The Faber Book of Utopias by John Carey

The Faber Book of Utopias Reviews

• 
  Ryan

  Despite the title, this is a surprisingly grim work. The problem with utopias, as Carey points out, is that they aim for perfection. That sounds noble. But human beings are far from perfect, and so are the societies they build. Utopias cannot tolerate imperfections: they delay our progress to a better world, and bear down on the gifted few who will build it. That tends to mean wiping out a lot of people today for the benefit of people tomorrow.
  
  Carey picks excerpts from a variety of works. His range is impressive: Homer, Tacitus, Sir Thomas More, Andrew Marvell, B.F. Skinner, Hitler, Julian Barnes. In all they're a bracing mixture of idealism and inhumanity. The theme of slaughtering for the betterment of society first appears in The Republic, not Mein Kampf. There are methods other than murder: Huxley and Skinner both describe worlds where criminality has been bred out through conditioning.
  
  Carey's commentaries on each entry are lively, often with licensed naughtiness. The World State from Brave New World wins praise as well as blame: it has eliminated crime and managed the eternal problems of happiness, death, and over-population. In Huxley's novel, the world's population is kept stable at around 2 billion. Our global population is due to reach 8.6 billion by 2025 - a number of people the Earth has never supported before. How long this can carry on - and what impact that will have on us - is a recurring question, especially in Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes.
  
  Julian Barnes' vision of Heaven (from A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters) emerges as the best realised Utopia of all. In Heaven your food is perfect and your football team never loses; you can meet anyone you want, master every skill, craft or sport; read every book, watch every film, and romp with supermodels every day. But it turns out there is death even in the afterlife. After a while people ask for oblivion, and get it. Shocked, Barnes' character asks how many people ask for death. The answer is simple: everyone. An eternity of always getting what you want, in the end, is much the same as never getting what you want. It's a uniquely human problem. It's also one the book covers with envious range and thoughtfulness.
• 
  Shel

  This fantastic compendium of snippets of essays, fictions, speeches, and poetry written by thinkers from 1490 B.C. to 1998 imagines what the world could be. The visions are diverse: serene and tormented, heavenly and horrific.
  
  Exploring works from Plato in 360 B.C. to Michio Kaku in 1998, by political figures from Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler, and by philosophers from Thomas Hobbs to Karl Marx, provides a chronological narrative of how utopian ideas have changed over time and been influenced by the events and dialogue.
  
  The editor John Carey provides analysis that helps put the reading into historical context and in view of what is known of the author's life. His comments are objective and useful, but not dispassionate.
  
  Recommended for anyone interested in utopian (or dystopian) literature as a reader or writer and for anyone working for social change.
  
  Read this if you have works by the authors of famous utopian/dystopian fictions on your reading list: Francis Bacon, Edward Bellemy, Elizabeth Corbett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Samuel Butler, or Marge Piercy. The anthology also provides some insight into the utopian thought of writers including Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Voltaire, and John Milton.
  
  Notable: "Sanctuaries for Sadists," The Marquis de Sade's version of utopia, Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1795 (notably disturbing); "Samoan Fibs," Coming of Age in Samoa, 1929 (Margaret Mead was lied to); "Women in Cages," Swastika Night, 1937 (Katherine Burdekin imagines the Nazi regime's enslavement of women); and "What Women Want," (a sampling of women's responses when asked the question in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women).
  
  Quotable: "To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray — these are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these, they never will have the power to do more. The world's prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things: but upon iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, no wise. And I am Utopian and enthusiastic enough to believe, that the time will come when the world will discover this." — "The Really Precious Things," John Ruskin Modern Painters, 1856
  
• 
  Sunny

  6 stars another astounding book compiled by John Carey. How come I have never heard of this guy before? And he doesn’t live that far away in London. The book is essentially a compendium of snippets and extracts of the world’s utopias with added commentary and notes from John delivered in his usual intelligent but fun and pertinent manner. I love this guy’s writing style and the book is about a subject that I’m extremely interested in: how can we better humanity whether that’s at the micro individual level or the macros societal level? The book covers a plethora of utopias a few of which I had already read (Republic, Erewhon to name a few … ) Anyway – here are some of my best bits: (anything from me in the theses of parents)
  • Under the new conditions individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking about the great imaginatively realized individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the actual great individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. The recognition of private property has harmed individualism and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led individualism astray altogether. It has made gain, not growth, its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have and did not know that the important thing was to be.
  • The function of the brain and nervous system and the sense organs is in the main eliminative. Mescalin and similar hallucinogens could reverse this process and re-opens the doors of perception presenting not a transformation of reality but the true reality in accord with William Blakes dictum that if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
  • Great importance is attached to education of which a revolutionary feature is the use of visual arts. All seven walls of the city are painted with pictures and diagrams illustrating astronomy, geology, anthropology, zoology, botany and other sciences, with showcases containing specimens if necessary. The mechanical arts are also illustrated. This means that the streets are classrooms and museums. Children learn without realizing it while they play.
  • Rousseau believed that compassion was stronger in savage man than in civilised man. For savage man did not have reason and it is reason that tells civilised man not to worry about the sufferings of others, so long as they do not threaten him. The human race would have long since have ceased to be had its preservation depended only on the reasonings of the individuals composing it.
  • But although we have plenty we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the west has succumbed to – the temptation to over consume. We don’t give ourselves coronaries by guzzling 6 times as much saturated fat as we are supposed to. We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that 2 tv sets will make us twice as happy as one television set (unless there is boxing on one and MOTD on the other). And finally, we don’t spend a ¼ of our GNP preparing for ww3. Armaments universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the 3 pillars of western prosperity.
  • “If I must spell it out” Frazier began with a deep sigh, “what they get is escape from the petty emotions which eat the heart out of the unprepared. They get the satisfaction of pleasant and profitable social relations on a scale almost undreamed of in the wild at large. They get immeasurably increased efficiency, because they can stick to a job without suffering the aches and the pains that beset most of us.”
  • We should not consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population of ignorant boorish coarse wholly uncultivated men and women as was the plight of the few educated in our day. Is a man satisfied merely because he has perfumed himself to mingle with a malodourous crowd? Could he take more than even a limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the windows on all 4 sides opened into stable yards?
  • The Australians explain that they take pride in their lack of passion. They consider European who have only one gender to be half men. For it is the nature of man to be reasonable, without passion. Whereas half men and lower animals succumb to gluttony lust and other vices as a consequence of their defective sexual nature. We are sufficiently satisfied in ourselves: we have no need to seek any happiness from without, and live contented as you see we do. The Australians disdain bodily functions. They eat only in secret, and sleep very little, regarding sleep as an animal action from which men should if possible wholly abstain.
  • (Origin of Bovril?) The proprietary name of J Lawson Johnston’s concentrated essence of beef, Bovril, invented in 1889 combined with Vril (a name of the power source of a super race of beings from a utopian novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton called the coming race) with bos latin for Ox.
  • (At school) each child is to be told on his entrance into the playground, in a language which he understands, that he is never to injure his playfellows but that on the contrary he is to contribute all in his power to make them happy. (What a beautiful sign to put up in the entrance of a school)
  • (on blind production and the numbers game ting) Do we want to be strong? – we must work. To be hungry? We must starve. To be happy? We must be kind. To be wise? We must look and think. No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour, nor making of stuffs at a thousand yards a minute, will make us one whit stronger, happier or wiser. There was always more in the world that men could see, walked they ever so slowly, they will see it no better for going so fast.
  • Instead of books, they have electrograms of the authors thoughts as they develop and shaped themselves. (In-cred-I-bal)
  • (true analytics - if you are falling in slow motion you can’t always see that you are falling) And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate scepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyse whatever they hear or read – this is an integral part of their school curriculum.
  • (female voices being heard in a male dominated world) Mental health. I want a ban on all media stories that cause distress and anguish unless. a) they give equal air and column space to the women and children involved and b) they tell me the listener what I can do about it.
  • (this was written in 1998) By 2020 he calculates microprocessors will be as cheap as scrap-paper, scattered everywhere in the environment giving us smart homes cars and jewellery that responds to us when we speak and sense our presence and mood. They will be flattened into wall screens or miniaturized to fit into a wrist watch (Apple Watch) spectacles or a key chain. Since they will be linked to the internet (Siri) we shall simply have to talk to them to access the entire planets body of knowledge.
  • (Orwells 1984) - it is party policy that warfare between Oceania and one of the other super states should be perpetual. This is not because any principles are involved but because war conveniently destroys the products of human labour which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and hence in the long run too comfortable. (Not sure comfort leads to intelligence - the opposite j would have thought?) The masses comprise 85 percent of the population and are called proles. They live in filth and ignorance. As they are politically inert the party does not bother to monitor their doings. But it controls their thought by distributing propaganda, cheap fiction and pornography. (Delivered via mediums like their iPhones, Netflix, countless box set series, adverts and other tools that feed them this shite openly and subliminally so the world continues to circle the gutter)
  • (my struggle). For the same reason the emphasis in German schools will be on physical education. Boxing and gymnastics will be more esteemed than academic education, which makes for degeneracy. Hitler was a pioneer of the green movement, lamenting the unlimited and injurious industrialisation that had scarred the German countryside and weakened the agricultural class. The landscape he declared should not be ruined by electric cables funicular railways or needless roadbuilding. It was not the town dweller but the sturdy peasant that formed the solid backbone of a nation. Hitler advocated a diet of raw food and vegetables and suspected that cooked and chemically processed food caused cancer.
  • (timelessness and the power of nature) Brute force crushes many plants. Yet, the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared to the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang and long after both the words of Buddha and Jesus are gone into oblivion the nightingale will still sing. Because it was neither preaching or teaching nor commanding no urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a word but a chirrup.
  • Since earths inner energy reserves and the almost limitless supply of food, meet all practical needs, humanity in its underground existence has turned to the arts. Aestheticism dominates the new culture as utilitarianism did the old. The tunnels and underground chambers are decorated with exquisite graffiti. To be human is to be artistically creative.
  • (important for businesses) Amongst the greatest needs of man and of society today, as at all times, are these: a worthy aim and an opportunity to realise it.
  • Know thyself was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world “be thyself” shall be written. (unfortunately what is written today in our iPhone, mobile phone zombified world is “by thyself”).
  • Jesus said to man. You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfect lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you.
  • The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic values have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst salve owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it.
  • The tendency common among proponents of monarchy and dictatorship, to appropriate art and culture in order to make political power and systems seem more august.
  • The republic is to permit only certain persons to publish a work, as it permits pharmacists only to prepare drugs. Liberty is not the right to be able to do anything indiscriminately, it consists only in doing that which does not harm other citizens and certain songs can be moral poisons as fatal to society as physical poisons.
  • They regard their houses as eternal and are appalled by smiths claim that where he comes from people actually build new houses.
  • (this should be standardised) Everyone is an author, in that everyone publishes a book of his best thoughts towards the end of his life. This is regarded as his soul and read at his funeral. Libraries are condemned as places of idleness and extravagance and most books from previous centuries have been burnt.
  • The human species alone has made the insane value distinctions between one of its members and another. As a result the human species alone has been obliged to experience misery and want.
  • He persistently refers man’s natural state to the civilised condition which as he sees it has bred corruption inequality luxury idleness and vice – in short what you see in mid eighteenth century France. He argued that art and science merely served the interests of the rich. It raised a storm of controversy.
  • Their imaginative excitement comes from the recognition that everything inside our heads are human constructs and can be changed.
  • (bravery in the face of cannibalism) I have a ballad made by one captive in which he tauntingly invites his captors to come boldly forward every one of them and dine of him, for they will then be eating their own grandfathers and fathers, who had served as food and nourishment for his own body.
  • Now as seed being cast into dung produceth good and wholesome corn for the sustentation of man’s life, so bad manners produceth good and wholesome laws for the preservation of human society.
  • He undergoes a full scale religious conversion. He realises that God is punishing him for his dreadful mis-spent life. Penitence and gratitude for his salvation overwhelm him. He discovers what genuine prayer is and proceeds to structure his life around a framework of religious observation. (Praying 5 times a day equally spaced out?)
  • They regard his human quick wittedness as a sign of great folly.
• 
  Alan Fricker

  Nearly two years in the slow nibbling at reading!
  
  Plenty of good things in here and I wish I had noted the ones I wanted to read more of as I went along.
  
  Amusing that one of the latter ones is a utopian vision of 2020 - the past already
• 
  Anne Charnock

  Look no further than John Carey’s compilation of utopias/dystopias to gain a real appreciation of how this form of literature has obsessed writers over millennia. Yes, millennia! From The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor (anonymous, circa 1940 BC), Homer, Plato, Tacitus, Plutarch, Tao Qian through to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Michel de Montaigne’s On Cannibals, Margaret Cavendish, Jonathan Swift, Marquis de Sade, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (a personal favourite), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Marge Piercy . . . . I have lost count of how many people have borrowed my copy and gone on to buy their own. Many small excerpts – excellent bedtime reading.
• 
  Rubi

  I think this is the best compendium of utopias and dystopias one can do. Perfect. A book full of imagination, creativity, desire, hope and much more ... I can say I will re-read it someday, I'm sure...so you can imagine how much I have enjoyed this book!
• 
  Juraj Holub

  Fantastic anthology of utopias and dystopias across the human history
  Particularly brilliant:
  - Plato
  - Plutarch
  - Oscar Wild
  - Thomas More
  - Michel de Montagne
  - Barbara Goodwin
  - Big dystopian 4 - Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut