181

p No major negative Utopias or antiutopias appeared in the United States during the war years. But that was then that the nation’s social consciousness began to generate-with the help of immigrants from Europe, and especially from Germany—moods and currents which led to a critical opinion of Utopia on the part of some American intellectuals.

p The “decline” or even “death” of Utopia was what highlighted these moods. "Our visions of the future," Kenneth Keniston wrote in 1960, "have shifted from images of hope to vistas of despair, Utopias have become warnings, not beacons. Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy and, ironically, even Skinner’s Maiden Two—the vast majority of our visions of the future are negative visions, extensions of the most pernicious trends of the present. They are deterrents, cautionary tales: Utopia has become counterutopia. The connotations of ‘utopian’ have similarly changed: the term is now unequivocally associated with ‘unrealistic’, 182 with ‘self-defeating’ and, for some, with man’s deepest and most prideful sins.”  [182•1 

p Keniston presents a sufficiently accurate picture of the moods which spread in the West, including the United States, in the initial postwar years and which persisted up to the early 1960s. Proof of this includes the absence of serious and well-written Utopias from the American literature of those years, and the "apostasy from Utopia" on the part of certain philosophers and historians, particularly Lewis Mumford who turned into a utopiaclast in the 1950s and 1960s.  [182•2 

p These moods were also clear from the attitude to the books listed by Keniston, above all to Orwell’s 1984, which appeared in 1949, and Huxley’s Brave New World, for which the author wrote his foreword in 1946. It would be no exaggeration to say that these British novels were as welcome among certain quarters of American society as they were among their counterparts in England and that they became organic elements of American culture. Moreover, reactionaries used these novels as weapons in the acute ideological confrontation of the Cold War. Orwell’s book was exploited with particular zeal; it was interpreted as a purely anticommunist book, the reader being told that the totalitarian society depicted in the novel was a direct result of attempts to implement the "communist Utopia”.

p It would be unfair not to mention that as early as the 1950s some (although few) American literary figures and social scientists pointed out that Huxley’s and Orwell’s works were ideologically and politically ambivalent and that they were interpreted in a rigidly one-sided way. As Erich Fromm wrote in his afterword to 1984, "the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons, and will not even be aware of it".  [182•3  Fromm called on the American reader not to be smugly certain that the book had nothing to do with 183 him, writing of enslavement and dehumanization as a danger "inherent in the modern mode of production and organization, and relatively independent of the various ideologies".  [183•1 

p That was a sign marking the beginning of a turn in some American intellectuals’ assessment of both antiutopias (a turn away from their one-sided interpretation) and the state of American society. The turn itself came later, in the mid1960s, when people suddenly saw an America of today or tomorrow in Huxley’s and Orwell’s novels. The Orwellian nightmares gave an impetus to the left radicals in their struggle against trends in the domestic and foreign policies of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Images from these books became catchwords these radicals used frequently to describe American realities.

p The antiutopian feelings of the 1940s and 1950s were by no means accidental; they stemmed from a series of objective circumstances—first and foremost, the socially and politically differing phenomena of the times such as World War II and the traumas it inflicted on liberal bourgeois consciousness, the Cold War imperialism launched, and the anticommunist hysteria which, in the United States, took the form of McCarthyism. Finally, there were the increasingly pronounced and contradictory consequences of scientific and technological progress, the progress the social Utopia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had advocated so vigorously. All these were heterogeneous developments, but they all pushed in one direction, generating what Raymond Aron later called "disillusionment with progress" among Western intellectuals. This disillusionment was bound to affect Utopia, with its faith in social (including political and moral) progress as its motive force (although this was not always recognized).

p Still, by the mid-1960s it was already quite obvious that the "death of Utopia" had been recorded prematurely and that the antiutopian trend had failed to take firm root in American consciousness and culture and to establish itself as a tradition. Utopia was alive. Having lived through a crisis, it reemerged, in a slightly different shape but with its essence unchanged. The proof was in the mass democratic movements which advanced social and political 184 alternatives sometimes of a Utopian hue, resurrecting the hope of creating a different, more humane world. This was also clear from what was happening in American literature.

p The assumption here is that science fiction (or fantasy) and Utopia are different things, that they reflect different phenomena. A Utopia may be free from any fantastic elements, just as a piece of science fiction may be devoid of any Utopian features. Here, science fiction means not only speculative fiction dealing exclusively with science but also science fiction concerned with technological or social matters: the term "science fiction" denotes not the scientific nature of a literary work or the degree to which it matches scientific accuracy (straight science fiction); it refers to the object of a given book, be it science, technology, or social, political or other processes. Certainly, science fiction may contain socioutopian ideals, just as a social Utopia may use science fiction techniques—the path that authors of negative Utopias or antiutopias may take.

p Then, what was the genre of the hundreds of books critics described as antiutopian science fiction, negative Utopias, or simply warnings? How can one assess, in relation to the subject under discussion, works that stand out among this mass, such as The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 457° Fahrenheit by Ray Bradbury, "A Ticket to Tranai" by Robert Sheckley and Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey?

p Upon a closer examination, most of these and many similar works are better described as negative Utopias than antiutopias in the strict sense of the term.

p Expressing a critical attitude to various social and political phenomena, including world nuclear war, destruction of the environment, bureau era tization of the social fabric, limitations of human rights and freedoms, modern American negative Utopias comprise a broad range of types. Among these, antitotalitarian, antitechnocratic and antiwar works should be singled out specially.

p The notion of a "totalitarian society", which arose in American social consciousness and political sociology not without the influence by the European immigrants who came to the United States between the 1930s and the 1950s (including figures like Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm and Thomas Molnar), was largely based on 185 European experience, above all on what happened in Nazi Germany. Projected against the background of postwar America, with its tendency to expand the functions and enhance the role of the state and with its crisis of traditional bourgeois individualism, this experience led to an image of totalitarianism as a system which was a repressive dictatorship of the whole vis-a-vis its parts: society oppressed the individual; the state, its citizens; and the organization, its members.

p Of considerable importance as factors which contributed to the appearance of this notion were Huxley’s and Orwell’s novels, especially 1984. The "Orwellian world" became a symbol of sorts of "totalitarian dictatorship" which frightened not only the American left but also conservatives and even certain right-wing groups, since in the United States their thinking was still shaped by individualist and antietatist values.

p The influence of the European experience and its concomitant political interpretations were also evident from the fact that throughout the 1940s and 1950s the possible establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States was connected either with a socialist revolution—in the eyes of the right—or with a fascist coup—in the eyes of the left. In other words, this dictatorship was considered to be incompatible with the typically American political and legal procedures. Most Americans entertain this notion to this day. However, now it is being attacked as a primitive concept which does not fully reflect the political realities of today.

p According to many liberal American journalists and sociologists, one cannot, essentially, rule out the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian regime of the "national type"—a regime which would take a "distinct road"—without a mass fascist party, without storm troopers or the use of the army. They maintain that a tense, stormy atmosphere and violent mass discontent would be all it would take—wary of the liberals, the masses would, without any storm trooper support, vote for some fascist demagogue who would seize power and "set things straight”.

p This was the pattern Sinclair Lewis used in It Can’t Happen Here. A similar plot is present in The R Document by Irving Wallace. One of the protagonists—the director of the FBI—dreams of a totalitarian dictatorship in the United 186 States. And so he tries to push through the legislature- bypassing the President-the so-called 35th Amendment which would suspend (in actual fact, repeal) the Bill of Rights and would vest unlimited authority in the director of the FBI. Suspecting nothing, many states vote in favor of the amendment (the pretext is to strengthen law and all is in full compliance with the constitutional procedure), and only an accidental combination of events and an incorruptible Attorney General frustrate the conspiracy which could have led America to tragedy.

p Today, such problems are discussed not only in novels but also in the academic community—witness, for example, the debate on the pages of The Futurist about the possibility of an "Orwellian world" in the United States.

p How 1984 Came to America, -a futurologist scenario by David Goodman, is set against such an ordinary and almost habitual sociopolitical background that the coming of "1984" looks frighteningly credible. "By the late 1960s," the scenario goes, "the increasing availability of fissionable materials and weapons-making information leads to escalating fears of ’atomic terrorism’. The intellectual community, journalists, corporate leaders, and politicians all warn that atomic bombs may soon spread beyond government control, but no one can devise a satisfactory solution to the problem.

p “In the colleges, students are also discussing the private construction of atomic bombs and what the consequences of such an occurrence would be.... In one Eastern experimental college, a course is offered on ’How to Build an Atomic Bomb’.”

p Finally, a "group of idealistic students" lays its hands on the quantity of plutonium and produces a bomb capable of destroying a large city. They blackmail the government and advance a program of demands. Panic engulfs the nation. The President’s aides insist that he declare an emergency. "Although the National Emergencies Act of 1976 repealed many of the president’s sweeping powers in time of national crisis, he is still able to issue binding executive orders good for six months provided he informs Congress of his intent." Therefore, Goodman argues in his scenario, "the president could still rule by ’lawful dictatorship’, with rationalizations to come later". After long hesitation, he declares a national emergency, demanding restrictions 187 on the freedom of movement and of the press, a ban on certain types of communications, and almost unlimited search powers for the police. He also proposes a " reassignment of troops and the institution of temporary martial law".  [187•1  Pressure from the opposition is growing. Finally, the terrorists are caught, but the tension remains: everyone fears a repetition of the incident. The President addresses the American people with a plea for restraint. He asks them not to limit his emergency powers. He also wants the right to suspend the Bill of Rights.

p One can easily see that the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship as seen by Goodman is not connected with a violent rejection of bourgeois democracy. In his article "Countdown to 1984: Big Brother May Be Right on Schedule", published together with the scenario, Goodman explains that "Orwellian world" may be a natural outcome of the functioning of traditional bourgeois-democratic institutions. Within the framework of these institutions and without any visible deviation from the letter of the law (or against the law but without its open rejection) occur changes which, imperceptibly, push the West into "1984" and make American democracy so fragile and volatile that one tiny external impulse is enough to eliminate it as such. According to Goodman, "the social trends of the last 30 years have brought the West closer to 1984 than ever before, and these trends could rapidly accelerate under certain circumstances".  [187•2 

p “Doublethink" is the way of the Oceanians in 1984. But it is already a feature of today’s America, Goodman says: "A recent example was in the late 1960s when the Nixon administration overtly promoted domestic law and order and decried all forms of ’civil disobedience’ while covertly ordering telephone taps, sponsoring break-ins, opening the mails, keeping the ‘enemies’ under surveillance, and committing other ostensibly lawless acts.”  [187•3 

p Oceania is ruled by Big Brother, an omnipotent and omnipresent dictator who is watching each and everyone all 188 the time. But, Goodman maintains "with today’s paternalistic government and powerful presidency, Big Brother may be somewhat diffused but just as strong".  [188•1 

p Total electronic surveillance is practiced in Oceania—and in the United States: "The surveillance of alleged subversives by U.S. government agencies has been documented by congressional testimony.”  [188•2 

p In Oceania, people are conditioned to see and feel "the right way" so as not to subvert society. Newspeak, a special language, makes it impossible to semantically express a heretical thought. All, even family, relations among people who, in the opinion of Big Brother, could pose the slightest threat to the totalitarian regime, have been severed. But, Goodman argues, all this is a feature of American life too.

p “The social trends of today clearly indicate a general decay of individual liberties, rational thought, personal privacy, and self-determination; a 1984-type future is getting closer every year. But the critics of 1984 are quick to point out that ’it can’t happen here’ and that 1984 certainly could not come true only five years from now. They maintain that our democratic beliefs run too deep to be destroyed by a predatory Big Brother.

p “They are partly right. None of the social trends have yet reached the intensity that Orwell envisioned in 1984, and at the current rate of ‘progress’ an Orwellian future is definitely more than just five years away. Unfortunately the trends could speed up. Not one of Orwell’s predictions is beyond the range of possibility, and almost any of the social and political trends described above could be brought to a head by just a single triggering incident. "  [188•3 

p Goodman’s analytical logic clearly records both the crisis of bourgeois democracy in the United States and the crisis of democratic thought, the lack of faith in the ability of the existing cultural and political institutions to prevent society from sliding into antidemocracy, the fear of a large-scale terrorist act or a natural catastrophe which, he holds, can demolish bourgeois democracy. Goodman is especially alarmed by scientific and technological progress 189 and the increasingly strong positions of the technocracy: he sees this as a sort of material base of a totalitarian dictatorship. This should be emphasized specially since the view that the threat of such a dictatorship is rooted in scientific and technological advances is not infrequently voiced in America. This view made itself felt, among other things, in the course of the discussion of Goodman’s scenario and article in The Futurist.

p “For the majority of the human race," wrote Joseph Maloney, an American systems analyst, "a society like 1984 is the most probable future. It probably won’t appear within five years, or even within a generation, but the continued spread of high technology, coupled with the continual growth of population, guarantees the eventual establishment of 1984.

p “A 1984-type society will not arise because of direct catastrophes, such as war, famine, and disease, caused by the growing imbalance between the earth’s resources and its population. It will arise instead from the technologies that must develop to sustain large numbers of people at the standards of living they expect.”  [189•1 

p The mass technophobia which springs from a fetishistic attitude to science and technology has, expectedly, given rise to an antitechnocratic and antiscientistic response in the sphere of consciousness and culture. Over the postwar decades, numerous books, including negative Utopias, have appeared in the United States, critical of science and technology and aimed against their claims to omnipotence and their schemes to replace man by machine.

p Player Piano, written by Kurt Vonnegut as early as 1952, still remains a classical example of an antitechnocratic negative utopia. The novel is set in the United States at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, when Machine reigns supreme. True, to an outsider it could appear that "things really were better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of unnatural terrors-mass starvation, mass imprisonment, mass torture, mass murder. Objectively, know-how and world law were getting their long-awaited chance to turn earth into an altogether pleasant and 190 convenient place in which to sweat out Judgment Day".  [190•1  But this is only a superficial impression. Gradually, it turns out that man has paid a stiff price for prosperity.

p Having guaranteed a certain minimum of material affluence, the Machine has made man into its appendage. Controlling him fully, it has actually ousted him from society as something irrational and therefore absolutely redundant. Officially, power is in the hands of a small technocratic elite, convinced of its superiority over others and imbued with a "sense of lightness about the hierarchy topped by managers and engineers".  [190•2  But even this elite does not enjoy the freedom of decision-making since ruling over all society, including the elite itself is EPICAC XIV, the manmade computer and the true master of the United States. There is even a joke, "the machine has all the cards". Lost in this world of machines, man loses his "feeling of ... dignity".  [190•3 

p Vonnegut demonstrates that such society unavoidably gives rise to protest—both by the mass of lumpens, a natural product of a technocratic society, and by some of the technocrats themselves. No one knows precisely how machines and men should be managed, but everyone feels—and that is the main thrust of the book—that technocratic society is hostile to man and is doomed.

p The idea that the technocratic world is inhumane and historically doomed permeates all antitechnocratic negative Utopias. But these books often distort the role science and technology do play in society. Taking them out of their broad social context and failing to detect their ambivalence, negative Utopias frequently blame science and technology for just about all evils existing in this world. As a result, they make a fetish of the very forces they want to fight. That is why these books’ positive significance is usually connected with their critical quality.

p One of the reasons behind the criticism of technocratic ideals is that everyday consciousness often sees science and technology as virtually the chief culprits of the emergence of weapons of mass destruction and of the threat of a new world war. And war, especially nuclear war, is treated in 191 many modern American negative Utopias as one of the greatest evils and dangers facing mankind. Significantly, negative Utopias often use a devastating war either as a background or as the culmination. And, no matter how the cause of the war is interpreted or who is blamed for it (the accusations may range from anticommunist to antiimperialist), it is usually cursed as the destroyer of civilization and of man.

p Fear of war is at the same time an indirect expression of fear of its source. Depending on the author’s politics and intellect, this may be the military-industrial complex, a shortsighted government, the "Red menace" (sometimes transformed into the "Yellow peril", as in Peter Bryan George’s "atomic Utopias"), the right or the left.

p The better-known antiwar negative Utopias—like Seven Days in May by Knebel and Bailey—discharge the warning function traditional for negative Utopias and antiutopias, and, given the present situation, are important in mobilizing public opinion for the prevention of a new world war.

p In some negative Utopias, antiutopian elements, sometimes muted and vague, can be detected. We may reject the world of 1984 as evil, Joseph Maloney writes, but we should realize, first, that this evil cannot be avoided and, second, that it is not as terrible or unfamiliar as it may appear at first sight. Essentially, life in a small town where each is known to all, where people live in a fishbowl and are at the mercy of custom and public opinion, differs little from life in an Orwellian world, Maloney argues. And so, while trying to delay the coming of 1984, we should not despair when it does come. We would merely have to adapt to it, realizing that while it may not be to our liking, it is still not the worst of all possible worlds because its inhabitants at least have food, clothing, shelter and medical care.  [191•1 

p This reasoning, scandalizing the reader, displays a feature typical of modern Utopian consciousness: the Utopian ideal is becoming less and less remote. When an evil appears inevitable, the least of all possible evils appears as a positive ideal and eventually, it is no longer perceived as evil at all. The negative Utopia, as a form of possible reality rejected today, becomes the Utopian ideal of tomorrow. The distance separating the real from the possible and the possible 192 from the desirable becomes infinitesimally small, the dividing lines practically disappear; it remains to be grateful for food, clothing and shelter and to hope that nothing worse will happen. Obviously, this is a covert manifestation of the crisis of bourgeois Utopian consciousness, a covert rejection of utopia per se—although the fear that Utopian ideals may be actually implemented (which surfaced in European culture half a century ago) is not yet in evidence; nor is there a conscious, philosophically substantiated rejection of attempts to build the "ideal society”.

p Still, it does not at all follow that there are no overtly antiutopian works in modern American literature. Take "A Ticket to Tranai" by Robert Sheckley, a well-known science fiction author. Marvin Goodman, the main protagonist, learns that "out past the Galactic Whirl" there is a Utopian world called Tranai-’Tranai the Bountiful, a peaceful, creative, happy society, not saints or ascetics, not intellectuals, but ordinary people who had achieved Utopia".  [192•1 

p After all sorts of ordeals and trials, Goodman reaches this Promised Land. At first he is delighted, but gradually he realizes the meaning and the price of utopia. There is no crime on Tranai—simply because criminals are not called criminals, and a man who has killed five people is termed a "potential criminal". There are "no police force or courts, no judges, sheriffs, marshals, executioners, truant officers or government investigators. No prisons, reformatories or other places of detention"  [192•2 —because those in authority administer the law swiftly and easily, using rifles with silencers and telescopic sights. Arbitrary action and mistakes are ruled out because by definition and under the unwritten law, each person dispatched by the authorities is a "potential criminal". Tranai has achieved "a stable economy without resorting to socialistic, communistic, fascistic or bureaucratic practices", based on a distribution of wealth "without resorting to governmental intervention".  [192•3  It soon becomes clear, however, that wealth is distributed and redistributed with the help of a blaster.

193

p In a word, Goodman had another think coming. "His mind was in a complete turmoil.... Was Tranai a utopia or a planetwide insane asylum? Was there much difference? For the first time in his life, Goodman was wondering if utopia was worth having. Wasn’t it better to strive for perfection than to possess it? To have ideals rather than to live by them?”  [193•1 

p This is the clearest possible expression of the antiutopian’s credo, the formula of antiutopia. Nevertheless, despite the fact that some literary antiutopias do exist and that antiutopian motifs do penetrate negative Utopias and other literary genres, one would be justified to say that on the whole, the antiutopian tradition remains undeveloped in the United States. Eugen Weber, who holds this view, sees the reason for this undeveloped state in that while it has felt, perhaps even more acutely than other countries, the negative consequences of technological progress, the United States has not yet lived through the kind of social and political upheavals that have shaken Europe; a benevolent history is not the best environment for the rise of an antiutopian spirit. Americans are not yet really disillusioned with their political prospects. "They have produced Utopian satires of the bitterest kind-D. N. Keller, Revolt of the Pedestrians; Ward Moore, Greener than Grass; S. Mead, The Great Ball of Wax,—but the dread and despair characteristic of anti-utopia appear only in the work of the ‘technologists’— Bradbury, Vonnegut, Asimov, etc., writers who see the machines taking over; human personality, initiative, and fantasy lost or floundering in a sea of gadgets, experience garnered vicariously through electronic apparatus.... The mood of the American anti-utopia is just as despairing, the defeat of the individual is just as sure, but the end is attained by different means in plot and in treatment, which themselves reflect the author’s different experience.”  [193•2 

p Although Weber does not clearly distinguish between the negative utopia and antiutopia, he has grasped the essence of the latter, and, on the whole, correctly evaluated the development level of the American antiutopian tradition. "The Utopian is either a hopeful critic or a hopeful rebel, 194 because he has an alternative to offer.... The anti-utopian does not believe in alternatives: it is too late for that. He is defeated before he starts to write.”  [194•1  America has not yet lived through enough social and political upheavals, it has had the luck to easily solve the problems which plagued capitalist Europe, its faith in its abilities and historical destiny is still too great for a powerful, emotional and influential body of antiutopian literature to have developed in the United States.

Naturally, the undeveloped state of the antiutopian tradition should not be viewed as something meaning that American culture is inferior. One should remember that it is an ambivalent tradition. True, it does check the infiltration of political theory and practice by Utopian concepts and it does stimulate greater realism. But its corroding skepticism leaves a twofold imprint on culture, since it breeds both pessimism and nihilism. So far, Americans are more idealistic than Europeans, with all this entails. However, things are changing now faster than ever before. The nation is growing increasingly aware that America has lost its “ exceptionalism”, and the possible range of historical adjustment is shrinking. This means that the contradictions America will in all probability face at home and abroad in the near decades will be increasingly acute. The 21st century promises many upheavals and great disillusionment for America; this is sure to affect the nation’s consciousness and to generate, sooner or later, a more powerful and distinctive antiutopian spirit which will clash with Utopian feelings and orientations and with practical attempts to implement new Utopian ideals.