9

War Is Peace: Conscription and

Mobilisation in the Modern Utopia

‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.

‘6097 Smith W.! Yes, you!’
(George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four) r1

One of the defining features of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Fourr is its por-

trayal of a future engulfed in perpetual warfare. Oceania, we are told, is
at war with Eurasia (or is it Eastasia)? There are newsflashes reporting
‘glorious victories’ on remote fronts, while rocket bombs fall regularly
on London and enemy prisoners of war are hanged in the city’s parks.
The people are weary, shabbily dressed and undernourished. Constant
war propaganda is needed to justify the universal mobilisation that the
ruling Party imposes on its members and, to a lesser extent, the whole
workforce. Winston Smith is a civilian, but his day begins with compul-
sory physical jerks in front of the telescreen, with a female instructor
resembling the traditional sergeant major bawling out recruits on a
military parade ground. Later Winston will attend the daily ritual of
the Two Minutes Hate. His peaceful, apparently humdrum existence as
a civil servant is completely circumscribed by the atmosphere of war.
Nineteen Eighty-Fourr is a visionary satire with close and well-known
links with other twentieth-century dystopias such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. All these works have more in
common than is often acknowledged with the modern positive utopias
that attempt to imagine a future without war. To begin with, they all
share the distinguishing features of the modern utopia (as outlined in
Chapter 1). They are future states with a political constitution that we
could theoretically work towards, not parts of our own world whose
existence is more favoured than ours. They are world states or (as in
Nineteen Eighty-Four)r parts of a fragmented world society, not isolated
129
130 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

enclaves difficult to pinpoint on any map. They are states involving a

new form of organisation that only modernity (including technologi-
cal modernity) has made possible. This organisation, moreover, is seen
as an end in itself, not as a means towards the fulfilment of some pre-
existing ideology such as Christianity or millenarian socialism. At the
same time, following H.G. Wells’s assertion in A Modern Utopia that any
utopia after Darwin must be kinetic rather than static, they are societies
still in the process of development and change. Nineteen Eighty-Four, r for
example, is set at an interim stage in the adoption of Newspeak, the
official language intended to make totalitarian thought control far more
effective than it appears to be in Winston’s generation.
The modern utopia as defined here is neither a becalmed Arcadia like
William Morris’s Nowhere, nor a luxurious country club for tired art-
ists like Henry James’s ‘The Great Good Place’ (1900).2 It is more like a
motor-car assembly line than the Land of Cockaigne or Big Rock Candy
Mountain. In most if not all cases, it is a utopia of mobilisation rather
than a utopia of perfection, a land of massed marches and public spec-
tacles rather than a lotus-eater’s paradise. Its egalitarianism shades into
totalitarianism, however much individual utopian authors from Edward
Bellamy to Ursula K. Le Guin have tried to resist this conclusion. Its
metaphors, beginning with the ‘industrial army’ of Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward 2000–1887, are not millenarian but military and
scientific.
One may argue, of course, that the modernity of the modern utopia is
not all that it seems. In Zamyatin’s We, the protagonist D-503, mouth-
ing the official state ideology, claims that there is an ‘impassable abyss
between the past and the present’. The teasing agent provocateurr I-330
disputes this: ‘But why impassable? A bridge can be thrown across an
abyss. Just think: drums, battalions, ranks – all this has also existed
in the past’.3 Serious visions of the classical utopia (as opposed to the
earthly paradise) have always been to a greater or lesser extent mobilised,
beginning with Plato’s Republic, which is based on the Spartan ideal of
the militarised city-state. It is no accident that in both Zamyatin’s One
State and the Republic of Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985), the heavily armed police forces are known as Guardians.
The innovation of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Bellamy was
to apply utopian mobilisation to the process of industrial production,
abolishing scarcity and guaranteeing a level of wealth and prosperity
in which everyone can share. Bellamy’s vision of modern industrialism
has its roots in the French utopian socialists of fifty years earlier, yet in
Looking Backward d he went to great lengths to disguise the full extent of
 War Is Peace 131

mobilisation in the twenty-first-century Boston that his novel depicts.

The huge popularity of Looking Backward d as a social blueprint in the late
nineteenth century very probably reflects this decision to stand aloof
from the day-to-day reality of an ‘industrial army’. Labour is seen from
an essentially managerial position, reducing it to a mechanical abstrac-
tion or a functional spectacle. Not all readers, however, were taken in.
Not only did William Morris write News from Nowhere in protest against
Bellamy’s militaristic ideal, but Morris’s daughter May reported her
father’s instant reaction to reading Looking Backward: ‘if they brigaded
him into a regiment of workers’, Morris said, ‘he would just lie on his
back and kick’.4

The moral equivalent of war

Bellamy’s original plan was to open Looking Backward d with a military

parade in North Carolina in the year 3000. His first draft presents ‘a
gala picture of an annual muster day’, the occasion when new recruits
were conscripted into the industrial army.5 However, he revised his text
to bring his utopia much closer to his own times, and the published
novel opens in Boston in the nineteenth century (on 30 May 1887) with
a brief reference to an annual military procession to honour the dead
in the American Civil War. The Civil War, in fact, provides an essential
historical context for Looking Backward, since the modern system of
conscription (invented by the revolutionary French Republic in 1798)
was introduced into the northern United States by the 1863 Enrollment
Act, creating the Union Army. By the 1880s, countries such as France
and Germany had adopted the principle of peacetime military service
as a basic constituent of social solidarity. Bellamy’s industrial army
extends that principle from soldiering to all forms of economic activ-
ity, conscripting everyone – or, as we shall see, nearly everyone – for a
period of twenty-four years’ not particularly hard labour between the
ages of 21 and 45.
Far from beginning Looking Backward d with a muster-day parade,
Bellamy never actually shows twenty-first-century Boston on parade at
all. Of all utopian texts this is the most stay-at-home. Julian West falls
asleep in 1887 in his own home, waking up 113 years later in another
house built on the same site; he soon becomes a fixture in his new
dwelling, joining the family of Dr Leete (who now occupy it) and even-
tually getting engaged to the daughter of the house. West never leaves
the domestic interior except to go shopping or visit the communal
dining hall. There is no suggestion of recruiting him into the army of
132 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

labour, but Dr Leete, his wife and daughter also stand apart from it. The
reason for this, as Leete explains in one of the leisurely conversations
that take up most of the novel, is that members of the liberal professions
are exempt from military discipline; moreover, his daughter is presum-
ably under 21. As for Mrs Leete, women (her husband tells us) are part of
the industrial army but ‘leave it … when maternal duties claim them’.6
So we have the extraordinary paradox that on the one hand, as
Krishan Kumar observes, in Looking Backward d the ‘military analogy is
worked through precisely and in detail’,7 yet on the other, Bellamy con-
veys no direct experience of mobilisation whatever. The logic of his uto-
pian society is production oriented, highly disciplined, meritocratic and
based on a strict separation of ranks. What we actually see, however, is
the leisured and privileged existence of the Leete family together with
the numerous opportunities for consumption that they enjoy.8 Looking
Backward d differs from the vast majority of utopias (before or since) in
its unexplained retention of the bourgeois nuclear family. West, moreo-
ver, shows no curiosity about the individual people, as opposed to the
social systems, outside the Leete family. However understandable it may
be for Bellamy to delegate the task of explaining the new society to an
intelligent senior citizen with time on his hands, the fact that his main
utopian characters are a retired professional man and his under-age but
marriageable daughter can seem tiresomely artificial.
Reading Looking Backward d between the lines we will, in any case, find
something rather different from the relaxed and affluent exterior that the
Leetes present. What Bellamy offers is, in some respects, a sanitised fore-
cast of the condition of life that twenty-first-century global capitalism
claims to be able to offer to everyone – contrasted with brief, nightmar-
ish perspectives on the actual conditions of nineteenth-century Boston.9
Nevertheless, in certain respects his future society fails to live up to its
own ideals of equality and social justice. For example, Dr Leete’s explana-
tion that the physical superiority of the twenty-first-century Bostonians
is the ‘effect of untrammeled sexual selection upon the quality of two
or three successive generations’, in other words of ‘race purification’
through eugenics (161), was quoted in Chapter 5. No details are given
(though Leete attributes the ‘improvement of the species’ to the institu-
tion of the welfare state), and nothing is said about black Bostonians
(136). One group who are clearly stigmatised are the physically and
mentally disabled, who are forced to join an ‘invalid corps’: ‘All our
sick in mind and body, all our deaf and dumb, and lame and blind and
crippled, and even our insane belong to this invalid corps, and bear its
insignia’ (80). Crime, moreover, has been medicalised, or as Leete puts it:
 War Is Peace 133

‘All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals’ (121). The industrial
army is divided into an officer corps and three different grades of other
ranks. Men refusing to do their allotted duty are sentenced to solitary
imprisonment on bread and water. Members of the industrial army have
no votes; the special treatment of the professional classes, which benefits
Dr Leete, is compounded by the fact that they alone get to choose the
President. By twenty-first-century standards this socialist utopia is not
only undemocratic but quite disturbingly cruel and repressive; yet, as
Kumar reminds us, Bellamy’s ideal of a future society ‘mobilised, as in
war, in the face of a great national emergency’ has continued to appeal
to revolutionary thinkers down to our own day.10
When Julian West and the Leetes go to the municipal dining hall,
they are served by a waiter with ‘the manner of a soldier on duty,
but without the military stiffness’ (94). This near-oxymoron tells us
little – except that the waiter was businesslike rather than servile – but
it suggests that in twenty-first-century Boston mental attitudes, too,
have changed and that membership in the industrial army has become
a source of pride as well as an obligation. Even a routine act such as
waiting at table has become what philosopher William James would
soon be calling a ‘moral equivalent’ of war. James, born in 1842, was an
older contemporary of Edward Bellamy; he regarded himself as a pacifist
and some of his younger brothers had fought in the American Civil War.
His 1906 pamphlet ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ seeks to find a middle
ground between what he calls the utopia of the ‘war-party’, based on
perpetual deterrence, and that of the ‘peace-party’. It is James who first
states the paradox that would become one of the founding principles
of Orwell’s Oceania:

Every up-to-date dictionary should say that ‘peace’ and ‘war’ mean
the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably
be said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the
r permanent, unceasing.11
nations is the real war,

Yet James adds that all-out warfare under modern technological condi-
tions would be disastrous for those who engage in it. The alternative
is to turn the ‘old elements of army-discipline’ to new ends, conscript-
ing the whole of the youthful population into what James calls an ‘army
enlisted against Nature’ – in other words, an industrial army dedicated
to the ends of socialism and world peace (287, 290). James’s prescription
for a peaceful but mobilised state closely resembles the ‘army of indus-
try [which] is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization,
134 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its

members’ of Looking Backward d (59).
For James, a ‘moral equivalent’ of war is needed because mankind’s
‘innate pugnacity’ and ‘ideals of hardihood’ must find expression in
any future society (269, 276). He sees the ‘martial virtues’ of ‘intrepidity,
contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, [and] obedience to
command’ as ‘absolute and permanent human goods’ (287–8). By con-
trast, the peaceful utopias of his time were ‘mawkish and dishwatery’,
impervious to the scorn of inferiority, which is the ‘keynote of the
military temper’: ‘“Dogs, would you live forever?” shouted Frederick
the Great. “Yes,” say our utopians, “let us live forever, and raise our
level gradually”’ (284–5). James’s alternative of universal conscription
combines a Puritanical work ethic with the romanticisation of manual
labour in the age of heavy industry:

To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in

December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing,
to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes,
and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted
off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of
them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and
soberer ideas. (291)

James specifies that the ‘gilded youths’ will become ‘part of the army
enlisted against Nature’, an army that apparently consists of the whole
industrial proletariat. That class is (as he perhaps carelessly implies)
external to ‘society’, and the idea that its labour could offer a ‘moral
equivalent of war’ suggests that the working classes oughtt to be subjected
to some degree of military discipline. In fact, James’s high-minded ideal
is not that far from the (equally utopian and high-minded) justification
for the methods of assembly-line production put forward by his slightly
younger contemporary Frederick Winslow Taylor in The Principles of
fi Managementt (1911).12 Equally, James’s rhetoric of a war ‘against
Scientific
Nature’ suggests that it is human muscle power rather than technology
that is to be pitted against nature, disregarding the predictions of uto-
pians such as Bellamy that the application of technology would greatly
increase the availability of leisure time and shorten the hours of neces-
sary labour. There is another consideration, too, since a war ‘against
Nature’ must also set its sights on human nature – and on human nature
in general, not merely the idleness of ‘gilded youths’ that James makes
one of his primary targets. In the aftermath of the First World War,
 War Is Peace 135

D.H. Lawrence for one would offer a powerfully imagined picture of a

mobilised society pursuing a war against both nature and the industrial
workers.
Lawrence, like William James, is not usually considered a utopian
thinker, but he evidently knew something of The Principles of Scientific fi
Management, t and understood and feared the utopian impulse that lay
behind it. In Taylor’s vision of industrial reorganisation, enlightened
management cooperates with an educated workforce to bring about
greater prosperity for all. Taylor’s main contribution, however, was to
advocate the use of time-and-motion study and other forms of scien-
tific expertise to force through radical changes in the culture of the
workplace. The ‘Industrial Magnate’ chapter of Lawrence’s novel Women
in Love (1920) describes Gerald Crich’s reorganisation of the coal mines
he owns, a reorganisation on Taylorian lines to which the miners
helplessly – and, it seems, willingly – submit. David Craig has shown
how far this is from reflecting the actual industrial history of the pre–
First World War Britain in which the novel is set.13 What Craig fails to
notice, however, is that Lawrence was almost certainly responding
to the phenomenon of mass mobilisation on the battlefields of Flanders
and Picardy – the system of trench warfare in which hundreds of thou-
sands of disciplined conscripts went to their deaths apparently without
any large-scale protest – and transposing it to the pre-war context of the
mining industry. Gerald, an ex-army officer who has fought in the Boer
War, applies the lessons of military discipline to bring about a manage-
rial revolution, creating a ‘great and perfect system that subjected life to
pure mathematical principles’:

The working of the pits was thoroughly changed, all the control was
taken out of the hands of the miners, the butty system was abolished.
Everything was run on the most accurate and delicate scientific
method, educated and expert men were in control everywhere, the
miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments. They had to
work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible and heart-
breaking in its mechanicalness.
But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the
hope seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanical.
And yet they accepted the new conditions.14

Not only is Gerald’s dehumanised industrial army the perverse embodi-

ment of a ‘moral equivalent of war’, but – unlike James’s wholly secular
essay – it also constitutes a kind of crusade. Utopian novelists before
136 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

Lawrence had tended to portray the industrial army as a church mili-

tant transforming humanity in spiritual as well as material terms. The
English hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ dates from 1865, the time of
the American Civil War, and in 1878 ‘General’ William Booth founded
the Salvation Army. Bellamy in Looking Backward d preaches a ‘religion of
solidarity’, while H.G. Wells in A Modern Utopia entrusts the construc-
tion of utopia to the quasi-religious and quasi-military Order of the
Samurai. For Lawrence in Women in Love, Gerald’s work in the mines is
a vast perversion of orthodox religion. In this ‘great and superhuman
system’, Lawrence writes, Gerald Crich was

the God of the Machine, Deus ex Machina. And the whole productive
will of man was the Godhead. He had his life-work now, to extend
over the earth a great and perfect system in which the will of man ran
smooth and unthwarted, tireless, a Godhead in process. (239)

Lawrence’s industrial army thus joins religion to mechanism and math-

ematics, just as Yevgeny Zamyatin does in We, which, like Women in
Love, was first published in 1920. Each writer was responding to a con-
temporary external reality, Lawrence to trench warfare on the Western
front and Zamyatin to Soviet Communism in the East. Each runs ahead
of that reality to imagine the construction of a totalitarian – meaning a
totally mobilised and militarised – order.

Numbers on the march

It is true that Zamyatin’s One State does not describe its citizens as
soldiers. Instead the preferred word is ‘number’, conveying that people
are mere ciphers or abstractions, not human beings. The state in We is
a ‘single, mighty, million-celled organism’ of which the individual is a
‘molecule’, but Zamyatin’s narrator also frequently states the relation-
ship of the individual to the mass in religious terms, saying that ‘we are
the Church, one and indivisible’ (137, 216); the state is ‘God’, and the
spectacle of a public execution is a ‘solemn liturgy’ or sacrifice (45–6).
The people have been ‘nurtured from earliest infancy in the Taylor
system’ (179) and, as a result, the state is visibly regimented and drilled.
Everyone has to turn out for the daily parade, but in fine weather
many also choose to take an ‘additional walk’ (in fact a mass march)
during the so-called personal hour in the afternoon. Recalling Bellamy’s
abandoned opening to Looking Backward, the first passage of extended
description in We is D-503’s account of one of these ‘personal hours’:
 War Is Peace 137

As always, the Music Plant played the March of the One State with
all its trumpets. The numbers walked in even ranks, four abreast,
ecstatically stepping in time to the music – hundreds, thousands of
numbers, in pale blue unif[orm]s, with golden badges on their breasts,
bearing the State Number of each man and woman. (5)

The passage seems prophetic of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, but Zamyatin

extends the notion of ‘stepping in time to the music’ even to the eating
habits of the future. The people sitting in communal dining halls make
‘fifty prescribed chewing movements to each bite’, once again in unison
(102). The idea of marching in step is fundamental to We, but the novel
is also full of the dangerous possibilities of interruption, of getting out
of step, and the emotional turmoil that this causes. D-503, the narra-
tor and protagonist, can claim special insight into the ‘mathematically
perfect life of the One State’ thanks to his professional training in math-
ematics and physics (2). The diary entries that make up his narrative
begin as an exposition and justification of the state ideology, but soon
turn into an expression of frantic self-division. He is the chief engineer
of the One State’s pioneering spaceship but, as the novel develops, he
is increasingly drawn into the underground opposition. His mental
torment is finally resolved when he undergoes a surgical operation to
remove his ‘soul’ or imagination, and then betrays his former comrades,
including his lover I-330. The One State remains in a state of rebellion,
but D-503, at least, is back marching in step.
Like Dr Leete in Looking Backward, D-503 is a highly privileged and
special individual, even if he is in many ways treated like an ordinary
number. He is one of his society’s top scientists and, not coincidentally,
is fought over by three women. His diary is offered as a record of ‘what I
see and think, or, to be more exact, what we think’ (2), but this attempt
to expunge the first-person singular soon becomes an empty gesture,
even though it provides the novel with its title. Typically, D-503’s nar-
rative position is above the masses, not with them, as in the following
scene where he pauses to watch a team of mechanics at work on his
spaceship:

I watched the men below move in regular, rapid rhythm, according

to the Taylor system, bending, unbending, turning like the levers of
a single huge machine. … I saw transparent glass monster cranes roll-
ing slowly along glass rails, turning and bending as obediently as the
men, delivering their loads into the bowels of the Integral. And all of
this was one: humanized machines, perfect men. (82)
138 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

It is true that immediately after this D-503 momentarily joins the

assembly line, but Zamyatin’s emphasis is on the social machine as aes-
thetic phenomenon, something to be observed and appreciated from a
distance. The narrator’s special status is confirmed near the end of the
novel when he gets a direct phone call from the ruler of the state (the
Benefactor), with an order barked down the phone to ‘Report to me at
once’ (210).
The position of the observer watching from above is equally promi-
nent in Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899; revised as The Sleeper
Awakes, 1910), where the Sleeper, Graham, looks down from a high
building at the industrial armies marching in the street before being
told that he is their nominal ruler. This is the most Bellamy-like of
Wells’s novels, although it is full of the civil strife and industrial unrest
that are completely absent in Bellamy. The Sleeper Awakes was Orwell’s
favourite among Wells’s novels, and like We it furnishes a model for the
Orwellian dystopia. However, there are also military motifs in Wells’s
positive utopian writing – notably in his film script for the Alexander
Korda film Things to Come (1936), where the primitive fascist warlord is
overcome by the disciplined pilots of ‘Wings over the World’, a futur-
istic air force armed with the anaesthetic ‘Gas of Peace’. In contrast to
this idealisation of chemical warfare, A Modern Utopia seems at first sight
to be completely unmilitaristic. It is a world state, so ‘the ugly fortifica-
tions, the barracks and military defilements’ of our world are no longer
needed, although Wells does envisage the use of armed guards to patrol
criminal settlements (78, 101). Since everyone must work to earn the
means of subsistence, Wells’s utopian visitors briefly become unskilled
labourers, but the direction of labour is assigned to a purely civilian
bureaucracy conceived on Fabian lines. Nevertheless, the society is run
by the elite managerial corps of the Samurai, named after the traditional
Japanese warrior caste, whose task is to take the process of utopian con-
struction still further forward. The Samurai may be seen as an anticipa-
tion of the Leninist communist parties with their militant ‘cadres’, but
the rhetoric of A Modern Utopia is religious and millenarian rather than
military. The narrator of Wells’s story is searching for his ‘double’ in
Utopia, and his double is, needless to say, one of the Samurai, a member
of management rather than a factory worker.
Wells returned to the idea of the Samurai in his non-fictional treatise
First and Last Things (1908), two passages from which William James
cited at length in an expanded conclusion to ‘The Moral Equivalent of
War’ (293–4), even though Wells himself would later expunge them.15
In the first passage, Wells describes military organisation as existing on
 War Is Peace 139

a ‘higher social plane’ than that of capitalist competition. It is military,

not civil life that provides regular employment and promotes tech-
nological progress through the endowment of research.16 A few pages
later Wells predicts that the ‘phase of universal military service’ is one
through which humanity must necessarily pass, since ‘the concep-
tions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of
physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal responsibility’ can be
learned in no other way. Yet, he assures us, this ‘phase’ is a prelude to
‘the coming of the ultimate Peace’.17 For Wells (both at this time and
later) such a peace incorporates the ‘moral equivalent of war’, and the
same idea was inherited by the pacifist thinkers of the next generation,
notably through the medium of the Encyclopædia of Pacifismfi that Aldous
Huxley would edit (and, for the most part, write) for the Peace Pledge
Union in 1937. Here there is a section explicitly devoted to William
James’s proposal.18 Five years earlier, however, Huxley had published his
modern (anti-)utopia in which both war and its ‘moral equivalent’ seem
at first sight to be conspicuously absent.

The return of the repressed: Demilitarisation

in Brave New World d and its successors

Huxley’s New World has none of the obvious signs of militarisation:

the rigid discipline, the self-surrender, the massed marches. Its people
ostensibly worship the god of production (‘Our Ford’), but its effective
religion is one of unending consumption. Huxley is less interested
in the industrial assembly line than in the new science of biological
assembly – the manufacture of more or less identical human beings
who will automatically fall into line without the need for an imposed
military discipline. The novel opens, therefore, with a guided tour of the
Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the Director
describes the ‘Bokanovsky process’ of human cloning as the ‘principle
of mass production at last applied to biology’:

‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!’

The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know
where you are. For the first time in history.’ He quoted the planetary
motto. ‘Community, Identity, Stability.’ Grand words. ‘If we could
bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.’19

The ‘problem’ to which the Director refers is in fact twofold. The avail-
ability of identical batches of workers contributes to factory discipline,
140 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

removing a potential source of social instability. But the Bokanovsky

process, let alone the possibility of ‘indefinite’ Bokanovskification,
also implies an almost unlimited prospect of population growth. This,
ultimately – rather than the numerous measures taken, we are told, to
stimulate demand artificially – is presumably what underwrites the con-
tinual economic expansion to which the New World is committed. We
may suspect that there is a fundamental contradiction between the phi-
losophy of economic growth and the aim of social stability, but – for all
the richness of Brave New World’s exploration of utopian ideologies – this
particular issue is never confronted. Huxley simply takes it as read that
industrial civilisation requires a huge, fully employed and preferably con-
tented proletariat. Once again, this is a society divided between an elite of
intellectuals and scientists and a virtually unseen mass, and the view we
are given is strictly from the officers’ ranks and not from any lower caste.
The central utopian proposition in Brave New World d is that (as Henry
Foster tells Lenina Crowne while they are flying over the Slough
Crematorium) “‘Everybody’s happy now’” (59). Happiness is assured
not only by the processes of hatchery and conditioning, but also by
universal addiction to the drug soma. It is no accident that the novel’s
first outbreak of social disorder occurs when the outsider in Huxley’s
New World, John the Savage, prevents a group of hospital porters from
receiving their daily soma ration. Riot police (armed with ‘water pistols
charged with a powerful anæsthetic’, a neat Huxleyan joke) are called
in and the disturbance is instantly suppressed (148).
This scene is followed by the confrontation of Huxley’s protagonists
Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson and John the Savage with the World
Controller Mustapha Mond, a scene towards which Huxley’s narrative
logic has been moving all along. (Similarly, A Modern Utopia reaches
its climax with its narrator’s meeting with his Samurai double, and
Nineteen Eighty-Fourr leads up to Winston’s intimate torture sessions
with the Inner Party member O’Brien.) Mustapha Mond sends Bernard
and Helmholtz into exile – the normal and not unenviable fate, he
suggests, of dissident intellectuals – but the main purpose of the meet-
ing is to allow him to debate the meaning and purpose of utopia with
John the Savage. Here a book by William James, The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), forms one of the reference points, and the Savage
speaks up for James’s ‘martial virtues’ while Mond insists that ‘civiliza-
tion has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are
symptoms of political inefficiency’ (161). There is, however, as Mond
later concedes, a distinction between civilisation’s ‘needs’ and the unre-
generate demands of individual psychology. The fact that the members
 War Is Peace 141

of the elite in the New World resemble their twentieth-century ances-

tors in most (but not quite all) respects is one of the main sources of
Huxley’s satire. For example, we see throughout the novel that the more
‘well-adjusted’ the New World people are, the greater their reliance on
soma and other drugs to maintain emotional stability. The ‘feelies’ sup-
ply vicarious doses of heroism and passion to a population conditioned
not to want direct experience of these things. In addition, regular
treatments with ‘Violent Passion Surrogate’, or ‘V.P.S’, have been made
compulsory in the interests of psychological health (163). In Huxley’s
infantilised society a moral equivalent of war is still necessary, but only,
Mond thinks, at second hand. And the novel ends with a riotous orgy
that calls this whole pharmaceutically imposed order into question.20
In 1962 Huxley published Island, his fable of a present-day utopian
enclave threatened by an aggressive, expansionist neighbour. Militarism
in Island
d is represented by Colonel Dipa, the dictator of Rendang, while
the Buddhist inhabitants of Pala have no army. The case against war
and its ‘moral equivalents’ is put in a dialogue involving Murugan,
the young Raja of Pala who was brought up overseas and who despises
his subjects’ pacifist isolationism, and Huxley’s utopian spokesman
Dr Robert MacPhail:

This was too much for Murugan. Unable to contain himself, ‘But
look at the energy Colonel Dipa generates in his people,’ he burst
out. ‘Look at all the devotion and self-sacrifice! We don’t have any-
thing like that here.’
‘Thank God,’ said Dr Robert devoutly.
‘Thank God,’ Vijaya echoed.
‘But these things are good,’ the boy protested. ‘I admire them.’
‘I admire them too,’ said Dr Robert. ‘Admire them in the same way
as I admire a typhoon. Unfortunately that kind of energy and devo-
tion and self-sacrifice happens to be incompatible with liberty, not
to mention reason and human decency.’21

Pala, however, does have its own way of fostering energy and self-
sacrifice, since its young people undergo a process of initiation,
beginning with dangerous rock-climbing feats and ending with a drug-
enhanced religious ceremony. Rock-climbing, says Dr MacPhail, is ‘An
ordeal that helps them to understand the world they’ll have to live in,
helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precarious-
ness of all existence’ (165). Wells’s Samurai in A Modern Utopia undergo
a comparable experience – an annual ritual of solitude in one of the
142 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

world’s remaining wildernesses – but this aspect of Island d strongly sug-

gests an attempt to reconcile John the Savage’s ideals with the Huxleyan
utopia. In the Savage Reservation of Malpais, John was debarred from the
tribal initiation designed to convert teenage cadets into adult warriors.
His unfulfilled desire to prove himself and demonstrate his manhood is
at the root of his conflicted, self-flagellating and ultimately suicidal pres-
ence in Brave New World. In Pala, however, Dr MacPhail’s explanations
suggest what educators and religious leaders have always known (though
Mustapha Mond has apparently forgotten): that the dangerous energies
of youth can be harnessed in the service of well-worn platitudes.
Huxley had long been settled in California when he wrote Island.
Among more recent utopias, a work by another Californian writer – Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Pacificfi Edge (1990) – is nearest in spirit to Huxley’s
late novel. Once again we are concerned with a utopian enclave, the
mid twenty-first-century self-governing community of El Modena in
Orange County, which is threatened not by a military takeover but by
external business interests. The novel follows the progress of a political
struggle, fought out in El Modena’s town council, against the advocates
of commercial development. Life in El Modena is ecologically self-
sustaining and somewhat Spartan, although it resembles Huxley’s New
World in that everyone (or nearly everyone) takes part in organised
sports. Athleticism and physical ordeals are integral to everyday life.
In addition to the ten hours’ compulsory manual labour each week,
Robinson’s utopians spend their time in competitive softball games,
communal hikes, pedal-gliding and fire-fighting, as well as in social-
ising, political organisation and making love. Although Pacific fi Edge
focuses on a single community, Robinson implies that similar utopias
in the making occupy the rest of California, and perhaps of the world,
in 2065. Of all modern utopias, this deliberately small-scale work is the
most consistent in searching for a moral equivalent to war in a genu-
inely demilitarised terrestrial society.

Armies for war and peace

Soon after Pacific

fi Edge, Robinson wrote his Mars trilogy (1992–96), in
which (resembling William James’s original proposal) the moral equiva-
lent of war consists in the vast project of physical reconstruction, as
well as the cultural changes and political struggles, needed to establish
a complex human society on an alien planet. Robinson’s epic achieve-
ment is a reminder that the great majority of utopian and dystopian
novels since the Second World War have been written and published
 War Is Peace 143

as science fiction. The science fiction genre, above all in its American
homeland, has always been deeply militaristic in its visions of space
conquest and inter-planetary warfare. Moreover, the close links between
military strategists and some science-fiction writers are well known.22
A novel such as Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) is both
a science-fiction classic and, in effect, a recruitment poster for the US
Army. At the same time, utopian fiction and anti-utopian satire have to
take account of the fact that a utopian world is, almost by definition,
a world at peace. Does this mean that war has been abolished or, as in
many of the variants on Bellamy’s industrial army, simply displaced?
The final section of this chapter will consider this question in rela-
tion to two of the most widely discussed utopian novels of the later
twentieth century – Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Ursula K.
Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) – together with Margaret Atwood’s
dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale.
In Ecotopia, California and its neighbours have seceded from the
United States and set up a closed society, protected from invasion by a
nationwide militia and also by what appears to be an elaborate bluff.
Callenbach’s narrator, William Weston, is the first official visitor to
Ecotopia from the United States in the twenty years since secession in
1980. His first impression is of a virtually demilitarised society in which
the border guards consist merely of ‘two young men in rather unpressed
uniforms’.23 In 1975, when Ecotopia was published, the Americans were
finally defeated in Vietnam, and the anti-war rhetoric of Callenbach’s
utopians – citizens of a state that has opted out of the Cold War and
the international arms race – was one of the main sources of the novel’s
instant popularity. Nevertheless, the Ecotopians rely on nuclear deter-
rence to maintain their independence from the United States. They
have persuaded their former rulers that ‘at the time of secession they
had mined major Eastern cities with atomic weapons, which they had
constructed in secret or seized from weapons research laboratories’
(57). During the one recorded American attack, the Ecotopian militia
fought off the enemy’s troop-carrying helicopters with hand-launched
electronic missiles.
The Ecotopians work an obligatory twenty-hour week, just as the
inhabitants of El Modena put in a communal ten hours. Both socie-
ties are based on the Puritan ethic and the obligation to work, while
doing everything in their power to dispel the associations of Bellamy’s
industrial army. In one significant episode, Weston tours a factory
that has abandoned assembly-line principles. Nevertheless, there are
ritual war games in which, we are told, ‘hundreds of Ecotopian youths
144 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

perish every year’ (46). The advocates of ritual warfare believe that
it is ‘essential to develop some kind of open civic expression for the
physical competitiveness that seemed to be inherent in man’s biologi-
cal programming – and otherwise came out in perverse forms, like war’
(94–5). Weston is wounded while taking part in an all-too-realistic war
game; earlier, observing Ecotopian deer hunters, he has commented
that ‘Maybe they have gone back to the stone age’ (18). Callenbach’s
alternative to modern war is to return to a more primitive and individu-
alistic, if ritually circumscribed, form of warfare.
A very different kind of secessionist state is portrayed in The
Dispossessed, Le Guin’s ‘ambiguous utopia’ in which the barren planet
of Anarres has been settled by the members of an anarcho-syndicalist
opposition movement exiled from their native planet. The process of
colonisation has brought about radical departures from the blueprint
laid down by Odo, the movement’s founder and ideologist. In theory,
‘There was to be no controlling center, no capital, no establishment
for the self-perpetuating machinery of bureaucracy and the dominance
drive of individuals seeking to become captains, bosses, chiefs of state’.24
The settlers found, however, that ‘There had to be a center’, a capital
city housing the ‘central federatives of most of the work syndicates’
and the ‘computers that coordinated the administration of things, the
division of labor, and the distribution of goods’ (78). One hundred
and fifty years after the first settlement, there is a profound mismatch
between the ideology that everyone still professes and the reality.
Le Guin’s novel tells of the struggles of the theoretical physicist Shevek
and his associates to survive and flourish in such a society, but it also
reveals the effects of universal mobilisation through the small details
of life that both bureaucrats and potential dissidents have learned to
accept. For example, although the citizens of Anarres have names, not
numbers, all names are randomly computer generated, which means
that they function exactly like the numbers in Zamyatin’s We and Wells’s
A Modern Utopia. The words for ‘work’ and ‘play’ are identical in the set-
tlers’ invented language, a fact that we are told ‘had, of course, a strong
ethical significance’; but this prescription for an anarchist paradise
of fulfilled labour could equally apply in a slave society (216). Since
Anarres is a separate planet it has almost no need for military institu-
tions, yet they are so popular that ‘the work-posting called Defense
never had to call for volunteers’ (75). This work assignment, like all
others, is presumably overseen by Divlab, the organisation that directs
labour all over the planet. Postings are issued by Divlab’s ‘computers’, a
formulation that conveniently obscures the bureaucratic human agency
 War Is Peace 145

involved. Shevek knows that he must take whatever assignments (to

intellectual or manual labour) he is given – ‘To survive, to make a go of
life, an Anarresti knew he had to be ready to go where he was needed
and do the work that needed doing’ – and he has no say in the deter-
mination of needs (198). The organisation of economic life on Anarres
is, in its essentials, hard to distinguish from that of Bellamy’s socialist
state imagined ninety years earlier. The glamour of mobilisation in an
industrial army fighting against Nature in order to build a new society
still pervades The Dispossessed. Le Guin’s innovation, however, is to
portray intellectual dissent as a force for change leading, it is hinted,
to potential improvements in a consciously experimental social order.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, not only is mobilisation stripped of its glam-
our, but the defining features of the modern utopia have also disappeared.
Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, like Callenbach’s Ecotopia, is an enclave
of North America, set up after an armed attack on the president and
congress that led to the suspension of the US constitution. The tech-
nology of Gilead is either old-fashioned or consciously retrograde: the
Guardians carry pistols and electric cattle prods, and execution is by
lynching or public hanging. The religious basis of the Republic lies in
fundamentalist Christianity, which means that the state cannot be seen
as an end in itself. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, is a woman not, admit-
tedly, from the bottom echelons of society, but still appreciably lower in
status than D-503, Bernard Marx, Winston Smith or Shevek.
In fact, The Handmaid’s Tale views the idea of a moral equivalent of
war with unmistakable abhorrence. A series of civilian nuclear accidents
has brought about a disastrous decline in human fertility. Gilead’s mili-
tary rulers respond by conscripting fertile young women and training
them in army centres run by ‘Aunts’ wearing battledress and brandish-
ing cattle prods. The ‘handmaids’, of whom Offred is one, are then
assigned to senior officers’ households, with the duty of reproducing
the officer caste. Although the Republic is perpetually at war against
so-called rebels, its militarisation represents a historical looping-back,
not a logical (however undesirable) culmination of the social progressiv-
ism of the Enlightenment. Offred’s disjointed autobiography centring
on the bizarre rituals of her life as a handmaid suggests the personal
nightmare of a slave narrative rather than a careful attempt to imagine
a credible dystopian society. When – in a pale replica of the scenes with
the Benefactor, the Inner Party member and the World Controller in
Zamyatin, Orwell and Huxley – Offred’s Commander sets out to justify
the social regime of the Republic of Gilead, his arguments (as Offred
reports them) are weakly apologetic and cliché ridden: ‘You can’t make
146 Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds

an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we

could do better. … Better never means better for everyone, he says’.25
This is a dystopia without intellectual force – in effect, an updated ver-
sion of the long tradition of tyrannical rule in the past – and as such
it is bound to fail sooner or later. Its claims to have put an ‘impassable
abyss’ between the present and the past are manifestly false. The world
of The Handmaid’s Tale is unlike the utopias and dystopias of Bellamy,
Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell in that it makes no pretence to historical
necessity, even though it might now be seen as prophetic of the darkest
aspects of twenty-first-century religious fundamentalism. Its mobilisa-
tion is as brutal as that of Nineteen Eighty-Four and We, but it is a brutal-
ity without rational justification, however perverted. It may be future
history, but it does not claim to represent a new stage in the historical
evolution of humankind.
It seems, then, that – short of the colonisation of other planets – the
search for a moral equivalent of war in the modern utopia has largely
failed. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the concept of an industrial army reaches
its nadir when that army consists of young women drilled, paraded and
then forced into acts of rape behind closed doors in order to maintain
the social order. Has Atwood written the conclusively dystopian novel,
pillorying the hopes of the modern utopians even more finally than
George Orwell was believed to have done thirty-five years earlier? I do
not think so, since both writers point (however briefly and, in Orwell’s
case, cryptically) to a further future beyond the totalitarian nightmares
that they have imagined. Yet in redefining ‘labour’ as reproductive
rather than economic activity, The Handmaid’s Tale suggests that uto-
pian speculation must approach the challenge of an improved global
community in ways no longer dependent on the concept of a regener-
ated army – industrial or otherwise.
© Patrick Parrinder 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-45677-9

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

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First published 2015 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parrinder, Patrick, 1944–
Utopian literature and science : from the scientific revolution to Brave New World and
beyond / Patrick Parrinder, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Reading, UK.
pages cm
Summary: “Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but
science and utopia are frequently at odds. Utopian Literature and Science traces the
interactions of sciences such as astronomy, microscopy, genetics and anthropology
with 19th- and 20th-century utopian and dystopian writing and modern science fiction.
Ranging from Galileo’s observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-
human and the human-animal boundary, the author’s re-examination of key literary
texts brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato. This
book is essential reading for teachers and students of literature and science studies,
utopian studies, and science fiction studies, as well as students of 19th and early
20th-century literature more generally”– Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Literature and science. 2. Utopias in literature. 3. Science fiction–History and

criticism. I. Title.
PN55.P37 2015
809’.93356—dc23
2015012635

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.