It is my firm conviction, brought about by the observation of history, that the dreams of Utopians are far more likely to drag us to hell than to build a better world. From Hitler’s Reich to the terrorism of Bin Laden, many of histories greatest evils have come from the pursuit of the perfect world. Really, Utopianism is a kind of hate. It identifies what I see as the perfect state for human kind, it becomes intoxicated with that vision, and then it cannot help but make that the end of all action, and in so doing come to see any who stand in its way as monsters and sinners. We all hope for a better world, that is our nature, and it is a fine thing to strive for that world, to work at it with sweat and tears, and most of all with love. But, when we try and make that world, to forge it by power, to force it on others for their own good, then we become Utopians and we soon become monsters.
The temptation for the Utopian is the temptation to think that the best way to achieve the ideal human circumstances is through exercising the influence of some strong centralized power, most notably that of government. In general, this view seems to arise from the appeal of efficiency. Where a thousand local agencies might work at cross purposes, sabotaging the formation of Utopia, a single central organization can organize these efforts and thereby seemingly better achieve the goal. However, it is precisely this efficiency that makes the temptation to centralization a liability.
At its heart the problem is the limits of our own knowledge, which in turn leads to a deep moral concern. As is frequently mentioned by moral philosophers, there is a great diversity of moral codes present in the world, ranging, for example, from cultures which practice female circumcism to keep women in their “proper” place to those which view women as equal to men. This doesn’t actually, as some claim, lead to the conclusion that the moral ideal is relative, but it does seem to show that it is very easy to go astray. Mistakes in this area are bad on a local and individual level, leading to ruined lives, but they are devastating when made by a centralized power. It is here that the moral problem comes into to the picture, as in the historical case of Soviet Russia, whose attempt to create a Utopia based on their view of flourishing human life led to the deaths of millions, and to economic damage from which the country is still suffering.
Thus, precisely the inefficiency of local attempts to make the world ideal seem to actually make these the ideal case. It is important here to make a distinction between inefficiency and incompetency. Local efforts to build a better world will still ideally make a difference, only doing so more slowly. Those communities which properly understand the good will see their members flourish more, while those which don’t will ultimately run into far more problems. As other communities see the success of the flourishing locality over the others, this will encourage them to adopt similar practices. This is more piecemeal, but it avoids the devastating consequences possible when a mistake is made by centralized power.
This, I argue, is one of many justifications for the distributionist and communitarian state. We cannot afford to build a legal and economic system on the basis of a centralized power that will too easily be co-opted by the machinations of Utopians seeking to make the world a better place… at any cost. In the human world of limited perspective and moral failure, inefficiency is a boon, not a detriment.
Note: Much of what was written here was originally explored by me in a paper for my Metaethics class in the Fall of 2009 (and, hey, I got an A on it, so I must have done something right)
My primary protest to this entire post comes from your use of 'utopia'. I fail to see where utopian became synonymous with authoritarian. Other then a slight trend within Sci-fi writing there is nothing to suggest so strong a connection between the utopian concept and this need to subjugate and centralize. Even your mention of Hitlers Reich and Soviet domination are not necessarily fair, as their idealistic attempts at the perfect society could be could said of Greek or American democracy just as easily.
ReplyDeleteWhile this does not necessarily disprove your later points, I would say that it does muddle them. I would think that the flaw and danger of the Utopian concept is not in some necessary connection to control, but its unrealistic idealism. The mere thought that humanity can reach perfection would be what, in my mind, leads to such atrocities as attempting to ethnically purge the nation. If one accepts that no society can be completely flawless, the temptation to systematically destroy everything it sees as flawed is allot less powerful. Only by recognizing our propensity to err and adjusting for it, creating a system that tries to compensate for it (and thus recognize our imperfection), can we truly come as close to that utopian perfection as we can ever come.
As for your comments on efficiency, they confuse me. Are you trying to say that efficiency in government leads to moral slippage and totalitarian tendencies? Because that’s rather what it looks like.
“This doesn’t actually, as some claim, lead to the conclusion that the moral ideal is relative, but it does seem to show that it is very easy to go astray. Mistakes in this area are bad on a local and individual level, leading to ruined lives, but they are devastating when made by a centralized power.”
Here you appear to claim that decentralization within the distribution of power prevents immoral concepts from spreading to quickly. A sound point, but wouldn’t it, at the same time, prevent good ideas from spreading quickly as well? Female circumcision is, I think we agree, an immoral act, and were a centralized power in favor of it to gain control it could be spread over a far wider region then is now, true enough, but by the same token, a centralized power against it could gain control and wipe it out completely. What decentralization does in this case is simply slow down the spread and change of new or different ideas and morality. Fine if you have a society with good moral system that you want to keep from slipping into immorality, but if your society has a poor moral system it will be much more difficult to change.
To tie back to your efficiency claim, you seem to be stating that it is under cries for efficiency that decentralized systems are often demolished and replaced with centralized systems, and that’s very much true. But it is because, quite simply, decentralized systems are inefficient. But then to claim that inefficiency is laudable because of that seems absurd to me, irrational reactionism against centralization. Would not an efficient decentralized system be superior to a inefficient one?
I’m curious what your reply to this is, I’d love to start a dialog on the matter here.
Yours
Sigmund Werndorf
"My primary protest to this entire post comes from your use of 'utopia'. I fail to see where utopian became synonymous with authoritarian. Other then a slight trend within Sci-fi writing there is nothing to suggest so strong a connection between the utopian concept and this need to subjugate and centralize"
ReplyDeleteI suppose my contention is that there is, or at least that it's a very risky slippery slope. I should say that in the original paper, I was responding to an article that was advocating using government to bring about Utopia.
To clarify, I genuinely believe the idea of human perfectibility (as you say) is a very tempting one. I mean, who wouldn't want a better world? It strikes me that if you really deeply believe there's a way to make the world perfect, you'll do what it takes to bring it about. This just seems intuitive to me. In a way, individuals and communities working to make a better world is a form of utopianism, and that's fair, but it doesn't seem to have as lofty of goals, it cannot.
"Are you trying to say that efficiency in government leads to moral slippage and totalitarian tendencies?"
I can see how it looks like that. Let me clarify, efficiency in government simply leads to a better ability of those on the top to force change on those bellow them. It doesn't mean its going to be taken, but it's a dangerous option.
"A sound point, but wouldn’t it, at the same time, prevent good ideas from spreading quickly as well? "
I guess my, probably overly optimistic, idea is that the good ideas will make for better, stronger communities. The immoral ones will self-destruct and the influence of the good ones will spread. Admittedly it is slower, and more inefficient, but I guess I consider that to be a necessary evil of sorts.
Further (I've talked about this elsewhere on this blog in more detail) I believe that good society (to use the term VERY vaguely) has to come about by way of cultural change. The hearts and minds of the people have to be changed, you might say. I don't believe a central government, however efficient, can actually do this. The government can make people externally act in a certain way (at least for a time) but they can never make people actually good.
Some forms of external action are necessary to be enforced by some sort of government (murder, for example) but you can't create the ideal society through efficiency of power (I use the term "ideal" because I want to contrast that with the "perfect" society we call utopia, since I do not think that exists).
I suppose I'm concerned because I see so much of this kind of action, right left, whatever, in politics today. People trying to make the world perfect, and damn what anyone else thinks about it.
I think I understand your argument better now, and I don’t think we’re disagreeing to much, but I’m still not lock step with you.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it is because this was specifically a response to a paper and I have not read this paper, however it seems to me what you are more arguing against is fanaticism. You are right, human perfectibility is extremely tempting. I think it’s driven nearly every civilization builder and political visionary from Alexander the Great to Theodor Hertzl. But for every Hitler, dreaming of a pure Arian nation, there’s been a John Addams, dreaming of a democratic state with rule by the people. To me this shows that, while utopianism is susceptible to fascism and totalitarianism, it’s not a direct catalyst for it. And really, when pushed to extremes, what isn’t susceptible to fascism and totalitarianism?
Which is what I feel the truth root of the problem is. Not the desire for the perfect society, but the fanatical devotion to obtaining it. I think that you’ll find, behind every totalitarian, fascist or otherwise oppressive society, was extremism of one form or another. That is why I don’t buy the ‘slippery slope’ argument. Because it is not utopianism that places itself at the top of a greased side. Something must push it over, and that something is Fanaticism, and when fanaticism gives it the shove, I don’t think we should blame Utopianism for it, we should blame the extremists. Now is utopianism susceptible to that push? Yes, and should we consider that a failing? Yes. But it’s one thing to call a concept susceptible to falling down a slippery slope, and a entirely different matter to say it’ll push itself, because really, almost anything can fall down that slide with a big enough shove. Hopefully that metaphor isn’t too tortured...
As to the efficiency topic, I feel like you’re too focused on the matter of preventing governments from oppressing their people. It’s a important thing, yes, but if we could all just do the right thing without having someone there to make sure we do it or watch us, we wouldn't need government to begin with. I feel like this is a natural mistake for our society/generation to make though, because we’ve never really seen what the true horror of no authority can mean. Occasionally we’ll get tastes like with Katrina, and what do we do? Turn around and yell at the government for not acting quick enough. We’ve had the safeties and rights and comforts provided by government for so long, we forget that it is the government that provides them, so all we see are its failing, the places where it has potential to go horribly wrong. There is an amusing trend in political philosophers, those that tend to advocate highly powerful, centralized governments tend to come from times of high political unrest (see Thomas Hobbs who lived most of his life through the extreme chaos of the English civil wars, and our own ‘founding fathers’ who chafed under the rule of King George III), which rather proves my point there.
So you advocate these somewhat radical measures such as condoning inefficiency, so as to reduce the likely hood of centralized oppression, and assume that the ‘good’ social moralities and tendencies will just flourish in the vacuum created by the bad stuff being kept out, forgetting that all those things take a hell of a lot of work, if not more work then said ‘bad’ concepts take.
I'll take your point about the fanatical devotion. Really, that's what I was referring to as Utopianism. The mere desire for a better world to me is not Utopianism, it's just normal.
ReplyDeleteAs for condoning inefficiency... I don't think it's that radical a position. The main advantage of democracy isn't that everyone gets a say (since a mass is just as likely to be a tyrant as an individual) but the inefficiency the prevents it from doing too much damage.
Finally, I think we get more out of striving for a better world than we do having it created for us.
That is, I think, a good point. I guess in my definition of Utiopianism it is not smuch much fanatacism as the idea that we can in fact have a perfect world, but I see your point.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very interesting view on democracy that I've never heard before. I shall have to think that over.
As for that point, I would agree, but I don't see who or what could possibly create it other then us.
Anyways I think we've explored this about as far as Blog posts will let us. I look forward to your next posting.
Thank you for the comments. I'll try and have a new philosophy post up by the end of the weekend.
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