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.

Hidden Figures - a movie

Again we were persuaded to go to the cinema by our son. I had heard good reports of this film and it didn't disappoint. I am pretty sure that after last year's Oscars, which were all white people films about white people, the industry would have been encouraged to make some films about black people. This was a bio-pic about some real women who worked at NASA. They were pioneers, truly, the first women to have beaten the odds and got to positions of responsibility in their workplace. But my God, it was hard for them, and the white people of America should hang their heads in shame.

I thought I knew about segregation - black people had to sit at the back of the bus, for example, - but I didn't know they weren't able to borrow the same books from the library as white people. This shocked me more than anything else - in fact I couldn't take in the implication at first. It is this. White people didn't want to touch the books if black people had touched them. It is so horrible. They didn't want black people to touch their coffee pots either. (This is illogical because they all had black maids who could touch everything in their kitchens and why am I trying to understand the logic to something so horrible and stupid?)

Then white people made it so hard for black people to get a good education. It was illegal for a black woman to go to university and become an engineer. Illegal. Americans have never really been sane. That's what I took away from the whole story. They only wanted to get to the moon, really, to show the Russians that they could do that. That they had great mathematicians, too. That they had heroic young men, too.

For some reason, one really bad misrepresentation of pre-computer engineering mathematics was that, in this film, no one used a slide rule. There seemed to be log tables but the slide rule - gone. Rubbed out of history for no good reason.

There is quite a lot of suspense to the movie - it's written to a formula, to some extent, but it's very good.

The Sun - and petitions

One of the petitions I have signed is about taking the bare boobs out of The Sun newspaper. I think it is sad to encourage young girls to think their tits give them more value than any other thing about them. There is more than enough encouragement for young girls to think that way and it would be great to prune it back a little. Sadly, girls judge themselves by what boys/men think and eventually they fall under the spell of judging themselves by what one boy/man thinks. (Until they are older and wiser - but sometimes there's no chance of becoming wise.) However, when it came to explaining why I signed up to take the boobs out of The Sun I just couldn't do it - it seemed so self-righteous. So I never tried to spread that particular petition. I have also signed one against FGM. It is illegal in this country so the Muslim communities who want it done (African) take their girls back to Africa for them to be mutilated in this way. So the petition is to spread the word that this is happening and by teaching about it in schools, make it socially unacceptable.

A lot of the petitions do have a good effect! For example, the petition to keep searching for the crew of Cheeky Rafiki, that was lost in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, had an immediate effect.

I signed a petition to stop Michael Gove making the English Lit curriculum so "Little England" - everything on the GCSE syllabus has to be English, ridiculous. No more "Of Mice and Men", or "To Kill a Mocking Bird" - these are stories with a bit of real meat to them which show young people how powerful a story in a book can be. Who cares that they're American?? It doesn't matter. Young people have to do Shakespeare and a 19th cent novel - this is hard enough for them: let them have at least one book they can just enjoy.

Another petition I tried to spread is the Stop the Funding Cuts to Kew Gardens one. it's still short of signatories. But the organisers have taken it to Downing Street by way of getting it in the news. Needs 1200 more to cause a question to be asked in parliament I believe. It's so close.

the Sun newspaper came through my door (a free marketing strategy) and it has a lovely montage on the front of 117 English people we are proud of. The Queen is there in front of the mob and there are many, many popular entertainers, Prof Brian Cox is near the front with David Attenborough to represent science. Stephen Hawking is squeezed in at the back. But we seem to be mainly a nation of pop singers, actors and footballers. They even have a pixellated image of someone you have to guess is Banksy.   It's not racist as there's a smattering of black musicians and footballers and Mo Farrer - suddenly he's English. But inside we have a poem by Katie Hopkins, an erstwhile contestant on The Apprentice who looked as though she would give the patronising Alan Sugar something to think about and then became a journalist.

I'm not naturally distrustful

I just like my own

Proper English lads - strong and brave

Perfectly home grown

Whatever happens at the World Cup

I know this to be true

If you cut me to my core

My blood's red, white and blue.

Racism is never far from patriotism and I haven't seen anything like this for ages. But then, I get the Guardian free from Waitrose, don't I?  (This means, a liberal paper from an upmarket supermarket.) I have no idea what most of the country thinks, because I live in a prosperous part of the country. Some of my family is pretty right-wing and probably reads this sort of thing every day quite happily.