Dreams and Nightmares
And now Norm emails to point out an article of his on this very subject. Very apropos, and full of good points. I want to quote and quote…
Notwithstanding any of this, however, it remains true that from the outset socialism was utopian. It was a distant land, another moral universe. It was radically other vis-a-vis the order of things it aspired to replace. And that is what it still is. A society beyond exploitation is in the realm of the ideal.
And the thing is…well, my colleague will doubtless disagree, but I can’t help thinking that those distant lands we imagine, those other moral universes – those thought experiments and counterfactuals and what ifs – are good for us, if only to get us to realize that the way things are is not necessarily the one and only way they possibly could be. Yes, it can be risky to think that way (al Qaeda dreams its dreams too, as do the people who would like to make the ‘Ten Commandments’ the law of the land, as do white supremacists, as do – ), but it can also be productive.
We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians…nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable…The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.
There is minimum utopia and there is maximum – and even maximum notions have their place, but minimum utopia should be the goal.
There is an interesting column by Ishtiaq Ahmed in Pakistan’s Daily Times that talks about a related subject: revolution as forward-looking, progressive, and revolution as ‘restoration of some normal or pristine state of the past.’
In the dogmatic Islamic conception of time, the pinnacle of human achievements was the Madinese state of the Prophet and his pious caliphs (in the case of the Shias only the period of Hazrat Ali). Since then society is understood to have deviated from that perfect model and has gone completely astray in the current times. Consequently the Wahhabi movement of the 18th century and its current peddlers aim at a revolutionary restoration of early Islam.
Dreams of the lost Golden Age are indeed another version of utopia – and a very scary one for people who are attached to their modern liberties and comforts. I’m a woman, and I don’t want to go back to the 8th century and be locked away for the rest of my life, thanks. I have a perverse fondness for autonomy, for being able to decide all by myself what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go. Most women throughout history and geography have been flatly automatically denied such autonomy, as a matter of course. So have most peasants, surfs, peons, coolies, lower castes, slaves, farm laborers – most people, in fact. And then – autonomy of course is all bound up with time, and who has time if it takes eighteen hours a day just to get the most basic work done? So electricity, running water, refrigeration, various kinds of soap, supermarkets – those are all part of our relative autonomy too; hence facing backward, as Meera Nanda calls it, is not an appealing form of utopianism – except maybe to the people who won’t be doing the drudgery.
So there’s the crux again. Utopia can be a good thing – if it’s the right kind of utopia, but there are other utopian dreamers whose dreams are everyone else’s nightmares.
I think the problem of utopianism can be seen by asking tough questions about good and bad utopias: Why do some people aim at disastrous utopias in the first place? We need look no further than the shoddy historical and philosophical reasoning underlying communism or the utter lack of reasoned argument for the goodness of the Islamic “golden age” of theocracy: What makes a utopia genuinely good? What makes it actually utopian instead of horrifically distopian in fact for most everyone living in it, as communist nation-states turned out to be and as Islamic (or any other) theocracies are, have been and always will be? The difference is a sound argument with valid reasoning and plausible, defensible moral premises. Norman Geras posits an attractive-sounding utopia because he makes a good argument, not because the end state he describes is somehow obviously the only right and proper vision of a good world.
And that, I think, is the problem with aiming towards ANY vision of utopia: The very act of focusing on the end state rather than on the processes of achieving social goods inevitably glosses over the reasoning that leads one to see any given utopia as a desirable end state in the first place. If one glosses over the reasoning process, one loses sight of the caveats, limitations, rebuttals only partially answered, and opennesss to reconsideration and revision that characterize well-structured arguments. In short, utopianism makes critical thinking about social goals more difficult, if not impossible. I say ditch the utopian vision and keep our sights firmly fixed on concrete moral and practical arguments about what makes for a better world and how to get there.
Yes, but surely you don’t imagine a utopia as being achievable? One of the problems with Marxism – certainly in some of its varieties – is that utopia is the destiny; and it is the proletariat who represent the liberatory potential of humankind.
“nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice.”
Sorry Norm, but I just don’t buy this. Not least, I think it is defeasible by a simple thought-experiment: there just doesn’t seem to be an in principle reason why action based on thoughts about a utopian goal will necessarily be any different from actions based on a pragmatic imperative (motivated, for example, by some combination of utilitarian and Kantian thinking). If that’s the case, there’s no prima facie reason for thinking that “nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice”.
“there just doesn’t seem to be an in principle reason why action based on thoughts about a utopian goal will necessarily be any different from actions based on a pragmatic imperative”
But having said that, I think I might be in severe danger of ending up in contradiction…
Because if there’s no difference, what’s the problem with utopian thinking – that contradiction?
Speaking for myself, here – I don’t so much think there is necessarily any in principle reason why actions will be any different, as I think that utopian thinking may be necessary or at least useful for getting started at all. For thinking there might be something wrong with things as they are, in the first place.
(But then every time I have that thought, I follow it almost instantly with the thought of other utopians who have the same thought, whose utopia I would never ever in a million years want to live in.)
“Because if there’s no difference, what’s the problem with utopian thinking – that contradiction?”
That’s the one! Though it’s avoidable, I think, by drawing a distinction between what is likely for psychological reasons and what is the case in principle; and also between utopian thinking leading to rational decision making, and utopian thinking which doesn’t.
Makes sense to me (of course, that’s not saying much…). It seems to me there are cruxes at various points along the way in utopian thinking. (One path marked sensible, the other marked silly – that sort of crux.)
I propose an analogy to a walking steeplechase (that is, no horses). The steeple is our utopian goal, drawing us on, but the steeple alone is not enough to determine our direction as we are walking. We must consider the general lay of the land as well as obstacles such as fences, ditches, impenetrable shrubbery, and possibly a deep ravine which would require an arduous detour. These represent the moral choices which continually rise up before us. The point is that sometimes we have to turn our back on the steeple in order to find another, easier path.
In the long run, I believe it is better not to strike out across heroic terrain just because our goal seems to lie just on the other side.
I like that analogy, and I think that it is important in another way. In a walking steeplechase it is I who must clear the fence, or bridge the ravine, not a horse upon which I ride. It is fine to have one’s utopian dream and fine to use such free will as one has to achieve it, but not at the expense of one’s fellows. The end can never justify the means because we are not omniscient.
In actual fact, utopians do worry about such things. The whole point of reducing concentrations of power is that it is human nature to be corrupted by huge power.
The steeple is our utopian goal, drawing us on, but the steeple alone is not enough to determine our direction as we are walking. We must consider the general lay of the land as well as obstacles such as fences, ditches, impenetrable shrubbery, and possibly a deep ravine which would require an arduous detour.
Isn’t this approach kin to other ideas like Simon’s ‘satisficing’ or Lindblom’s (I think) ‘disjointed incrementalism’? They are all saying in effect we need a big idea but we have to be realistic about our ability to achieve it? That we do better by compromising on our big idea than we do by holding out for it?
Sounds similar. Excuse ignorance, but Who Simon, Who Lindblom? They sound worth a look.