William Morris

Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these 'Chapters from a Utopian Romance' recount the character William Guest's journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Morris's book is not only astatement of his egalitarian convictions but also a distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition.

Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance

News from Nowhere, Or, An Epoch of Rest

Deyana

A nice, socialist-fueled read that makes you think, but a bit anti-climactic--an end, never-existing. I had favorite quotes noted in a notebook somewhere, but I don't have it with me at the moment. Something about humanity and narcissism, carrying on legacy--that sort of thing.

Sophie Shrimpton

"... and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream."

News from Nowhere is a so-called 'customer journey' (ironic as that is) through the logic and ideal of Morris' decentralised socialism. Subtlety is not William Morris' strong suit. It is clear from page one that he has a vision, and he WILL enlighten the reader on the underlying reasoning of that vision through on-the-nose dialogue and observations from the point of view of the Guest. The introduction gives some context: Morris was enraged by Looking Backward - a utopia that outlined a state socialist ideal. He is determined to counter the urbanism found there with an extended appreciation (glorification?) of the rural, and a hate and minimisation of work with a love and maximisation of pleasurable work. However, he does not quite land on two feet. His claims are tenuous and unsupported, and interspersed with bland tangents about the beauty of women and nature. 

EDIT 26/04/19: found a winning quote from this book in my notes:
“...whereas the nineteenth century ones were hypocrites, and pretended to be humane, and yet went on tormenting those whom they dared to treat so by shutting them up in prison, for no reason at all, except that they were what they themselves, the prison-masters, had forced them to be.”

In more detail, here are some things that got on my nerves:
Gender
It seems that a radical progression in economic organisation of society has somehow left gender liberation behind. I won't discuss the pervasive gender binary and transphobia, because this was written in the 19thC and I don't think we can quite expect Morris to be that 'woke'. But in terms of traditional female-male relations it's still a male-identified voice determining that women find it much more fulfilling to manage a household than other pursuits (though this is countered by Ellen, who is promptly put on a pedestal above all other women). Additionally, a lot of emphasis is put on women's looks as being more youthful, energetic, fertile - ("I was pretty busy watching the grand-daughter moving about as beautiful as a picture") it's easy to pick up where their value from a male-identified view lies. Is it really that much to expect someone who has the open-mindedness to hope for a communist society to also ask what role women would want to play in that society, and how they want to be valued? 
A prime example of this is when he degrades "superior" women who want to emancipate themselves from the bearing of children, labelling it as yet another result of class tyranny. He claims this is no longer necessary as maternity is now 'highly honoured'. Child-bearing should be highly valued, don't get me wrong, but just because it is highly valued doesn't mean all women want to be bound by an expectation that they will bear children, and in that way, not all women want to be bound by their biology and what society determines the functional purpose of their body is. To label these women - who simply want to be valued as humans - a result of 'atmosphere of mingled prudery and prurience' created by class relations is (for want of a better word) bananas. 

Transition
Hammond provides a brief outline of how we transitioned from a capitalist society to a communist one. This falls into the same trap of providing extreme detail based on real resistance and then rushingthrougheverythingthathappenedafterwardsbecausewedon'thaveafirmgrasponwhatthatwilllooklikeandwehavenowaytoensureitwon'tresultintyranny. At the most crucial moment, where utopia could become an actual distant possibility if a cogent, clear explanation of how a transition may occur was provided, Morris fails. At least he is not alone in this. 

Education
It is not widespread to read books in communist England. That is a sentence that will send chills down any prolific readers' spine. A common worry in the book is that they will run out of the pleasurable work to do - yet they have not turned to literature and the expansive experiences and opportunities that provides? Morris briefly states that people who believe this are absurd - "...the ordinary daily work of the world would be done entirely by automatic machinery, the energies of the more intelligent part of mankind would be set free to follow the higher forms of the arts, as well as science and the study of history. It was strange, was it not, that they should thus ignore that aspiration after complete equality which we now recognise as the bond of all happy human society?"
He does not offer any explanation as to why automatic machinary can not free all people to do the labour and learning they wish to, in an equal manner. I'm not sure why equality and automation are necessarily mutually exclusive. 
Obviously, it will also set off alarm bells for any political thinker - uneducated masses who can't criticise their reality is a breeding-ground for tyranny and exploitation. Though they seem to have avoided that so far. 


Though this paints a critical view of News from Nowhere, there were a few ideas that I enjoyed. Direct quotes say it all.

Criticism of education
"... of times past, when "the struggle for life," as men used to phrase it (i.e.,the struggle for a slave's rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slaveholders' privilege on the other), pinched "education" for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not: and which had been chewed and digested over and over again by people who didn't care about it in order to serve it out to other people who didn't care about it."
"... you expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be, and when there, with like disregard to facts to be subjected to a certain conventional course of "learning"... such a proceeding means ignoring the fact of growth, bodily and mental. No one could come out of such a mill uninjured; and those only would avoid being crushed by it who would have the spirit of rebellion strong in them."
On Oxford - "My old kinsman says that they treated them in a very simple way, and instead of teaching poor men's sons to know something, they taught rich men's sons to know nothing... it was a place for the "aristocracy" to get rid of the company of their male children for a great part of the year."

Complacency of the masses
"Well, these men, though conscious of this feeling, had no faith in it, as a means of bringing about the change. Nor was that wonderful: for looking around them they saw the huge mass of the oppressed classes too much burdened with the misery of their lives, and too much overwhelmed by the selfishness of misery, to be able to form a conception of any escape from it except by the ordinary way prescribed by the system of slavery under which they lived; which was nothing more than a remote chance of climbing out of the oppressed into the oppressing class."

Pleasure and Art in Work
"...many of the things which used to be produced - slave-wares for the poor and mere wealth-wasting wares for the rich - ceased to be made. That remedy was, in short, the production of what used to be called art, but which has no name amongst us now, because it has become a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces."

A home I want
"...while nearer to us, in fact not half a furlong from the water, was a quite modern stone house - a wide quadrangle of one story, the buildings that made it being quite low. There was no garden between it and the river, nothing but a row of pear-trees still quite young and slender; and though there did not seem to be much ornament about it, it had a sort of natural elegance, like that of the trees themselves."

True wealth
He characterises those in this society as those "who had cast away riches and attained to wealth."
"... while you live you will see all around you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives - men who hate life though they fear death."

Nature
On a final note, over the past while I have nurtured a growing appreciation for nature. This book offered a picturesque, calming escape from my everyday when I am not often out of view from a building or road. I want that little stone house, blended into the landscape.

Bryan Alexander

This is such a strange and moving book, a novel about ideas that largely avoids plot, an argument for a retro utopia build in science fiction.

News from Nowhere is a utopian novel. It imagines a future almost two centuries off, wherein the market economy is gone, governments are done with, and cities have been reduced to small towns and a returning countryside. The novel offers an anarchist vision, but doesn't use that word more than once, and then only in the preface. 

The novel also rejects contemporary (Victorian) technology and civilization. While some Americans today flock to an imagined nineteenth century for steampunk delights, Morris hauls us back to the late middle ages. Time and again he shows us people dressed in medieval costume, living in medieval houses, working at premodern tasks (rowing, carving, hay mowing). The narrator compares what he sees to the fourteenth century at least five times. But gone is the ancient regime's theocracy; instead people do what they want, trying not to hurt anyone else. There are a couple of hints about technology as work, like this tantalizing note: "All work which would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery" (Kindle Locations 1322-1324). But we never see signs of that. Overall the novel's world is a bit like a cross between arts and crafts, Mr. Rogers, and punk. 

Morris strives to make this work, partly through nice descriptions of happy people in a lovely countryside, but also through arguments, which constitute most of the novel. Our point of view character falls asleep in his time and wakes up sometimes in the 21st century, then wanders around talking with people. Each utopian denizen tries to convince "William Guest" that their way of life is superior. The novel's center is a long Socratic dialogue with a local elder who lives in the more or less abandoned British Museum, and who harangues the narrator about how awful his time was, then sketches out parts of the revolution which led to utopia.

I'm a reader who enjoys conversational texts. I also like philosophical novels. But I recognize how dull this can be. Morris runs smack into the problems of utopia - without unhappiness there isn't much room for plot. We get some discussions about scheduling and delicate steps around the possibility of offending characters, and that's about it. One solution to the narrative problem of utopia is to focus on its edges, where it meets other worlds. That's Iain Banks' frequent approach in his Culture stories. Morris' nowhere doesn't really have a boundary, and we're given to understand the world has been globally transformed into versions of his London. There are hints that love can upend society, as it often does in dystopias, but apart from one cautionary tale of ax murder (!) there isn't much sign of that actually occurring. 

It is easy to poke holes in News from Nowhere's ideas. Its dispute-handling mechanisms would break down under determined opposition. Hoarding could easily upend a locality. A group of determined, organized, and violent people could have a delightful time trashing the place. And there isn't much room for psychologies other than that of Mr. Rogers. The landscape and general happiness has to do a lot of work to cheer people up. I would also cast a skeptical eye on the happiness of people without modern dentistry, or antibiotics, or anesthetics, and so on.

Ultimately this reminds me of the Marxist idea of reformatting human psychology by altering material conditions. The Soviets aimed to create a "new Soviet man" in the 20th century, someone who grew up in socialism, not capitalism, and would therefore have a different mix of desires. That didn't work out, and gave ammunition to anticommunists who insist on an immutable human nature. Morris is with Moscow here, as his utopians argue that removing the state and money would generate a different kind of human being.

What might interest today's reader the most is the novel's argument that people don't really want to be idle. While we discuss the potential of universal basic income, News from Nowhere offers a kind of version of UBI. People do take time off to enjoy watching the sky, but they also love work, because it's work they find meaningful. Morris' conceit is that the capitalist marketplace drives people to work at jobs they despise. Without that framework we'd turn our hands to make things and perform services that we delight in. Those goods and services should be better constructed and make their consumers happier than if they purchased mass-produced schlock fabricated by unhappy wage slaves. This is why everyone in News is so much happier. (Sam Harris and Andrew Yang recently made a related argument about IBU).

Another point of interest is Morris' feminist and semi-Freudian ideas about sex and violence. The elder informs Guest that they don't have much violence because they have far more sexual freedom. "[M]any violent acts came from the artificial perversion of the sexual passions, which caused overweening jealousy and the like miseries." What does he see as the cause of that perversion, religion or science? No:Now, when you look carefully into these, you will find that what lay at the bottom of them was mostly the idea (a law-made idea) of the woman being the property of the man, whether he were husband, father, brother, or what not.  That idea has of course vanished with private property, as well as certain follies about the ‘ruin’ of women for following their natural desires in an illegal way, which of course was a convention caused by the laws of private property.(Kindle Locations 1098-1102) This latter sentiment might connect well with today's readers.

As I approached the end of the novel my enjoyment had sunk as I kept poking holes in the world. The lack of narrative tension gradually wearied me. But the finale had quite the sting in store. Guest starts to attend a party, but then -ah, spoilers: (view spoiler)[a Twilight Zone event occurs. Guest stares at people and they don't see him. They walk past him. He has become a ghost or nonperson. The party is in a church, but Guest is being barred from its new communion. Thus we know he is starting to disassociate from the utopia. 

Then we know he's back in his time because he meets a Victorian person. The contrast is shocking:as I turned round the corner which led to the remains of the village cross, I came upon a figure strangely contrasting with the joyous, beautiful people I had left behind in the church.  It was a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half forgotten, was really not much more than fifty.  His face was rugged, and grimed rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping.  His clothing was a mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me.  As I passed him he touched his hat with some real goodwill and courtesy, and much servility.(Kindle Locations 2913-2917) On the SFF Audio podcast Jesse Willis drew our attention to that last line, that combination of hierarchy reinstalled (servility) and its deep embrace ("some real goodwill and courtesy"). What an effective way of showing the fall from anarchy into the world of law and states. (hide spoiler)]
So I recommend this to you. Read it with some energy. Be ready to argue.

News from Nowhere, Or, An Epoch of Rest Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance

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