The American Utopia

[Arthur Gordon Pym]

Batalov, Eduard. The American Utopia, translated from the Russian by Dmitry Belyavsky (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), Chapter III, The Evolution of U.S. Capitalism and the Modern American Utopia, section 2, pp. 122-131.

(excerpts from the book)

The American Utopia

Eduard Batalov

Chapter II

American Utopia in the 19th and the First Half of the 20th Centuries

5. The Technocratic Utopia

A new social utopia type began to take shape in the United States in the 1930s. This was the so‑called technocratic utopia, which subsequently played an important part in American culture and political thought.

It reflected those changes in America's social consciousness and interpretation of social ideals which had affected first and foremost, part of the industrial bourgeoisie and experts in science and technology and had been caused, on the one hand, by rapid advances in science and technology and the social change they produced and, on the other, by the crisis of laissez‑faire liberalism, the transition from free competition capitalism to monopoly capitalism, and the development of the working‑class movement.

Aimed at a radical transformation of the bourgeois‑democratic institutions of government, which it saw as the only way to save and consolidate capitalism, the technocratic utopia broke with the ideals (and even with the rhetoric) of democratic self‑government and proclaimed the ideal of a centralized society built according to the principles of rationality and efficiency. In that world, all life of society, all institutions, relations and values are determined by positivistically interpreted laws of science (natural science) and technology. The principles which operate in the limited sphere of human activity are extended—fully in the spirit of scientific and technological fetishism—to all spheres of activity, ousting and replacing social laws and thus appearing universal. Man is subordinate to machine; he loses his identity and becomes an easily replaceable cog in a giant bureaucracy which is built with the help of modern science and technology and according to their principles.

The second salient feature of the technocratic utopia—and a logical consequence of the approach described above—is that society is ruled by the masters of technology and by scientists (this is what makes it possible to call this type of utopia "technocratic"). The result is a latter‑day version of a utopian society headed by a wise ruler; the only difference is that he is a technocrat, not a humanitarian philosopher.

Despite its break with the democratic tradition of the American utopia and social consciousness, the technocratic utopia attracted many Americans by its promises. In the words of Robert Walker, "technocracy . . . appealed to a broad stripe in the national character by arguing that the country should become more—rather than less‑productive and at the same time more efficient." [1] V. L. Parrington, Jr. agrees but adds that the technocratic utopia attracted Americans not only by promises of abundance but also by images of a technological world so dear to the American's heart. "This willingness to accept the promise of plenty," he notes, "this faith in the fruits of the machine, is typical of the American dream. For a hundred years and more we have beguiled ourselves with visions of a utopia which was a sort of mechanical heaven where the goods coming off the conveyor belts were always bigger and better and more functional. The Technocrats capitalized on this faith with their romantic and frequently exaggerated promises." [2]

The technocratic utopian projects most popular in the United States of the 1930s were those developed by a group of engineers, economists and architects led by Howard Scott. In late 1931 and early 1932 a group of experts under Howard Scott studied the relationship between technological development and the economy. In April 1932 the Energy Survey of North America was created on the basis of that group. Members of the Survey were soon called "technocrats". [3] Subsequently, the term "technocracy" acquired a broader, more general meaning and was no longer associated directly with Scott's group.

As could be expected, the technocrats disclaimed both the utopian nature of their projects and their involvement in the utopian tradition. Berating "utopians and socialists" for basing their constructs on "a priori objectives", "eventual desired human goals", "value orientations" and the like, they did point to the actual substantive features of utopianism. This, however, did not prevent the technocrats themselves from claiming to have found the perfect solution to the problems which had defied authors of projects based on "moral or philosophical constructs", and from advancing a typically utopian model of a "rationally harmonized society". "Between 1933 and 1936 the Scottians, who defined technocracy as a form of social organization, drafted an idealized social system based on their assump-

1 The Reform Spirit in America, p. 216.
2 V. L. Parrington, Jr., op. cit., p. 203.
3 Henry Elsner, Jr., The Technocrats, Prophets of Automation, Syracuse University Press, 1967, pp. 1‑2.


tions about the nature of modern science and society. They could not imagine anyone choosing the austerity of a nonindustrial world; and, they reasoned, having elected to partake of the material benefits of a high‑energy civilization, man would have to organize himself around its immutable laws and principles in a way that would maximize efficiency and harmony. Following this reasoning, their thinking led them to construct mentally the most rigorously mechanical society Yankee ingenuity had yet devised." [1]

The technocratic utopia is shot through with the spirit of criticism of American society—its politics, economy and culture. But this criticism is very unlike that offered by romantic or socialist utopians. For all the distinctions that separated them, those utopians criticized society for restrictions on freedom and democracy, suppression of individuality, and absence of the true equality of opportunity. Making references to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they suggested blueprints for a more humane, free, egalitarian and democratic society because, they held, democracy and freedom were indispensable for abundance, prosperity, personal security and meaningful recreation.

The utopian technocrats abandon that type of critical tradition; in their opinion, the root of all evil is not a lack or shortage of democracy but the lack of harmony born of the disbalance between the logic of efficiency and the logic of social relations in conditions of bourgeois democracy. To prevent social chaos and save the nation, it is indispensable to establish harmony between the social structure and the imperatives of science and technology, or, to be more precise, to subordinate the former to the latter. But democracy, the technocrat maintains, is essentially incapable of coping with the task. Decisions have always been and will always be taken by a minority; this is perfectly reasonable, and the important thing is for this minority to be competent and not to engage in pointless games of politics while taking decisions on important matters, not to stage the usual cheap

1 William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream. The Technocrat Movement, 1900‑1941, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977, p. 131.

political shows.

Like the romantic utopian, the technocrat would like to take power out of the hands of politicians and to build a depoliticized society. However, unlike the romanticist who sees the meaning of depoliticization in investing each individual with power and thus eliminating centralized government, the technocrat would like to replace political institutions with organizations of scientific and technological experts and hand power over to a technocratic elite.

The Scottian technocrats pictured a powerful social hierarchy which Scott defined as the "technate", a single continent‑wide corporate structure (Scott held that it should include, aside from the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America) in which social and production divisions coincided. These "functional divisions" were to comprise industry, services, education, health care, etc. They would also include "certain social and quasi‑political sequences to handle research, foreign relations, armed forces and 'social control'." [1]

In Scott's view, the technate was to be a pyramid, with functional divisions at its base, each represented by a director and all directors making up a Continental Control Board which would be responsible for all important decisions bearing on the functioning of the social mechanism as a whole; at the top of the pyramid there would be a Continental Director elected by the members of the Board and responsible for the normal operation of the technate. As a result, instead of an ineffective democracy with its three branches of power and its mechanisms of control and regulation, America would be blessed with an efficient Director relying on a narrow group of top experts.

The technocrats did not deny that their system was not only undemocratic but also inhumane in the sense in which humanism and humanitarianism had been interpreted heretofor. But they held that humanism, freedom and democracy were worthless in a technological civilization since they were not directly indispensable for rationality and efficiency. Why should man, merely a human animal composed of atoms, they argued, need freedom and democracy? Man is "an engine taking potential energy . . . and con-

1 Ibid., p. 138.

verting [it] into heat, work, and body tissue", [1] while freedom and democracy introduce anarchy and arbitrariness into a rational system. They claimed that while the technate, ruled by engineers and scientists, would mean a dictatorship, it would be a dictatorship not of an individual but of science; people could expect only good from it, for this dictatorship would be totally objective and free of any preferences or mistakes.

The technocrats proposed that the technate include a special division dealing with social control to ensure that "human relations be subordinated to efficiency". The institutions regulating human relations on the basis of a subjective approach and "passion", like the "judgment by the twelve good men" were to be abolished; the matters they dealt with were to be decided "by the most impersonal and scientific methods available". [2]

The technocrats also intended to radically restructure the economy in order to abolish pursuit of profit as the goal of production and change the system of pricing and distribution of material goods. "The cost of any particular commodity," Howard Scott wrote, "would be determined entirely by the energy consumed in the process of its production and delivery to the point of consumption." [3] The plan was to abolish money, replacing it with "energy certificates" each state‑employed worker under the "energy contract" would receive. "Such a period of service should not exceed four hours per day, four consecutive days at a shift, and 165 days per year. For a period of about twenty years, from the age of twenty‑five to forty‑five, this period of service would cover the fulfillment of the energy contract.” [4] The technocrats promised to involve all able‑bodied people in useful work and thus eliminate unemployment; to ensure equal profits for all, including the technocracy which, Scott assured, would not enjoy any material privileges; and to balance the ratio of production, thus creating a stable and crisis‑free economy.

1 Technocracy Study Course, N. Y. Technocracy, Inc., 1934, pp. 105, 117. Quoted in: W. E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream, p. 134.
2 Ibid., p. 141.
3 Passport to Utopia. . ., p. 235.
4 Ibid., pp. 234‑35.
[107/108]

Essentially, economic and social stability, a new ideal for the American Utopia, was the prime objective of the technocratic utopians. Besides, they were becoming increasingly convinced that the level of socioeconomic stability was inversely proportionate to the level of political activity and directly dependent on the degree of centralization of government. It was not surprising that the technocrats regarded the army as the most efficient and rational organization and, with the advent of World War II, they called for a nationwide labor conscription.

The concrete forms of the technocratic utopia which it assumed originally in the 1930s proved to be short‑lived, but as a distinct type, this utopia took firm root in the mainstream of the American socioutopian tradition.

Ideologically and theoretically, Scott and his colleagues in "Technocracy, Inc." did not invent the technocratic utopia. Its formation was to a high extent influenced by Thorstein Veblen's ideas about rational organization as the substantive basis of social forms capable of ensuring effective functioning of capitalist society against the background of growing social tensions on the global, regional or local scale. Curbing the unruly market and social elements, generally regulating social processes to make them rational and effective, nominating "engineers" to rule society—all these ideas had been formulated, in one form or another, in Veblen's book The Engineers and the Price System. Scott's plan was merely an ambitious attempt to project Veblen's ideas onto a specific social situation and on this foundation to build an alternative (given the utopian pluralism of the 1930s) utopia. This utopia was crude, simplistic and theoretically artless (the fate of almost all initial forms of new utopian types). But as a type, it was a sign of the times. The technocratic utopia reflected not only the crisis of the traditional political and economic forms brought on by the changes in the structure and functions of the state and the market which became clear in the mid‑1930s. It also reflected the disintegration of the traditional constructs of consciousness which was manifested in the crisis of the liberal ideology and the consequent rift among liberals.

The idea of a direct correlation between bourgeois democracy and the efficiency of the institutions it generated and sanctified, including economic institutions, that matured in the thinking of the third estate and forced its way into the political science and political practice of the 17th‑19th‑century bourgeois revolutions, that idea emerged as one of the fundamental ideological precepts of 19th‑century liberalism. The sociopolitical practice of "mass" society, that is, bourgeois society at the time of imperialism, showed that in the new conditions traditional democracy was no longer capable of ensuring the former efficiency of social institutions.

One of the most important lessons of the technocratic utopia was perhaps the fact that it demonstrated not only the volatile and unstable nature of the links between democracy and efficiency, but also the readiness of many Americans to sacrifice, in certain conditions, the traditional democratic values to the promises of "abundance", "rationality", "efficiency" and "order". On this scale, this was a new development in social consciousness; and it prompted critical remarks from some in the Left to the effect a fascist‑type dictatorship could be established in the United States.

From the mid‑1930s to the mid‑1960s the technocratic utopia consolidated its positions in American culture; naturally, this influenced the status and functions of this utopia in the national perceptions. But, having consolidated its positions, this utopia was never to absorb, let alone eliminate, other types of utopia. On the contrary, the 1960s proved that each new stage in the development of technocratic consciousness triggered a "democratic", romantic or socialist reaction (and this was reflected in the sphere of utopia), simultaneously generating social despair and pessimism expressed in negative utopia and antiutopia.

...

[Arthur Gordon Pym]

The American Utopia


Eduard Batalov


Chapter III

The Evolution of U.S. Capitalism and the Modern American Utopia

2. The Technocratic Utopia

The technocratic utopia consolidated its positions considerably and moved to the foreground in the postwar years. Retaining the principles, ideals and orientations formulated by Veblen, Scott and their followers half a century ago, modern technocratic utopians have adjusted and complemented them, added subtle theoretical touches, and geared them to the interests, orientations and expectations of those rather large groups which connect the survival of bourgeois civilization with scientific and technological progress, with the use of its advances to stabilize the existing social relations and with stronger positions of the social stratum of professionals often described as the technostructure.

Utopian elements are visible in the sociological theories Daniel Bell, Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Kenneth Galbraith formulated in the 1960s and 1970s ("industrial society", "post‑industrial state", "technetronic society"). A utopian spirit is present in the works of Stuart Chase, the dean of American technocracy and author of The Tragedy of Waste (1925) and The Most Probable World (1968), a number of prominent futurologists such as Herman Kahn, Norbert Wiener, B. Bruce‑Briggs and several outstanding scientists such as Burrhus Skinner.
[122/123]

It goes without saying the technocratic utopians' concepts of the social ideal or of the ways to establish the utopian society differ more or less substantially, depending on the authors' political stand, the range of their intellectual grasp, the extent of their personal experience and on their specialization in this or that science. Still, these concepts share a number of common features, and this makes it possible to classify them as a single trend in modern utopia.

Stability is central to the hierarchy of values making up the composite ideal of the modern technocratic utopia. This was expressed with the utmost clarity in a small but exhaustive article entitled "A Modest Utopia" and published by Stuart Chase in 1975. Noting that modern American (and not only American) society faces difficult problems such as the arms race, the energy crisis, unemployment, pollution, dwindling natural resources, etc., Chase concludes that, given all this, mankind can find salvation only in utopia viewed as a planetwide system established by purposeful action based on rationality and efficiency. [1] He quotes John Platt: "The world is now too dangerous for anything less than Utopia." [2] "The logic of the situation, whatever the politics," Chase writes, "runs increasingly in the direction of a single civilization where a steady‑state condition is dominant. . . . The idea of a world state has been discussed for centuries, but the steady‑state society is a relatively new concept," [3] yet its outlines, Chase holds, can already be imagined.

First and foremost, a steady‑state society stabilizes population growth, its rate gradually diminishing to zero; this, the author of the project asserts, invoking Aldous Huxley's ideas, is the key to the solution of all other problems. "A steady‑state society, thus stabilized, can and should assure adequate living for every human being—food, shelter, education, health protection (though not a car and a color TV). This should go a long way toward stabilizing the human family. It should go a long way toward providing useful work for all. With slums abolished and meaningful occupation developed, the crime rate should drop, and juvenile delinquency all but disappear. One good working de-

1 The Futurist, Vol. IX, No. 5, October 1975, pp. 249‑50.
2 Ibid., p. 252.
3 Ibid., p. 250.
[123/124]

finition of Utopia might be a place where everyone feels he has an important role. The steady‑state society should make considerable progress in that direction.

"It would demand, of course, the conservation of the ecosphere and the biosphere; the balance of nature respected and held firmly at par.
"War would have to be disallowed, perhaps with a planetary guard in command of all nuclear, chemical, biological, and conventional weapons." Energy and material resources would be regulated, transport problems solved and so on and so forth—and all this given strong centralized government. "The planet will be administered, one might guess, by a consortium of functional Planning Authorities in charge of vital material resources; of the oceans with their riches and fragile food chains; of international pollution abatement; of satellites and global communication, trade routes, and international finance. Gold will be strictly for dentists and jewellers. Nations will continue to control local affairs insofar as they are not in conflict with steady‑state priorities." [1]

Essentially, there is nothing novel in Chase's project, but it deserves to be mentioned because it lays such great emphasis on the ideal of stability—a typical (although not always clearly articulated) feature of the modern technocratic utopia.

True, classical utopian projects, too, often presented society as stable. But that was the stability of harmony, of the absolute, of a society which had reached the uppermost limits of perfection. The modern technocratic utopia is another matter. Here, the yearning for stability is dictated not only by the realization that Earth's resources are finite but also by the desire to preserve a certain state of society, albeit quite far—and some utopians admit that—from perfection. This is the stability of a system threatened by disintegration, stability as a means of survival. John Kenneth Galbraith has once remarked that "for any organization, as for any organism, the goal or objective that has a natural assumption of preeminence is the organization's own survival. [2] However, the meaning of self‑preserva-

1 Ibid., p. 252.
2 John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1969, p. 167.
[124/125]

tion to a system (and its realization by the latter) is different at different stages. Most frequently, self‑preservation becomes a utopian ideal at the stage of disintegration, when survival becomes the system's highest goal—a rule demonstrated by Plato and confirmed by many politicians, sociologists and natural scientists today.

The technocratic utopia does not rule out certain social changes. Moreover, it insists on them (and here it cannot be accused of being static) since it is by partial changes from within that the desired stability is deemed to be made possible. But, unlike Plato, whose stability was based on "justice", today's utopian technocrat connects stability with organization based on rationality and efficiency. As to "justice", its specific expression is the principle of meritocracy—each man remunerated according to his "merit". [1]

Meritocracy does provide all citizens with a certain minimum of benefits which, the technocrat holds, will be high enough for his utopian society to be called a "welfare state". True, the Club of Rome reports, especially Limits to Growth, the response they generated and, most importantly, the economic difficulties the United States encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, did dampen the technocrat's optimism somewhat. Nevertheless, the "welfare state" ideal is firmly established as part of the technocratic utopia which promises a guaranteed, minimum of profit, a certain measure of personal security, a considerable easing of human labor, as well as recreation.

However, operating beyond the universal guaranteed minimum is the principle that the evaluation of the individual and the remuneration society accords him differ depending on his merit and his intellect determined by special tests.

In the classical utopia, the principle of justice underlay the authority of the philosopher‑prince as legitimate; similarly, the modern technocratic utopia uses the principle of meritocracy to justify the claims to power made by the scientist and the engineer. Bell maintains that in a "post‑industrial society" they should occupy the same place the businessman, and the industrial manager held in "industrial society".

1 For principles of meritocracy, see Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post‑Industrial Society.
[125/126]

Today's utopian technocrat does not aim directly at eliminating the existing institutions of power. But he would like to transfer control over them from professional politicians and businessmen to experts who would restructure these institutions to meet the needs of science and technology, possibly making them more rigid and centralized.

In a "scientifically managed" utopia, where organization dominates man, determining all the major parameters of his activity, the limits to individual freedom are set strictly functionally. Freedom is not an end, not a condition for the development and existence of a harmonious personality but only a means of maintaining society's rational and effective functioning and stability. In this respect, the utopian technocrats follow in the footsteps of Howard Scott; the only difference is that they are less cynical and promise more material benefits in exchange for freedom.

Kahn and Bruce‑Briggs claim that in a "post‑industrial society" all men will live at about the level enjoyed by the high‑income groups, like "the managers and professionals" in the 1970s. "They have very large homes filled with gadgets, and often have two homes, one just for vacations. They have day servants, once or twice a week, but we do not need them in our post‑industrial society—there have long been dreams of household robots or trained simians, and why not? . . . They travel frequently both on business and pleasure, penetrating all parts of the globe. When not dieting they eat well, whether the cosmopolitan food of the East or the grade A beefstakes [sic] of the West. They have two or more cars, a Cadillac or a Mercedes‑Benz, a station wagon, and a sports car for the kids. Many of them have planes or boats. Their children go to graduate school and do not start work until they damn well like it, and the parents do not seem to mind. Of course, they may have the mild alcoholism of too many martinis, neurotic wives popping pills, junior who is wild and undisciplined, and little Sally who is sleeping around." [1]

This cozy picture, drawn with good‑natured irony, offers little explanation of the way a utopian society based on technocratic principles may function. But it is possible to visit such a society—through the good offices of B. F. Skinner, prominent American psychologist, sociologist

1 Herman Kahn, B. Bruce‑Briggs, op. cit., pp. 229‑30.
[126/127]

and Harvard professor. His utopian novel Walden Two, published back in 1948, has long earned the status of a classic and his views are regarded as a classical expression of modern technocratic ideology in its behaviorist version.

"Walden Two is, of course, science fiction," Skinner wrote many years later. "I was not saying, 'This is the way it should be.' I was simply describing one possible culture designed on behavioral principles. The book does not seem to me to have been too bad a guess. It was written nearly thirty years ago and seems to me more relevant than ever." [1]

The novel is about an imagined utopian community of some one thousand members. One thousand healthy, cheerful, happy and content people living—the author stresses this—not on a desert island and not in the 21st century but in postwar America with all its problems and contradictions.

This is especially important to Skinner who, in the late 1940s, arrived at the conclusion proclaimed (though for entirely different reasons) by the left radicals many years later: utopia has ceased to exist; what used to be considered utopian is perfectly possible today. "The Good Life is waiting for us—here and now," exclaims Frazier, the community's founder. "I almost fancied I heard a Salvation Army drum throbbing in the distance. . . . At this very moment we have the necessary techniques, both material and psychological, to create a full and satisfying life for everyone." [2]

Later we heard similar assertions from "critical" philosophers and sociologists who immediately added, however, that while the necessary technical prerequisites were already available, the political conditions for realizing the utopia were not yet ready. But Skinner does not recognize these obstacles. The traditional opinion that people can build a perfect society through political transformation is a fallacy, asserts Skinner's Frazier. "Political action was of no use in building a better world, and men of good will had better turn to other measures as soon as possible". [3] These measures are science, specifically psychology, or, to be more

1 The American Political Science Review, Vol. LXIX, March 1975, p.228.
2 B. F. Skinner, Walden Two, Macmillan, Toronto, 1970, p. 193.
3 Ibid., p. 14.
[127/128]

precise, behaviorism. A "technology of behavior" based on behavioral principles, Skinner maintains, can achieve that which politics cannot ensure.

Frazier (Skinner) goes on to explain that the behavioral principle of "positive reinforcement" makes it possible easily to solve problems which have plagued utopians for centuries. "The things that can happen to us fall into three classes. To some things we are indifferent. Other things we like—we want them to happen, and we take steps to make them happen again. Still other things we don't like—we don't want them to happen and we take steps to get rid of them or keep them from happening again. . . . If it's in our power to create any of the situations which a person likes or to remove any situation he doesn't like, we can control his behavior. When he behaves as we want him to behave, we simply create a situation he likes, or remove one he doesn't like. As a result, the probability that he will behave that way again goes up, which is what we want. Technically it's called 'positive reinforcement'." [1]

This "positive reinforcement" is what shapes life in Walden Two. There is no external coercion in the community—neither an army nor a police nor courts nor prisons nor overseers. There is a code of conduct drawn up on the basis of "positive reinforcement" and gladly observed by all members of the community. But the code exists mostly for newcomers. Those born in the community are handled by psychologists from the moment of their birth; these experts bring them up fully in accordance with "behavioral engineering" principles, taking care that now and later the children not only do what they like but also like only what should be liked. Here, the last word belongs to "behavioral engineers" making up a Board of Planners. "Our only government is a Board of Planners," Frazier explains. "The name goes back to the days when Walden Two existed only on paper. There are six Planners, usually three men and three women. . . . The Planners are charged with the success of the community. They make policies, review the work of the Managers, keep an eye on the state of the nation in general. They also have certain judicial functions." [2] Aside from the Planners and Managers who are

1 Ibid., pp. 259‑60.
2 Ibid., p. 54.
[128/129]

responsible for the operation of functional divisions and services, the community also includes scientists who conduct experimental research and issue recommendations to "behavioral engineers".

Neither rank‑and‑file community members nor even scientists, Frazier adds, have any say in determining the composition of the Boards of Planners and Managers, but that does not bother them at all—the important thing is that they are happy. When Frazier's opponents charge that there is neither freedom nor democracy in his utopian community, he calmly agrees.

More than 20 years after Walden Two Skinner published a book that scandalized the academic (and not only the academic) community. The book, entitled Beyond the Freedom and Dignity, claimed that the concepts of freedom and human dignity were obsolete and fictitious. But this view, expressed by Skinner directly and openly in 1971, had long been expounded by Frazier, his alter ego, in virtually the same language.

No, there is no democracy in Frazier's community—because it is not needed. Democracy "isn't, and can't be, the best form of government, because it's based on a scientifically invalid conception of man". [1] No, there is no freedom—because it is not needed either., "Dictatorship and freedom —predestination and free will. . . . What are these but pseudoquestions of linguistic origin?" [2] Frazier proudly declares that "we can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. . . . By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises." [3] It does not because "we see to it that they will want to do precisely the things which are best for themselves and the community". [4]

Soon after it appeared, Walden Two was attacked by pub-

1 Ibid., p. 273.
2 Ibid., p. 297.
3 Ibid., p. 262.
4 Ibid., p. 297.
[129/130]

lic figures, authors and scientists, some calling Skinner a fascist. In all probability, Skinner expected such accusations: in his novel, Frazier's opponents call him a fascist, to which he replies that he is neither a fascist nor a democrat. The attacks came not only from the left but also from the right wing, from the opponents of scientism who accused the author of Walden Two of unwarranted denigration of American democracy.
It is indeed obvious that Skinner's criticism of democracy, freedom and other "obsolete" values sometimes closely resembles the curses the Nazis used to heap on them. Skinner, of course, is no fascist. He is one of those gifted but socially narrow‑minded professionals of the positivistic type who see science, especially their own discipline, as a cure‑all and man as an aggregate of "scientifically" verifiable processes and phenomena. They naively believe that in a society ruled by the laws of physics, biology and other natural sciences, politics would be useless, social conflicts would be eliminated at one stroke and complete harmony would be established. They either ignore or dismiss as "metaphysics" the fact that society cannot be governed by the laws operating in this or that sphere of nature, that man cannot be reduced to the level of an animal or a machine.

A closer look at Skinner's community shows that its citizens are not really people but rather beings resembling robots. The all‑round personality, the dream of thinkers of the past, has no place in his utopia. The Procrustean logic of "behavioral engineering" cannot accommodate a harmonious and free individual. A model member of Skinner's community is not only depersonalized but also dehumanized. Man is human only as long as he retains (and realizes through his activity) a connection with culture as a concentrated expression of the experience of the preceding generations, with objects representing their creative efforts, with history. This connection colors man's reaction to various stimuli. Man does not simply respond automatically to external orders, his reaction is adjusted by culture (in this or that form), specifically by ethics and the knowledge of the past—his own and his own nation's. Incidentally, fascism took this into account and declared war on culture, trying to produce a depersonalized man ignorant of his own history and acting like an automaton.
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Essentially, Skinner suggests the same thing, the only difference being that the individual would receive his orders not from a drill sergeant but from the "psychologist"—that is, a well‑balanced program of behavior—inside him. No wonder that Walden Two distrusts history which may, all of a sudden, disrupt the path from "stimulus" to "reaction". It is perfectly possible that, could Skinner realize his project on a large scale, the result would be an updated and improved version of Huxley's Brave New World. And should the Planners (who are supposed to operate virtually uncontrolled) include people not only dictatorially but also fascistically minded, the "happy" utopia would turn into a concentration camp. In 1967 a group of young people established the Twin Oaks community which, as originally conceived, was to be based on the principles described in Walden Two. However, life forced Twin Oaks to alter these principles so drastically that this experiment can be regarded as a practical refutation of Skinner's project. [1]

And yet, the community built to Skinner's blueprint has one quality that the utopian technocrat finds valuable—it guarantees the survival of the whole. At any rate, he has stated repeatedly that "survival of Western civilization" is his prime objective. This is an important admission in that it records the change in the priority of ideals typical of many modern Western utopians. Their goal is not a perfect society but preservation of the existing society (even though in a somewhat modified form).

Thus the modern technocratic utopia opens no new humanitarian vistas and promises essentially nothing beyond what the "welfare state" promises and, apparently, can provide. At the same time it demonstrates that the "nonpolitical" dictatorship of science (and scientists)—should it, by some miracle, be established—would be no more humanitarian and, ironically, no more efficient than the currently existing dictatorship of the monopoly bourgeoisie which uses technocrats but gives them only limited leeway. As for the efficiency of social system (from a small group to society as a whole), it depends not only on rational organization but also on the degree to which the acting individuals realize their personal potential.

1 See: Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment; The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community, Morrow, New York, 1973.

...

[Arthur Gordon Pym]

The American Utopia

Eduard Batalov

Chapter IV

FROM UTOPIA TO ANTIUTOPIA

1. The Negative Utopia from Donnelly to Lewis

At every stage of its development the inherently contradictory tradition of utopian thought has encountered more or less active resistance. It has not been merely a clash of different temperaments, a debate between optimists and pessimists. It has also been. a clash of different political forces and different social ideals. "The concept utopia," the American scholar Frank E. Manuel writes, "has from the beginning been used in both a positive and a pejorative sense; it has connoted at the same time an ideal longed‑for and a crackpot scheme. The negation of the great dream has always constituted a parallel stream, from the very inception of utopian thought. The antiutopia was not the invention of Aldous Huxley and Zamiatin: after all, The Parliament of Women by Aristophanes was contemporaneous with Plato's Republic; More's Utopia produced a galaxy of mocking parodies." [1]

One could agree with this statement but for an element which, at first glance, appears purely semantic but proves to be quite important. Today's experts use—often indiscriminately—a variety of terms: "antiutopia", "negative utopia", "dystopia" and "cacotopia". Meanwhile, the history of utopia proves that these terms denote two different phenomena, and to confuse them means to distort the picture.

There are books which, unlike utopias with their image of a desired world, picture an undesirable world whose emergence must be prevented. It is very important that such works may accept the utopian quest, utopian ideals

1 Frank E. Manuel, "Toward a Psychological History of Utopias" in: Studies in Social Movements. A Social Psychological Perspective, Ed. by Barry McLaughlin, the Free Press, New York, 1969, p. 372.
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and principles. These works are negative utopias, or dystopias ("bad place" in Greek). "Cacotopia" is synonymous with "dystopia".

But aside from these there are books which not only describe an undesirable world but also link its emergence to the very attempts to construct and implement a utopia. These books dispute and even negate utopia; they are antiutopias. One may debate which term should denote which phenomenon, but it is imperative to distinguish between them.

A negative utopia criticizes deviations from progress as seen by the utopians. And if its denunciations do deal a glancing blow to progress, it contains no radical negation of the latter. It is perhaps for this reason that a negative, often satyrical, [sic] utopia could exist side by side with a utopia within one and the same book. Conversely, antiutopia is a more or less pronounced negation of the very notion of progress, of the very striving to improve the world. And so the two phenomena differ quite substantially; to ignore this means to oversimplify the history of utopia, of the struggle of ideas and ideals.

The "parallel stream" Manuel refers to is made up not by antiutopias but by the negative utopia which was born simultaneously with utopia. And the works he mentions belong to the class of the negative utopia. Naturally, even some classical philosophers were skeptical of the attempts to improve man and society. But this skepticism could crystallize in the form of an antiutopia only given certain conditions which could not arise before it became clear that historical progress had a contradictory nature and that a striving to realize a utopia may entail far from pleasant consequences. This happened in the 20th century.

Some scholars who admit that antiutopia is a product of our times believe that it is rooted in the advances of science and technology. According to George Kateb, "antiutopianism . . . is a crystallization of a number of ideas, attitudes, opinions and sentiments that have existed for centuries. And it is nothing but the development of technology and the natural sciences that is responsible for the crystallization that has taken place". [1] Other authors (Fred Polak)

1 George Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies, Schocken Books, New York, 1972, p. 3.
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look for the roots of antiutopia in the political history of the modem age. [1]

Although in both cases authors speak of phenomena which have a bearing on the process under discussion, their approach appears too simplistic and superficial. Certainly, scientific and technological progress and political crises both are bound to influence the emergence of antiutopia. But the main causes were in‑depth historical processes, above all the general crisis of capitalism and all its consequences. This crisis signified a gradual decomposition of bourgeois civilization which inevitably produced qualitative changes in bourgeois historical consciousness and led to disillusionment in "reason" and "progress" among certain social groups who felt they were now treading shaky ground. Before the very spirit of social utopianism (and not merely specific utopian ideas) was called into question, before the striving to attain social Perfection encountered a skeptical reaction, before philosophers rejected utopia, progress and perfection on the grounds that the search for perfection led to destruction, bourgeois civilization had to enter a period of protracted but total and irreversible crisis.

In 1917 Pavel Novgorodtsev, a prominent Russian jurist and professor at Moscow University, wrote in his book On the Social Ideal: "Utopian hopes to find an ideal form of social organization have foundered. There is no political means which could give people immutable perfection of life once and for all.

"(1) We must abandon the notion of finding an Open Sesame which would show us the absolute form and point the way to paradise on Earth.
"(2) We must abandon the hope that in the near or distant future we might reach a blissful and happy epilogue of the earlier drama, the last and concluding period of history ....

"The experience of the 19th century has undermined the faith in the miraculous power of political change, in' its ability to usher in a heavenly reign of truth and good." [2]

This idea was subsequently echoed in different ways by many authors and philosophers, particularly Nicolas Ber-

1 Fred L. Polak, The Image of the Future, Vol. 2, A. W. Sythoff, Leyden; Oceana Publications, New York, 1961.
2 P. I. Novgorodtsev, On the Social Ideal, p. 17 (in Russian).
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diaeff who expressed it almost aphoristically. "Utopias," this Russian idealist wrote in his essay "Democracy, Socialism and Theocracy", "seem very much more realizable than we had formerly supposed. And now we find ourselves face to face with a question which is painful in quite a new way: How can we avoid their actual realization?

". . .Utopias are capable of realization. Life moves towards Utopia. And perhaps a new age is beginning in which the intellectuals and the cultured class will dream of methods of avoiding Utopia and of returning to a society that is not Utopian, that is less 'perfect' and more free." [1]

This was not simply one of the catch phrases for which Berdiaeff had a penchant, but an extremely succinct expression of the social mood certain strata of bourgeois society experienced upon entering a crisis; it was their social and political credo and, most importantly, the very essence of antiutopia. It was no accident that Aldous Huxley, an author of rare sensitivity to social change, used this quotation from Berdiaeff as the epigraph for his Brave New World.

Antiutopia expresses the crisis of historical hope, and the antiutopian is usually a disenchanted utopian. He would have loved to support the values extolled by many generations of utopians, all the more so because he himself harbors a utopian project which he hides guiltily. But the antiutopian no longer believes—is afraid to believe—that it is possible to create a free, happy and prosperous society. He is not only a disillusioned but also a despairing utopian for he is convinced that any attempt to put utopia into practice will lead to directly opposite results. And so he is against utopias and utopian experiments as such.

Critics of antiutopia justly blame it for some of the hostility toward utopia which emerged and became fairly widespread in the West in the 20th century and which contributed to the banishment of utopia from culture and political practice and to the spread of pessimistic, if not apocalyptic sentiments. I believe, however, that a purely negative attitude to antiutopia is as unjustified as the latter's purely negative attitude to utopia. After all, antiutopia is right in its assertion that attempts to translate utopia into

1 Quoted in: A. L. Morton, The English Utopia, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1952, p. 202.
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practice very often lead to arbitrary and violent action against the laws of history, against nature and man and that therefore utopia should be rejected as a practical way of transforming society. Essentially, antiutopia soberly, albeit sometimes in extravagant terms, states the repeatedly proven fact that an arbitrarily constructed (and for this reason "perfect") model of society can usually be implemented only contrary to the natural course of developments—that is, also arbitrarily. Marx and Engels were well aware of this, and they resolutely opposed the practice of approaching social transformation as the realization of ideal (or perfect) projects constructed a priori. The founders of scientific communism invariably stressed that workers "have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant". [1]

But the distinctly negative attitude of Marx and Engels to attempts at implementing social utopias in practice did not prevent them from appreciating the role of individual utopians in the shaping of socialist consciousness and culture and from making use of their legacy in elaborating a scientific approach to history.

When an antiutopian banishes utopia not only from the sphere of sociopolitical. practice but also from the spiritual and intellectual sphere, trying to dismiss it as a phenomenon of culture, of consciousness, he, perhaps unwittingly, turns against the humanitarian principles, although their defense was perhaps the prime reason for the crusade against utopia launched by many other antiutopians. As a result, antiutopianism emerges as a sort of positivist tyranny which is no less dangerous than the tyranny of a utopian.

Let us now return to America and trace the genesis of the critical attitude to utopia.

In the opinion of some American literary critics, historians and sociologists, U.S. authors anticipated Yevgeni Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, the classical threesome of European antiutopians, by more than a quarter century. They hold that the pioneers of this genre were Jack London, the author of The Iron Heel, and Ignatius

1 Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France" in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, p. 224.
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Donnelly, a public figure almost forgotten today but very popular in the late 19th century, the author of several novels, including Caesar's Column.

"Obviously, Caesar's Column, though possessing definite characteristics of the utopian romance," W. B. Rideout, an American literary critic, writes, "stands more in the tradition of antiutopia, that tradition which has become characteristic of our own violent century and which has produced such books as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. As a novel it is certainly inferior to either of these two; yet all three are alike in being extrapolations into the future of major forces that each author sees operating in sinister fashion at the present time." [1] M. Fellman, a U.S. historian, is even more outspoken in his claim that Caesar's Column, the peak of Donnelly's literary effort, marked the death of utopia and the birth of antiutopia. [2]

Before taking up Huxley's and Orwell's novels, one should examine these assessments of works by American authors. It is not a matter of precedence, for precedence here is nothing to be proud of, but of historical accuracy. There is no doubt that The Iron Heel and especially Caesar's Column, as well as several books written in imitation of these novels, recorded new tendencies in American social consciousness and a new stage in the development of the utopian tradition and in the attitude to it. But was Donnelly really the first antiutopian and his novel, the first antiutopia? Or, to put it differently, did the United States of the late 19th century really develop conditions which gave rise to the antiutopian phenomenon?

Caesar's Column is set in the United States of 1988. Gabriel Weltstein, a Swiss colonist from Africa, arrives in New York and witnesses the collapse of civilization, the inevitable result, the author emphasizes, of developments over the past 100 years.

"There was a golden age once in America—an age of liberty; of comparatively equal distribution of wealth; of democratic institutions." [3] The United States used to be a country of "universal justice" which meant "equal oppor-

1 Ignatius Donnelly, op. cit., p. XII.
2 M. Fellman, The Unbounded Frame, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1973.
3 Ignatius Donnelly, op. cit., p. 45.
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tunities for all men and a repression by law of those gigantic abnormal selfishnesses which ruin millions for the benefit of thousands". However, several shortsighted and selfish generations gradually spoiled it all. "Now we have but the shell and semblance of all that. We are a Republic only in name; free only in forms.... The very assertions, constantly dinned in our ears by the hireling newspapers, that we are the freest people on earth, serve only to make our slavery more bitter and unbearable." [1] The social classes have become sharply polarized and so have power and wealth, which have come alienated from the people and usurped by a brutal and mercenary plutocracy led by a handful of international bankers, with a few score dictating to the entire nation. "This is the real center of government of the American continent; all the rest is sham and form. The men who meet here [in the home of the Prince of Cabano, the leader of the plutocrats] determine the condition of all the hundreds of millions who dwell on the great land revealed to the world by Columbus. Here political parties, courts, juries, governors, legislatures, congresses, presidents are made and unmade; and from this spot they are controlled and directed in the discharge of their multiform functions. The decrees formulated here are echoed by a hundred thousand newspapers, and many thousands of orators; and they are enforced by an uncountable army of soldiers, servants, tools, spies, and even assassins. He who stands in the way of the men who assemble here perishes. He who would oppose them takes his life in his hands.” [2] The plutocracy wallows in luxury, while at the opposite pole the workers are deprived of all rights and are doomed to poverty. Mistrust, suspicion and hatred are rampant. People "are suspicious, and properly so, of strangers, and even more so of each other". [3]

Donnelly paints a frightening picture of the degradation of the personality which afflicts this society at all levels. "The women, young and old, were much alike in some particulars . . . their jaws. . . were firmly developed, square like a soldier's. . . . The most peculiar features were their eyes. They had none of that soft, gentle, benevolent look . . .

1 Ibid.
2 Ibid., p. 62.
3 Ibid., pp. 30‑31.
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their looks were bold, penetrating, immodest. . . .
"The chief features in the expression of the men were incredulity, unbelief, cunning, observation, heartlessness." [1] Here is the portrait of the leaders of the Brotherhood of Destruction set up by the desperate workers to fight against the system: "It was an extraordinary assemblage that greeted my eyes; a long array of stem faces, dark and toil-hardened, with great, broad brows and solemn or sinister eyes. . . .

"The large heads at one end of the line were matched by the large heads at the other. A great injustice, or series of wrongs, working through many generations, had wrought out results that in some sense duplicated each other. Brutality above had produced brutality below; cunning there was answered by cunning here; cruelty in the aristocrat was mirrored by cruelty in the workman. High and low were alike victims—unconscious victims—of a system." [2]

Donnelly goes to great lengths to convince the reader that the situation in the America of 1988 is irreversible and can no longer be corrected by reform—it's too late! The only way out is an uprising of those below who would be glad to rebuild the world and to restore its former virtues but who are unable to perform anything constructive. The only thing they can do is to bring about destruction, chaos, anarchy and death. "The rude and begrimed insurgents . . . do not mean to destroy the world; they will reform it—redeem it. They will not make it a world where there shall be neither toil nor oppression. But, poor fellows!

Their arms are more potent for evil than their brains for good. They are omnipotent to destroy; they are powerless to create." [3]

That is precisely what finally happens in 1988. The people rise. "Like a huge flood, long dammed up, turbulent, turbid, muddy, loaded with wrecks and debris, the gigantic mass broke loose, full of foam and terror, and flowed in every direction. A foul and brutal and ravenous multitude it was....

"A sullen roar filled the air as this human cyclone moved onward, leaving only wrecks behind it. . . .

1 Ibid., p. 15.
2 Ibid., pp. 148‑49.
3 Ibid., p. 258.

"That which it took the world ten thousand years to create has gone in an hour." [1]

Having exterminated the plutocrats (together with a multitude of innocent people) the insurgents finally turn against one another. Caesar Lomellini, the president of the Brotherhood of Destruction, who distinguished himself only by erecting a column of 250,000 corpses over which cement was poured, is assassinated. The vice-president, having stolen 100 million dollars, flees by airship to Palestine where he "proposes to make himself king in Jerusalem, and, with his vast wealth, re‑establish the glories of Solomon, and revive the ancient splendors of the Jewish race, in the midst of the ruins of the world". The dream of the insurgents was "to create order out of chaos and reconstruct society. But that dream is past". [2]

Donnelly's novel is valuable to the sociologist and the historian above all because it is a concentrated expression of the author's fears, of the trends in the development of American society at the end of the 19th century which, in his view, should be stopped so as to prevent the destruction of America and of civilization as a whole. Donnelly maintains that all evil is rooted not in private property (Bellamy's view) but first and foremost in inequality and concentration of wealth; not in the fact that a bourgeoisie exists but in the concentration of power and the weakening of America's democratic institutions, in the excessive gap between the classes and in the fact that entrepreneurs and bankers rob ordinary people, producers. Caesar's Column expresses the disillusionment and alarm of the utopian advocate of a "farmers' America", his warning to the ruling class to the effect that if it does not move fast to counteract the nascent antiegalitarianist trends and if it does not heed his advice, revolution will be inevitable and will destroy all.

Like many 19th‑century authors, Donnelly ingenuously explains in his foreword what his novel is all about and who it is addressed to: "I seek to preach into the ears of the able and rich and powerful the great truth that neglect of the sufferings of their fellows, indifference to the great bond of brotherhood which lies at the base of Christianity,

1 Ibid., pp. 256, 257.
2 Ibid., p. 283.
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and blind, brutal and degrading worship of mere wealth, must—given time and pressure, enough—eventuate in the overthrow of society and the destruction of civilization." [1]

Donnelly, however, believes that the situation can still be salvaged, that all is not lost. His pessimism and criticism are directed not at utopians who try to squeeze society into the rigid framework of their constructs but at specific social and political groups and their policies. His position differs greatly from the stand taken by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and other antiutopians of the 1930s and 1940s.

Donnelly openly admitted his dislike of Bellamy and the socialist ideas he advocated, a fact directly reflected in Caesar's Column. Viewed from this angle, his novel was not only a negative utopia but also a counterutopia (in relation to Looking Backward). Still, it remained alien to the antiutopian tradition for which the necessary conditions did not exist in 19th‑century America—the very conditions which arose in Europe after World War I, after the fascists seized power in Italy and Germany—in other words, after developments which led critical consciousness to face problems America had not been ready to contemplate at the time. In the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries the United States stopped at the negative utopia, although the latter was represented not only by clumsy pieces like Joaquin Miller's Destruction of Gotham but also by serious works like Jack London's Iron Heel, let alone It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

While Donnelly warns against a plutocracy seizing power and, in the final analysis, against a revolutionary explosion, Jack London, taking a different stand (defending socialist ideas and advocating rule of labor) and writing at a different time (1908), warns against the danger of oligarchy and counterrevolution. Anthony Meredith wrote in his foreword to the novel: "The Iron Heel . . . we feel descending upon and crushing mankind." [2] Like Donnelly, London tells the reader directly (but not so naively) that his goal is to warn of a danger that can be prevented. "What else than Feudalism could have followed upon the breakdown of that great

1 Ibid., p. 3.
2 See: Jack London, The Iron Heel, Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1917, p. XI.
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centralized governmental machine known as the Roman Empire? Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly procedure of social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It must always remain the great curiosity of history—a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of today who speak with certitude of social processes." [1] According to the novel, the Iron Heel finally (after 700 years of oligarchy domination) loses power to the labor movement which wins a worldwide victory. But the terrible nightmare of seven hundred years hangs, like the sword of Damocles, over the American people.

It Can't Happen Here appeared during the 1936 election campaign, when Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal supporters clashed with their rivals, Huey Long among them, a man many democratically inclined Americans charged could become a dictator of the fascist type. In his novel, Lewis warned of the danger of fascism in America which could lead to a new war, destroy democratic institutions, suppress personal freedoms and do many other things fascism was capable of. Much of this was obvious enough from the German experience.

Lewis describes what could happen in the United States if the voters believed demagogues like Senator Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip (copied, in the unanimous opinion of the critics, from Huey Long, although he is mentioned in the book by name, as a different person) and helped him to become President of the United States. In his election speeches, Windrip spoke of a "Paradise of democracy in which, with the old political machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be king and ruler". [2]

After his arrival in the White House, Windrip proclaims a "real New Deal" which essentially means that "he should have complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do". [3] A personal dictatorship is established in the United States, all parties except "the

1 Ibid., p. XII.
2 Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here, The New American Library, New York, 1970, p. 97.
3 Ibid., p. 126.
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American Corporate State and Patriotic Party" are banned, labor unions are outlawed, censorship is introduced, labor concentration camps are set up to "help combat unemployment", and a reign of terror begins.

Lewis was no pessimist. Like Donnelly who believed that a plutocracy could be barred from power, like London who held that the rule of an oligarchy could be prevented, Sinclair Lewis was convinced that America could turn away from the German path if it voted for Roosevelt. This was obviously the immediate political goal of the author who was concerned over the future of America as a democracy.

And so one can conclude that neither Donnelly nor London nor Lewis nor their imitators approached antiutopia. They warned their country and the rest of the world of the coming danger but, I repeat, believed that democracy, freedom and other values they cherished could be saved. They did not oppose utopia because they still had faith in the very idea of progress and in its tangible results.

2. "Disillusionment with Progress" and Conflicting Attitudes to Utopia

No major negative utopias or antiutopias appeared in the United States during the war years. But that was then that the nation's social consciousness began to generate—with the help of immigrants from Europe, and especially from Germany—moods and currents which led to a critical opinion of utopia on the part of some American intellectuals.

The "decline" or even "death" of utopia was what highlighted these moods. "Our visions of the future," Kenneth Keniston wrote in 1960, "have shifted from images of hope to vistas of despair, utopias have become warnings, not beacons. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy and, ironically, even Skinner's Walden Two—the vast majority of our visions of the future are negative visions, extensions of the most pernicious trends of the present. They are deterrents, cautionary tales: utopia has become counterutopia. The connotations of 'utopian' have similarly changed: the term is now unequivocally associated with 'unrealistic',

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with 'self‑defeating' and, for some, with man's deepest and most prideful sins." [1]

Keniston presents a Sufficiently accurate picture of the moods which spread in the West, including the United States, in the initial Postwar years and which persisted up to the early 1960s. Proof of this includes the absence of serious and well‑written utopias from the American literature of those years, and the "apostasy from utopia" on the part of certain philosophers and historians, particularly Lewis Mumford who turned into a utopiaclast in the 1950s and 1960s. [2]

These moods were also clear from the attitude to the books listed by Keniston, above all to Orwell's 1984, which appeared in 1949, and Huxley's Brave New World, for which the author wrote his foreword in 1946. It would be no exaggeration to say that these British novels were as welcome among certain quarters of American society as they were among their counterparts in England and that they became organic elements of American culture. Moreover, reactionaries used these novels as weapons in the acute ideological confrontation of the Cold War. Orwell's book was exploited with particular zeal; it was interpreted as a purely anticommunist book, the reader being told that the totalitarian society depicted in the novel was a direct result of attempts to implement the "communist utopia".

It would be unfair not to mention that as early as the 1950s some (although few) American literary figures and social scientists pointed out that Huxley's and Orwell's works were ideologically and politically ambivalent and that they were interpreted in a rigidly one-sided way. As Erich Fromm wrote in his afterword to 1984, "the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it". [3] Fromm called on the American reader not to be smugly certain that the book had nothing to do with

1 Kenneth Keniston, Youth and Dissent. The Rise of a New Opposition, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1971, p. 43.
2 See: Lewis Mumford The Myth of the Machine. Technics and Human Development, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1967.
3 Erich Fromm's afterword in: George Orwell, 1984, A Signet Classic, New York, 1962, p. 257.
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him, writing of enslavement and dehumanization as a danger "inherent in the modern mode of production and organization, and relatively independent of the various ideologies". [1]

That was a sign marking the beginning of a turn in some American intellectuals' assessment of both antiutopias (a turn away from their one‑sided interpretation) and the state of American society. The turn itself came later, in the mid‑1960s, when people suddenly saw an America of today or tomorrow in Huxley's and Orwell's novels. The Orwellian nightmares gave an impetus to the left radicals in their struggle against trends in the domestic and foreign policies of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, Images from these books became catchwords these radicals used frequently to describe American realities.
The antiutopian feelings of the 1940s and 1950s were by no means accidental; they stemmed from a series of objective circumstances—first and foremost, the socially and politically differing phenomena of the times such as World War II and the traumas it inflicted on liberal bourgeois consciousness, the Cold War imperialism launched, and the anticommunist hysteria which, in the United States, took the form of McCarthyism. Finally, there were the increasingly pronounced and contradictory consequences of scientific and technological progress, the progress the social utopia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had advocated so vigorously. All these were heterogeneous developments, but they all pushed in one direction, generating what Raymond Aron later called "disillusionment with progress" among Western intellectuals. This disillusionment was bound to affect utopia, with its faith in social (including political and moral) progress as its motive force (although this was not always recognized).

Still, by the mid‑1960s it was already quite obvious that the "death of utopia" had been recorded prematurely and that the antiutopian trend had failed to take firm root in American consciousness and culture and to establish itself as a tradition. Utopia was alive. Having lived through a crisis, it reemerged, in a slightly different shape but with its essence unchanged. The proof was in the mass democratic movements which advanced social and political alterna-

1 Ibid., p. 267.
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tives sometimes of a utopian hue, resurrecting the hope of creating a different, more humane world. This was also clear from what was happening in American literature.

The assumption here is that science fiction (or fantasy) and utopia are different things, that they reflect different phenomena. A utopia may be free from any fantastic elements, just as a piece of science fiction may be devoid of any utopian features. Here, science fiction means not only speculative fiction dealing exclusively with science but also science fiction concerned with technological or social matters: the term "science fiction" denotes not the scientific nature of a literary work or the degree to which it matches scientific accuracy (straight science fiction); it refers to the object of a given book, be it science , technology, or social, political or other processes. Certainly, science fiction may contain socioutopian ideals, just as a social utopia may use science fiction techniques—the path that authors of negative utopias or antiutopias may take.

Then, what was the genre of the hundreds of books critics described as antiutopian science fiction, negative utopias, or simply warnings? How can one assess, in relation to the subject under discussion, works that stand out among this mass, such as The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 451° Fahrenheit by Ray Bradbury, "A Ticket to Tranai" by Robert Sheckley and Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey?

Upon a closer examination, most of these and many similar works are better described as negative utopias than antiutopias in the strict sense of the term.

Expressing a critical attitude to various social and political phenomena, including world nuclear war, destruction of the environment , bureaucratization of the social fabric, limitations of human rights and freedoms, modern American negative utopias comprise a broad range of types. Among these, antitotalitarian, antitechnocratic and antiwar works should be singled out specially.

The notion of a "totalitarian society", which arose in American social consciousness and political sociology not without the influence by the European immigrants who came to the United States between the 1930s and the 1950s (including figures like Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm and Thomas Molnar), was largely based on

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European experience, above all on what happened in Nazi Germany. Projected against the background of postwar America, with its tendency to expand the functions and enhance the role of the state and with its crisis of traditional bourgeois individualism, this experience led to an image of totalitarianism as a system which was a repressive dictatorship of the whole vis‑a‑vis its parts: society oppressed the individual; the state, its citizens; and the organization, its members.

Of considerable importance as factors which contributed to the appearance of this notion were Huxley's and Orwell's novels, especially 1984. The "Orwellian world" became a symbol of sorts of "totalitarian dictatorship" which frightened not only the American left but also conservatives and even certain right‑wing groups, since in the United States their thinking was still shaped by individualist and antietatist values.

The influence of the European experience and its concomitant political interpretations were also evident from the fact that throughout the 1940s and 1950s the possible establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States was connected either with a socialist revolution—in the eyes of the right—or with a fascist coup—in the eyes of the left. In other words, this dictatorship was considered to be incompatible with the typically American political and legal procedures. Most Americans entertain this notion to this day. However, now it is being attacked as a primitive concept which does not fully reflect the political realities of today.

According to many liberal American journalists and sociologists, one cannot, essentially, rule out the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian regime of the "national type"—a regime which would take a "distinct road"—without a mass fascist party, without storm troopers or the use of the army. They maintain that a tense, stormy atmosphere and violent mass discontent would be all it would take—wary of the liberals, the masses would, without any storm trooper support, vote for some fascist demagogue who would seize power and "set things straight".

This was the pattern Sinclair Lewis used in It Can't Happen Here. A similar plot is present in The R Document by Irving Wallace. One of the protagonists—the director of the FBI—dreams of a totalitarian dictatorship in the United

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States. And so he tries to push through the legislature—bypassing the President—the so‑called 35th Amendment which would suspend (in actual fact, repeal) the Bill of Rights and would vest unlimited authority in the director of the FBI. Suspecting nothing, many states vote in favor of the amendment (the pretext is to strengthen law and all is in full compliance with the constitutional procedure), and only an accidental combination of events and an incorruptible Attorney General frustrate the conspiracy which could have led America to tragedy.

Today, such problems are discussed not only in novels but also in the academic community—witness, for example, the debate on the pages of The Futurist about the possibility of an "Orwellian world" in the United States.

How 1984 Came to America, a futurologist scenario by David Goodman, is set against such an ordinary and almost habitual sociopolitical background that the coming of "1984" looks frighteningly credible. "By the late 1960s," the scenario goes, "the increasing availability of fissionable materials and weapons‑making information leads to escalating fears of 'atomic terrorism'. The intellectual community, journalists, corporate leaders, and politicians all warn that atomic bombs may soon spread beyond government control, but no one can devise a satisfactory solution to the problem.

"In the colleges, students are also discussing the private construction of atomic bombs and what the consequences of such an occurrence would be. . . . In one Eastern experimental college, a course is offered on 'How to Build an Atomic Bomb'."

Finally, a "group of idealistic students" lays its hands on the quantity of plutonium and produces a bomb capable of destroying a large city. They blackmail the government and advance a program of demands. Panic engulfs the nation. The President's aides insist that he declare an emergency. "Although the National Emergencies Act of 1976 repealed many of the president's sweeping powers in time of national crisis, he is still able to issue binding executive orders good for six months provided he informs Congress of his intent." Therefore, Goodman argues in his scenario , "the president could still rule by 'lawful dictatorship' , with rationalizations to come later". After long hesitation , he declares a national emergency, demanding restrictions

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on the freedom of movement and of the press, a ban on certain types of communications, and almost unlimited search powers for the police. He also proposes a "reassignment of troops and the institution of temporary martial law". [1] Pressure from the opposition is growing. Finally, the terrorists are caught, but the tension remains: everyone fears a repetition of the incident. The President addresses the American people with a plea for restraint. He asks them not to limit his emergency powers. He also wants the right to suspend the Bill of Rights.

One can easily see that the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship as seen by Goodman is not connected with a violent rejection of bourgeois democracy. In his article "Countdown to 1984: Big Brother May Be Right on Schedule", published together with the scenario, Goodman explains that "Orwellian world" may be a natural outcome of the functioning of traditional bourgeois‑democratic institutions. Within the framework of these institutions and without any visible deviation from the letter of the law (or against the law but without its open rejection) occur changes which, imperceptibly, push the West into "1984" and make American democracy so fragile and volatile that one tiny external impulse is enough to eliminate it as such. According to Goodman, "the social trends of the last 30 years have brought the West closer to 1984 than ever before, and these trends could rapidly accelerate under certain circumstances". [2]
"Doublethink" is the way of the Oceanians in 1984. But it is already a feature of today's America, Goodman says: "A recent example was in the late 1960s when the Nixon administration overtly promoted domestic law and order and decried all forms of 'civil disobedience' while covertly ordering telephone taps, sponsoring break‑ins, opening the mails, keeping the 'enemies' under surveillance, and committing other ostensibly lawless acts.” [3]

Oceania is ruled by Big Brother, an omnipotent and omnipresent dictator who is watching each and everyone all

1 The Futurist, Vol. XII, No. 6, December 1978, p. 354.
2 Ibid., p. 350.
3 Ibid., p. 351.
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the time. But, Goodman maintains "with today's paternalistic government and powerful presidency, Big Brother may be somewhat diffused but just as strong". [1]

Total electronic surveillance is practiced in Oceania—and in the United States: "The surveillance of alleged subversives by U.S. government agencies has been documented by congressional testimony." [2]

In Oceania, people are conditioned to see and feel "the right way" so as not to subvert society. Newspeak, a special language, makes it impossible to semantically express a heretical thought. All, even family, relations among people who, in the opinion of Big Brother, could pose the slightest threat to the totalitarian regime, have been severed. But, Goodman argues, all this is a feature of American life too.

"The social trends of today clearly indicate a general decay of individual liberties, rational thought, personal privacy, and self-determination; a 1984‑type future is getting closer every year. But the critics of 1984 are quick to point out that 'it can't happen here' and that 1984 certainly could not come true only five years from now. They maintain that our democratic beliefs run too deep to be destroyed by a predatory Big Brother.

"They are partly right. None of the social trends have yet reached the intensity that Orwell envisioned in 1984, and at the current rate of 'progress' an Orwellian future is definitely more than just five years away. Unfortunately the trends could speed up. Not one of Orwell's predictions is beyond the range of possibility, and almost any of the social and political trends described above could be brought to a head by just a single triggering incident.” [3]

Goodman's analytical logic clearly records both the crisis of bourgeois democracy in the United States and the crisis of democratic thought, the lack of faith in the ability of the existing cultural and political institutions to prevent society from sliding into antidemocracy, the fear of a large‑scale terrorist act or a natural catastrophe which, he holds, can demolish bourgeois democracy. Goodman is especially alarmed by scientific and technological progress

1 Ibid., p. 352.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
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and the increasingly strong positions of the technocracy: he sees this as a sort of material base of a totalitarian dictatorship. This should be emphasized specially since the view that the threat of such a dictatorship is rooted in scientific and technological advances is not infrequently voiced in America. This view made itself felt, among other things, in the course of the discussion of Goodman's scenario and article in The Futurist.
"For the majority of the human race," wrote Joseph Maloney, an American systems analyst, "a society like 1984 is the most probable future. It probably won't appear within five years, or even within a generation, but the continued spread of high technology, coupled with the continual growth of population, guarantees the eventual establishment of 1984.

"A 1984‑type society will not arise because of direct catastrophes, such as war, famine, and disease, caused by the growing imbalance between the earth's resources and its population. It will arise instead from the technologies that must develop to sustain large numbers of people at the standards of living they expect." [1]

The mass technophobia which springs from a fetishistic attitude to science and technology has, expectedly, given rise to an antitechnocratic and antiscientistic response in the sphere of consciousness and culture. Over the postwar decades, numerous books, including negative utopias, have appeared in the United States, critical of science and technology and aimed against their claims to omnipotence and their schemes to replace man by machine.

Player Piano, written by Kurt Vonnegut as early as 1952, still remains a classical example of an antitechnocratic negative utopia. The novel is set in the United States at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, when Machine reigns supreme. True, to an outsider it could appear that "things really were better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors—mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know‑how and world law were getting their long‑awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and con-

1 The Futurist, Vol. XIII, No. 2, April 1979, p. 115.
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venient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day". [1] But this is only a superficial impression. Gradually, it turns out that man has paid a stiff price for prosperity.

Having guaranteed a certain minimum of material affluence, the Machine has made man into its appendage. Controlling him fully, it has actually ousted him from society as something irrational and therefore absolutely redundant. Officially, power is in the hands of a small technocratic elite, convinced of its superiority over others and imbued with a "sense of rightness about the hierarchy topped by managers and engineers". [2] But even this elite does not enjoy the freedom of decision‑making since ruling over all society, including the elite itself is EPICAC XIV, the manmade computer and the true master of the United States. There is even a joke, "the machine has all the cards". Lost in this world of machines, man loses his "feeling of . . . dignity". [3]

Vonnegut demonstrates. that such society unavoidably gives rise to protest—both by the mass of lumpens, a natural product of a technocratic society, and by some of the technocrats themselves. No one knows precisely how machines and men should be managed, but everyone feels—and that is the main thrust of the book—that technocratic society is hostile to man and is doomed.

The idea that the technocratic world is inhumane and historically doomed permeates all antitechnocratic negative utopias. But these books often distort the role science and technology do play in society. Taking them out of their broad social context and failing to detect their ambivalence, negative utopias frequently blame science and technology for just about all evils existing in this world. As a result, they make a fetish of the very forces they want to fight. That is why these books' positive significance is usually connected with their critical quality.

One of the reasons behind the criticism of technocratic ideals is that everyday consciousness often sees science and technology as virtually the chief culprits of the emergence of weapons of mass destruction and of the threat of a new world war. And war, especially nuclear war, is treated in

1 Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, Macmillan, London, 1967, p. 6.
2 Ibid., p. 5.
3 Ibid., p. 80.
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many modem American negative utopias as one of the greatest evils and dangers facing mankind. Significantly, negative utopias often use a devastating war either as a background or as the culmination. And, no matter how the cause of the war is interpreted or who is blamed for it (the accusations may range from anticommunist to antiimperialist), it is usually cursed as the destroyer of civilization and of man.

Fear of war is at the same time an indirect expression of fear of its source. Depending on the author's politics and intellect, this may be the military-industrial complex, a shortsighted government, the "Red menace" (sometimes transformed into the "Yellow peril", as in Peter Bryan George's "atomic utopias"), the right or the left.

The better‑known antiwar negative utopias—like Seven Days in May by Knebel and Bailey—discharge the warning function traditional for negative utopias and antiutopias, and, given the present situation, are important in mobilizing public opinion for the prevention of a new world war.

In some negative utopias, antiutopian elements, sometimes muted and vague, can be detected. We may reject the world of 1984 as evil, Joseph Maloney writes, but we should realize, first, that this evil cannot be avoided and, second, that it is not as terrible or unfamiliar as it may appear at first sight. Essentially, life in a small town where each is known to all, where people live in a fishbowl and are at the mercy of custom and public opinion, differs little from life in an Orwellian world, Maloney argues. And so, while trying to delay the coming of 1984, we should not despair when it does come. We would merely have to adapt to it, realizing that while it may not be to our liking, it is still not the worst of all possible worlds because its inhabitants at least have food, clothing, shelter and medical care. [1]

This reasoning, scandalizing the reader, displays a feature typical of modem utopian consciousness: the utopian ideal is becoming less and less remote. When an evil appears inevitable, the least of all possible evils appears as a positive ideal and eventually, it is no longer perceived as evil at all. The negative utopia, as a form of possible reality rejected today, becomes the utopian ideal of tomorrow. The distance separating the real from the possible and the possible

See: The Futurist, Vol. XIII, No. 2, April 1979, pp. 115, 117.
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from the desirable becomes infinitesimally small, the dividing lines practically disappear; it remains to be grateful for food, clothing and shelter and to hope that nothing worse will happen. Obviously, this is a covert manifestation of the crisis of bourgeois utopian consciousness, a covert rejection of utopia per se—although the fear that utopian ideals may be actually implemented (which surfaced in European culture half a century ago) is not yet in evidence; nor is there a conscious, philosophically substantiated rejection of attempts to build the "ideal society".

Still, it does not at all follow that there are no overtly antiutopian works in modem American literature. Take "A Ticket to Tranai" by Robert Sheckley, a well‑known science fiction author. Marvin Goodman, the main protagonist, learns that "out past the Galactic Whirl" there is a utopian world called Tranai—"Tranai the Bountiful, a peaceful, creative, happy society, not saints or ascetics, not intellectuals, but ordinary people who had achieved utopia”. [1]

After all sorts of ordeals and trials, Goodman reaches this Promised Land. At first he is delighted, but gradually he realizes the meaning and the price of utopia. There is no crime on Tranai—simply because criminals are not called criminals, and a man who has killed five people is termed a "potential criminal". There are "no police force or courts, no judges, sheriffs, marshals, executioners, truant officers or government investigators. No prisons, reformatories or other places of detention” [2]—because those in authority administer the law swiftly and easily, using rifles with silencers and telescopic sights. Arbitrary action and mistakes are ruled out because by definition and under the unwritten law, each person dispatched by the authorities is a "potential criminal". Tranai has achieved "a stable economy without resorting to socialistic, communistic, fascistic or bureaucratic practices", based on a distribution of wealth "without resorting to governmental intervention". [3] It soon becomes clear, however, that wealth is distributed and redistributed with the help of a blaster.

1 Robert Sheckley, Citizen in Space, Ballantine Books, New York, 1968, p.111.
2 Ibid., p. 114.
3 Ibid., pp. 114, 115.
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In a word, Goodman had another think [sic] coming. "His mind was in a complete turmoil. . . . Was Tranai a utopia or a planetwide insane asylum? Was there much difference? For the first time in his life, Goodman was wondering if utopia was worth having. Wasn't it better to strive for perfection than to possess it? To have ideals rather than to live by them?" [l]

This is the clearest possible expression of the antiutopian's credo, the formula of antiutopia. Nevertheless, despite the fact that some literary antiutopias do exist and that antiutopian motifs do penetrate negative ut