role of government is to guarantee individual liberty. For example, he wants the government to step in to make sure that the liberties of mothers are not compromised by them having children. People interested in the history of socialism will recognize this one. So we see the central role of "liberty" and the germ of sympathy for women (from a man's point of view).
• HG needs some kind of Utopian money. He wants an underlying value. Not gold. Maybe "energy". Not a bad idea, but it side-steps the actual security behind money - debt. HG is a bit vague about the role of debt in the Utopian economy. Interestingly, he wants a woman to assume debt to cover the social cost of raising her children. I find HG's economic (monetary) ideas to be completely implausible, but that's OK because HG explicitly admits the Utopia is his Utopia with all the warts that may afflict his own imagination. 
• In HG's world, legislation and executive authority are trusted in a kind of priesthood. Ironically, HG himself would spectacularly fail the entrance criteria for the elite (HG was a famous womanizer). But one must ask a more better question: would actual humans ever accept the rule of any kind of "morally superior" group? Isn't this a bit like the Communist vanguard or the Chinese Communist party?

HG's line of thinking forces you to consider the details in a way that other "Utopias" don't. This is not entirely different from HG's most famous work: "War of Worlds," which imagines real people caught in an alien invasion. Both are classic examples of the "Science Fiction" method, which is to ask "What If?"

Utopia - Careful What You Wish For

My adventures in literature lead me to "A Short History of Europe" and then a side road to Thomas More's "Utopia". Then to HG Wells' "A Modern Utopia" and, returning to a book that was waiting for all this, "Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberation" and the "Federalist Papers".

The two Utopias and the Papers (as commented on by Deliberation) are about the same subject: what would be the perfect society -- the Utopia that should replace the repressive rule of English kings?

There is a progression from More to the US Constitution of 1787. Most people imagine that the Constitution magically popped into existence as soon as the States declared independence in 1776. In fact, many confuse the stirring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. It took over 10 years for the colonies to establish anything like functioning government. They fought a war with the world's most powerful nation without a functioning government of their own. To cite just one problem, they had no money of their own, and no authority to raise taxes, but real debts (in gold) to foreign creditors. Soldiers who won the battle for independence were never paid and went home to ruinous debt. Some protested and were executed for their trouble.

More's Utopia, set in the 16th century, seems hopelessly naive in many ways. The most cogent criticism offered by HG is that there are no real people in More's world. HG's Utopia, through a masterpiece of inventive storytelling, drops himself into a world full of people, with a companion that's not "buying" HG's idea of perfection. HG's approach is layered, subtle and deeply philosophical. For example, he accepts that, for his Utopia to happen, all of history would need to be retroactively re-written. This apparently didn't bother HG, who simply went on to crank out more utopias, dystopias, and imaginary worlds. He was a founding father of the Science Fiction technique, which is to ask "What If"?

The US Constitution faced the problem "in the flesh". After 10 years of chaos. the French provided the decisive and organized help needed to shake off the yoke of England. American colonies then demonstrated all the faults of "real" democracy. Their attempts to create a stable and effective democracy brought up dozens of hard questions dealt with at length in the Federalist Papers. One can read the Papers as an attempt to set up a real Utopia surrounded by the wreckage caused by real people with (mostly) good intentions. Many of the problems were "structural", which is what the Constitution tried to address (by reserving the right to create money to the Federal government for example but still no standing army). But the Framers were all too aware of the material they were working with - the human beings that make up the government and the governed. I should be remembered that the Republican idea - that a country could be governed by its citizen was, at that time, tested only once - in the French Revolution - that had ended in catastrophe.

It can be said that the American Constitution failed. So far, at least. This should educate us on any project we might entertain to force "democratic" government on a foreign nation with no experience with the concept. A certain minimum of chaos and bloodshed can be expected, nor can we expect the project to end well - with a "democratic" system of government.

Alexander Hamilton, in proposing a Union between the States  saw the possibilities of war between the States:

IT IS sometimes asked, ... what inducements could the States have, if disunited, to make war upon each other? 

Hamilton, Alexander. The Federalist Papers (AmazonClassics Edition) (p. 39). Amazon Classics. Kindle Edition. 

Hamilton goes into lots of causes for such war, missing the cause that actually resulted in war, and provides no real way that the Union he proposes could prevent it.

The American Civil war ended in 1865, fully 89 years from the 1776 declaration of independence, leaving the South devastated and the cancer of racism still festering. What you might say is that, in 1865, you see the modern "United States" finally emerge as a result of war - not the deliberative process imagined by the Founders, but by "the sword", also imagined by the Founders. This was not that different from the wars that swept Europe in the same period. In Europe, the struggle was for a constitution, any constitution, that would reign in the absolute power of the monarch - exactly the issue most famously addressed by the US Declaration of Independence.  These revolutions all failed except, paradoxically, in England, where a constitutional monarchy emerged.

In our time, we have observed the vulnerability of the "American Experiment". It's worth reading the Federalist Papers to understand what was supposed to work and why. If a machine is broken, the first step is to try to figure out how it's supposed to work. Given that, the next question is whether the design itself is sound. Are we dealing with faults or features? Loose bolts or square wheels?

At bottom, the issue is with democracy itself. As HG points out, your "utopia" must be populated by actual human beings. The "Founders" fully understood that there were politicians who would lead the ignorant masses by rhetoric and lies. Part of their strategy was to make sure that the masses didn't exert direct authority - a policy that had had disastrous consequences in living memory. We can see exactly this mistake in the Brexit vote and, needless to say, in the "populism" that drives the Trump presidency.

The Founders needed to slow down the legislative function of government and broaden the inputs. They felt that "small" democracy was unstable and that longer terms for representatives lead to more deliberation and less influence from the masses shouting about the issue of the day. On the other hand, they needed an "executive" that could act quickly, decisively and "energetically".  We see this balance being played out between the "energetic" (many would say "impulsive") presidents, reacting to emergencies that exist only in his mind, and the Congress who are attempting to perform a more deliberative "big picture" role. IF there is an emergency, that's what the "executive" is for.

It doesn't seem that the Founders imagined what would happen if a lunatic somehow won the presidency. They also seemed to place a lot of faith in "deliberation", which ignores the way that legislators actually work - the subject of "Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberation". Party politics, ideology, outright corruption and "horse trading" seem to be, at the very least, as important than calm, sane analysis of policy. It was not long before Congress abandoned all pretext of "deliberation" and resorted to fist fights and duels.

Writing in 1787, they did not see party politics coming. At the time, "ideology" was "tyranny versus democracy". Remember, this is long before Marx took up the challenge to ask questions about the justice of economic policy. In fact, the question of "justice" was hardly on the table in 18th-century political thinking. In 1787, there was no thought of freeing slaves, enfranchising women or how to treat the original inhabitants of the land. The Framer's reluctance to empower the unwashed masses is, at least partly, a decision of a political class to "bake in" power their own class and skin tone  This criticism can still be leveled against all current "Western democracies".

Going back to the Federalist papers, you can see that their goal was to create a stable democracy.

After all this, I confess that I am quite pessimistic about finding Utopia using HG Wells' criteria - working with real people. I think human beings are fundamentally ungovernable and our social arrangements, like our financial markets, are unstable. In the light of history and the thinking of the Founders, we can isolate a few of the causes of instability, but the modern situation adds quite a few more, including the speed of communication, the party system, allowing corporations to be legal persons and so forth.

To put it another way, assuming we survive at all, stability will only come at the cost of democracy. "Revolutions" have a nasty way of causing anarchy and the simple solution to anarchy: tyranny.

• the French Revolution, which gave them Emperor Napoleon
• the Maoist dream & the "cultural revolution"
• "communism" in Russia ending up with Stalinism and Putin
• Pol Pot's Cambodia
• Jim Jones and his Utopia in Guyana

So, when we are tempted by some Utopian dream, we must not forget to ask "Then what?"

White water canoeing is one of my hobbies. When things get exciting, the main idea is to stay afloat. It's not a good time to fight over the paddles.