H G Wells - A Modern Utopia

Wells' Utopia is an alternative world but serves as an imagined future for our world. I have reached the chapter where his Utopian counterpart takes him to London. I was in the same part of London last week (Millbank) and I am able to compare what Wells wanted with what we have.

We have pleasant avenues by the sides of the Thames, but we have too many cars, and Wells didn't mention those.

London's air is dirty, which would have disappointed Wells, but the river is clean and the streets are fairly clean. We would disappoint Wells by our propensity to wear black instead of gay colours. Although you don't generally see people who are ragged or dirty, you do see some. Busking on the bridge, for example. He imagined we would wear woollen robes. It would be lovely to have woollen robes, but few people wear wool at all. Clothes now are very cheaply produced and not expected to last, so making them of wool would be a terrible waste. He imagined that in the clean air, people would often wear white.

Wells imagined that Utopian London would be heated by electricity, which is largely true, although there are also gas boilers, and the roads are sealed, which they are, and there are hardly any dogs or horses, which again is true. So he thought the city would be clean - where did he think the electricity would come from? Had he not seen a power station, burning coal?  No.

He thought everyone would be healthy, walk well, and have clear eyes and shapely bodies. Ah, well, they're not too bad, the Londoners, and in winter many of the office workers go running about in their lunch break displaying fit bodies. (In summer there are too many tourists in the way.)  However, they are all shapes and sizes, and I can't say that Londoners have good complexions, but they are not too noticeably spotty either. He thought that the Utopians would put off the years of decay. Well, that is true, in that some lucky people remain healthy until very old age, but I am beginning to see that as a matter of luck. It is true that we have learned to look after our teeth, on the whole, but having said that I heard something awful on the radio this morning  about children's teeth. - From today's Guardian -

The number of tooth extractions on children aged four and under in English hospitals has risen by almost a quarter over the past decade.

NHS data obtained by the faculty of dental surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) shows there were 9,206 extractions within the age group in 2015-16 compared with 7,444 in 2006-07 – a 24% rise.

He said 90% of tooth decay is preventable through reducing sugar consumption, regular brushing with fluoride toothpaste and routine dental visits, but that 42% of children did not see a dentist in 2015-16 despite treatment being free for under-18s.

 So 42% of children have parents who neglect their well-being. Not much of a Utopia, is it?

Wells says - "they have extended the level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes swiftly and easily." Hahaha. Old age never comes swiftly and easily. The quicker it comes, I would judge, the more of a shock it is.

However, he does talk about "a ripe, prolonged maturity. .. a grave deliberation, to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of life. " This is not the case at all. The drive for novelties is something Wells never anticipated.

He says that education and training in Utopia lasts until the student is twenty years old - 18 is normal in this country although some of the courses are of questionable value. He predicts the Gap year - "then comes the travel year" "and many are still students until 24 or 25." But he concedes that at this stage young adults need to take some responsibility for themselves, but says that their lives don't start in good earnest until the age of 30.  He sees the Utopians settling down to marry at about this time, and before that they fool around with love "play", he calls it.

This is nice - "my eye is caught at once by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut coat of purple-blue and silver." Wells was really very unusual for his time in that he wasn't a racist but an internationalist who believed that all races would work together in one world.

He really fulminates against all the nonsense of racism, but is very longwinded.
Then he asks what other alternatives there are to his idea of synthesis of all nations to the World State. "Synthesis... does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean uniformity." As one of his ironically outlined alternatives he predicts mass killings of foreign races, "race-destroying fumigations". He points out the process could go on over and over again.

Howard Jacobson - Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It, part 2, Ideas in art

In fact, I did like it, although with some reservations. This is a collection of essays written for the Observer, so they are all exactly the same length, which is long enough to allow for some anecdotes, illuminations and digressions, and they are serious in a mildly amusing way.

My main gripe is that each essay lacks a date, and a preface, explaining the circumstances that inspired it. Was Jacobson asked to write a preface (or an afterword) with the above, and any thoughts he may have had on re-reading the piece? If he wasn't asked then this failing is the publisher's fault, and if he didn't offer, or if he refused to do it, then it is his fault.

Included is a good essay called "What Things Are For" which was a response to something Tom Stoppard (the famous playwright) had said, and I had to have recourse to the Internet to find what Tom Stoppard had said, and when, in response to what. Credit to Jacobson because he does quote the nub of the argument, and goes forward to explain it and help us to see.

Stoppard made a critical speech about the Turner shortlist in 2001 - that information should have been in the non-existent preface - in which he said: "The term artist isn't intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making." Jacobson explains Stoppard isn't referring to craft and honest labour but....

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A work not made is a work not undergone, a process of discovery and change not submitted to, revelations not revealed. Every good writer and artist will tell you that the most productive days are those which begin in ignorance and confusion, the tunnel ahead black, and not an idea in your head. Strictly speaking, ideas are your enemy. Ideas are what you had before, not where you might end up. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale," D.H. Lawrence famously wrote, meaning that an achieved work is another thing entirely from anything the artist merely wanted it to be.
The conceptual artist reverses Lawrence's dictum, in effect saying, "Never trust the art, trust the artist's intention."
In art we get beyond ourselves; here is part of the reason we value it. Marooned in the sterility of his will ... the conceptual artist fears the process of change and contradiction which is art's justification. Hence the inertness of his work when we stand before it - no trace anywhere of what else it might have been or any argument it might be having with itself. Mere insistence. Which isn't, as Stoppard reminded us, what art is for.


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So what did Stoppard say art is for? Can't find that. But the BBC News site says:

Stoppard made a link between the work of such artists and Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a urinal in 1917 under the title Fountain.

He said that Duchamp's gesture had been a valid attack on the orthodoxies of the time, but that now conceptual artists were themselves an orthodoxy, championed and supported by the establishment.