“Nothing struck me more during my whole sojourn in the country,” Butler’s narrator observes, “than the general respect for law and order.”

As might have been expected, a major deterrent to “renewing American civilization” has been smoked out by the new House Speaker in his blunt notice that it is “impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies,” conjuring up once again Butler’s kingdom, where the birth of a child was looked on as a painful event, and the pregnancy concealed as long as possible “in anticipation of a severe scolding as soon as the misdemeanor is discovered.” For Erewhon was under constant siege by the World of the Unborn clamoring to enter its ranks, drawing lots for prospective parents, each unborn then setting himself to “plague and pester two unfortunate people who had never wronged him, and who were quite contented and happy until he conceived this base design against their peace.” Clearly, our own 12-year-olds are the more vulnerable to the blandishments of the hordes of unborn crowding slums in which religion and sex are the only free diversions available, and love more freely given than parental discipline. And where the Erewhonian baby was kept out of sight until it was able to walk and talk, the architects of this renewal of American civilization, facing the scourge of teen-age pregnancies and more than 10 million children already living in poverty, propose cutting all aid to mothers under 21 and consigning their intrusive offspring to the storied mercies of orphanages and private charities; cutting off aid to all welfare mothers and other recipients after two years whether health care and jobs are there for them or not; and, for good measure, ending Federal support for food stamps and nutrition programs for countless women and noncitizens. As bluntly expressed by the Speaker, “The welfare state kills more poor people in a year than private business.”

Embracing the principles of wealth as the measure of power, the millionaire as of greater benefit to society than the beggar and cunning as the guiding policy for all—the projected capital gains tax cuts and indexing, more generous business depreciation and estate and gift tax exclusions, revised laws on liability for defective products and similar arcane provisions in the Contract With America exalt Erewhon’s view of money as “the symbol of duty . . . the sacrament of having done for mankind that which mankind wanted,” holding so high the businessman who has made a fortune “worth 10 professional philanthropists” that the Erewhonian making over $:20,000 a year was exempted “from all taxation,” considered “as a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with.”

“I write with great diffidence, but it seems to me that there is no unfairness in punishing people for their misfortunes, or rewarding them for their sheer good luck,” Butler’s narrator takes up. “Wherefore should a man be so richly rewarded for having been son to a millionaire, were it not clearly provable that the common welfare is thus better furthered?” We can’t help thinking of the recently elected Governor of Texas when reading Butler: “We cannot seriously detract from a man’s merit in having been the son of a rich father without imperiling our own tenure of things which we do not wish to jeopardize,” since “property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organize our thieving.”

Accordingly, in that land where ill luck “of any kind, or even ill treatment at the hands of others, is considered an offense against society,” such breaches of decorum as swindling, check forging and even outright robbery were treated in hospitals at the public expense; or, if someone in good circumstances perpetrated them, he simply let it be known “to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality . . . and they come and visit him with great solicitude”—much, we may imagine, as the friends of our current Secretary of Commerce, or of the former Democratic head of the House Ways and Means Committee are currently engaged or, in the spirit of bipartisanship, those of the former President’s son Neil Bush, of Silverado fame, and even so blatant a case of deception and mendacity as our gap-toothed Marine colonel lately rehabilitated as a Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Virginia. Such egregious cases were subjected in Erewhon to correction at the hands of “straighteners.”

These highly trained specialists had passed their best years at the well-regarded Colleges of Unreason in the diligent study of “hypothetics” and the esoteric “hypothetical language” in which they were “always able to tell a man what is the matter with him as soon as they have heard his story, and their familiarity with the long names assures him that they thoroughly understand his case,” thus laying the foundations for the treatment of the many among us today who incline to conceal their ill health, but “are quite open about the most flagrant mental diseases” in the ramshackle mansion later erected in our midst by the father of psychoanalysis himself. Lesser “fits of immorality”—such as the book deals and Gopac funds entangled in the college courses taught by the House Speaker—may be expected to go into remission with the abolition of the House Ethics Committee under his party’s proposal to transfer its moribund activities to the House committee charged with handling office space and parking privileges.

“It is not our business to help students to think for themselves,” proclaimed the Professor of Worldly Wisdom at the Colleges of Unreason. “Our duty is to insure that they shall think as we do,” largely helping to explain the worship prevalent in Erewhon of the goddess of respectability, Ydgrun, whose law was “conformity until absolutely intolerable”—though she was seldom alluded to or even paid the hypocrisy of the kind of lip service that more fully corresponds to the new agenda’s call for a constitutional amendment to reintroduce prayer in our public schools and, with a provision strengthening parents’ rights in their children’s education, opening the classroom to the masked marvel of “creation science.”

“To the extent that we stay in the broad area of consensus, we avoid controversy,” John Ashcroft, a Republican senator from Missouri, states in a striking tautology worthy of the highest Ydgrunite, speaking now to his party’s efforts to terminate Federal support for the arts and humanities. In finding unacceptable the use of money wrested from our nation’s taxpayers (at some 66 cents a year) to “subsidize an assault on their values, religion or politics” he follows a former czar of education, William J. Bennett, who now casts its agencies as intellectually and morally corrupt in their support of artists and scholars who have undermined our “mainstream American values” as reflected in the art-school curriculum at Erewhon’s university, where those studying painting were “examined at frequent intervals in the prices which all the leading pictures of the last 50 or a hundred years” had brought, with their values fluctuating upon being sold and resold. “The artist . . . is a dealer in pictures, and it is as important to him to learn how to adapt his wares to the market, and to know approximately what kind of a picture will fetch how much, as it is for him to be able to paint the picture.”

“When we get into the area of challenging some of the fundamental values of American culture, we get ourselves in real trouble,” our Missouri senator takes up. He especially rejects any definition of art that means “it has to challenge and be offensive.” And given such arguments as these, who can disagree?

“Erewhon” was originally published at the author’s expense, like the rest of his books, excepting, of course, his posthumous work, including the novel “The Way of All Flesh.” He wrote, as one erstwhile editor remarked, “to please himself, and to have something to read in his old age.” Of his books Butler himself said, “I never make them; they grow; they come to me and insist upon being written.” And it is the “practical side of literature and not the poetical and imaginative—I mean literature applied to the solving of some difficult problem which may be usefully solved—that alone fires me with hot desire to devour and imitate it. That, and the battering down of falsehood to the utmost of my poor ability.”