Well, Chesterton is right. Wells's utopia is utterly absurd and entirely unpracticeable. The specific criticism Chesterton had of all utopian dreams was that they "take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones." In this case, Wells explains the administering of a one-world State without ever explaining how the entire population submitted to the State. He describes the running of a world-class railroad without every addressing by what motivation any group of men actually designed, financed, and physically built the track.
(This insouciance concerning all economic matters, of course, drove me nuts throughout the book. It is not possible for the State to provide to all the people the high standard of living they desire. It must be worked for, and the motivation for that work must come from within. Societies have tried to build a socialist utopia. It don't work.)
Wells does mention the troublesome people who might get in the way of his single-State dream world. But he always dismisses the problem of dealing with them-- either through banishment or, in the case of young undesireables, through death. Simple!
In this, as far as I've gleaned from my other political readings, he typically reflects the views of the early-20th century progressives-- and their sentiments survive in the big-government impulses on the liberal side of the aisle today. (I gotta read Liberal Fascism.)
But the biggest hole in the tale of Utopia is the lack of personal interaction with its residents. There are maybe a total of four conversations with the citizens of Utopia. One is with the narrator's double, in which he learns the rules of the samurai (we must know how the elites behave!), two are with the innkeeper and the government bureaucrat, who are more confused about the narrator's situation than anything else, and the last is with the fellow-traveller who the narrator dismisses as a raving lunatic. That lunatic was simply not happy with the administration of the State, and the narrator pooh-poohed him for it. But surely in the entire world there must be millions who are unhappy with their lives and the way things are. Once again, the simple matter of disagreement-- which surely forms the central difficulty of political life-- is unacknowledged, unaddressed, unsolved. But they've got cool trains, and the fares are free!
The botanist companion leans a little more to the realistic side, however, in that he obsesses over the woman who broke his heart-- even in Utopia, he can't let it go. This will be a source of conflict in any world built by man. And the narrator is exasperated by the botanist's inability to get with the program. Sorry dude, you're just gonna have to to deal with it.
What I can't tell is to what extent the narrator's positions and attitudes are Wells's own. He does give a warning at the outset that the narrator is a fictional character, and when the dream of the Utopia dissolves we are left seeing the narrator as an angry character living in dirty London. But the design of the Utopia can only be a reflection of the author's desires, I think, even if he'd like to hide it.
Appendix
An essay on the limits of philosophy discovered by Wells's coming to logic after having learned evolutionary biology. The crux of his problem is that he does not believe in the objectivity of universals-- all categories are fuzzy, subjective, provisional, and imposed on the world by the human mind. This calls into question most of logic itself, as syllogism only works if categorical statements are possible. Problem number two is the tendency of the mind to take the negation of an idea and turn the negation itself into a positive idea for the purpose of logical analysis. And problem number three is our tendency to only pay attention to certain aspects of our disparate ideas when drawing comparisons between them. Put this all together and you get the impossibility of moral reasoning. And moral argument becomes an argument over mere aesthetic preference, with no proper or superior standard of judgment at all.
But does Wells know any of this? Clearly not, by his own lights. Materialistic philosophy eats itself whole.
My conclusion: If positivistic materialism conflicts with genuine human experience, so much the worse for materialism. And everyone believes this, no matter how "rational" they claim to be.
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Incidentally, this is the first entry in the blog I read entirely from a Kindle edition. I've decided that's an acceptable format for quick reads, especially for referred works that aren't classics in and of themselves.
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