Q: Yes, but come along, surely a perfect society isn’t possible?
A: How do you know? Why shouldn’t we have heaven on earth? You really make me tired, sometimes. You’re so full of ifs and buts, and looking for flaws, no wonder nothing ever happens: we all just drift on in the way we always have, bowing under legislation which builds on old legislation, precedent which builds on existing precedent: saying because this didn’t work then it won’t work now. But ‘then’ isn’t ‘now’. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the lessons of history are nonexistent. No doubt history will be taught but in classes, remember, made up solely of children who wish to be in them, and teachers who enjoy imparting information and rejoice in the excitement of new ideas, who have a sense of the flow of mankind’s history: how we have progressed out of primitivism, barbarity, into self-knowledge and empathy with others; how in the spite of our natures we have achieved at least an attempt at civilization.
In Darcy’s Utopia nostalgia will be out of fashion. We will look back into the past with horror, not with envy and delight — we will stop our romantic nonsense about the rural tranquillity of once upon a time, which is, if you ask me, nothing but the projected fantasy of old and miserable men who, looking back into their own childhoods, see paradise. But it is a false paradise, falsely remembered. Wishful thinking clouds our memory. Times were better then, we think. We assume that what is true for us individually is true for society too. But it isn’t. The antithesis is true. One by one we grow old and decline, but our societies increase in vigour, grow richer in wisdom, stronger in empathy, as we hand our knowledge down, generation from generation. Our own individual fate clouds our vision: we stumble and fall, exhausted, but pass the baton on, runners all in this great race of ours. We should not get too depressed about it. I, Eleanor Darcy, have no children: children are the great cop-out, the primrose path to non-thought, to destruction. Leave it all to them, the fecund say, that’s all we have to think about. Wave after pointless wave, generation after generation, looking backwards, saying better then. Mine is the pebbly, difficult, problematic path, thorny with impossible ideas, genderless; here you get spat upon, jeered at, derided, but it is the only path which leads forward to heaven upon earth.
And why should we not have it? I tell you, if you look back, you will get burned, like Lot’s wife, to a pillar of salt; Lot’s wife, nostalgic for the past. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be very bad form to hark back; collecting antiques for the domestic home will be outré. A museum will be the only place for the artefacts of past ages, and let them be as gloomy and dismal as can be. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be accepted that museums will be very boring places indeed. If you want to subdue the children you only have to take them on a visit to a museum, and they will behave at once, for fear of being taken there again.
Room service had brought breakfast, and the mail. Valerie sat up in bed, Hugo still asleep beside her, and read the transcript. What bliss, she thought, what paradise, thus to live. Someone else to cook and clean, and bring the food: to be a man’s lover, not his mother/wife. She would live in the present. She would avoid for ever the trap of nostalgia. She could see that the pleasure of this moment could, so easily, turn into pain, simply because it no longer existed. How was that to be avoided?
Q: But won’t that make for a heartless, soulless place? Surely we need the resonance of the past in order to enrich the present?
A: There you go again! Well, it’s understandable. Set foot outside your door, outside your little patch of safety, and lo, chaos waits; disease, poverty, madness, hurt, ebbs and flows all around: you’re knee deep in it. If you don’t get mugged your conscience gets pricked: the beggar at the door offends, the homeless in the alley hurts; drunkards sleep in every alley, the mad stand on the motorway and shake their fists. Those that have not reproach you: those that have, braying about profit and self-interest, offend you. You cannot believe that the past was worse than this. Rather, you don’t want to believe it was. Wars lay waste a generation, they say: fear of war has wasted one of ours.
And how we made them feel it, our young, with our talk of nuclear winter and Armageddon! The revenge of the old upon the young, to deprive them thus of all hope of the future. Look at them now: how they appal you! Hollow-eyed, white-faced, black-clothed, they walk like zombies round the streets, puffing in or shooting up the dreary stuff, which makes the present real, enables them to smile, and lift a languid hand in salutation to their friends. They vomit if they can, they sick it all up: and if their digestions in spite of all abuse stay sound, they drop their litter instead: walk ankle deep in discarded Coke cans, beer tins, fast food packs, dust and rubbish of every kind, not to mention the excreta of rats and dogs, and they don’t care one bit. It even seems to cheer them up a trifle. Looking at all this, you are assailed by guilt and confusion, and you think, what’s happened can only be this: that once there was a golden age, and everything ever since has been a falling away from that. Well, it shows a niceness of nature. You believe there’s something good somewhere: if only by process of polarity: that is to say, your profound belief in the existence of opposites; that if there is bad, there is also good.
Q: Isn’t there?
A: As it happens, yes. But it lies in front, not behind. We move towards the golden age, not away from it: it is inscribed in gold upon the gates which open into Darcy’s Utopia.
Q: You see it as a walled city, then?
A: I’m not quite sure. It stays vague. There are shining towers, golden spires. Or is that some memory I have of Toronto? I suspect as a place it may be rather boring to the eye, being ecologically sound. A lot of people will be doing a lot of painting pictures and making music, so the standard won’t be very high. But we’ll make up in quantity for what we lose in quality. And of course affairs of the heart will keep most of us very busily occupied, and make up for a lot.
Q: I take it that, in the manner of Utopias, the streets will be clear of litter?
A: Singapore changed from the dirtiest city in the world to the cleanest, by dint of one month in which the police shot on sight anyone dropping litter.
Q: And that will happen in Darcy’s Utopia?
A: I was joking, Mr Vansitart. I am teasing you. No, there are no firearms in the place. No one can point a stick of metal at anyone else and kill them from a distance, that goes without saying. Since it will be a recycling society, rather than a consuming society, there will be very little litter available for the dropping: and being a pleasant enough place, no particular desire to spoil it: and profit no longer being the object of the manufacturing process, Coke won’t have to come in cans: it will flow free from taps. There will be Coke points everywhere. Money will flow freely from the cash points next to them, in the transitionary period while we move from a money economy to a Community Unit economy. If you remember, our taxation comes in the form of a sliding scale of units – the young, strong, able, good and bright are awarded the most, the weak, ill, inadequate and feeble the least. Natural justice demands it. To each according to the ability, from each according to the need. The aim ceases to be to acquire money, but to expend Community Units. Those who are left with least at the end of their lives win the game! Unpleasant work gets rid of more units than does pleasant; cigarette smoking will actually gain you more units: the consumption of luxuries likewise. Necessities will be available in plenty in the shops – shopkeepers will be honoured; to keep shop will be a high status occupation, eating up Community Units by the hour! A coveted job. But we’re getting bogged down in detail, Mr Vansitart. Don’t you think it’s time for a drink? (Calls) Brenda, you don’t mind, do you? We’re going for a drink.
Valerie looked down at Hugo’s sleeping body, and the thought came to her, a little hard nugget in a meringue which otherwise melted on the tongue, that this was the wrong body, Lou’s was the right body. She spat the little hard nugget out of her mind efficiently, and rapidly, and her body dissolved back into rapture, but the pleasure of the moment stayed spoiled.