Man as Machine (Part two)
by TARQUIN O’FLAHERTY
If we know nothing else about him, mere mention of the name, Jerome K. Jerome is almost bound to remind somebody that this is the man who wrote “Three Men in a Boat’, a gentle tale of blokes messing about on a river. Less well known is his 1891 essay ‘The New Utopia’, in which he depicts a future and nightmarish society where everybody, whether they like it or not, is equal. In Jerome’s ‘society’, if equality fails to occur naturally, then it is forced on people. Everybody wears the same (black) clothes and has black (dyed) hair. The populus is required to think the same thoughts, act in the same way, march (or walk) in step with each other, etc. If an individual is too tall or too attractive then that person is surgically persuaded towards the idea of equality. Inevitably,cracks begin to appear…
Now, before we go any further, I would like to point one or two things out.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution people knew their place. You were either a born to rule bloated aristocrat or, from the cradle to the grave, an irretrievable peasant who’s back was aching for the lash. This, to a greater or lesser extent, had been true for centuries, and people had got used to it. Then along came canals and turnips and steam engines and people began to dream. People began to think disgraceful thoughts, have unacceptable ideas. One of these unacceptable ideas was trade unions, membership of which was (naturally) a criminal offence. 60,000 people went on strike in Scotland in 1820. They were put down savagely. This type of widespread repression of unions went on unceasingly up until the mid 1860’s when unions were at first decriminalised, and then, in 1871, made legal.
Two other ‘unacceptable’ ideas began to grow amongst the burgeoning new middle class. The first was an old one, a left-over from the English Civil War, the idea of equality. Whether we find the fact acceptable or not, it was church groups like the Puritans and the Levellers, who advocated most strongly for, and kept alive the ideas of, a society based on the notion of equality, universal suffrage, fair pay and reasonable hours of work. These ideas, the belief in the essential dignity of man, did not originate with, but were brought back together in the 19th Century by people like William Morris and Robert Owen in England and to an astonishing level, by Marx and Engels et al in Russia.
The other idea was the perhaps naive belief in the perfectibility of society; that Utopia was possible. You can easily understand why people believed this. Society had changed out of all recognition. There was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t go on changing, go on improving to the point where a Utopian society was inevitable. Sadly, people didn’t recognise that the road to the English Utopia was paved with dead people.
So, what have we got? What are we left with? People in Edwardian England were very comcerned about the direction in which society was heading. Some wanted Socialism; HG Wells saw Utopia as an inevitable result of this explosion in society; others saw a fairer society for all as a goal. Everybody, with a few exceptions, was very excited about the future.
The few exceptions included Jerome K Jerome and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Later on it would include Fritz Lang, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut.
TO BE CONTINUED…