Utopia

The Potential and Prospect of the Human Condition

George Kateb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351300384
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Amid the twentieth century's seemingly overwhelming problems, some thinkers dared to envisage a world order governed by utopian proposals that would eliminate--or at least alleviate--the evils of society and secure positive advantages for all human beings. Others found this utopian optimism a hopeless fantasy and predicted a utopian order only repressiveness, boredom, and the impoverishment of human experience. The unique gathering of articles in Utopia vividly demonstrates the tension existing between utopian ideas and their proponents and the severe criticism of their adversaries.

Among utopia's enthusiastic supporters, B. F. Skinner outlines the educational practices needed to sustain his concept of utopia, while Margaret Mead sets forth a bold defense of utopian vision in her article "Towards More Vivid Utopias." In active opposition to modern utopian idealism, Ralf Dahrendorf, the prominent German sociologist and politician, compares utopia with a cemetery and criticizes its fixed and uneventful life, and J. L. Talmon predicts that, since utopianism postulates absolute social cohesion, there is no escape from dictatorship in the utopian design. Still another alternative is offered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who bases his futurist ideology on the trends of technology in the advanced countries of the world, especially the United States. He sees in the conscious application of technical-scientific rationality by an intellectual elite the method by which the promises of modern knowledge can be made good.

Underscoring the fact that the utopian tradition can make us look at the real world with new eyes, George Kateb, the editor of Utopia, clarifies the terms of this long-standing debate and offers a thorough analysis of the "strong utopian impetus to save the world from as much of its confusion and disorder as possible." The work is an argument neither for utopian or anti-utopian visions. Rather it shows the possibilities of political norms in advancing the human condition in open societies.

1:	An Essay on Utopian Possibility
	Francis Golffing Barbara Golffing

The idea of Utopia is timeless. That is to say, it does not develop historically; the earliest Utopias are no less advanced than the latest. However, the idea requires to be restated in terms relevant to each new period of history; and to this extent every Utopia is an historic act: part of the continuum we call man’s evolution.

I

All writers of Utopias (be they novelists, social planners, or “mere” philosophers) necessarily come up against certain crucial questions which they must answer, either publicly or in their own minds. Chief among these questions are: what is possible to the human animal, in strictly operational terms, and what is desirable for the welfare of man, both individually and collectively? Evidently there is no obvious correlation, sanctioned by tradition, between these two lines of inquiry; yet the Utopist finds himself under the obligation of treating them as complementary aspects of one and the same question — Tolstoi’s great question; “What does man live for?” He must do this in face of the fact, as obvious to him as it is to everyone else, that human history teems with undesirable possibilities and impossible desiderata. These contradictory combinations he too must, and will, record while refusing to view them as necessary features of human development. While most observers accept them as given — part and parcel of man’s condition, or man’s essential paradox — he believes such combinations to be freakish, their components to be capable of final disassociation, not only verbally or logically, but in terms of actual operation, human behavior. It is this, and nothing else, that sets him apart from his non-utopian fellows.

In short, the cardinal issue — what does the species essentially want and what is it fit to accomplish? — is capable of solution, he thinks; and that solution leaves ample room for human striving, competition, and dissent. But there is no place in it either for impossible desires or for achievements that are possible, yet unwanted. Whatever is dictated by man’s biosocial needs is capable of ultimate satisfaction, provided he creates the conditions necessary to such process. And whatever runs counter to these needs he can keep from happening, by the same token and in the same manner, the only bars being, in either case, “crass casualty” (i.e., sheer accident) and biological exhaustion.

As a matter of fact, most Utopists of the past (and present) have dodged the central issue in one way or another, and to the extent that they have done this have failed to live up to their noble calling. Not from cowardice, surely, but from a commendable sense of “hard facts” — facts which they felt had to be either stoically accepted or else frankly escaped from. William Morris, in his admirable utopian romances, well illustrates the latter procedure. Morris looked technology in the face, and then left it on one side, taking the opposite direction. Nobody can accuse him of having been blind to the inevitability of technical progress; yet his look — which was close, not at all casual — convinced him that this way lay perdition and not, as most of his contemporaries would have it, salvation. All the same, in a deeper sense Morris may be said to have dodged the issue, which is not between hand labor and machine labor, or between socialism and capitalism, but between two basic cultural temptations: toward productiveness on the one hand, and toward destruction on the other. These temptations have been at war in homo sapiens since the beginning of culture and must have been experienced by the primitive toolmaker or tribal chief quite as forcibly as they are by today’s engineer or political leader.

Take, on the other hand, a writer like Sir Thomas More, who for all his contempt of hierarchies felt it necessary to maintain them in a (to us) astonishing degree. He too, like Morris, looked at the facts; like Morris he did not like what he saw; yet, unlike Morris, he felt he owed it to his sense of “reality” to give those facts his limited approval.

But why should the Utopist feel that he must bow to events (facts, res) and their “logic” — or else bow them out? It is one thing to observe and record them and quite another to treat them with the kind of ceremonial respect which should be reserved for their motivational matrix. And that matrix is single, no matter how multiple, or contradictory, may be man’s incitements to action.

II

The very term, possibility, has all along complicated and, in many cases, confused the Utopian mandate. Before exploring the mutual relations between what is desirable and what is possible to man, a word should be said about the conceptual range of the second term.

Possibility may be of two kinds, based either on logic or on the “facts” of the real world. Some of the greatest Utopias have been purely conceptual constructions following out, more or less strictly, certain premises laid down by the logic of the imagination. In a few cases — Leibniz’ Monadology is one — the “characters” or “agents” of the piece have not even been “men” as we normally understand that term. There is no harm, and there may be a great deal of good, in purely logical Utopias so long as the writer makes his intention clear at the outset. But in many cases of this sort the intention remains ambiguous: the reader is left to speculate whether the scheme is meant to be capable of ultimate realization or whether it presents an “ideal” in the strict sense of the word (a guiding norm, i.e., pattern of excellence, or else pure wish-fulfillment).

Similar difficulties arise from the use of ultimate in this context. These are due to the religious origin of the Utopian concern. Does ultimate refer to our sublunary world or is it to be read eschatologically? Again, the distinction is not always made clear by writers on the subject. In a sense, of course, all Utopias are secularized theologoumena (cf. the range and fluctuations of the word, millennium) but this fact does not absolve the writer from the task of definition.

The greatest confusion, then, is spread whenever both possible and ultimate remain undefined. The reader is often left unsure as to the genre of Utopia he is confronting. A strictly logical, “ideal” construction may still be viewed by its author as attainable in a life after death or even on this earth, at an imaginary “end of time.” A Utopia developed in purely social terms may be so at odds with the present state of society that its realization must be placed at an incredibly distant point of human evolution. That point and the “end of time” of theology then become indistinguishable from one another for all practical purposes, and both lay reader and critic are left completely at sea. Evaluation of the total scheme and criticism of its particular features become equally impossible.

As we see it, “realizing the human potential” means no less (but also no more) than an optimal efficiency in the transmission and reception of electrochemical signals, transactional soundness. These transmissions and receptions are ipso facto “desirable,” and need not be explained, much less justified, by any criterion borrowed from ethics or theology. Any organism, whether individual or social, fulfills its function in one way only: through the exercise of its biological abilities; which is to say, through profitable exchanges.

The utopian citizen will find himself confronted, as does the citizen of today, with a choice between immediate and long-range advantages; and the choice may sometimes be painful for him, as it is for us (though we assume him to be a great deal more clearheaded than ourselves when it comes to choosing, as well as virtually free of compulsions). But his choices will never be ultimate, in the sense of intending a definitive goal, or state of affairs, even as the utopian society itself lacks any feature that would give it the character of finality, permanence. Such a society knows no arbitrary limits to what may be computed as possible, on statistical grounds; yet projects that are plainly unprofitable, in terms of our earlier definition, will never reach the desk of the statistician, for the simple reason that nobody will care to conceive them. Projects, on the other hand, which promise substantial benefit to any or all residents of the globe will be pursued, even against heavy odds, and abandoned only if the probability of realizing them falls to zero. Neither destructive schemes nor inoffensive chimeras can survive under this dispensation: they will both wither away, not because they have been publicly outlawed or privately repressed, but through sheer inanition, lack of interest. No matter how different viciousness, de-structiveness, and idle scheming or daydreaming may be from the motivational point of view, what unites them in the eyes of the operationalist is their common character of stupid wastefulness. They batten on our attention; deny them this fuel, which is so urgently needed elsewhere, and they will without fail pass out of existence.

Science cannot carry on without Utopia, nor Utopia without science. But to wed Utopia with science takes a degree of skill not available to most writers of utopian fiction, H. G. Wells and, possibly, Edward Bellamy being the only exceptions that come to mind. With Samuel Butler — certainly the most brilliant of the lot — we are already on the way (down, as it happens) to such negative or mock utopists as Orwell and Huxley. The reader looking for fruitful marriages between Utopia and science will have to look elsewhere: to certain treatises by Lancelot Whyte, J. B. S. Haldane, J. Arthur Thompson, all of whom were trained scientists; or to a small group of psychoanalysts — Ferenczi and Rank, chiefly — who happened to be deeply concerned with biological issues. All purely technological and economic extrapolations of our species-future have failed, and always will fail, not accidentally but necessarily; the former by focusing on sheer operation, achievement (or worse, gear and gadgets), the latter by their blind faith in the efficacy of socioeconomic reform. Nor will the specialized student of history and politics — if he enlists in the Utopian cause at all, which is rare — be likely to advance it; yet the Utopist, on his side, cannot carry on his job without a profound, if somewhat paradoxical, commitment to history, which complements his equally deep commitment to science. History and science merge in the evolutionary study of human behavior: no Utopist can afford to be without a cogent behavioral model, based on the entire biological history of the species. But his locus — the place where he takes his stand — must inevitably be the present.

III

Each generation entertains its own image of the future, and that image is eminently historic. Even as the world has not stood still since Campanella, or Bacon, or William Morris wrote, so neither has that counterworld — no-world, no-place (Utopos) — stood still which forms its inevitable complement. Any yes-world requires a no-world to balance it. (The signs may be inverted; indeed, any Utopian writer will invert the conventional assignment, viewing as he must his Utopia as the world of yes.)

It is, then, the state of the world in which the Utopian writer finds himself that will determine his counterimage of a world-other-than-it-is. That counterimage is never the best of all possible worlds in an absolute sense: it is a world in which what is deficient in ours is supplied, except for such deficiencies as are radical, i.e., common to all man-inhabited worlds, be they actual or “merely” possible.

The first job of the Utopian writer is to take stock of the world into which he is born — to assess its total functioning. Into this assessment enters, necessarily, the entire past of the human species, but that past determines his counterworld only to the extent that it effectively survives in present practice. Essentially, he is not interested in the past — not curious about it, as past: he is interested only in the relation between what exists, at his moment in history, and what does not now exist but might and should exist at some different moment. (The Utopian counterworld too is seen as existing in history, provided that term is made sufficiently comprehensive. One of the hardest jobs confronting the Utopist is precisely this: to extrapolate history in such a way that it qualitatively changes without renouncing its character as history. For man cannot escape history, any more than he can escape himself.)

Man’s conceptual apparatus being what it is, the different moment at which the Utopian counterworld is assumed to exist must be a moment in time; and since such a world has never been known to exist, it must be projected into the future. From this fact arise certain embarrassments in the matter of tense; such embarrassments cannot be wholly expunged from utopian discourse. Yet they cannot obscure the much more fundamental fact that the Utopist speaks, of necessity, in and from the present. Looking at the world in which he happens to live, he finds a particular jumble of accomplishment and failure, saturation and lack, comparable to no other such compound. Perhaps the ratio of man’s achievement and nonachievement has remained roughly the same through the ages; perhaps only his specific goals, and the motivations prompting him toward those goals, have changed. Yet it is precisely these specific differences in conation that concern the Utopist, for it is from them, not from some presumed universal, that he derives his vision of possible counterworlds. And since his stance is the present, the counter-world he himself would project must correspond — as yes does to no, or no to yes — to the conative nexus our planet presents at this moment.

His job then (a job performed most admirably for the end of the Enlightenment era by William Godwin, in his Political Justice) is, first, to assess as accurately as possible the assumptions under which his own age operates, consciously, in part, but also, to no inconsiderable degree, unconsciously — what presses it forward to realize its ambitions in this particular manner and no other; and, second, to determine both where it is failing and why. Second, his job is to propose a set of counterassumptions which would be strictly relevant to the first, in the sense that it answers them point by point, and whenever possible resolves the perplexities which have arisen from them.

It follows directly from the foregoing remarks that a contemporary Utopia cannot be plotted on elite lines: it must be capable of satisfying men or women of all sorts and conditions and the rest of the planet to boot. The classical “island” situation has become totally anachronistic, not merely because of its associations with snobbery and privilege, or its ludicrous inappropriateness in an age of jet travel and telecommunication, but because it is much too circumscribed, much too limited ecologically and otherwise, to satisfy the requirements of a genuine counterworld which could answer every complexity, every opportunity, of our own. The new model, then, must be large, in every sense, and, along with blessings still unknown to mankind, must include its inevitable quota of curses. All Utopists worth their salt have of course known this and tried to steer clear of the chief pitfalls of “ideal commonwealths”: insipidity due to lack of normal human friction; stagnation of effort arising from “total comfort”; a beatitude made unreal by lack of contrast. Robert Frost’s pungent epigram, “But Islands of the Blessèd, bless you, son;/ I never came upon a blessèd one,” explodes a cozy myth but leaves the great Utopian tradition, both of the East and the West, untouched. Utopias are not, and never have been, Lotus-Isles whose inhabitants live in luxurious self-indulgence without effort and free of remorse, or Edens of innocence in which the lion and lamb lie down together. Rather, anyone who reads a body of such works cannot but be struck — even to tedium — by the pains their authors have taken to sketch the means of production and distribution, and by these same authors’ resolute acceptance of forms of social injustice and malpractice — war and slavery are merely the most outstanding examples — which they number among the world’s “necessary evils.”

Plato, as we all know, founded his Republic on slavery. Sir Thomas More made provision for war against an aggressor and war in support of treaty obligations, and imagined much work to be done by a class of bondsmen who might be either captives or criminals. Other, later writers have chosen other dark accents for their Utopian commonwealths, not to mention those “negative utopias” in which the accents are nearly all dark. It might be said that the reading of Utopias, though a fascinating pursuit, is hardly a heartening or cheering one, inasmuch as the reader often becomes aware primarily of unfreedom, sacrifice, and effort, rather than of their opposites: freedom, increment, ease.

IV

It becomes clear that such glaring imperfections in purely imagined worlds are not merely accidental oversights, nor indices of callousness on the part of the writers who have imagined these worlds, but essential features of the Utopian enterprise, which is — as we understand it — to imagine a world order that is sensible rather than mysterious, and that has a certain relation to the world in which we live. Whether Utopia is “better” or “worse” than “real” life is not a question the asking or answering of which throws any light on the enterprise. But the question: how does it differ is important, as is the further question: what does this difference do to our habitual responses to the so-called “real” world? But in order to differ significantly from it, Utopia must also strikingly assemble the “real” world, and here is where the imperfections to which we alluded above have their function. Rather than slips of the pen, they are seen to be guarantees of relationship of a sort that everyone can understand. A world in which war and slavery are practiced, or a world in which a man’s life is planned for him from the hour of his birth to the hour of his death, is a recognizable world in terms of our own experience of forced labor, of strife and aggression, or of a narrowly circumscribed freedom to do as we wish. By introducing these unappetizing features at the very foundation of their schemes, Utopian writers have given notice to their epochs of the seriousness with which they wished their schemes to be taken — of the schemes’ relevance, that is, to a world of strife and sorrow wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 : An Essay on Utopian Possibility
• 2 : Towards More Vivid Utopias
• 3 : Freedom and the Control of Men
• 4 : The Cult of Efficiency
• 5 : The Anti-Utopia of the Twentieth Century
• 6 : Utopianism and Politics
• 7 : Out of Utopia: Toward a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis
• 8 : America in the Technetronic Age
• 9 : Robots and Rebels
• Index