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Why Is Utopia Impossible?
“I prefer clarity over agreement.” — Dennis Prager
I think it’s safe to assume that all of us here agree that Utopia is impossible. Yet each of the two major caucuses here — call them “traditionally conservative” and “libertarian” as a rough shorthand — often view the other as having a suspiciously Utopian intent.
BDB’s recent thread gave me an idea. I thought it would be really helpful if each caucus explained why Utopia is impossible. Accusations of Utopianism seem to be based on misinformed views. So instead of accusing the other of Utopianism, we could explain why we hold that Utopia is not possible. It occurred to me that this could go a long way to helping us understand each other. To my knowledge, we have never discussed this subject, and this may account for why we continue to misunderstand and mistrust each other. Clarity helps to avoid misunderstandings and it also fosters trust. I want to foster trust, and since you are all my compatriots who are acting in good faith, I must do better to be more clear, more trustworthy, and more patient. Actually, I need to do those things anyway, but you’ve helped to provide a motive. :)
It occurs to me that attempting to speak for one’s entire caucus is too big a task, and therefore not a very reasonable one. I would like us to end up with a few guiding principles so that members of one caucus easily understand why the other caucus holds that Utopia is impossible and Utopianism a folly. Toward this end, I think it would be helpful if disagreements are limited to intra-caucus disagreements. For example, if you are a libertarian and you disagree with me about why I say that Utopia is impossible, I’d prefer it if you didn’t voice that here on this thread. On the other hand, if you’re a libertarian and you ask me for clarification because you don’t understand something, or if you’re a Catholic and you disagree with me about how I’ve characterized man’s sinful nature, then these kinds of exchanges are entirely within the realm of what I hope to achieve here. Those are just examples, but I hope they convey my intent. I realize that the comments will proceed however they proceed, but that is my preference.
I will go first.
As many of you know, I am an orthodox Catholic. The Catholic teachings about the fall of man and man’s inclination to evil inform my views.
Catholics make quite a few truth claims about human beings, why they were created, their structure and composition, and their nature. Catholics claim that every human being inherits original sin, which was passed down to us from Adam as the result of his disobedience to God. Original sin is the loss of sanctifying grace; it is not the same as personal guilt. This loss of sanctifying grace results in the darkening of the mind and the weakening of the will.
By definition, human beings who have a darkened mind and a weakened will can never create a Utopia, but, admittedly, this won’t stop some from trying. In fact, if they don’t understand their condition, it may mean they will try all the harder, not realizing their weaknesses. Certain nations in the 20th century provide horrifying examples of what can happen when sinners try to create a “worker’s paradise.” It should be noted that even Catholic saints, who surely have stopped sinning to an exceedingly large degree, still commit some sin in some small ways (we call it “venial sin”) and still struggle with the sinful nature they acquired at their conception.
In short, since every human person is a sinner, Utopia is always an impossibility. That’s my extremely brief explanation of the impossibility of Utopia. I am happy to elaborate or clarify. Regardless of your caucus, I hope you will consider joining this discussion so that we can all understand each other better.
Why is Utopia impossible?
Published in General, Religion & Philosophy
This introduces lots of things not part of Genesis 1. I do not see what it has to do with the question of how to think about the judgments passed on, on one hand, several created things, &, on the other hand, on creation as a whole.
Do you mean, “…many judgments regarding what is good”?
I have revised my chart to include the day numbers.
While so doing, I realized that I previously (and inadvertently) neglected day two.
We are determining what was “good.” Since I assume we must follow grammatical rules, what was “good” needs to be a single thing, or the single collection containing multiple things. What was “good” can’t be multiple things, since the antecedent of “it” must be singular (this refers to the quotes in the third column). For example, the texts don’t say “And God saw that they were good,” plural, as if referring to the individual items, or some of them, that were created that day.
Edit: I think day six follows a similar grammatical pattern as day one. I have revised my chart again to reflect this.
Ok, with all these revisions, & all, what are your thoughts? Why should two things created not be called good? Why should all the others be called good? After all, the conclusion is, the whole of creation was very good! Why be repetitive, & in a somewhat inconsistent manner, leaving out two things of some importance?
Returning to Jennifer’s original question, about why Utopia is impossible, I see two trains of thought running through this thread. On the one hand, there are people who seem to think that Utopia is impossible because man is fallen and subject to evil, and such evil will inevitable throw a monkey wrench into Utopia.
On the other hand, some of us think that even people of good faith, acting in the most morally upright manner (as best they can discern morality), cannot create Utopia because there will still be differences between them, conflicting claims on resources, and differing understandings of morality.
If the goal here was to discern a difference between SoCons and libertarians, I think it would be a not unfair generality to say the the former of these modes of thought is typical of SoCons, while the latter is more typical of libertarians. However, it may be broader than that. The former mode of thought may be typical of all ideologues, religious or otherwise. The former mode of thought assumes that there is only one true morality (hence, ideologues) and that the only reason that everyone doesn’t follow that morality is because they are subject to the temptation of evil. Libertarians understand that, evil aside, not everyone agrees on what is good and moral, and therefore it is hopeless to create a Utopia where everyone sees everyone else as being good and moral.
I don’t think that’s the case, Larry. While serious Christians believe in truth, we all understand that there are many different moral systems in the world. We might think that it is our duty to work to convert as many as possible through their own free will to Christian truth, but we know that people must be free to choose their own beliefs and we are respectful of people’s beliefs so long as they don’t lead to violence. Rather, for us, short of heaven, utopia isn’t the point. People are here on earth to make choices, we hope to choose God. Utopian schemes generally want to force people to be someone’s idea of good, which is antithetical to the whole reason for our lives on earth. And humans are, frankly, very bad at figuring out what is good on their own. As Dennis Prager points out often, people are not “naturally” good. They have to seek the good and make choices in their own lives to find it. We believe God is the source of all good, but since we have to come to Him of our own free will and choice, the whole idea of utopia doesn’t make any sense. It would only subvert the necessary journey that every human child of God must make.
Maybe you could sum up this Christian opinion by saying that the troubles of this world are worth undertaking only in the hope of salvation, but that for such hope to be genuine, they must be undertaken?
Very pithily said, Titus!
Or both :-)
We can theorize about morally-perfect behavior, even if we cannot achieve it – indeed, where would moral philosophers be if they did not theorize about it? And there are very good reasons to believe that even if humans did achieve moral perfection, we would not achieve Utopia.
Actually, even if we all shared moral perfection and an identical moral framework (not a stretch if “everything that rises must converge and there is only one true morality), local knowledge discrepancies would mean we’d still disagree on moral actions. For agreement on moral actions requires not only agreement about virtue, but about facts, and as long as transaction/knowledge costs remain nonzero…
Unless, of course, moral perfection requires omniscience :-) If it did, then no knowledge would prove prohibitively costly. But perhaps most people’s intuition about morally-perfect behavior does not include omniscience.
Tipler wrote a bit about the interaction between knowledge/transaction costs and moral agreement here. I think it was a preliminary paper, and, if it were my paper, there are a few things I’d change. But it’s interesting.
Tipler is a devout Catholic, though of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin variety, which, and Chardin… well, I think the Catholic church probably came to the correct conclusion about Chardin – that he was a visionary whose thought enriched Catholicism, not a heretic – but I think if I were the stodgier type of Catholic, I’d just find Chardin irritating.
(Note that what others call the “Coasean world” is the opposite of what Coase said the real world was. Coase’s whole point is that transaction costs are not nonzero, for if they were, we could expect X, Y, and Z. So having the zero-transaction-cost world dubbed “the Coasean world” always rather frustrated Coase.)
If Chardin is not a heretic, the word should be consigned to museums-
Welding?
But you are quite right about transaction costs and imperfect knowledge. Both of these are additional impediments to Utopia, without implicating the notion of evil or immorality. I should have included those in my little list.
I think if it is possible for welders to philosophize & for others, too, utopia becomes inevitable. Both transaction costs & imperfect knowledge would become far less important.
Why did you cut off the rest of my quote. I went on to say:
Whether you have that that view that everything man seeks is good or not, your governing principle certainly is based on it. And please, we can do without the Bernie Sanders crack.
That’s called tradition. Conservatives argue that tradition has established such a body of intelligence. You are actually arguing for the conservative position. The problem is that every generation seems to think they have to protest the past and find the same old errors over and over.
250 word restriction. Same reason you cut off the rest of my quote.
My governing principle certainly is not based on that. You and I agree that all men will sometimes seek and do things that are not good. The difference between us is that you somehow believe that you can fix this problem by taking freedom of choice away from men. But you can’t. All you can do is take freedom of choice away from one man and give that choice it to another man, who is equally flawed.
The question is not whether free men will do the right thing. The question is whether men are more likely to do the right thing if they are free than if they are controlled by politicians.
For example, if men have guns I am well aware that some men will misuse those guns to do horrible things. But I still prefer that outcome to confiscating private guns and putting all guns in the hands of the state. It’s not that my outcome is perfect. It’s that your outcome is worse.
Well, you’re picking a freedom that has a mixed bag of results. On balance guns in society can be beneficial. And tradition has told us so. Let’s pick what are called illegal drugs. Such drugs have no societal or individual benefit. It’s quite clear that society has rightly decided that drugs should be off limits for free use by individuals. “Controlled by politicians”? Politicians react to voters. Let’s be a little more mature. Controlled by societal values.
I certainly am happy we don’t have any of these illegal drugs being used by society.
Does alcohol? Do large sugary drinks? Do transfats? I certainly have of liberal friends who see no “societal or individual benefit” to gun ownership. There is no end to what we can ban once we determine that 51% has the right to determine what is beneficial to the other 49%.
What right do you have to decide what other people enjoy and find beneficial?
The detriments of those, except for alcohol, do not warrant legal restriction. As to alcohol, if alcohol were to be introduced into society today, it might very well be deemed to be legally restricted. But thousands of years of being enculturated in our society has made it impossible to restrict. The demand far outpaces the ability to control it. We don’t want to let currently illegal drugs reach that level.
At about a few percent of the population. Make it legal and you will have the same percentage as cigarette smoking.
I love the sound of sarcasm in the morning. It sounds like… Victory.
LOL you should take a look at the statistics on our ability to “control” illegal drugs.
I know a lot more people who smoke marijuana than smoke cigarettes.
Just to put a personal perspective here. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 12 years old. Smoked for 25 years, enjoyed every time. Quit to preserve a possible future of good health since I had wife and 3 children. Know that I would enjoy a smoke now. I also stopped drinking alcohol and chasing women. None of these cessations of bad habits was because of some government action inhibiting the behavior. This informs my opinion on these matters. Government is a very poor substitute for what many of us think of as self-discipline.
I don’t know. But I can’t then honestly conclude that this means that man, as of the end of day six, is not good.
Cigarette smokers nationwide after a huge effort to get them to stop is down to 18% in the US. It once was around 50% . Regular pot smokers (non medical related) is up to around 7% and will go higher if legalized. Hard drugs is about 2%. So yes, our ability to hold down the use of drugs is very good. Legalizing pot would make it go to at least that of cigarettes, and possibly that of alcohol consumption.
25 years of smoking is hardly a positive example of self control. Look at my post above.
No one said that. Good grief, if you got set loose controlling others’ behaviors, where would you stop. Please tell us.
Edit: I went away and thought about it and then I realized Manny is the answer to the OP title, for sure.
I don’t get to set people’s behavior. Society does. It’s called democracy, which is not Libertarianism. You seem to think you don’t have behavioral restrictions now. You do, lots, and you live in the good ol’ USA. And we live in a free country.
There I fixed it for you.