The Road to Utopia

Dystopian novels and movies have dominated science fiction in recent years, e.g. The Road, The Hunger Games, Blade Runner 2049, Idiocracy, etc. They haven’t entirely squeezed out other types (e.g. The Martian and the Star Trek reboot), but they are at the forefront. To be sure, dystopias always have had a place in the genre (e.g. Metropolis, 1984, the original Planet of the Apes, etc.), but at present we are surprised if a scifi book or film is set in anything else. The dystopian Hotel Artemis (reviewed on this site last week) motivated me to look for something else.

H.G. Wells has occupied space on my bookshelves since I was a boy. The War of the Worlds was the second novel I ever read that wasn’t intended by the author to be children’s literature. (The first was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.) His best-known science fiction tales were written between 1895 (The Time Machine) and 1914 (The World Set Free, which features a war with “atomic bombs” built from radioactive materials), but Wells continued to write on various subjects until his death in 1946. His later books include fiction of a non-scifi nature, A Short History of the World, numerous political/philosophical tracts, and, of course, more scifi. One scifi novel from the later phase that I had missed until a few days ago is the utopian Men Like Gods published in 1923. One must remember that this was shortly after a horrifically bloody war in which 2% of the British population died (concentrated, of course, in a single generation). It was a time of cynicism to put it mildly: the self-styled “Lost Generation.” Utopian dreams were in short supply, but Wells came up with one.

Almost every trope in contemporary scifi has some antecedent in Wells, who more often than not did it not only earlier but better. Men Like Gods posits the existence of parallel worlds in a multidimensional multiverse (yes, 1923); they are possibly infinite in number with the “closest” alternate worlds being most nearly alike. In a world right next door to ours, beings (altogether human but socially far more advanced) experimentally open a door (another “direction”) into our world for a moment. It is open long enough for three cars on the road from Slough to Maidenhead to drive through it. The protagonist, Mr. Barnstable, is a writer for a liberal newspaper. He needs a break from his unsatisfying job and his even more unsatisfying family. His decision to get away from both for the weekend puts him on the fateful road alone in his yellow two-seater. The occupants of the other cars include an aristocratic lady, a greedy power-seeker, a puritanical priest, a beautiful minor celeb, a very intelligent but ultimately amoral conservative politician, and a few other hangers-on. They find themselves in what Mr. Barnstable unabashedly calls Utopia. Handily, the Utopians’ telepathic abilities are advanced enough that when they speak listeners understand them in their own languages provided they can grasp the concepts. Of all the earthlings, only Barnstable likes the place. All the others – the prudish priest most of all – consider the Utopians and their society degenerate.

The Utopians at first glance have an anarcho-communist post-scarcity society. While there is no central authority as such, however, we learn that there are global institutions: “Decisions in regard to any particular matter were made by the people who knew most about the matter.” For example, while there is no money per se in Utopia, there is a global “electrical” accounting system (necessarily run by technocrats) that assures everyone gets what he or she needs and gives back appropriately. The “giving back” (i.e. work) is not very burdensome or time-consuming, and its type is freely chosen: a Utopian is “credited at his birth with a sum sufficient to educate and maintain him up to four- or five-and-twenty, and then he was expected to choose some occupation to replenish his account.” When Barnstable asks what happens if someone doesn’t do that, the answer is, “Everybody does.” Amusingly, Wells in his Utopia still allows artists (presumably including writers such as himself) to “grow rich if their work is much desired.” The Utopians are beautiful and we learn that they practice eugenics (a progressive thing back in the 20s) and they use genetic engineering of plants and animals to tame nature. They wear little clothing (being beautiful, why wear more?) and lack sexual hang-ups. They speak of an Age of Confusion in their history that was very much like 20^th century Earth. The global population is a manageable 250,000,000, far lower than during their last Age of Confusion. (Earth’s population in 1923 was about 1.8 billion; it’s over 7.7 billion today.) They tell Barnstable that the Ages of Confusion are necessary stages, but that they can be transcended. Their science is advanced and they have aims of reaching the stars. There are adventures and problems with the earthlings including infections they brought with them. Eventually Barnstable realizes that as much as he loves Utopia his place is back home where he can do his bit to put Earth on the path to its own Utopia.

The novel, while somewhat preachy, is worth a read on its own merits, but also for another reason. Wells was a Fabian socialist (though he had nothing nice to say about Marxism or Bolsheviks) who very much wished to do his bit to nudge the world step by step to a higher plane. Wells’ vision of Utopia in this novel is helpful in elucidating what he has ultimately in mind in two of his nonfiction books: The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The New World Order (1939). Someone reading those titles for the first time might be forgiven for thinking Wells is scaremongering against these threats. Quite the opposite. He is all in favor of a conspiracy to effect a New World Order and tells the reader how to be a part of it.

There is a belief among some conspiracy theorists that, going back to the time of Cecil Rhodes, there has been a conspiracy of an international elite to create (as summarized by Wells) a New World Order that is a single, globalized, corporatized, fundamentally undemocratic (despite democratic window dressing) social welfare world-state run by technocrats. The theorists don’t mean a conspiracy by some fanciful secret Illuminati sect (well, all but a fringe don’t mean that) but by actual elites who meet in publicly acknowledged (but closed to the public) settings such as the meetings of the secretive Bilderberg Group or the more formal WTO Ministerial Conferences. Does such a conspiracy exist? The short answer is yes. The Bilderberg Group in particular tends to draw attention precisely because of its efforts to avoid attention. Major political, financial, and business figures attend, but you cannot buy your way into it. It is by invitation only. Just as a small sample, among the attendees have been Henry Kissinger (the author of World Order still attends at age 95), David Rockefeller, Margaret Thatcher (prior to her stint as PM), Bill Clinton (prior to being elected President), Tony Blair (prior to being elected PM), Angela Merkel (prior to being elected Chancellor), Bill Gates, David Petraeus, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, Hillary Clinton, Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, Jeff Bezos, and The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. The meetings are not recorded, no notes are kept, and attendees agree not to publicly identify a speaker afterward with anything he or she might say in the meeting. Said Labour MP Denis Healey who was on the Bilderberg Group's steering committee for three decades, “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair.” With regard to invitations he said, “We make a point of getting along younger politicians who are obviously rising, to bring them together with financiers and industrialists who offer them wise words.”

So, does this shadow elite actually govern the world, making (as some theorists would have it) the politics that dominates the news a mere puppet show to distract the populace? The short answer (for well or ill) is no. They may be influential and they may be (to a degree) like-minded, but their influence is limited. They are thwarted time and again: especially by populist movements, be they mild or radical (in the latter case all too often murderous) and be they on the Left, the Right, or some other (such as religious) direction. No wonder “populism” was on the 2018 meeting agenda last June. Perhaps, though, history flows their way in the longer run despite many sanguineous setbacks along the path. Whether it flows to Utopia the reader can judge.

As for my opinion, I’ll go along with something said by Henry Kissinger decades ago in another context: “We have always believed that every problem must have a solution and that good intentions must necessarily guarantee good results. Utopia was seen not as a dream but as our logical destination if we only traveled the right road. Ours is the first generation to discover that the road is endless, and that in traveling it we shall find not utopia but ourselves.”

Alanis Morissette – Utopia