The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  Producers and consumers produce and consume as it pleases them, when it pleases them and where it pleases them. Liberty is freedom. No one asks them: Why this? why that?

  The children of the rich, in the hour of recreation, taking from the toy basket a hoop or a racket, a ball or a bow, amuse themselves together or separately, and change their comrades or their playthings as the whim takes them, but always solicited to movement by the sight of others and the needs of their own turbulent nature; so too do the children of anarchy, men or women, choose in the community the tool and the labor that suits them, work in isolation or in groups, and change tools or groups in accordance with their caprice, but always stimulated to production by the example of others and the charm they experience in the collective enjoyment of creation.

  Again, at a dinner of friends, the guests drink and eat at the same table, taking as they choose a morsel from one dish or another, a glass of one wine or another, without any of them abusing with gluttony a delicacy or a rare wine; so too do the people of the future, at the banquet of the anarchic communion, consume in accordance with their taste everything that seems agreeable to them, without ever abusing a toothsome delicacy or a rare product. They are more likely only to take the smaller share.

  In a restaurant, in civilized countries, the traveling salesman, the businessman, the bourgeois, is coarse and brutal; he is unknown and he is paying; that is legal morality. At a meal of selected individuals, the man of the world, the aristocrat, is decent and courteous; he wears his name blazoned on his visage, and the instinct of reciprocity commands him to civility. Who obliges others obliges himself. That is free morality. Like that victim of commerce, legal liberty is coarse and brutal; anarchic liberty has all the delicacies of good company.

  Men and women make love when it pleases them, as it pleases them, and with whom they please: full and entire liberty on one part and the other. No convention or legal contract binds them. Attraction is their only chain, pleasure their only rule. Thus, amour is more durable and is surrounded by more modesty than among the civilized. The mystery with which they are pleased to envelop their free liaisons adds an ever-renewed charm to them. They regard it as an offense against the chastity of mores and a provocation to jealous infirmities to unveil to public view the intimacy of their sexual amours.

  Everyone, in public, has affectionate gazes for one another, the gazes of brothers and sisters, the warm radiation of lively amity; the spark of passion only gleams in secret, like the stars, those chaste glimmers, in the somber azure of the night. Happy amours seek shadow and solitude. It is from those hidden springs that limpid joys are drawn. There are sacraments for hearts smitten with one another that ought to remain unknown to the profane.

  In the civilized world, men and women pin up at the Mairie and the church the notification of their union, and display the nudity of their marriage to the light of a fancy dress ball, in the middle of a quadrille, with the accompaniment of the orchestra: all the glare and bacchanal desired. And, scandalous custom of the nuptial brothel, at the prescribed hour, the vine-leaf is snatched from the lips of the bride by the hands of matrons, and she is prepared ignobly for ignoble bestialities.

  In the anarchic world, one would turn away, blushing and disgusted, from that prostitution and those obscenities. All those men and all those women sold, that commerce of cashmeres and notaries, of cotillons and feasting, that profanation of human flesh and thought, that crapularization of amour…if the people of the future could form a image of it, they would shiver with horror, as we shiver, in a dream, at the thought of a horrid reptile strangling us with its cold and deadly coils and inundating our face with its warm and venomous drool.

  In the anarchic world, a man can have several lovers, and a woman several lovers, without any dubiousness. Temperaments are not all the same, and attractions are proportionate to our needs. A man might love one woman for one thing, and love another for something else, and reciprocally. Where is the harm, if they are obeying their destiny? The harm would be in violating it, not in satisfying it. Free love is like fire; it purifies everything.

  What I can say is that in the anarchic world, inconstant amours are very small in number, and constant amours, exclusive amours, amours à deux, are very considerable in number. Vagabond amour is the search for amour, it is the voyage, the emotions and the fatigue, not the goal. Unique amour, the perpetual amour of two hearts confounded in a reciprocal attraction, is the supreme felicity of lovers, the apogee of sexual evolution; it is the blazing hearth to which all pilgrimages tend, the apotheosis of the human couple, happiness at its zenith.

  At the moment when one loves, is not doubting the perpetuity of one’s love crippling it? Either one doubts, in which case one does not love, or one loves, in which case one does not doubt.

  In the old society, love was scarcely possible; it was never more than a momentary illusion; too many counter-natural prejudices and interests were there to dissipate it; it was a fire extinct as soon as it was lit, and which evaporated in smoke. In the new society, love is too vivid a flame, and the breezes that surround it are too pure and gentle, such sweet and human poetry, for it not to be fortified in its ardor and not to be excited by contact with all those breaths. Far from impoverishing it, everything that it encounters serves as an aliment.

  Here, the young man and the young woman have all the time needed to get to know one another. Equal in education as in social position, brother and sister in arts and sciences, in studies and professional labors, free in their steps, their gestures, their speech and their gazes, free in thought as in action, they have only to seek in order to find. Nothing is opposed to their meeting; nothing is opposed to the modesty of their first confessions, or to the sensuality of their first kisses. They love one another not because it is the will of their parents, the interests of trade, or by virtue of genital or cerebral debauchery, but because nature has disposed them toward one another, because it has made twin hearts of them, united by the same current of thoughts: a sympathetic fluid that reverberates all their pulsations and puts their two beings in communication.

  Is the love of the civilized—the love of naked forms, public love, legal love—really love? There is a savagery in it, something like a coarse and brutal intuition. Love among the harmonized, love artistically veiled, caste and dignified love, although sensitive and passionate, anarchic love: that is natural and human love, the ideal realized, its scientification. The former is animal love, the latter hominal love. One is obscenity and venality, the sensation of the brute, the sentiment of the cretin; the other is decency and liberty, the sensation and sentiment of human being.

  The principle of amour is one and the same, for the savage as for the hominal, for the humans of civilized times as for the humans of harmonic times: it is beauty. Except that beauty, for the anterior and inferior humans, for the fossils of humankind, was sanguine and replete with carnality, or deformed and variegated envelopment, a luxury of meat or crinoline, ribbons and ostrich or seabird plumes, the Hottentot Venus or the drawing-room doll. For the ulterior and superior humans, beauty is not only in the carnal fabric, but also in the purity of forms, the grace and majesty of manners, the elegance and choice of adornments, and above all in the luxury and magnificence of the heart and the brain.

  Among the perfectibilized, beauty is not a privilege of birth or the reflection of a golden crown, as in savage and bourgeois societies; it is the daughter of its endeavors, the fruits of its own labor, a personal acquisition. What illuminates the visage is not the exterior reflection of an inert metal, so to speak—a vile thing—but the radiation of all that there is in human being of ideas in effervescence, of vaporized passions, of heat in motion, a familiar gravitation that, having arrived at the summit of the human body, the skull, filters through its pores, flowing in a stream of impalpable pearls, and, as a luminous essence, inundates all external forms and movements, consecrating the individual.

  What is, in the final analysis, physical beauty? The st
em of which mental beauty is the flower. All beauty comes from endeavor; it is by endeavor that it grows and blossoms on everyone’s forehead, an intellectual and moral crown.

  Essentially, carnal amour, the amour that is only instinct, is for the human race merely the indication, the root of love. It vegetates, opaque and devoid of perfume, buried in the filth of the soil and delivered to the embraces of that mud. Hominalized amour, the amour that is above all intelligence, is, in the corolla of transparent flesh, the corporeal enamel from which embalmed emanations escape, a free incense of invisible atoms that cover the fields and rise up to the clouds.

  To Humanity in seed, filthy amour

  To Humanity in flower, the flower of amour.

  This square or phalanstery I shall henceforth call a Humanisphere, because of the analogy between that human constellation with the grouping and movement of the stars, an attractive organization, a passionate and harmonic anarchy. There is the simple Humanisphere and the composite Humanisphere—which is to say, the Humanisphere considered in its individuality, or embryonic monument and group, and the Humanisphere considered in its collectivity, or harmonic monument and group. A hundred simple Humanispheres grouped around a Cyclideon form the first ring of the sequential chain and take the name of a “communal Humanisphere.” All the communal Humanispheres of the same continent form the first link of that chain, and take the name of a “continental Humanisphere.” The combination of all the continental Humanispheres forms the complement of the sequential chain and takes the name of the “universal Humanisphere.”

  A simple Humanisphere is a building composed of twelve wings joined together and simulating a star—the one, at least, whose description I am undertaking here, for they come in all forms, diversity being a condition of harmony.

  One part is reserved for the apartments of men and women. Those apartments are all separated by walls that cannot be pierced either by gazes or voices, partitions that absorb light and sound, in order that everyone might have privacy and can laugh, dance, sing, and even play music—which is not always amusing for the obligatory listener—without inconveniencing their neighbors and without being inconvenienced by them. Another part is disposed for children’s apartments.

  Then come the kitchens, the bakery, the butchery, the fish-processer, the dairy, the vegetable-processer; then the laundry, the machines for washing drying, ironing, and the underwear-store; then the workshops for everything related to the various industries, and factories of all kinds; the food-stores and the stores of raw materials and manufactured goods.

  In addition, there are stables for a few animals of pleasure, which wander freely by day in the interior park, and with which children or adults play, as riders or as drivers. Next are the garages for vehicles of whimsy; after that come the saddlery, the tool-sheds, and the hangars for agricultural locomotives and apparatus. Here is the landing-stage for large and small aerial vehicles. A monumental platform serves as their dock. They drop anchor there on arrival and raise it again on departure.

  Further away are the study-rooms for all tastes and all ages—mathematics mechanics, physics, anatomy, astronomy—the observatory; the chemistry laboratories; the botanical hothouses; the natural history museum; the galleries of painting and sculpture; and the main library. Here there are rooms for reading, conversation, drawing, music, dancing and gymnastics. There is the theater, the concert hall, the display halls; the arenas for dressage and equitation; the firing range; the billiard-room and accommodation for other games of skill; the playrooms for little children; the young mothers’ hearth; then the large meting-rooms, the refectories, etc., etc.

  Then, finally, comes the place where people assemble to discuss questions of social organization. That is the little Cyclideon, the club or forum particular to the Humanisphere. In that parliament of anarchy, everyone is their own representative and the peer of the others. Oh, it is very different from those of the civilized; there one does not perorate, one does not debate, one does not vote, one does not legislate, but everyone, young and old, men and women, confer in common regarding the needs of the Humanisphere. Individual initiative grants itself or refuses itself the floor, depending on whether it is useful to speak or not. In that enclosure, there is an office, as is appropriate; but in that office there is no authority but the book of statistics. The Humanispherians find that it is an eminently impartial president, very eloquent in its laconism, so they do not want any other.

  The children’s apartments are large rooms in series, illuminated from above, with a row of bedrooms to either side. They are reminiscent, but on a larger scale, of the lounges and cabins of magnificent transatlantic liners. Each child has two connected rooms, a bedroom and a study, in which are placed, according to age and taste, books, tools or toys of predilection. Surveillance is maintained night and day by men and women occupying cabinets of vigilance in which there are camp-beds. Those watchers contemplate solicitously the movements and the slumber of all the young human shoots, and provide for their needs and desires.

  That guardianship is entirely voluntary, taken up and abandoned freely by those who have the greatest sentiment of paternity or maternity. It is not a chore commanded by discipline and regulation; in the Humanisphere there is no other discipline and regulation than the individual will; it is an entirely spontaneous impulse, like the glance of a mother at her child’s bedside. It is for those who testify the most love to the dear little beings, and who enjoy their infantile caresses the most.

  Thus, the children are all charming; mutuality is their humane educator, which informs them of the exchange of mild manners and makes them enthusiasts for cleanliness, generosity and kindness, which exercises their physical and moral aptitudes, which develops in them the appetites of the heart and the brain, which guides them in their games and studies, and finally, teaches them to pick the roses of instruction and education without scratching themselves on the thorns.

  Caresses are all that anyone seeks, child or adult, in the prime of life and in old age. The caresses of science cannot be obtained without brain work and the expenditure of intelligence, nor the caresses of amour without the work of the heart and the expenditure of sentiment.

  Human children are rough diamonds; friction with others polishes and cuts them, forming them into social jewels. They are, at all ages, pebbles of which society is the mold and individual egotism the lapidary. The more contact they have with others the more impressions they receive therefrom, which multiply the passionate facets in the head and in the heart from which the sparks of intelligence and sentiment fly. A diamond is wrapped in an opaque and rough crust; it only really becomes a precious stone, shows itself to be diaphanous and shines in the light, when that crust has been removed. Human beings are like precious stones; they only pass into the state of brilliance after their crust of ignorance, their harsh and filthy virginity, has been worn away in every sense, and by means of every sense.

  In the Humanisphere, very young children learn to smile at those who smile at them, to embrace those who embrace them, to love those who love them. If they are surly to those who are amiable to them, the privation of kisses soon teaches them that one is not surly with impunity, and amiability is returned to their lips. The sentiment of reciprocity is thus engraved in their little brains. They teach one another to become humanely and socially human.

  If one of them tries to abuse his strength against another, he immediately has all players against him, is put under the ban of juvenile opinion, and the neglect of his comrades is a punishment more terrible and far more efficacious than the official reprimand of a pedagogue. In scientific and professional studies, if there is one of them whose relative ignorance casts a shadow in the midst of scholars of his own age, that is a fool’s cap heavier to wear than the paper one inflicted by a Jesuit of the seminar or a universitarian, so he makes haste to rehabilitate himself and strives to regain his place at the level of the others. In authoritarian education, the cane and impositions might well bruise the bodies a
nd brains of pupils, degrading the work of human nature, and giving rise to acts of vandalism, but they will not model original humans, specimens of grace and strength, intelligence and amour. For that, the inspiration of the great artist whose name is Liberty is required.

  Adults almost always supervise the accommodation of children during the night. It does happen, however, albeit rarely, that if one of them, for example, spends the evening with his mother and stays late, he remains there until morning. The apartments of adults being equipped, as noted, with two bedrooms, they can be shared, if that is convenient for the mother and child. That is exceptional; the general custom is to separate at the hour or sleep; the mother remains in her apartment and the child returns to the dormitory.

  In the dormitories, moreover, the children are no more compelled than adults always to keep to the same compartment; they change them at will. Nor are there special places for boys or girls; they make their nests where they wish, only attractions decide. The youngest generally accommodate themselves pell-mell; the older ones, those approaching puberty, generally group themselves by sex; an admirable instinct of modesty draws them apart by night.

  No inquisition, in any case, monitors their sleep. The watchers do not do that, the children being big enough to look after themselves. They can find the water, fire, light, syrups and essences of which they might have need without leaving their dwelling. By day, girls and boys meet one another again in the fields, the studies or the workshops, reunited and stimulated to work by those common exercises, taking part in them without distinction of sex and without regular fixity in their places, always acting in accordance with their own caprices.