Utopia

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Utopia
/juːˈtoʊpiə/ (n.)
The apocalypse, if you’re the sort of person who sees the glass half-full. The singularity. Nirvana.

Personally, I’m a cynic, and I think it sounds ghastly. I rather like the sound of the apocalypse, on the other hand: the grim contemplation of what’s coming to me is swamped by the happy thoughts that so many other odious people are going to get what's coming to them.

Thomas More’s utopia

Doesn’t actually sound like a lot of fun, .

• No private property and no locks on doors
• Houses are rotated between citizens every ten years
• Everyone must work at one of the essential trades (weaving, carpentry, smithing and masonry), and is sent out to farm for two years at a time, but the (mandatory) working day is six hours long (but feel free to work for longer).
• Educated people get to be ruling officials and priests and they get the best food.
• Every house has two slaves (captured from other countries or domestic criminals)
• Hospitals are free, euthanasia is allowed, pre-marital sex is not allowed, and the punishment for adultery is enslavement.
• Everyone must carry an internal id card at all times, on pain of enslavement.
• There are no lawyers! Law is simple and everyone is expected to be in no doubt as to right and wrong.
• Privacy is discouraged, seeing as if you can see everyone, they are obliged to behave well.

Utopia vs Dystopia

Note how, even ion Thomas More’s original vision, plainly utopia can resemble dystopia they tend to converge.

Key concepts

Tragedy of the commons: infinite demand, limited supply

Demand is personal

Working definition

Actual utopian visions tend to be very vague and light on specifics. We can state general principals easily enough, but if we put too much detail around them, they quickly start fo conflict.

A quick fix whereby an appeal to forbearance/sacrifice/restraint/counter-incentivistic behaviour now — particularly based on simplistic principles — leads to a state of bliss for everyone later.

What does this state of bliss look like? Quickly becomes incoherent: an aspiration for equality, diversity and fair treatment for the disenfranchised runs into problems because you have to define diversity in a way which means there can be no difference of opinion, because if there is, then there can be no utopia.

It also implies all challenges have been overcome, all mysteries solved, all differences of opinion resolved. which implies also that all literature is written, all scientific discoveries complete. But a utopian state is one in which we are free to explore the cosmos and discover these things. A world in which all things are resolved is suboptimally dull.

Someone will be dissatisfied with the utopian state. It therefore either leads to a uniform kind of dystopia, or an elusive state we can never quite get to.

Solutions to these logical conundrums

Delayed gratification: “dangletopia”

Utopia later as a justification for permanent asceticism now:

The utopia is to come at a point unfalsifiably distant so that our own status is a necessary transitional state of purgatorial subutopia — progressing haphazardly towards a utopia we will never personally see, but our nearest and dearest will. This is the monomyth of Moses leading the children of Israel to the promised land.

The appeal of delayed utopia is that we don’t have to think too hard about what it would be like and don’t really have to confront the conundrums: how boring it would be, and in fact how unpleasant if you have to cleave perpetually to the same moral abstentions you have manfully tolerated through your subutopian existence. Or you don’t, in which case it is all a bit hypocritical. If you can have 72 virgins later, why not now?

Dangletopian visions that use this ruse:

• Religions promising afterlife paradise for those who have behaved themselves.
• Effective altruism, which says we are preparing for a utopian for our distant descendants which we will never see ... and which when they get to it, our distant descendants will be preparing for their distant descendants and so on.

Let’s run it and see

Let’s try it out and see how it goes. Generally, badly, as the icy, atmospheric principles collide with the earthy urges of basic self-interest.

Collapse to dystopia: Where the community of interest is strong, the vision involves centralising,and the enemy is a well-identified unitary group — the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, certain minority interest groups — such that the power structures are strong enough to head off internecine fighting, these generally turn into totalitarian dystopias:

• Fascism
• Communism

Collapse into squabbling: Alternatively, the community of interest is too weak, and the “enemy” is not tightly enough defined, and the whole thing breaks down into squabbling and resentment. This is where identity politics is going (the aligned groups are discovering they don’t really have much of a common interest at all, and the “enemy” is a bit too homogenous and ill-defined, and its figureheads are too well-organised and funded.

• Identity politics
• Intersectionality etc

Collapse into pragmatism: The community of interest is loose, decentralised and not guided, or the principles involve decentralising, meaning there is no particular enemy, there is nothing to stop people “defecting” and forming groups with common interests. This leads to pragamatic rules to manage that, and the utopian state never arises.

• laissez-faire capitalism

Ideas of progress:

• Directed: we are going towards something, converging on a final truth, singularity, resolution. Presumes there is a “something”, and it already exists, and could have been articulated from the beginning of the universe; we just haven’t found it/don’t know it yet. Progress is a process of gradual revelation. But this directedness
  • implies some kind of intentionality on the part of the universe as a whole which is theistic.
  • contradicts basic known rules about entropy, in that it implies a world moving from disorder to order.
  • Seems strikingly inefficient. Why isn’t the universe in a state of singularity already, and it isn’t what grounds do we have for thinking it will naturally converge on one, without a directed hand moving it along.
• Undirected: we are moving away from an imperfect history, or to adjust to unexpected changes in the environment. Progress is a process of adjustment.

Path-dependency of design space and perspective chauvisnism

What would “undirected progress” look like? Wittgenstein’s pithy question cited by analytical philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe:

He once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

—G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959)

Collisions with reality

Having something to complain about is relative, not absolute: people will always find something that is unsatisfactory. This is indeed the driver for pragmatic undirected progress, but a problem for utopia, because we have to imagine a point where those with grievances concede they are settled, and no further claim is due.

• CF Graeber: the very thing that keeps a society together is that sense of mutual indebtedness. discharging all obligations gives the community less communal obligation.
• this obliges people to give up their position of influence/authority in the power structure. If you are the principal lobbyist for interest group X and you accept your cause has been resolved then you should have no option but to disband. But this isn't what people do: they find other things to agitate about.

converging on a uniform state of bliss is necessarily intolerant because the interest of accelerating towards the state of utopia means suppressing “misguided” opinions that distract from that quest.

Examples of utopian visions

• Religions that offer a post-mortem heaven or paradise — call these “dangletopian” programmes.
• Communism and Fascism: the big ideas to replace the death of God
• Modernism and high-modernism
• [Laissez-faire capitalism]] — in the sense of pure, no rules, no government intervention whatsoever
• Bitcoin maximalism
• Effective altruism — also dangletopian
• Artificial intelligence
• Singularity
• The end of history — Fukuyama

See also

• Omega