Krishan Kumar asserts that HG Wells “never wrote a proper utopia, in the strict sense.” This may seem a paradoxical statement regarding the author famous for being the main apostle of scientific utopias, and lends itself to the question: “what is a utopia “in the strict sense”? The term coined by Thomas More in his 1516 novel Utopia has a double meaning. The word is derived from the Greek ou-topos, meaning "no place", although the English homophone "eutopia" is derived from the Greek eu topos, meaning "good place". In this sense, a true utopia can be interpreted as the dream of a perfect place, but also inaccessible. Wells seems to recognize this in his novel A Modern Utopia through the following sentence: “Utopias were once bona fide projects for a new creation of the world and of a most supernatural completeness; this so-called modern utopia is just a simple story of personal adventures among utopian philosophies. Wells's depiction of society is one of "utopian philosophies" put into practice and, therefore, is flawed - in fact, there is a chapter devoted to "failure in a modern utopia". In realizing utopian dreams, we inevitably encounter imperfections, and from there arises “anti-utopia”, or dystopia. The 20th century saw a shift from Victorian interest in utopia to a marked increase in dystopias, and Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) is a pivotal moment in this transition from dreams to the practical limits of reality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris is an example of a utopian dream. Humanity has reached a point of fulfillment where happiness and beauty are omnipresent, evil is almost non-existent, and even the difficulties of work have become a pleasure: “The more you see of us, the more clearly you will understand that we are happy. . That we live in the midst of beauty without any fear of becoming effeminate; that we have much to do and that, on the whole, we enjoy doing it… [England] is now a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoiled, with the necessary dwellings, sheds and workshops scattered across the country, all trim and neat and pretty. The description in this passage of a garden with nothing but happiness and beauty is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden; he looks away from Morris's contemporary Victorian industrialism in an attempt to reclaim the world as it was before the fall. Morris is well aware that his utopia is impossible to achieve, and the description of this world in the title as "Nowhere" clearly shows this intended irony. HG Wells is somewhat critical of the creation of an inaccessible paradise: "If we were free to express our desires without hindrance, I suppose we would have to follow Morris in his Nowhere, we would have to completely change the nature of man and the nature of things; we should make the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect - wave our hands to splendid anarchy, each doing what he pleases, and none content to do evil, in a world so good in its essential nature, also ripe and ripe. sunny, like the world before autumn. He believes that it is better to try to create a formula that moves away from the generalities of previous utopias and towards true human nature. Morris himself concedes that his Nowhere is not a vision or projection of the trajectory of human progress, but an idealized dream. Morris is able to reject any form of government or justice system by removing any form of evil inherent in humanity. Wellswishes, however, to draw the line between idealism and a society that can be practically realized without the need to modify the human disposition: “Our proposal here is at least on a more practical level than that. We must limit ourselves first to the limitations of human possibilities as we know them among the men and women of this world today, and then to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of nature. Wells's utopia may not be a traditional utopia, but its imperfections don't quite rise to the point of dystopia. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World extrapolates some Wellsian ideas, projecting aspects of A Modern Utopia far into the future and displaying concern about how a society of this form can fail. The title is a quote from Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest: “Oh, wonder! / How many beautiful creatures are there here! / How beautiful humanity is! O brave new world, / There are no such people! There is dramatic irony in this passage in that it has been shown that many of the people Miranda sees here for the first time are not such good-hearted men, and in her naivety she cannot conceive of their flaws . By adopting this for the title of his novel, Huxley is commenting on the naivety of his contemporaries and those like Wells who failed to see the negative possibilities of the way their culture was developing. Wells continued in the Victorian vein of believing in the continued development of science and technology, but also in the progression of government: "The State must be progressive, it must no longer be static." Huxley's extension is the assumption that society must inevitably reach a point of flourishing, both in governance and mechanization. The controller, Mustapha Mond, expresses this idea: “It’s curious… to read what was written at the time of Our Ford on scientific progress. They seem to have imagined that this could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else.” He believes that the constant desire to satisfy desires through the development of technology leads us towards a distorted vision of happiness. Life becomes too easy, and because of this simple stasis, emotion, passion, and love are incompatible with the culture of boring pleasure. Huxley worries that the relentless mechanization of humanity removes every component of life's daily difficulties, but in doing so it also removes the true beauties of existence: "Our world is not the same as that of Othello… you can't make tragedies without socialism. instability,” says Mond, “universal happiness makes the wheels turn regularly; truth and beauty cannot. Huxley criticizes this very idea of ​​happiness. It is a sterile existence, certainly without pain or suffering, but also without the major influences that characterize human nature. The Controller tries to convince the Savage that this modern world is a utopia: “The people are happy; they get what they want and they never want what they can't get. They are well-off; they are safe; they are never sick; they are not afraid of death; they are perfectly ignorant of passion and old age; they have neither mother nor father; they have no wife, no children, no love to be strongly attached to; they are so conditioned that they practically cannot help but behave as they should. And if something goes wrong, there's something. Essentially, he explains that the depths of life have been removed, but ignores the fact that the heights have been removed as well. This is in many ways reminiscent of The Birth of Tragedy in thatNietzsche asserts that the most troubled and sensitive societies produce the most beautiful works – true beauty and tragedy can only be realized if the horrors of the Dionysian spirit can be perceived. In response, the Savage refutes this disfigured image of happiness and asserts human nature: “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. George Orwell summed it up well when he said: “although everyone is happy in an empty way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society can continue.” It is symbolic that the Savage returns to nature at the end of the novel, working the land by hand without resorting to machines. George Orwell believed that Huxley directed his criticisms at "the implicit aims of industrial civilization." and this is most clear in this reversal of progress and rejection of mechanization. Thomas Hardy believed that industrialization harmed humanity by separating it from nature, and this is evidenced by the "engine man" in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). : “His thoughts being turned upon himself… hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and not caring at all about them; having only strictly necessary relations with the natives… The long strap which went from the driving wheel of his engine to the red thresher under the millstone was the only line of connection between agriculture and him. This introspective and insensitive attitude represents the tunnel vision of urbanization: progress for progress's sake without consideration for the flaws that modernity can bring. The worker is only connected to the outside world by a “single bond” and this detachment leads to a lack of care. Huxley was writing forty years after Hardy, and it seems that the march of mechanized progress had become an even more important concern. Morris's News from Nowhere was published just a year before Tess and expresses concerns about the progress of his contemporaries in a decidedly different way from Huxley's. Rather than projecting industrialization into the future and showing its follies, Morris's Nowhere is closer to a pastoral, paradisiacal Arcadia of the Middle Ages. Clive Wilmer states that "a dream set in a real or possible place can draw attention to the flaws of contemporary reality", and Morris's dream is undoubtedly England. By placing the protagonist in a place that he knows well, but which has undergone many changes, Morris manages to lucidly contrast his utopia with contemporary Victorian England, and thus to criticize the latter. The most obvious difference is the rejuvenation of nature and the reduction of mechanization: “The soap factories with their smoke-spewing chimneys had disappeared; the engineer's work has disappeared; the lead works have disappeared; and no sound of riveting or hammering came from the west wind from Thorneycroft. Morris sees this new world as purged of evil, and one of the main reasons for this is that man is reunited with nature: "Is not their error once more born of the life of slavery which 'they led – a life which was always regarding all but humanity, animate and inanimate – "nature", as it was once called – as one thing, and humanity as another. It was natural for people thinking this way to try to make "nature" their slave, since they thought "nature" was something external to them. This complements Hardy's notion that industrialization causes a divide between man and nature, and that this divide may be the source of man's insensitivity to progress. In Morris's utopia,humanity has come to accept their position as a part of nature, which allows them to take pleasure in their work and thus achieve happiness in all aspects of life – leisure and work. By slowing the march of human progress to a halt, Morris is able to criticize the blind movement of industrialization. We can criticize human progress by showing its madness in a dystopian world, but also by opposing it to the perfect balance of a static utopia. Labor-saving machines are taken to the extreme in EM Forster's short dystopia, The Machine Stops (1909). This is an early response to Wells' idea that machines can be constantly improved for the benefit of humanity. The purpose of machines was to make life easier and satisfy the daily wants and needs of humanity; Forster imagines a society where this is taken to the extreme, and therefore humanity has no desires outside of the Machine and exists in static fulfillment achieved through mechanization. Human progress has reached a stage where it has been consumed by technology and humanity has lost its relationships with each other and with nature. George Orwell describes the Machine as "the genie which man has thoughtlessly taken out of its bottle and which cannot be put aside". return", and it is this fear of loss of control that Forster expresses. Kuno, the protagonist's revolutionary son, tries to please his contemporaries: "Don't you see, all of you lecturers, can't you have the impression that it is we who are dying and that here below the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine to do our will, but we can't make it do our will now... The Machine is developing - but not on our lines. The Machine advances – but not to our goal. We only exist as blood cells that course through its arteries, and if it could function without us, it would let us die. The death he refers to is not a literal loss of life, but a loss of control over the individual's own humanity. As technology replaces the age-old idea of ​​getting people to things by getting things to people, the need to interact is negated. One can spend their entire life in a single room, communicating only through the Machine and being supported only by the Machine. Humanity is consumed and, in the body of the Machine, life fades. Forster is interested in man's obsessive compulsion to replace life with technology: walking is replaced by airships (an extension of the railway), communication by a form of video calling (an extension of the telephone ) and even music becomes synthetic (an extension of radio). ). Showing a world blurred by mechanization, he warns that the rush to embrace technology can lead to ruin: "Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all visible creatures, the man who had once made God in his image and who had reflected his strength on the constellations, a beautiful naked man died, strangled in the clothes he had woven. It is the naive arrogance of human progress that Forster criticizes – the idea that man is so perfect, so divine, that he can create a substitute for nature, for God. The progress that concerns George Orwell is less linked to technology. Jenni Calder states: "Orwell saw power politics, not science, as the major threat to humanity" and Orwell explains the defeat of the importance of science in 1984: "In the early 20th century... science and technology were developing at an accelerating pace. a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would continue to develop. This could not have happened, in partbecause of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on an empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regulated society. The world as a whole is more primitive than it was fifty years ago. » Confidence in technology in the Victorian era and early 20th century had been shaken by two world wars and multiple revolutions. Although mechanization was seen as a threat, its force had manifested itself in the form of the atomic bomb and there was greater belief in the technological capacity for destruction than in progress. Orwell therefore feared more the growing power of extremist governments. For a brief period during World War II, Orwell believed that there could be real movement toward equality, but in the post-war ashes he lost all faith. The Labor government elected in England in 1945 did not bring about the radical changes he wanted and its advance in Holland, France and Germany after the Allied armies in 1945 deeply shocked him. 1984 was an enlarged projection of a present that contained Stalinism and an immediate past of Nazism; It stands to reason that Orwell feared that the future of humanity would fall into the hands of a draconian totalitarian government. O'Brien captures the violence and oppression of this political progression in this sentence: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face – forever." » The Brave New World political system is a gentler form of totalitarian government that avoids the use of violent oppression through psychological and biological conditioning. The castes of World Controllers and Alphas to the semi-morons of Epsilons are a parody of HG Wells' idea of ​​the samurai, an educated ruling class, and the division of society into the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Boring and the Down. Wells was interested in the idea of ​​"eugenics" based on theories developed in Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This selective breeding aimed at creating an ideal society is extrapolated in Brave New World to the extent that all babies are created to fit into a given caste. As a result, one of the fundamental human relationships – that between a mother and her child – is destroyed. “Viviparous” reproduction is viewed with such contempt that even the word mother is considered an obscenity. This breakdown in human relationships can be seen in The Machine Stops ("Parents, duties of", says the Machine book, "cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483") and 1984: "Almost all children today today were horrible. Worst of all, through organizations such as the spies, they were systematically transformed into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency to rebel against Party discipline. On the contrary, they loved the Party and everything related to it... All their ferocity was directed outward, against the enemies of the state, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be afraid of their own children.” The children's loyalty to the Party, but their hatred even toward their own parents, is an example of how the Party channels relationships between individuals into a single relationship with the state. Communicating, even thinking and feeling, become irrelevant concepts. The only relationship that remains – between the state and its citizens – is the relationship between power and its victims. While familial love is removed from society, passionate and sexual love is also denied. Sexual promiscuity in The Bestdes Mondes is encouraged to the extent that it removes any affiliation between the physical act and an emotional connection. Sex becomes mechanical; Lenina even describes herself as “pneumatic”, while rubbing her thighs. DH Lawrence, writing at the same time, sets out his views on his contemporaries and sex in A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover: “Culture and civilization have taught us to separate the two. the word of the act, the thought of the act or the physical reaction. We now know that the act does not necessarily follow the thought. In fact, thought and action, speech and action are two distinct forms of consciousness, two distinct lives that we lead. We must, quite sincerely, keep a connection. This distortion of gender is an idea that Lawrence is very concerned about and attributes much of it to industrialization. The description of miners as "strange, deformed, and small beings like men" in Lady Chatterley's Lover is an example of dehumanization which, according to Lawrence, is the result of mechanization. Viewed in this light, Brave New World can be seen as concerned with the human progression of sexual relationships. In addition to describing the soulless nature of sex, Huxley implies that the state fears that love can divide allegiances. An important factor in totalitarian government is that society is much more important than the individual. Love gives power to individuals, and therefore the state wishes to eradicate this danger through excessive promiscuity. It is also a way of channeling all desire into harmless physical acts, rather than directing passion against the government. In Calder's words, "Huxley visualizes sex as a means of consuming excess energy, Orwell visualizes sexual repression as a means of generating it." The energy generated in Orwell's dystopia is diverted from the Party to figures such as Goldstein, or the enemy powers of Eurasia or Eastasia. The Party's problem with sex was not simply that the sexual instinct creates a world of its own, beyond its control; sexual repression accumulates into hatred which transforms into “war fever” and “worship of the leader”. Julia describes this: “She put it this way: 'When you make love, you consume energy; and then we feel happy and we don't care about anything. They can't stand you feeling this way. They want you to be full of energy all the time. All that walking up and down and clapping and flag waving is just sex gone wrong. There are mass rallies, public hangings and Two Minutes of Hate, and all of this is a means of sexual repression, while serving the dual purpose of allowing the individual to forget himself and reinforcing the power of the Party. Distorting perceptions of sex and associating it with hatred diminishes human relationships, and it is these relationships that make humanity what it is. Humanity and morality are defined by relationships, and Winston realizes this: "What mattered were individual relationships, and a relationship completely A gesture of helplessness, a hug, a tear, a word addressed to a dying person, could have value in themselves... The proletarians had remained human. They had not hardened themselves internally… “Proletarians are human beings,” he said out loud. “We are not human. » This moment is epiphanic because he comes to the conviction that all the Party's efforts to remain under total control dehumanize the population. These are the “primitive emotions” that constitute humanity, and the state forces them to be repressed and ultimately destroyed. Orwell worries that human progress runs the risk of developing in a political direction.