Merrie England

 As a young socialist, I generally avoided reading the acknowledged classics of socialist thought. This allowed me to persist in the pleasant and untested belief that someone had worked out a plausible comprehensive theory somewhere for how all this was supposed to work, and I just didn't know about it yet. 

And so, if anyone asked me for my institutional model of socialism, I could gesture to these dense volumes and explain that someone smarter than me must have thought of it already. I was just here as an evangelist for a system that more profound minds had already worked out. How could they not have? Don't you see how thick their books are? 

This week, though, I finally read William Morris's utopian classic, News from Nowhere. And while the book is admittedly not very thick in one sense of the word, it is so in another. 

Morris imagines a socialist reformer much like himself falling asleep one night in the late Victorian age, and waking to find himself, a century later, in a socialist paradise. Everyone is healthier, more beautiful, ages more slowly, and appears to have their every material need satisfied without strenuous effort. 

More remarkable still: there are no police, law courts, or prisons; and they would hardly be necessary anyway, since there is next to no crime. 

How, Morris's protagonist wants to know, did this remarkable change come about? Let us in on the secret so that we can go back to our own time and implement your wisdom!

An old codger, the only one in the new utopia with an interest in history, offers to let him in on the secret. Morris's protagonist—like the reader—leans in close at this point. "Go on," he says, "give me more detail; explain more fully. For this subject interests me intensely."

"Yes, I will," he replies—we can scarce believe our luck that the great secret of the ages—the path to complete and perfect human beatitude—is about to be unveiled!—"but in order to do so," he adds, "I must weary you by talking a little about the past."

We feel the bathos like air being let out of a balloon. We begin to suspect this procrastination and dawdling along the way may hide the fact that there is less to be found at the final destination than we had hoped. But still, we are willing to indulge him. 

He talks for a time about how dreadful everything was in the nineteenth century, and we can scarcely disagree with him there. But what new institutional arrangements, we want to know, came along to replace this unjust society? How did they manage to create universal abundance out of scarcity? 

He explains that at a certain point in history—the (then-future) 1950s, to be specific—a Revolution came about and abolished private property and the wage system. Once people no longer had to work for money, they realized that they liked it, and started doing it spontaneously. 

But didn't people want to keep some of the proceeds of their own labor? Not at all. Private property doesn't exist anymore. People produce for the community, simply because it's fun to labor. 

But is it fun to labor? Then why aren't people doing it already for free? Why do they currently need other incentives in order to bother?

That's because we've made work miserable by replacing all handicrafts with machines, which churn out cheap crap that no one could want or take any delight in producing. 

It is a common criticism of socialism that it lacks a method of incentivizing labor. In some socialist utopias, though, (including the theories of coming "AI superabundance" pushed by our current techno-boosters), this problem is at least partially mitigated by the theory that eventually, machines will make production so cheap and plentiful that very little labor will be required to meet our needs. 

Morris does not even have this avenue of escape. He not only has no plausible answer to the problem of incentives, he exacerbates the problem by imagining that, in his future utopia, all machines will have been voluntarily abolished and dismantled. 

Why, then, are all the people Morris's hero meets in this utopia so well-fed and well-nourished and well-clad and well-housed and prosperous? How did they achieve this feat of material abundance without bringing in any techniques of mass production whatsoever? 

Again, the answer is apparently that they all hand-produce everything they use and consume, and that they do so in abundance precisely because work becomes so much more fun once you are no longer paid for it. 

But wait—I think—didn't humanity already try the natural experiment of having no machine production? Indeed, wasn't most of human history endured under conditions in which all production had to be done by hand? 

Let's take the Middle Ages, say. There were no machines then. And what was the result? Was it universal abundance and prosperity? 

And here comes the point in the argument in which we realize that Morris thought that, yes, conditions in the Middle Ages really were ones of universal abundance and prosperity. As the inhabitants of Morris's utopia put it: "Like the medievals, we like everything trim and clean, and orderly and bright."

If one of your starting axioms is that everything was "trim and clean, orderly and bright" in the thirteenth century, and that poverty and scarcity only crept into human communities with the coming of the steam engine, then I suppose Morris's argument is indeed irrefutable. 

But suppose we take issue with this premise. Suppose we express some doubt or hesitation before adopting the historical thesis that everything was perfectly jolly and prosperous in medieval "Merrie England," during the long ages of superstition and persecution and plague. 

Suppose, for instance, we side with Jim Dixon, in his drunken lecture on "Merrie England," with which Kingsley Amis closes his great and ever-relevant campus novel Lucky Jim: 

The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It's only the home-made pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd, the Esperanto... and this is about as far as Dixon gets before the intoxication overwhelms him. 

But his point has been made, and made for all time. For it is irrefutable. 

But then, Morris was precisely a member of the "home-made pottery crowd." Indeed, he was in many ways its originator. 

And such people are with us still, and will go on insisting that their hand-spun standards of beauty are simply the natural and inevitable predisposition of human beings, and would be realized fully if we could only get rid of such pesky barriers to human flourishing as science and industry and trade.  

But the rest of us will tend to agree more with Kingsley Amis, who writes elsewhere in the same novel: "Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, [...] by a short study of the Middle Ages."