A human being ought to be simultaneously a thinker and an actor, producing by means of the hand as well as the brain. Otherwise, he sins against his virility, he forfeits the work of creation, and, in order to obtain a falsetto voice, he loses all the deep and moving notes of his free and vibrant instrument. A man is no longer a man then, but a canary.
A Humanispherian not only thinks and acts simultaneously, but exercises different métiers on the same day. He sculpts an item of jewelry and digs a plot of land; he passes from the graver to the spade, and from the kitchen oven to the music-stand. He is familiar with a host of tasks. An inferior worker in one, he is superior in another; he has his specialty, in which he excels; and it is exactly that inferiority and superiority of one toward another that produces the harmony.
It costs nothing to be submissive to a superiority, I do not say officially, but officiously, recognized, when a moment later, in another phase of production, that superiority becomes your inferiority. That creates a salutary competition, a benevolent reciprocity destructive of jealous rivalries. Then, by means of those various labors, humans acquire the possession of more objects of comparison, their intelligence is multiplied, like their arms; there is a perpetual and varied study that develops all physical and intellectual faculties, from which they profit in order to improve themselves in their actions of predilection.
I repeat here what I have noted previously: when I speak of human beings it is not only half of humankind that is in question but humanity entire, women as well as men. What applied to one applies equally to the other. There is only one exception to the rules, one labor that is the exclusive prerogative of woman, and that is childbirth and nursing. When a woman is accomplishing that work, it is perfectly simple that she can scarcely occupy herself actively with any other. It is a specialty that separates her momentarily from the plurality of general attributions, but, once her pregnancy and nurture are accomplished, she resumes her functions in the community, identical to those of all humanispherians.
At birth, a child is inscribed under the name and forename of the mother in the book of statistics; later, he takes of his own accord the name and forenames that suit him, keeping or changing those given to him. In the Humanisphere, there are neither disinherited bastards nor privileged legitimates. Children are the children of nature, not of artifice. All are equal and legitimate before the Humanisphere and Humanispherity.
So long as the external embryo is still attached to the teat of the mother, as the fetus is to the internal organ, it is considered as only being one with its nurse. Weaning is for the woman a second delivery, which is operated when the child can come and go independently. The mother and child can still remain together, if such is their wish, but if the infant, who senses the pressure of his petty will, prefers the company and the dwelling of other children, or if his mother, weary of a long brooding, does not care to have him constantly with her any longer, they can separate. The children’s apartment is there, and no more lacking in care than any other, for all the mothers meet up there.
If, in the permutation of deaths and births, it happens that a new-born loses its mother, or a mother loses her child, the young woman who has lost her child gives her breast to the infant who has lost its mother, or the orphan is given the teat of a goat or a lioness. It is even customary among nursing mothers to give a puny infant the milk of a vigorous animal to drink, such as that of a lioness, as it is among the civilized to give the milk of donkeys to consumptives.
(Let us not forget that in the era in question, lionesses and panthers are domestic animals; that humans possess flocks of bears as we possess flocks of sheep today; that the most ferocious animals are ranged, submissive and disciplined, under the human pontificate; that they crawl at human feet with a secret terror and bow down before the aureole of light and electricity that crowns the human head and imposes respect upon them. Humankind is the sun around which all the races of animals gravitate.)
The nourishment of men and women is based on hygiene. They adopt for preference the aliments most appropriate to the nutrition of the muscles of the body and the fibers of the brain. They do not have a meal without eating a few mouthfuls of roasted meat, whether mutton, bear or beef, and a few spoonfuls of coffee or other liquids that stimulate the sap of thought. Everything is planned so that pleasures, even those of the table, are not unproductive or injurious to human development and human faculties.
Among them, every pleasure is labor, and all labor a pleasure. The fecundation of wellbeing is perpetual there. There is a continuous spring and autumn of satisfactions. The flowers and fruits of production, like the flowers and fruits of the tropics, grow there in all seasons. As the banana tree is the little humanisphere that provides shelter and pasture to the negro child, the Humaniphere is the vast banana tree that satisfies the immense needs of free human beings. It is in its shade that they fills their lungs with all the gentle breezes of nature and, raising their eyes to look at the stars, contemplate all their radiations.
As one might imagine, there are no physicians—which is to say that there are no maladies. What is it that causes maladies today? The pestilential emanations of one part of the globe and, above all, the lack of equilibrium in the exercise of human organs. Human beings exhaust themselves in one unique labor, one unique enjoyment. One writhes in the contortions of hunger, another in the colics and hiccups of indigestion. One occupies his arm to the exclusion of his brain, the other his brain to the exclusion of his arm. The frictions of the day and the worries of the day to come contract the fibers, inhibit the natural circulation of the blood and produce interior cloacas that exhale withering and death. The physician arrives; he has an interest in disease, just as the advocate has an interest in crime, and he inoculates the veins of the patient with mercury and arsenic; of a temporary indisposition he makes an incurable leprosy that is communicated from generation to generation. One is horrified by a Brinvilliers,13 but what is one Brinvilliers compared with the poisoners named physicians? La Brinvilliers only attacked the lives of a few of her contemporaries; they attack the life and intelligence of all men, including their posterity. Civilized, civilized, have academies of torturers if you wish, but do not have academies of medicine! Men of amphitheaters or scaffolds, murder the present if you must, but at least spare the future!
Among the humanispherians there is an equation in the exercise of human faculties, and that leveling produces health. That does not mean that they do not occupy themselves with surgery or anatomy. No art or science is neglected there. There is not a single humanispherian who has not studied them. Those laborers who profess surgery exercise their knowledge on an arm or a leg when an accident occurs. As for indispositions, as everyone has notions of hygiene and anatomy, they medicate themselves; one takes a spoonful of exercise, another a draught of sleep, and the next day, as often as not, all is said and done; they are the most predisposed people in the world.
Contrary to Gall and Lavater,14 who have mistaken the effect for the cause, they do not believe that humans are born with absolutely pronounced aptitudes. The lines of the visage and the contours of the head are not things innate in us, they say; we are all born with the seeds of all the faculties—save for rare exceptions; there are mental infirmities as well as physical ones, but monstrosities are summoned to disappear in Harmony—and external circumstances act directly upon them.
According to whether those faculties are or are not exposed to their radiation, they acquire a greater or lesser growth, shaped in one fashion or another. A person’s physiognomy reflects their penchants, but that physiognomy is often quite different from the one they had as a child. The craniology of a man testifies to his passions, but that craniology often has nothing in common with the one he had in the cradle.
In the same way that a right arm exercised to the detriment of the left acquires more vigor, more elasticity and also more volume than its counterpart, to the extent that abuse of that exercise might render a man hunchbacked on one shoulder, so
the exclusive exercise given to certain passionate faculties can, by developing the organs, render a man’s skull bumpy. The furrows of the visage, like the bumps of the skull, are the blossoming of our sensations on our face, but are not original stigmata. The environment in which we live and the diversity of the points of view at which humans are placed, which means that they do not see things in the same aspect, explain the diversity of craniology and phrenology in humans as well as the diversity of their passions and aptitudes.
The skull in which the bumps are equally developed is assuredly that of the most perfect human being, but how many people in the present world are proud of their bumps and their horns! If some learned astrologer in the name of that pretended science were to say that it is the sun that is escaping its radiation, not its radiation that is escaping the sun, trust me, he would find civilized persons to believe him and sub-professors to discuss the matter. Poor world! Poor educational bodies! Inferno of humans! Paradise of spice-merchants!
As there are neither slaves nor masters there, neither chiefs nor subordinates, neither property-owners nor disinherited, neither legality nor penalization, neither frontiers nor barriers, neither civil not religious codes, there are no longer any civil, military or religious authorities, nor abdicates, bailiffs, solicitors, notaries, judges, policemen, bourgeois, lords, priests, soldiers, thrones, altars, barracks, churches, prisons, fortresses, pyres or scaffolds; if there are any, they are preserved in alcohol, mummified in natural grandeur or reproduced in miniature, all arranged and numbered in some back-room of a museum, as objects of curiosity and antiquity.
Even the books of French, Russian, German and English authors, etc, etc. lie in the dust and the store-rooms of libraries; no one reads them; they are, in any case, written in dead languages. A universal language has replaced all those national jargons. In that language, one can say more in one word than could be said in ours in a sentence. When, by chance, a humanispherian takes it into his head to cast his eyes over pages written in the times of the civilized and has the courage to read a few lines, he soon closes the book with a shiver of shame and disgust, and, thinking about what humankind was in that epoch of Babylonian depravity and syphilitic constitutions, he senses a blush rising to his face, as a woman, still young, whose mouth has been soiled by debauchery, blushes after being rehabilitated, at the memory of her days of prostitution.
Property and commerce, the putrid affection for gold, the usurian malady, the corrosive contagion that infests contemporary societies with a virus of venality, and metalizes amity and amour: that scourge of the nineteenth century has disappeared from the bosom of humankind. There are no more sellers or sold. The anarchic community of interests has spread purity and health in mores everywhere. Amour is no longer a filthy traffic but an exchange of tender and pure sentiments. Venus is no longer the immodest Venus but Venus Urania. Amity is no longer a market trader caressing the purses of passers-by and changing honeyed words into abuse depending on whether one accepts or refuses his merchandise; he is a charming child who only requests caresses in exchange for his caresses, sympathy for sympathy.
In the Humanisphere, everything that is apparent is real, appearance is not a travesty. Dissimulation was always the livery of valets and slaves; it is required among the civilized. The free human being bears frankness, the escutcheon of Liberty, over the heart. Dissimulation is not even an exception among the humanispherians.
Religious artifices, the edifices of superstition, respond among the civilized, as among barbarians and savages to a need for the ideal for which those populations, not finding it in the world of the real, go in search in the world of the impossible.
Women especially, the half of the human race even more excluded than the other from social rights, and relegated, like Cinderella, to the corner of the household hearth, delivered to catechismal meditations and unhealthy hallucinations, abandon themselves with all the impetus of the heart and the imagination to the charm of religious pomp and spectacular masses, to all the mystical poetry of that mysterious romance of which the handsome Jesus is the hero and divine love the intrigue.
All those songs of angels and saints, that paradise filled with light, music and incense, that opera of eternity of which God is the great maestro, the decorator, the composer and the leader of the orchestra, those azure pews in which Mary and Magdalen, the two daughters of Eve, have places of honor; all that phantasmagoria of sacerdotal physicians cannot fail in a society to impress the sentimental fibers of women, compressed and always quivering, forcefully.
Their bodies chained to the kitchen oven, the shop counter or the drawing from piano, they wander in thought, without ballast or sail, without tiller or compass, toward the idealization of human being in the spheres, strewn with reefs and constellated with superstition, of the fluidic azure, in the exotic reveries of the paradisal life. They react by mysticism, rebel by superstition, against the degree of inferiority in which men have placed them. They appeal from their terrestrial abasement for celestial ascension, from human bestiality for divine spirituality.
In the Humanisphere, nothing similar can happen. A man is nothing more than a woman, and a woman nothing more than a man. They are both equally free. The urns of voluntary education have poured their streams of knowledge over their heads; the collision of intelligences has leveled their course. The flood of fluctuating needs raises that level every day. Men and women swim on that ocean of progress, linked to one another. The lively springs of the heart spread their heady and burning passions into society and make a flavorsome perfumed bath for the ardors of men and women alike. Amour no longer has anything in it of mysticism or bestiality; amour has all the voluptuousness of physical and mental sensation; amour is that of humanity purified, vivified and regenerated, humanity become human.
As the ideal is on Earth, present or future, why would you want to seek it elsewhere? In order for the divinity to float over the clouds of the imagination, there have to be clouds, and within the humanispherian cranium, there is only sunlight. Where light reigns, there is no darkness; where intelligence reigns, there is no superstition. Today, when existence is a perpetual maceration and claustration of the passions, happiness is a dream. In the future world, life being an expansion of all the passionate fibers, life will be a dream of joy.
In the civilized world there is nothing but masturbation and sodomy, masturbation or sodomy of the flesh and masturbation or sodomy of the mind. The mind is a sewer of abject thoughts, the flesh a cesspit of filthy pleasures. In present times, men and women do not make love; they serve their needs. In the future there will be no need for them but that of love! And it is only with the fire of the passion of the heart, and with the ardor of the sentiment of the brain, that they will unite in mutual intercourse. Sensualities will no longer operate in any but the natural order, those of the flesh as well as those of the mind.
Liberty will have purified everything.
After having visited in detail the buildings of the Humanisphere, where everything consists of workshops of pleasure or salons of labor, storehouses of sciences and the arts and museums of all productions; after having admired the machines of iron powered by steam or electricity, laborious mechanisms which are to the humanispherians what multitudes of proletarians or slaves are to the civilized; after having witnessed the no-less-admirable movement of that human mechanism, that multitude of free laborers, a serial mechanism of which attraction is the sole motor; after having observed the marvels of that egalitarian organization whose anarchic evolution produces harmony; after having visited the fields, the gardens, the meadows, and the rustic hangars whose roofs serve to shelter the flocks wandering the countryside and whose lofts serve for the storage of grain and forage; after having traveled all the railways lines that furrow the interior and the exterior of the Humanisphere, and having navigated in the magnificent aerial steamers that transport people, products, ideas and objects with the flight of an eagle from one humanisphere to another, from one continent to another a
nd from any point of the globe to its extremities; after having seen and heard, having palpated with the fingers and thought all these things, how can it be, I said to myself, on returning to the civilized, that one can live under the Law, that Knout of Authority, when Anarchy, that law of Liberty, has such pure and mild mores? How is it that one regards that intelligent fraternity as something so phenomenal, and this fratricidal imbecility as something normal?
Oh, phenomena and utopias are only phenomena and utopias in relation to our ignorance. Everything that is phenomenal for our world is something quite ordinary for another, whether it is a matter of the movement of planets or the movement of people; and what would be most phenomenal for me is if society were to remain perpetually in social darkness and not awaken to the light. Authority is a nightmare that weighs upon the breast of human beings and stifles them; let them hear the voice of Liberty, let them emerge from theirs dolorous slumber, and they will soon have recovered the plenitude of their senses and their aptitude for work, for amour, and for happiness!
Although, in the Humanisphere, the machines do all the heaviest labor, there are, in my opinion, some labors that are more disagreeable than others, and there are even some that seem to me unlikely to be to anyone’s taste. Nevertheless, those labors are carried out without any law or regulation constraining anyone. How can that be? I said to myself, having only as yet seen things through my civilized eyes. It was, however, quite simple.
What is it that renders work attractive? It is not always the nature of the work but the conditions in which it is carried out and the condition of the result to be obtained. In our day, a worker goes to exercise a profession; it is not always the profession he would have chosen; hazard more than attraction has decided it thus. If that profession procures him a certain relative ease, if is salary is high, if he deals with a boss who does not make his authority felt too heavily, that worker will accomplish his work with a certain pleasure. If, subsequently, the same worker labors for a churlish boss, if his salary diminishes by half, if his profession no longer procures him anything but poverty, and he will henceforth only do with disgust the work that he formerly accomplished with pleasure. Drunkenness and indolence have no other cause among workers. Slaves at the end of patience, they throw in the towel and, rejects of society, wallow in the lees and the dirt, or, if they are elite characters, they rebel to the extent of murder or martyrdom, like Alibaud,15 like Montcharmont,16 and lay claim to their human rights, iron against iron, face to face with the scaffold. Immortality or glory for them!
The Humanisphere Page 14
