Anti-Utopias

Anti-Utopias

A body of writings commonly associated with the utopian tradition even though the works seem to be in direct contradiction are variously referred to as anti-utopian or distopian. This group includes some distinguished books, the most famous being Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984. If it is remembered that the primary motivation for all utopian writing is a desire to attack the ills of existing society and to point directions for the amelioration of human society, we will recognize that these anti-utopian documents are not entirely remote from the traditional utopias. Indeed, the anti-utopian works purport to offer utopian solutions to social, economic, and political problems at the outset, but sooner or later—usually sooner—the reader discovers that the author’s real purpose is satirical.The title of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) is intended as an anagram for “Nowhere”; and that, it is recalled, is the translation of “Utopia.”

Erewhon is a remote kingdom not on any map, which the narrator claims to have discovered in his travels. Much of the landscape resembles a region of New Zealand where Butler had lived for a few years. The residents of Erewhon are without contact with any other nation and live according to their own eccentric pattern of civilization. In many respects their life resembles that of contemporary Western civilization rather than Plato’s or More’s plan of society. They are governed by a monarchy, and have lawyers, judges, and prisons. They have money, banks, rich citizens, and poor.

The features of Erewhonian society that surprise the author are those that differ from the England that he knew. According to the early impressions of the travelers, the people all appear to be exceptionally healthy, exceedingly handsome, and altogether contented. Their life style is characterized by simplicity and gracious manners, best described as Arcadian. Gradually, however, oddities, or what appear to be oddities to the visitor, begin to surface. Duplicity pervades every aspect of thought and action. The natives habitually profess agreement to a proposition although they do not believe in it, and their friends are perfectly aware that they do not mean what they say. There are two separate banking systems in operation and two sets of religions. The people give lip service to what they call the Musical Banks, but they transact all serious business with the currency of the other chain of banks. Similarly they recognize a group of deities representing the personification of human qualities—justice, hope, love, fear—and erect statues to them; but their pragmatic morality is evidently dictated by a goddess—Ydgrun (Grundy). More and more they reveal themselves to the traveler as victims of self-deception and inverted logic. Their universities are called Colleges of Unreason, and the principal course of study is Hypothetics.

One of the most eccentric features of Erewhonian life is the interpretation of crime and punishment. Illness is treated as a crime. Sentences of varying degrees of severity are pronounced according to the nature and seriousness of the disease. There are no physicians in the country. Those actions which Europeans consider criminal—theft, fraud, embezzlement—are regarded as weaknesses of character deserving sympathy and help, help which is provided through the ministrations of “straighteners.”

Another surprising feature is the attitude toward machinery. Several centuries earlier, the Erewhonians had attained a remarkable stage of sophistication in the development of machinery, but through the teachings of a prophet they had been persuaded that machines might some day become masters over men, with the result that they destroyed all of the machinery having any degree of complexity and outlawed any further experimentation in the field. They retained only the simplest kinds of implements—spades and scythes—and horses and wagons.

The section of the book dealing with the outlawing of machinery has attracted special attention from students of utopian literature because of its possible bearing on the attitude of certain philosophers who viewed the industrial revolution with alarm and warned of the menace of the machine age. It can hardly be concluded that Butler meant to advocate the elimination of machinery, as some later utopists did, for he treats this attitude as one more example of the susceptibility of the natives to outlandish arguments. Nevertheless, he sets forth the arguments in such a fashion that the reader is obliged to reflect seriously on the issue and recognize in advancing technology some serious threats to human values.

The reader, following the narrator’s shifting attitude from admiration to surprise and finally to contempt, is led to believe that the author is bent on demonstrating the vast inferiority of the Erewhonians to his fellow Englishmen; but it gradually becomes clear that he attributes to Englishmen much of the irrationality and the ingenious equivocations that make the Erewhonians look foolish. The difference is only one of degree. The technique is close to that of Swiftian satire. In some places it is confused and inconsistent, but in other passages it is both clever and devastating, worthy of the master.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) offers a projection of what life on earth might become in another 500 years if technology plays an increasingly dominant role and if government control of all aspects of human activity becomes absolute. Skyscrapers will become taller, factories will become more efficient, travel will be mainly by air, diseases will be virtually eliminated, and universal happiness will be provided through elaborate sports and entertainment programs and through a happiness pill called soma.

The new plan of society does not conform to many of the familiar features of classical utopias. Money is used in much the way it was used in the 20th century—for wages, for the purchase of goods and property, and for amusements and travel. Most radical of the anti-utopian features is the denial of equality. Mankind is classified in a caste system that is achieved through controlled genetics and that insures the society a supply of dull-witted, underdeveloped individuals to perform the less agreeable jobs and those demanding lesser skills.

The application of scientific methods begins in the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.” There humans are bred in test tubes, transferred as they grow to larger jars, and nourished under controlled conditions until they reach the stage for hatching or “decanting.” Even in the test tube stage they are marked for treatment that will produce the type of human desired. The types are labeled alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon, with certain plus or minus grades within each type. In infancy the individuals are scientifically “conditioned” to cultivate certain desires, to abhor certain things, to believe certain truisms, according to the kind of service for which they are designated. The conditioning takes the form of nutritional treatment, electric shock, screeching sirens, or hypnopaedia—that is, sleep-teaching.

Every individual is employed according to his classification—in an office, a factory, a hatchery, on a farm, or flying a helicopter taxi. A great variety of entertainment is provided for after-working hours—sports like electromagnetic golf, Riemann-surface tennis, and centrifugal bumble-puppy. There are lively nightclubs and “feelies,” movies that provide accompanying scents and that also stimulate appropriate tactile sensations. Every evening seems to end with going to bed with someone of the opposite sex. Sexual relations are completely promiscuous. “Everyone belongs to everyone” is one of the clichés drummed into the consciousness through conditioning. There is no such thing as a marriage. Contraceptives are provided by the government to make sure that people will not interfere with the test tube method of producing children. Sex is purely for sport.

The planning of their extensive program of amusements has two main purposes. First, it is intended to stimulate the economy. The games and feelies all require expensive equipment; that means more factories and also more opportunities for people to distribute their pay checks. Second, the government is concerned to keep everybody busy during waking hours to leave them no odd moments for thinking.

This so-called Brave New World, based primarily on advanced technology combined with regimented control, as Huxley presents it, is a horror because it means death to individuality, to liberty, to art and literature—to the spirit of man. The book is one of the most virulent of the anti-utopias.

In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), the society of the year 1984 which Orwell projects for us is based on the assumption that a “limited” nuclear war of the 1950s had left civilization severely crippled and that government controls were seized by well-organized opportunists employing the familiar methods of a police state to maintain power. London, the scene of the novel’s action, is the capital of Oceania, one of three superpowers. The other superpowers are called Eastasia and Eurasia. The city of London contains a few enormous government buildings and a small number of fine apartment buildings, but the vast majority of the buildings are eighteenth- or nineteenth-century houses in dilapidated condition which provide shelter for the common people. There are also a good many neglected bombed-out areas. Certainly this is not a picture of somebody’s dream city.Oceania is completely dominated by the members of “the Party,” a handpicked group of loyal supporters of the government. The mass of the population, the proletariat or “proles,” are purposely kept poor and ignorant and are without any voice in public affairs. Actually, the real power is held by the “Inner Party,” the elite of the Party membership.

The methods employed by the Party to maintain control and to manipulate the population are copied directly from the records of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Any opposition to the system in deed, word or thought is summarily stamped out. Naturally freedom of speech and of the press are suppressed. Spies are everywhere. There are hundreds of posters throughout the city showing the enormous head of a man with steely eyes and heavy black mustache. The caption of the posters reads: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Monitoring screens for official spying are in public places, in hallways, and even in apartments. One’s every action or word may be under surveillance. It represents something of a refinement over wiretapping. People live in constant fear of being detected in some fault or of being suspected of some fault, and there is always present the dread of a banging on the door in the middle of the night. Confessions are wrested even from innocent persons by refined methods of torture.A new form of language called “newspeak” is being developed to facilitate the process of thought control, and there is a movement called “doublethink” whereby the most absurd ambiguities are propounded in all seriousness. The mottoes of the Party are: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The Ministry of Truth deals mainly with propaganda, the Ministry of Peace manages military operations, the Ministry of Love is concerned with matters of law and order, and the Ministry of Plenty regulates the economy.There is, of course, nothing new in all of this program, nothing fantastic such as Huxley’s “Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.” The reader, while he cringes at the horror, keeps repeating to himself, “It can’t happen here.” Nevertheless, Orwell compels us to recognize not only Nazi devices but also certain telltale symptoms in our own social and political practices that cannot help but undermine our complacency.1984 is brutally anti-utopian in every detail, the complete antithesis of the meliorative societies conceived by More and Bacon, by Bellamy and William Morris.The reports of the above books must not be regarded as reviews of them as literary works. They are all cast in novel form with a plot line and cast of characters. Our study is concerned only with those aspects that throw light on the concepts of society reshaped. In each case it is fair to say that the author has concentrated more attention on the “brave new world” concept than on the accompanying romantic fiction.