Tag Archives: Utopia

Reflections on Abundance

Great Chain of Being and the Feudal Orders

 

It is hard to avoid getting swept up in the utopian optimism of Peter Diamandis.  The world he presents in his Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think is certainly the kind of future I would hope for all of us: the earth’s environment saved and its energy costless, public health diseases, global hunger and thirst eradicated, quality education and health care ubiquitous (not to mention cheap) and, above, all extreme poverty at long last conquered.

 The way Diamandis gets us from here to there is almost all a matter of increasing efficiency through technological innovation. The efficiency of solar cells is rising exponentially along with a whole suite of clean energy options from fuel producing organisms created through synthetic biology to Fourth Generation nuclear power plants that not only manage to not produce any radioactive byproduct, they are safe from Three Mile Island style disasters, consume old nuclear waste and are so small they actually don’t need anyone to run them.

 Then there is the future of toilets. Hypothetical sewage systems that in addition to not using any of our precious water, can use human waste as a home brewed power source, and produce a natural form of agricultural fertilizer to boot. Access to a clean toilet is actually a very big deal. 2.5 billion people on earth do not have access to a clean toilet with the effect that 1,800 children die needlessly from waste borne illness each day.

Amazingly enough more people have access to cellphones than clean toilets as the use of the former has exploded over the preceding decade, and with this factoid appeared my first doubts regarding Diamandis’ assumptions, but for now let’s stick to the optimism of solutions.

 Far too many people go hungry in the world today, 925 million or one out of every 7 of us, according to Diamandis (102), but that might be about to get a whole lot worse. That’s because the world’s population is rapidly headed towards 9 billion while our ability to increase agricultural yields in the way we did with the Green Revolution has stalled. Thankfully, Diamandis sees technological solutions on the horizon- genetically modified crops, including one of the best ideas I have heard in years that of “golden rice”, that is rice fortified with the essential and often missing vitamin in the diet of the poor- Vitamin A.  There are also vertical farms where crops are grown using aeroponics, giving a whole new meaning to “locally grown” along with bringing agriculture into the “internet of things” equipping plants and animals with sensors that give constant feedback and allow the meticulous allocation of water, nutrients, light, temperature and pesticides. There is also the long promised “meat in a vat” promising a final rapprochement between carnivores and herbivores everywhere. World running out of fresh water? No problem, technologies are in the works that can cheaply realize the perennial human dream of turning the salted oceans into a drinkable Niagara.

 Then there is the education of tomorrow: if much of essential learning in the world today is either absent, as in large parts of the developing world, or composed of factory age style education that lumps children into groups and stamps them out like Model T’s, technology promises to solve that too. Salman Khan, whose Academy I love, has brought learning to anyone with an internet connection. Massive Open Online Courses -MOOCS- have done Khan one better and are now bringing the classrooms of elite universities to the masses. Advances in artificial intelligence promise a future where every child (and perhaps adult) has their own customized tutor and moves through the world of knowledge not based on some cookie cutter idea of what an educated person looks like, but based on their own interests, abilities and learning styles.

 The doctorless masses, especially those in the developing world, are about to get their own personal assistants as well- automated nurses and doctors brought to them through the miracle of their cell phone and other wireless technology.

 All these developments Diamandis hopes will raise the world’s bottom billion up through Maslow’s Pyramid to the point where the bear struggle to survive no longer prevents individuals from pursuing self-actualization. A billion new entrants to the global economy will make a damned good consumer market to boot.

 Every bone in my body hopes Diamadis’ predictions bear fruit and believes we should push forward at every level, both public and private, technological innovations to address many of the world’s problems. There are, however, a number of big- questions Diamandis does not address- issues like inequality and technological unemployment, and the tensions between globalization and democracy- that should give us pause when it comes to the essentials of Diamadis’ argument which in a nutshell boils down to this: that most of the world’s deepest problems are to be solved by the application of technology to increase efficiency, and that a good deal of these solutions will be spurred on by a class that combines aspects of business, science and technology. and philanthropy, the so called techno-philanthropists of which Diamandis counts himself.

 Inequality gets barely a mention in Abundance and when it does it is brought up in the carbon cutout form of “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer” only to be dispatched with with a wave of Diamandis’ hand. Sometimes the things unmentioned in a good book on closer inspection turn out to be somehow deeply interwoven with the author’s underlying assumptions. The primary target of Abundance is not how to get the sputtering US economy back into motion it is how technology might be used to get the horribly poor 2.5 billion people who struggle on a little more than a dollar a day out of such extreme poverty without as a consequence wrecking the planet. Behind these billions of the poor lies a sad statistic that reveals a great deal about the nature of our new global economy that, as David Rothkopf puts it in his Superclass, The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making:

 

The reality is that the combined net worth of the world’s richest thousand or so people- the planet’s billionaires- is almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion. (xv)

 I do not know what it is like going to sleep knowing that you own more than hundreds of millions of people many of whom live in conditions you would not think fit for your pets, but somewhere it has to pull on the conscience. When you hold Diamandis’ argument in your hand and spin it so that you can see it from the view of the bottom up what you get, I think, is a kind of shaving off of these sharp edges of egregious human inequality in order to justify what amounts to a still pretty extreme view of what “normal” inequality looks like. It’s a hell of alot easier to justify your G550 when millions of children aren’t living in garbage.

 The fact that Diamandis’ argument is at bottom a justification for an only somewhat less extreme form of today’s unprecedented levels of inequality can be seen in one of the primary vectors through which he thinks the “bottom billion” will be raised out of the most dehumanizing poverty not nation states, international institutions, or world government, but those Diamandis calls “techno-philanthropists” that is people with both the technological prowess and the capital to solve the major energy, food, water, education and communication problems that he holds responsible for extreme poverty. His models for this are not only Bill Gates and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an institution that I do believe when the history books are written will be remembered as one of the most positive and impactful initiatives of the early 21st century, but also the old “robber barons” of the late 19th century of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. For Diamandis the robber barons were economically transformative figures that in addition left a lasting cultural and educational legacy that has benefited us all. Doubtless, but then no mention is made of how the likes of Carnegie achieved this enormous wealth he could use for our benefit by earning ten thousand times the salary of his lowest paid workers. (Superclass 102)

 Diamandis is speaking from the perspective of a global elite, the people who hobnob at Davos, and whip up sleek versions of saving the world at TED, people that quite rightly, and much unlike the provincial bumpkins of American national politics, are conscious of the enormous problems found in the world. Diamandis thinks the solution to these problems is an increase in technological efficiency which only raises questions when one remembers that is this very efficiency which is the source of the global elites enormous wealth in the first place, and is an area where their global interests collides head on with the economic and social reality of the developed world’s democracies from which most of this elite still hails.

 Like Carnegie and Rockefeller and unlike many of the elites of old today’s superclass have their money and the power that comes with it because they have been transformative figures and have largely affected this transformation through quantum leaps in  efficiency- for those old enough- think of how difficult it was to find information before Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented Google, or how easy Jeff Bezos’s Amazon made shopping for books or anything else or how expensive necessities were before Sam Walton built Walmart. Diamandis promises more of these revolutions in efficiency this time targeted directly at the world’s poorest. Yet already there is an elephant in the room.

 The largely unacknowledged problem is that globalization and the revolutions brought about by the continued progress of Moore’s Law have been of enormous benefit to the developing world and a decidedly mixed bag for the developed countries. To quote John Cassidy from the New Yorker from back in 2011: 

To me, what is really, really alarming is this: a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and Don McLean topped the charts with “American Pie”

 Both globalization and Moore’s Law enabled revolutions have, however,  been a miracle for the world’s poor- especially those of the world’s two most populous countries China and India- something the ever entertaining Hans Rosling brings home with gusto here.  The uplifting effects of globalization are now, at long last, even being felt in Africa, and Diamandis is right to point out the profound changes cell phones have brought to that continent.

 How is such a discrepancy between the rich/developed and poor/developing world to be explained? I think at least part of it can be explained this way:  if technological innovation is all about creative destruction then perhaps the developed and developing world do not get the two in equal measure. This is because in the developed world there is an awful lot to destroy. Cell phones in North America, Europe and Japan replaced well established landlines, whereas cell phones in the developing world had very little to replace at all. Automation has been in a generation long race with the poorly paid factory workers of the developing world as to which could produce goods more cheaply, but both left developed world manufacturing workers in the dust. Diamandis’ prescriptions fails to acknowledge this disconnect of globalization and technological innovation in terms of their varied impact on developed and developing economies to merely embrace the trend.

 It is one thing to replace nurses with cell phone apps where few nurses are to be found-the situation in the developing world- and quite another in an economy such as that of the US where not only do millions make their living doing such tasks but where we have spent a decade or more pushing people towards this career on account of a looming shortage of health care workers. Replacing non-existent teachers with AI tutors is all well and good where there are very few teachers to begin with, but what do you do when you have millions of people who have committed themselves to this noble profession who have been replaced by self-directed videos or a teaching bot?

 We have seen the idea that globalization and technology has the effect of pushing down wages for the majority while creating at the same time a spiked world of the super-wealthy before. This was essentially the future as written by Karl Marx- a still relevant  thinker who gets no mention from Diamandis. Marx might have been widely off in terms of his historical timeline, but correctly identified the deep trend of capitalism to push in this direction. If we are at the beginning stages of developing something like Marx’s bi-polar class system we might ask what took these predictions so long in coming about? Marx missed a lot of things- from the strength of unions to the willingness of the state to act against the interest of economic actors, which were important in delaying his predictions but tangential here.

 Someone might have been able to prove to Marx, writing in the 1800s, that his ideas were going to take a long time to be anywhere close to reality with the simple exercise of asking him how long he thought it would take until the majority of available occupations would be replaced by mechanized labor or labor so simplified that it could be done by a human being with even the most rudimentary education. How long would it take before there was an automated doctor, automated lawyer, automated journalist like Marx himself. How long would it be until shopkeepers and bureaucrats could be replaced by machines? For it was fields such as these that exploded in growth after the decline of the craft guilds and the mechanization of agriculture, both brought about by machines and the new ideas regarding the division of labor in which workers were turned into cogs of production. Marx might have then seen that the near future in front of him would be less likely to be the age of revolution than a golden age of the middle class as societies were able to tap millions of workers who had been let loose by the end of the craft guilds and above all the mechanization of the farms and put then to work at non-automated tasks. Today’s situation might prove different because the kinds of innovations we are pushing towards, for the developed economies, might end up leaving far too many people without a job. Unless that is we can come up with a whole host of occupations that will remain off limits to AI for quite some time.

 I have no real solution to this dilemma other than to caution skepticism towards the all too common view that technology is somehow a panacea to all, rather than just some, of our problems and that innovation is merely a matter of gain without real and profound costs. Above all, I would warn against attempts to read our present condition as somehow indicative of the “destiny” of life, our world, or the universe itself or at least not in ways where such views can be used as justifications for what in the end remain political decisions.

 Towards the beginning of Abundance Diamandis presents a picture of the evolution of life moving through stages of specialization and cooperation from the singular prokaryotes to the cooperative eukaryotes with their internal specialization to multicellular organisms. Diamandis leaning on Robert Wright takes this story of specialization and cooperation up another level to us and our global civilization built on yet greater specialization and complexity. In a separate article that in some sense is merely an extension of the argument proposed by Diamandis Wright discusses the rise of the internet and the way it has allowed human beings to weave themselves together, asking:

Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution — both the biological evolution that created an intelligent species and the technological evolution that a sufficiently intelligent species is bound to unleash — has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain? Kind of in the way that the point of the maturation of an organism is to create an adult organism?”

 On the one hand this view rings true to me, but then I start to think about the life and nature of our 21st century elites who have thrown off their ties to the local and the national to live their lives enmeshed in global networks of the rich and powerful. Innovators who have built, own, and control the very networks through which a world that is for the first time in history truly one has come about. People who whatever their virtues reap enormous benefits from the wealth they possess and the power they exercise, who  already act in some sense like Wright’s “planetary brain”. It’s then that I remember how invisibly political such ideas are and wonder- was there ever an age where the elites of the day did not see their own reign written into the very fabric of the universe itself?

The Lost Art of Architectonic

Palmanova

One of the things that most strikes me when thinking on the subject of our contemporary discourse regarding the future is just how seldom those engaged in the discussion aim at giving us a vision of society as a whole. There are books that dig deep but remain narrow  such as Eric Topol’s: The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care, and George Church’s recent Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Many of these books are excellent, but one walks away from reading them with a good idea of where a particular field or part of our lives might be headed rather than society as a whole.

Even when authors try to extend the reach of speculation out more broadly they tend to approach things from certain lens that ends up constraining them. Steven Johnson’s Future Perfect tries to apply the idea of peer-networks to areas as diverse as politics, education, economics and the arts while Peter Diamandis, and Steven Kotler in Abundance appear to project the mindset and passions of Silicon Valley: exponential growth in computers, the D.I.Y movement, billionaire philanthropy, and the spread of the benefits of technology to the world’s poorest, into a future where human potential can finally be met.  However good these broader approaches are they seldom leave you with an idea of how all the necessary parts of the future societies they hint at and depict fit together let alone what it might be like to actually live within them.

What seems to be missing in many works on the future is the sense of a traveler’s perspective on worlds they depict. The interesting thing about being a traveler is that you both experience the society you are traveling in as an individual and are at the same time outside of it, able to take a bird’s eye view that allows you to see connections and get a sense for how the whole things fits together like an artful building designed by an architect.

We used to have a whole genre devoted to this architectonic way of looking at the future, the literature of utopia. Writing utopias may seem very different from envisioning positive versions of the future, but perhaps not as much as we might think. Like futurists, many utopian writers tried to extrapolate from technological trends. Way back in 1833, John Adolphus Etzler, wrote a utopia  The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, that bears remarkable similarity to the arguments of Diamandis and Kotler though the technology that was thought would finally end human want was nascent industrial era machines, and Etzler embedded his argument in a narrative that gave the reader an idea of what living in such a society should look like. More famous example of such extrapolations are Edward Bellamy’ s Looking Backward, 1887 or the incomparable H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia, 1905.

One might object that futurism is a predictive endeavor whereas utopianism tries to prescribe what would be best and therefore what we should do. Again, I am not quite sure this distinction holds, for much of futurists writing is as much arguments about potential and are meant to coax us into some possible future, or as Diamandis and Kotler put it in Abundance: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” (239). Utopianism is at least transparent in the fact that it is being prescriptive as opposed to futurism which often tries to come across as tomorrow’s news.

I am not quite sure who we could blame for this state of affairs, but surely Friedrich Engels of  the duo Marx and Engels would bear part of the responsibility. Back in 1880 Engels in his essay Socialism: Utopian and Scientific made the case that Marxism as opposed to the utopianism such found in figures such as Robert Owen was “scientific” in that it was based upon an understanding of the future as determined. Marxists in this view weren’t trying to influence the course of history they were just responding to and playing a role in underlying forces that would unfold to an inevitable conclusion anyway.  Whether he wanted to or not, Engels had removed human agency when it came to the issue of deciding what the human future would look like, or rather he drove such agency into the shadows, unacknowledged and occult.

One might ask, what about futurism that is focused not on good scenarios at least from the author’s point of view, but bad outcomes- predictions of disaster and explorations of risk? Even here, I think, futurists are trying to shape the future as much as predict it like a fortune teller. It’s a sadistic prophet indeed who merely tells you your society will be destroyed without giving you someway to avoid that fate. Futurism that focuses on negative futures are largely warnings that we need to take steps to prevent something terrible from happening or at the very least prepare.

We can find utopian literature in this world of negative futures too or at least the doppelganger of utopia- the realm of dystopia. Indeed, dystopian literature has provided us with some of the best early warning systems we have ever had such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We which warned us about Soviet totalitarianism, Jack London’s The Iron Heel which provided us with a premonition of fascism or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which has proved a better reflection of the future with its depiction of the dystopia of consumer society than George Orwell’s 1984.

The one place where compelling architectonic versions of the future continue to be found is in science-fiction. Writers of science-fiction continue to play this social role, and often do so with brilliance as this praise for Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel 2312 attests. This teasing out and wrestling with both the positive and negative possible worlds we might arrive at given our current course or with some changes in our trajectory lend evidence to the observation that science-fiction whose surface often seems so silly is in fact the most socially and philosophically serious form of fiction we have.

Yet there are differences between science-fiction and utopian literature not the least of which is utopia’s demand to convey an architectonic vision of possible worlds. The desire in utopias to get every detail right down to how people dress and what they eat make utopian literature some of the worst we have because it takes away from the development of characters. In a utopia the normal way fiction is organized is inverted: the world portrayed is the real character whereas the protagonists and others are the mere backdrops  for this world.

Unlike much of science-fiction, the focus of utopia is more on social organization than science and technology  although even in one of the earliest and the most famous utopia- Plato’s Republic- science and technology play a role, just not in a form we would readily recognize. Plato based his work on some of the most advanced applied-sciences of his day: pedagogy, dialectical philosophy, geometry, musicology, medicine/athletics, and animal husbandry. Yet these sciences and technologies were not the driver of his utopia. They were the building blocks he used to create a certain form of social organization.

In the sense that they were often seen as proposing a blueprint for the human world utopian literature was often serious in a way science-fiction need not be. Etzler did not merely write a utopia he tried to build one in Venezuela based upon his ideas. Edward Bellamy is a mere footnote in American literature compared to the geniuses who shared the stage with him during his era: Herman Melville, Henry James or Mark Twain. Yet, Bellamy’s work was considered serious enough that it inspired clubs to debate his ideas regarding the future of industrialism all throughout the United States and  influenced real revolutionaries such as V.I. Lenin. Would any serious social thinker today dare to write a version of the future in the form of a utopia?

Perhaps what we need today is less a revival of utopia as a literary form- something it was never very good at- than a new way to imagine architectonic possible futures. Given the fact that we are a long way off from the day when a person like H.G. Wells could conjure up a vision of utopia sure in the belief that he had some working knowledge of everything under the sun this new form of utopia would need to be collaborative rather than springing from the mind of just one individual.

I can imagine gathering together a constellation of individuals from across different disciplines in a room: scientists, engineers, artists, fiction writers, philosophers, economists, social scientists etc and asking them to design together the “perfect” city. They would ask and answer questions such how their imagined city provides for its basic needs, how it is layed out, how it fits into the surrounding ecosystem, how its economy works,  how its educational system functions, its penal system. Above all it would attempt to create a society whose pieces fit together in an architectonic whole. Unlike past utopian literature, such exercises wouldn’t present themselves as somehow final and perfected, but merely provide us with glimpse of destinations to which we might go.

Response to James Cross

A fellow blogger, James Cross, who writes at Broad Speculations left some comments that I thought raised enough interesting questions to qualify for a response
in the form of a full blog entry.

Here is part of James’ response to my recent post:  The Shirky-Morozov Debate Or How Facebook Beat Linux.

I am interested in Shirky’s ideas but I am a little at a loss to understand how it would actually work. The Internet and social media have potential for making major changes in collaboration and political activity, but those things are mainly the theater aspect of politics whereas actual politics is about how resources are divided up and who has power.

Shirky’s position, or at least my understanding of it that I laid out in  The Shirky-Morozov Debate, was that Shirky: “sees the potential of governance to follow the open source model of software development found in collectively developed software such as Linux and Github that allow users to collaborate without being coordinated by anyone from above- as opposed to the top-down model followed by traditional software companies i.e. MicroSoft.”

James sees  potential for collaboration and political activity offered by the Internet as  “theater aspects of politics whereas actual politics is about how resources are divided up and who has power”. If I understand James correctly, Shirky et al are pushing on a string; the Internet and related technologies may offer real opportunities for collaboration and political activity, but at the end of the day these aren’t the things that actually count; real politics is about power and dividing up resources.

James’ position as stated in the quote above is a powerful and succinct summation of a realist’s conception of power. It put me in mind of the definition offered by Hans Morgenthau:

Power may comprise anything that establishes and maintains the control of man over man. Thus power covers all social relationships, which serve that end, from physical violence to the most subtle psychological ties by which one mind controls another.  (Politics Among Nations)


With all due respect to both James and the late Morgenthau, while this understanding of power appears to gel with our commonsense notions, I do not think it is correct. For my part, I hold to the definition of power offered by Morgenthau’s friend, Hannah Arendt:


Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together (The Crisis of the Republic)

Under this understanding political activity and collaboration aren’t something separate from, less real, in James’ word “actual” than power, instead, political activity, collaboration, and power are all effectively synonymous.

This collaboration or political activity does not need to be understood in a purely positive way: a secret police may collaborate in a country to exercise political control, a conqueror needs the help of local “collaborators” to effectively rule over a conquered  territory. In a positive sense a minority group can join together and with others- collaborate- to secure political rights, a resistance can engage in political activity to overthrow a dictator.  In either sense, collaboration and political activity are the essence of politics not its surface.

Even if we substituted the word “authority” for “power” in James’ formulation so that he would read:   “actual politics is about how resources are divided up and who has authority” I do not think the view of political activity, collaboration, and power being synonymous would change.  Imagine, if you will, that tomorrow some major scandal breaks upon the Obama Administration that is so deep that it alienates not just the people who already oppose him, but the majority of Americans (such as myself) who voted for the man. In such a scenario, the authority of his position as president would be almost useless, and he would be essentially politically paralyzed, not because he had lost his actual position of power, but because he would have lost the base of political support- the political activity and collaboration- that makes such a position meaningful and effective.

Once you start to look at power in this way I think a whole new set of questions start to open up. The questions are no longer necessarily “who holds power?” or “what resources does some group control?”, but, “How open is the system?” “Can any group participate or is political activity- the exercise of power- limited to some select group(s)?” “What are the barriers to participation?”

But, for me, perhaps the most important question  is “what is meant by political participation?” That is, what kinds of political activity/collaboration are encouraged/permitted by the political system.

As mentioned, Clay Shirky, among others, has thought that the Internet in particular, and the communications revolution more generally, would have lowered the barriers to political participation in a way that would make something like truly citizen-directed government possible. An example he cites in one of his talks is the open source crafting of legislation in Utah where the people collectively wrote one of the state’s laws online.  In this view, the answer to the question of “what is meant by participation?” would be decentralized collaboration between citizens who work together to achieve self-chosen ends. It is a model of politics analogous to open-source software creation such as that found with Linx.

The problem with this view is that it is detached from reality.  Nothing like citizen-directed government has really emerged from the Internet, which is far from a “new” technology.  Indeed, if the Obama campaign in 2012 is any indication , in political terms, the Internet is best thought of as a tool of mobilization not direct participation in the form of discussion and debate. Participation is defined here almost purely in terms of mobilization.

In a really interesting way, these developments seems to have brought us back to the era before television when party machines and unions would get out the vote- only now mobilization is done using social media and GOTV efforts targeted at specific individuals.  My lament here is that this politics of mass mobilization has left all the characteristics of political participation Shirky had hoped the Internet would make possible in the dust. Rather than citizen-to-citizen debate and discussion issues are already decided upon in the higher echelons of the political party. Instead of groups being organized horizontally, we are back to the world of the pyramid, with the new technologies being used to foster mobilization receiving centralized direction from the party’s data rich “war-rooms”.

To be honest, I am not even sure you could have something like truly collaborative politics as in Shirky’s Utah legislation example on the mass level of a nation even if all of the technological-political trends would have played out the way he had hoped. If you think the process is ugly now- imagine the Federal budget being crafted as an open source project by the entire country!

Still, I continue to believe that the kinds of possibilities for citizen-directed government cyber-utopians have been preaching about for years still have some potential to be realized, only at a smaller scale. I think the first step in doing this is to remember that the kind of representational democracy we have isn’t the only form of democracy to have ever existed, or perhaps even the best for all purposes.

Lately, for a book I’m working on, I’ve been looking at the most famous democracy of them all, Athenian democracy, which at the very least, offers us an example of a system that tried to maximize the opportunity for individual citizens to engage in political activity.  In what follows immediately below I will not address the glaring flaws of Athenian democracy- imperialism, the condition of women, slavery. Rather, I just want to lay out the mechanics of how their participatory system worked.

Athenian democracy differed from modern democracy in many ways, but most especially in this: that the citizens themselves, rather than their representatives, gathered together in their assembly, called the Ekklêsia, to make political decisions.
The Athenian Ekklêsia included all male, Athenian citizens, of whatever class who were over 18 years of age. It met on a hillside, the Pnyx, south-west of the Agora or marketplace. The assembly began with the words of the herald that seemed to sum up
the whole world-view that underlie Athenian democracy: “Who wishes to speak?” Here, any Athenian citizen, of whatever station, was free to bring to discussion, debate, and a vote anything which they wished.  On the Pnyx, Athenians made decisions such as whether to start or end a war, when to ostracize a citizen ( most famously Socrates),  who to name as a general, whether to found a colony, inaugurate a religious festival, or literally any other question or issue that a member of the Ekklêsia wanted to discuss and decide upon.

Citizens of Athens bore direct responsibility for their decisions in a way citizens today might find hard to grasp.  Especially in decisions of war, Athenians were asked to make complex choices which were likely to have an immediate impact on either themselves or their children.

The Athenian courts or, Dikasteria, represents another of the sharp differences between Athenian democracy and our own.   Whereas our societies are guided by the input of persons deemed to be experts in some distinct domain of human knowledge: lawyers and judges on issues of law, economists in matters of economic policy, foreign policy professionals in areas of international affairs etc. Athenian democracy had a deep distrust of experts, or more clearly, a very narrow range of fields deemed by the Athenians to be capable of true expertise- generalship and water management topped their list, and they possessed a much more widespread faith in the ability of average citizens to come to reasoned decisions on public questions.

A Dikasteria was effectively judge and jury in one. It decided whether to take a case, what evidence was permissible, came down on the question of guilt or innocence, and decided upon the final sentence.

The only qualification for serving as a dikast was being over the age of 30, which suggests that the “expertise” being selected for was life-experience more than anything else.  Dikasteria for a particular trial were huge when compared to modern juries. They  could number anywhere from a low of 500 to a high of 6,000 members. Unlike in modern legal systems, there was no public prosecutor- Athenians brought other Athenians to trial.  Nor were there lawyers, Athenians prosecuted fellow citizens or defended themselves before the dikasts.

In still another sharp contrast to modern democracies, ancient Athens possessed no executive or permanent bureaucracy. What it had was The Council of 500, or Boule.  Members of this body, which was chosen by lot from members of the Ekklêsia served
for a period of one year.  The Boule acted in a coordinating and supervisory relative to the Ekklêsia engaging in such detail oriented tasks as the supervision of public finances, or the assessment of tribute from allies.

The way in which members of the Boule were chosen by lot was indicative of the way in which Athenians viewed the idea of elections.  The idea of electing someone to political office is based on the underlying assumption that someone is, in a sense, more qualified for some position than another person. Given the narrow definition of expertise held by Athenians, the idea that most public offices demanded anything more than requirements in the form of the personal characteristics of morality and judgement, that were possessed by almost everyone, was untenable. All citizens were deemed equally qualified for most public offices.  Election as a consequence was limited to the aforementioned experts such as generals and engineers.

The whole point of the Athenian system was to maximize the possibilities for citizens to engage in substantial political participation. Our system does not have this as a primary goal. Hell, we don’t even have off of work on election day!

Athens then, is at least one model of how politics in a society that put a premium on substantial participation could be organized. Today, I can imagine all sorts of ways that technology could be used today to increase the possibilities for citizens to engage in politics above and beyond voting in elections or working for campaigns while electoral contests are being fought. Technology could help make participation easier, and more compatible with the non-political aspects of modern human life.

For example, cities and towns could adopt something like the Athenian assembly rather than the mayoral and city-council systems now commonly used. Not everyone would have to physically attend an “assembly” if those who wished to participate in some sort of political debate and decision were able to do so virtually.  The key is to make participation as easy, integrated, and seamless with the rest of our lives as possible.  If I can receive updates via Twitter on fantasy football picks, why shouldn’t I be able to get an update on the town council meeting such as “ Proposition X will be held to a vote in so many days. Log-in and vote before such and such a date if you have a position on this issue”.  If I can spend hours of time in a virtual world such as World of WarCraft, can’t I spend a fraction of that in a virtual assembly whose decisions at least have some real world impact.

Would the majority of citizens participate in this sort of decision making?  Probably not, but I have no issue with such participation being self-selecting. If all debates concern you, participate all the time, if some, then just those, or if none, devote yourself to your private concerns, but remember that you now have no justification to complain. The point is to make it as easy as possible for those who want to to have their say- let the numbers shake out whatever way they do. Participation will likely vary over the course of life of the individual and with the general social mood of the society at large.

The limits to the political influence of experts found in Athens are no doubt impossible in our complex technological society, but I can imagine software systems, and expert services that provide information to citizens so they can test assumptions about the potential impact of their decisions from tax policy to water and resource management to zoning rules.  I can imagine the application of a blended model (real world/online) of the Athenian Dikasteria to non-criminal trials, and much of litigation supplanted by community based mediation.

And there I think is a very long background in response to James’ second comment:

I find myself in a rather odd political position of being a small government progressive. I want to find ways to organize society to accomplish progressive goals without an intrusive government.Do you or anyone else have ideas on that?”

A problem, I think, is that if the goal is meaningful participation where the individual can have a substantial impact on the society in which he or she lives, then the level at which many important decisions made by the government emerge will have to move downward. Right now, the level of government where an individual can most easily have an impact, municipal government, falls off the radar of most people. Part of the reason for this is certainly the role of national media which can only cover government at the Federal, and on rare occasions the state level. But, a large part of this inattention to municipal government probably also stems from the fact that almost all important political decisions are made at the higher levels of government.

In order to place real and substantial power at the level where individuals are actually able to shape it, one would have to shift many of the responsibilities and capacities now the prerogative of the Federal and state government, to a level closer to the individual. Oddly enough, this is a change in the direction of more democracy many conservatives would get behind. My guess is that the bottom level for such a unit would be a mid-sized city and its surroundings. If you go much smaller you cannot support the cultural institutions and ways of living that form the bones and sinews of a truly distinct community, go much larger to the level of a nation and the scale no longer supports a true sense of distinct community which is a matter of shared institutions and ways of living, not shared ancestry or ideology.

Perhaps oddly enough, libertarians are at the forefront of attempting to experiment with local level governance. There is Peter Thiel’s idea of utopian seasteading  and the grandson of Milton Friedman who is hoping to create cities based on libertarian principles from scratch in the Third World, at least partially inspired the similar idea
for charter cities of the economist, Paul Romer.

My guess, however, is that, at the end of the day, such experiments won’t work and any shift of responsibility to the municipal level will actually trend in the the direction of progressive government. Even the incredibly successful city-states whose economic performance these movements hope to emulate, such as Singapore, have governments that minimize social divisions and hold the well-being of the poor to be the responsibility of the community.

What the architect of Singaporean society, Lee Kuan Yew, understands is that no true community- as opposed to some gated enclave where wealthy people live- can be composed of only the rich. (It is a disaster for a community when it is composed of only the poor).  The wealthy seem more likely to pony-up if their money goes into the community where they and their children live.  To support progressive politics a community cannot be so small that the rich will simply put up and move, or so large that the wealthy cannot see that from their largess comes a community they and their children want to live in because of the quality of its cultural institutions, its schools, and general social and physical health.

This all may seem utopian, and perhaps, especially in terms of participatory politics it is.  Much of this, however, is echoed by someone like Jane Jacobs who saw a large part of the reason for the decline of the city in the 20th century in the shift of taxing authority away from the city to the Federal government. Though, I have yet to read the book, I believe they are also echoed by in Benjamin Barber’s recent If Mayors Ruled the World where he lays out just how much more effective the mayors of large cities have been at addressing endemic social problems than the ideologically driven national political parties. The danger here is paternalism as both Mayor Bloomberg’s New York, and the aforementioned Singapore of Lee Kuan Yew, seem to attest.

Relocating much of Federal authority to the level of cities might spur major innovations: in energy systems and climate policy, educational systems, food systems, criminal justice, tax policy, promoting economic equality, care for the elderly, health care, and the way we relate to and integrate technological and scientific innovation, which could prove scaleable and serve as solutions to the wider and more important national and international aspects of these issues. It might balance out the mind-numbing homogenization of modern industrial society: ”And each town looks the same to me the movies and the factories” (Simon & Garfunkel, Homeward Bound) from Shanghai, to Moscow, to London to New York.  As mentioned,  it might also put a brake on the tendency of the rich to avoid taxation because the effect of their taxes will be immediately manifest in the communities it which they live.

This century will be the first in which the majority of the human population will live in cities, if they can be allowed to get it right, things will work out for all of us- even for country dwellers like myself. One way to do that would be to relocate some of the powers of national governments regarding taxation, economic, and social policy back to the cities. Here also, I think a different, more participatory, and even more progressive form of democracy could find its 21st century home.

Thanks for inspiring this post James! As always, critical comments from everyone are desired.

A Utopian Reading of Pinker’s Better Angels Of Our Nature

Thomas More created the first modern version of an ideal society, giving his work the name that would stick for all such imaginings ever since, Utopia, in the year 1516.
More was an Englishman, and it might be good to gaze for a moment at the conditions for England in that year in order to gain some perspective on the changes that have since taken place.The life expectancy of an individual living in England near the year 1516 was around 38 years. That was, if you could make it to your tenth birthday. For, three out of ten children died before even reaching that age. Indeed, merely surviving up until that point depended on whether your parents had chosen to keep you alive rather than kill you shortly after birth. For, despite the prohibitions of the Church, many infants (we have no idea how many) died at the hands of their own parents who were unable to care for their newborns from either the condition of the newborn herself or the abject poverty of the infant’s family.

Famines had, thankfully, become somewhat less common in the England of the 1500s
than in prior centuries, but the lives of the island’s poorer farmers had not become any easier. The Enclosure movement, which turned England’s subsistence farms into pasture for sheep tossed many of the peasantry out into the world to fend, if they could, for themselves.  Thomas More himself, coming at the issue from a Christian-Humanist perspective, thought enclosure was a humanitarian disaster that drove displaced English peasants into a life of crime driven not by the evils of human nature but by hunger and extreme poverty. An issue he explores in Utopia.

The “criminals” who were caught did not have an easy time of it, and the definition of criminal, in today’s legal jargon, was an “overbroad” term. Persons could be executed not merely for murder, or even rape, robbery, and theft,  but for infractions such as “sodomy, gossiping, stealing cabbages, picking up sticks on the Sabbath, talking back to parents, and criticizing the royal garden”. During the reign of Henry VIII, the portund king who ruled in the time of Thomas More, there were “more than ten executions in London per week”. (Pinker BA 149)

Executions and punishment were not quick affairs either. Here is the punishment for a thief:

Rogues and vagabonds are often stocked and whipped; scolds are ducked upon cucking-stools (a kind of one-person see-saw) in the water. Such felons as stand mute, and speak not at their arraignment, (that is confess) are pressed to death by huge weights laid upon a board, that lieth over their breast, and a sharp stone under their backs
That’s the light stuff, I will spare you the horror show.Disease was an ever present danger as well. The Plague is only the most infamous of the diseases in the early 1500s that prematurely killed countless numbers of people,  which included;  influenza, dysentery, cholera, small pox, and a mysterious disease with the innocuous name of “English Sweat” that started with the chills and killed a person within a day.

Many of these diseases found their vector in the almost non-existent sanitary conditions of the time. Many simply threw their waste, including human waste, out onto the street.

As a further indicator of the general lack of sanitation and personal hygiene,Thomas More’s great friend, Erasmus, wrote one of the first books on manners that commended people urinating in public to face a wall rather than piss into public sight, refrain from licking their food dishes, or wiping their snotty noses onto tablecloths.

The 1500s and 1600s would witness cultural pandemics as well. Witch mania in which would leave up to 80,000 women in Europe dead, a large number by burning. If this was on the one hand a reflection of how horribly off course European religious ideas were moving, it is also gives us a glimpse into just how vulnerable lower-class women, lacking the protections of being the “property” of well-born males, were to the madness of clergy and crowd.

Witch burning, and public executions would pale, however, before the surge of violence of the European Wars of Religion which were just stirring as Thomas More penned his Utopia, the bloody conflict between the Catholic Church and the new Protestant groups that were sprouting up all over Europe. We would not see casualty rates like this again until the Second World War with perhaps over 5 million killed. The culmination of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in England with the English Civil War (1642-1651) would kill a larger proportion of British citizens than World War I. (Pinker BA 142). These wars had a nationalistic or “nation-building” aspect as well, the prelude to the English Civil War was The Bishop’s War (1639-1640) a conflict that forcefully wed Scotland to England.

Thomas More himself would be caught up in the fanaticism of the European Religious Wars in many way abandoning the Christian-humanism that had informed his Utopia, for what some might call an extremist defense of Catholicism. For this, he paid with his life after having resisted the move by Henry VIII to declare himself head of the Church in England.  More was fortunately not killed in the typical way persons accused of treason were treated ,which would have been to be hung till near death, his body taken down and fastened to horses, to be pulled at until he was ripped into pieces. Rather, the executioner merely cut off his head.

If we had a time machine and brought Thomas More to England in the year 2012- almost 500 years after he wrote Utopia what would he see?

The life expectancy for an English male is now a little more than double what it was in 1516- 78 years (for women it is 82). A disturbing number, 36, infants are killed by their parents in England each year around, but we have every reason to suspect that this is not even near the number of infanticides per day in 1516.  The last peacetime famine in England proper was 1634. The last devastating pandemic was in 1918. The last act of capital punishment was in 1969. The last “witch” executed in 1684.
“Today, according to British standards, the minimum provision of sanitary appliances for a private dwelling is: “One toilet for up to four people, two toilets for five people or more, a washbasin in or adjacent to every toilet, one bath or shower for up to four
people, one kitchen sink.”

The distinction in English attitudes to religion between the days of Thomas More and today can be seen in a great blog by a young ex-fundamentalist Christian, Jonny Scaramanga, called Leaving Fundamentalism which points out many of the absurdities of fundamentalism. In 1516, Jonny wouldn’t have lasted a day.

Of course, within the lifetime of people still living we did have The Second World War, which proportionally killed as many Europeans as the Wars of Religion, but we have seen nothing like it since. The very idea that Great Britain would fight another such conflict, especially against other European powers, within our lifetime, those of our children, or even the generation after them, seems, in a way it never has been before, ludicrous. Indeed, even in terms of nationalism we certainly live in a different age. Scotland looks likely to soon hold a referendum on independence from Great Britain, and absolutely no one thinks a verdict in favor of the Scotts going their own way will lead to civil war.

In other words, our time traveling Thomas More, were he to set foot in the England of today, would very likely think he had stepped into Utopia.

The side of this argument that takes note of the remarkable decline of violence in the modern era from the near end of judicial torture, of religious persecution, of slavery, of infanticide, of wife and children beating, of the use of the coercive power of the state to enforce moral norms (homosexuality, adultery), of the gratuitous abuse of animals, of genocide and politicide practiced by the big advanced powers, and the seeming disappearance of the willingness of those powers to go to war with one another is something meticulously laid out by Steven Pinker in his The Better Angels of Our Nature.  In part Pinker credits, or characterizes, this decline of violence to an expansion of human beings’ “circle of empathy”, an idea he borrows from the philosopher Peter Singer. Over time we have come to extend the kind of compassion human beings are naturally geared for, largely towards members of of own family or tribe, to other human beings, and even other animals.

Elsewhere I will offer an alternative reading of Pinker’s argument that sees these developments much less brightly than he does. For now, I will merely accept them as fact and turn my attention to Pinker’s attitude towards what I have called elsewhere “the utopian tradition”. For Pinker sees in utopia a major source of past violence, and as a consequence misses the very real and positive role the utopian imagination played in getting us to the conditions of today he so praises.

In setting out to identify both the reason the first half of the 20th century was so violent, and why, the world since has been so much less so, Pinker identifies a culprit in the rise and fall in the idea of utopia.

Why does the idea of utopia lead to violence?

“In utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite”.  The scale of such a promise leads to an abandonment of any limit on the price to be paid for utopia , especially in terms of the lives of others. Pinker: “How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain.” (BA 328)

Another way in which Pinker thinks utopia inspires violence because those who oppose such an infinite good can only be motivated by its opposite- absolute evil. Pinker: “They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. You do the math.”

In the mind of Pinker, utopian ideas also lead to genocide because they need to force people into a strictly laid plan:

“In utopia, everything is there for a reason. What about the people? Well groups of people are diverse. Some of them stubbornly, perhaps essentially, cling to values that are out of place in a perfect world…. “If you are designing a perfect society on a clean sheet of paper, why not write these eyesores out of the plan from the start”. (BA 329)

Pinker loves citations, and seemingly every paragraph in his 802 page Better Angels  has at least one. Except, that is, for these paragraphs, so I am not sure where Pinker is getting his version of the utopian mindset he finds so dangerous. Instead he turns to the a work by Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Seemingly on the basis of that work, Pinker claims of utopian ideologies: “Time and again, they hark back to a vanished agrarian paradise, which they seek to restore to a healthful substitute for the prevailing urban decadence”. He contrasts these utopian purists to the “intellectual bazaar of cosmopolitan cities” from which grew the implicitly non-utopian, healthy and rational ideas of the Enlightenment. (BA 329).

This theory of the agrarian-utopians vs the cosmopolitan-rationalists seems to make a lot of sense, nevertheless it is wrong. If any revolution was the Enlightenment’s revolution it was the American, and many of America’s Enlightenment heavy weights spoke against the “vices” of the city and the “virtue” of the countryside. Jefferson is best known for this, but an Enlightenment thinker Pinker appears to admire even more- James Madison- was an agro-phile as well. Here’s Madison:

“Tis not the country that peoples either the Bridewells or the Bedlams. These mansions of wretchedness are tenanted from the distresses and vices of overgrown cities” (If Men were Angels p. 90).

Pinker is certainly right in asserting that a certain group of utopian ideologies: French Revolutionaries, Soviet Communists, Maoists in China and elsewhere, and Islamic Jihadists are a group with an incalculable amount of blood on their hands. He uses a  quote from the most blood-soaked of the French Revolutionaries as evidence that the crimes of utopians arise from their denial of human nature.

Robespierre: “The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species”. (BA 186)

Yet, what is revealing to me about this quote is not its supposed denial of human nature as its clear indication that underneath Robespierre’s utopian ideology lay an idea of universal history. That is, he thought himself and his fellow revolutionaries were the people of the future, that this was ultimately where history was taking the human race, the French had just gotten there first.

And, when you look at it that way you see that all of Pinker’s bloodsoaked utopian ideologies were determinist theories of history in one way or another French Revolutionaries, yes, but also Nazis with their theory of history as a Darwinian struggle, and Soviet Communists, and Maoists with their ideas of history as a class war, and Jihadists along with Christian millennialist both of whom see history moving us towards a divine showdown.

But wait a second, isn’t Pinker’s own theory a determinist theory of history? Not if one takes his hedging at face value, but Kant’s theory which serves as a foundation of Pinker’s ideas certainly was one. Yet, neither Kant’s nor Pinker’s theories really build a positive role for violence in the movement of history. Certainly this must be the main thing: ideas that give rise to extreme violence tend to be theories of history that look at violence as somehow deeply embedded in the unfolding of history. Though, even here we need to be historically careful, for the American Civil War which resulted in abolition was itself infused with a millenarian based violence, so there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Pinker’s belief that utopian ideas are primarily a source of ideologically based violence blinds him to the way in which the idea of utopia helped move his humanitarian revolutions along. The list below is not meant to be comprehensive, and though each of these works or communities have deep flaws, when viewed from a modern perspective they no doubt helped moves things step-by-step forward to the place we are today:

Plato, The Republic: Often today viewed as a source of totalitarianism (more on that in a minute) A large part of The Republic is devoted to limiting the horrors of war- including the horrors of genocide, rape, and enslavement. The book also made the case for the political equality of women.

Thomas More, Utopia (1516): Religious tolerance: rather than heretics being killed even atheists are tolerated and encouraged to talk out their ideas. Violence: In More’s Utopia slavery is legal, but one should remember how why these slaves exists- that Utopia tries to avoid killing its enemies in war, and no longer executes common criminals. More’s use of his Utopia to criticize the inhumanity of the Enclosure movement was discussed above.

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627): Imagined a society in which the general welfare of all would be raised by the application of the nascent scientific method.

Gabriel Plattes, A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Marciana (1641): Public health: “for they have an house or College of Experience where they deliver out yearly such medicines as they find out by experience and all such as shall be able to demonstrate any experiment for the health or wealth of men are honourably rewarded at the publick charge by which their skill in husbandy physick and surgery is most excellent”.

Margaret Cavendish, A Blazing World (1666): Womens’ rights, animal rights, and perhaps the first person to argue against the use of animals in scientific testing.

The Commowealth of Pennsylvania (1681): Religious Tolerance: In the 1700s no American colony so captured the European longing for utopia and paradise than my home state of Pennsylvania of which Voltaire said: ” So, William Penn might be said to have brought back the Golden Age which never existed save in Pennsylvania.”

Mary Astell,  A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694): Women’s rights, famous for her quote: “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”

David Hume, Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth (1742): The classical liberal’s utopian: separation of powers, extension of the franchise to all of the propertied, decentralization, separation of church and state.

Sarah Scott,  A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1762): Women’s rights, universal education, and liberal economic equality.

Immanuel Kant, On Perpetual Peace (1802): Another classical liberal’s utopian: How the expansion of representative democracy, trade, and international law might result in the disappearance of war from human history.

Anonymous: Equality: a history of Lithconia (1802): Retirement, old age pensions.

Robert Owen’s Community at New Harmony (1824): In the midst of the horrendous working conditions of the early industrial revolution, Owen established experimental communities that tried to improve the general conditions of workers.

Northampton Association’s Abolitionist Utopia (1842): In 1842, a group of radical abolitionists and social reformers established the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in western Massachusetts organized around a collectively owned and operated silk mill. Members sought to challenge the prevailing social attitudes of their day by creating a society in which “the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion.”

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy 3rd Edition (1852): Usually considered among the classical liberals, Mill postulates here an end to the logic of endless economic growth instead giving way to concentration of human beings moral and intellectual growth.

Jean-Baptiste Andre-Godin’s Phalanstery for Workers Families (1871): Another utopian experiment in ways to alleviate the miserable conditions of industrial workers.

H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905): Equal rights for women. Animal rights.

Aldous Huxley, Island (1962): Sexual liberation. Decriminalization of drug use.

The Civil Rights Movement 1960s: The Civil Rights Movement grew directly out three utopian claims. The first an Enlightenment claim of human equality, the second a Christian-millennialist claim of an age of universal brotherhood “I have a dream”,
and lastly the utopian aspirations of non-violence found in Ghandi.

1960’s Communes, Anti-War, and the birth of the Internet: The commune movement of the 1960s may seem in retrospect silly, and much of it was, but it did have some positive effects: it was part of the larger anti-war movement that put a premium on non-violence “all you need is love”, and many of its members went on to create what they thought would be the next liberating technology- the Internet.

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1975): Biodiversity: An increased status for natural animals, plants, and ecosystems.

So, if the utopian tradition played such an obvious role in the expansion of Pinker’s (and Singer’s) circle of empathy, indeed, if it played such an obvious role in the other utopian trends seen in modern life, how does Pinker miss it? My guess, is that his views have been biased by the work of two influential authors on the subject of utopia, the historian, Karl Popper, and Pinker himself.

Karl Popper was just the most prominent of scholars after the Second World War who in trying to understand what went wrong laid their finger on utopia. In his, Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper especially indicted Plato, Hegel, and Marx as three figures who had lead the world down a dangerous path to believing that utopian projects could be brought into reality, and that this had resulted in the great bloodshed of the 20th century.

Popper was reasonably reacting against what is called “The Authoritarian High Tide of Modernism”, which included among other things the belief by intellectuals that society could be re-engineered in whatever way they deemed. Popper wanted policy makers to adopt instead the viewpoint of “piecemeal social engineering” rather than think society’s problems might be fixed all at one go. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is more one of association. By bringing Plato, who had merely imagined an alternative society to his own, and by reading him out of his historical context with the eyes of a modern liberal whose society had morally and intellectually evolved by leaps and bounds over the world in the times of Plato- Popper seemed to indict the utopian tradition in its entirety.

Popper’s association of the attempt to redesign society whole cloth with inevitable violence is blind to the reality of what almost all real world utopias were- small scale experiments that grew out of the political, economic, and social problems of their day that while they almost universally would ultimately fail- killed no one, insofar as one makes exceptions for those few cases where the “utopia” in question was in reality a religious or New Age cult.

Just how far this downgrading of utopia has gone is reflected in the conservative writer, Mark Levin’s recent best selling book, Ameritopia, where Levin uses Popper’s mis-association of utopia with mass murder, to indict accomplishments in Western societies that utopian movements were often in the forefront of, such as old age pensions (Social Security), and government funded health care.

Still, if Popper was one of the influences that lead Pinker to his misreading of utopia there is also the influence of Pinker upon himself. Better Angels of Our Nature should be read in conjunction with his earlier book The Blank Slate to best understand where Pinker is coming from.

In The Blank Slate Pinker was responding to two phenomena in American academia in the 1990’s, the first was political correctness, and the second was the resistance to, or even the unwillingness to engage with, the rising fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology by many members of the academy.

I was a college student in the 1990s, so I know what Pinker means by political correctness. There was a general sense that any willingness to engage with conservative ideas or traditional morality somehow tainted one in the eyes of professors as a closet fascists, racists, misogynist, or homophobe. I think the reason for this is that many participants in the revolutionary 1960’s, unable to really change American society through the government, found themselves in the academy, something that encouraged groupthink, and given the resurgence of conservatism in the larger American society at the time led to a sense of siege that left made academics particularly prickly whenever such ideas found were expressed by students. Both the retirement of this generation of professors, and the obvious traction their ideas now have in the larger society seem likely to end this state of affairs.

But the primary thing Pinker is out to defend in his Blank Slate is the attitude towards the resurgence of the  human sciences of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology a
resurgence that began with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology the New Synthesis in 1975. Academics, most notably the late Stephen Jay Gould were particularly concerned with any attempts to explain human nature in terms of evolution, both because it appeared to justify an oppressive status quo and because of the association of these ideas with both past US racism, and the genocidal nature of the Nazi regime, an argument Gould and others made in their 1975 essay, Against Sociobiology.  

This overreaction to Wilson is understandable given the historical context- it was, after all, only 30 years since the defeat of the Nazis, and less than that from the victories of both the Civil and the Woman’s’ Rights Movement. Again, time seems to have ironed out these differences and sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have joined the rank of mundane social sciences- though in some sense the dystopian anxieties of Gould and others regarding these fields might ultimately prove to have some basis.

Pinker, in some ways correctly, associates utopia with the idea of the human mind and character as a blank slate, and sets out in his work of the same title to disprove that view of human nature. Pinker divides the intellectual world into two camps- those with what he calls a “Tragic Vision” which is conservative and sees human nature as largely unchangeable and those with a “Utopian Vision” who see human nature as a “blank slate” upon which what humans are can be redefined. He himself thinks that science backs up the Tragic Vision, and therefore sides with it, writing:

“My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life.” (BS 294)
The problem here is on the one hand the seeming incongruence with the argument Pinker lays out in his Better Angels, that human society had progressed away from violence and discrimination in the modern era;  far too short for any evolutionary changes to human beings to have truly taken place, and in seeming contradiction to every existent human society that had come before. Indeed, what Pinker sees as the false science based on the idea of the mind as a blank slate may have been wrong, but, nevertheless, was an an assumption behind many of the factors Pinker credits with leading to our current era of non-violence including universal education, non-coercive methods of child rearing, equal rights for women etc.The “new human sciences” might tell us what human nature is, but they can’t really define what human societies can or should be like. Much of the utopian tradition might be seen as both speculative and small scale experiments to explore how far the gap between what human beings are, and what they wish to be, can be extended outward. And in part we have that tradition to thank in breaking the bonds of the Tragic Vision of human nature and society and leading us to the much better society we have today, that Pinker has drawn our attention to.

Still, if Pinker’s Better Angels can be read from this utopian standpoint it be approached from a dystopian viewpoint as well. My subject next time….

 

 

Kant’s Utopian Daydream

I am currently reading a monster of a book. At 802 pages, Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, leaves even a voracious reader like myself a little winded. Pinker’s argument is that the world has become less and less violent over time, so much so that we now live in what is the most peaceful period of human history ever.
I know what you’re thinking, but Pinker should not be dismissed as just another Dr. Pangloss preaching that we live “in the best of all possible worlds”. The sheer volume of statistics, and studies ,and stories, Pinker brings together make a strong case that the world has become progressively less violent, though it is a case that does indeed have some holes. It will be best then to deal with his argument in digestible pieces rather than all in one gulp, something I will try to do in a series of installments.

But not in this post, for Pinker has managed to get me sidetracked by drawing my attention to the writings of Immanuel Kant, a philosophical giant who never left his native city of Koenigsberg, but whose imagination stretched out to embrace not just deep questions on the nature of thought and ethics, which I knew, but the history and fate of the species, and indeed the state and future of intelligence in the universe, something I did not.

I can vividly remember, many moons ago now, attending a philosophy class as an undergraduate with the professor trying to explain Kant’s noumenon (thing in itself) vs phenomenon (appearance) with the vague feeling coming over me that my head was about to explode. Those ideas from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his famous guide to ethical behavior, the categorical imperative, which states: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” were basically all I remembered of old Meister Kant.

Pinker’s fascinating argument, however, made me want to take a second look. Better Angels of our Nature, talks extensively about Kant’s essay On Perpetual Peace, but I became more interested in an essay of Kant’s Pinker mentions, but discusses much less,an essay entitled: Idea of a Universal History from A Cosmopolitical Point of View. (Except for Nietzsche, German philosophers are never easy on the ears.) Kant sets his sights pretty high in this essay where he explores whether, in the seemingly senseless tumult of human history, some pattern or purpose can be seen.

Like in his other works, Kant sets his argument in a series of propositions.  These propositions essentially give us his idea of progress, an 18th century idea that the human species had entered a new and brighter phase of history, an “enlightenment” after the cave- black barbarism of the “dark ages. “

What I found so interesting about Kant’s idea of progress in this essay was the way he seems to be groping towards ideas about human potential, the evolution of mind, the trajectory of human history, and even the possibilities of intelligence in the universe beyond the earth that we can, two centuries later, see much more clearly. These were ideas that could only be put into what we would recognize as a modern context by the theory of evolution, something that would have to wait 64 years into until Darwin published his Origin of Species.

Kant speculates that any creature will move towards the full manifestation of its potential, and that the full potential of all creatures are destined to be reached at least  over the long arc of time.  For human beings, this potential is definitively historical in that every generation builds on the accomplishments of the one before, so that the possibility space of human potential expands with each new person born into the world. (First and Second Propositions) .

These ideas are remarkably similar to Kevin Kelly’s idea of the relationship between human beings and the expanding possibilities opened up by technology found in his book What Technology Wants. For example, Kelly thinks that only a certain level of technological development in musical instruments could have allowed a genius like Mozart to achieve his full potential.  In Kelly’s religiously inspired view, God desires for there to exist the maximum number of perspectives and intelligences, who in turn realize their potential, and therefore constitute a reflection of God’s own divine intelligence.

They also echo the explorations of two fellow bloggers whose work I really love both of whom, from quite different perspectives, attempt to understand the evolution of human consciousness and spirituality in light of the findings of modern science and what it has told us about our place in the universe. These bloggers are John Hyland who writes the blog, John’s Consciousness, and James Cross who writes at Broad Speculations.   Check them out.

To return to Kant, in The Third and Fourth Propositions Kant reflects on how humankind had uniquely been granted almost nothing by nature except raw intelligence, and therefore, had to develop all of its capacities from their own powers of reason.  As mentioned earlier, Kant has no knowledge of the theory of evolution, though what he’s talking about in modern parlance is something we would probably call cultural evolution. And much like evolution in the biological sense, he sees innovation caused by both environmental pressures against which human beings have no natural protection, and competition for scarce resources, especially between human beings themselves. Kant deliciously calls this natural competition human beings’ “unsocial sociability”.  Humans have both a deep need to be social and the need to be separate and provide for themselves. They naturally compete with one another, and if they did not humankind would have found themselves stuck in a kind of effortless paradise reminiscent of the Eloi of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine or the Greek poet, Hesiod’s, Golden Age.  Kant writes:

Without those qualities of an unsocial kind out of which this Antagonism arises which viewed by themselves are certainly not amiable but which everyone must necessarily find in the movements of his own selfish propensities men might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony contentment and mutual love but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ. As gentle as the sheep they tended such men would hardly have won for their existence a higher worth than belonged to their domesticated cattle they would not have filled up with their rational nature the void remaining in the Creation in respect of its final End.

Like other social contract theorists Kant thinks humankind’s natural antagonism leads to the creation of a coercive state which eventually gives way to mutually recognized law. The reason for the creation of a coercive state is that man as an animal needs a “master”, but this need for a master can not ultimately be fulfilled by other human beings because these “masters” are other animals as well. The answer is for human beings to place themselves under the rule of Law. For, to be ruled by Law is at one and the same time to be ruled by both an product of human intelligence and something that does not share in their animal nature.

As was the case for Hobbes, states, in Kant’s scheme, exist in a condition analogous to individuals before a the state has come into being. That is, in a condition of extreme and often violent competition. The solution Kant sees to this would be an international institution under which the world’s of representative democracies would voluntarily place themselves under in effect constraining their sovereignty with the limits of international law. An issue he more fully explores in On Perpetual Peace.

Here Kant gets interesting for he is indeed serious when he uses the phrase “cosmopolitical” in the title to his essay. The scope of his speculation expands beyond the earth and humankind to other worlds and different intelligent species. In a fascinating footnote he writes of alien worlds:

The part that has to be played by man is therefore a very artificial one. We do not know how it may be with the inhabitants of other planets or what are the conditions of their nature but if we execute well the commission of Nature we may certainly flatter ourselves to the extent of claiming a not insignificant rank among our neighbours in the universe. It may perhaps be the case that in those other planets every individual completely attains his destination in this life .With us it is otherwise only the species can hope for this.

I find this quote interesting for several reasons. For one, it seems we, or our children, will likely be the very first generation in human history to discover life elsewhere in the Milky Way. And not just bacteria, but fully developed biospheres like our own earth. People often wonder how this will affect humanity’s idea of itself, and it is a helpful reminder that for a long stretch of time after Galileo discovered “other-worlds” orbiting Jupiter, many people actually accepted, and expected , other fully developed sister-earths to exist and eventually be found. It wasn’t until telescopes were improved and long after probes sent out into space that we realized our own solar system was largely dead, and our living planet unique. In fact, the Church’s struggle with Galileo may have been much more about this implication of other earths being out than it was about any contradiction with scripture. If anyone knows of any books looking at Galileo from this angle, please share.

Kant also seems to be suggesting that human beings are collective in their intelligence in a way other species need not be, though I have no idea how to understand this without adopting the position that Kant was somehow blinded by his lack of knowledge regarding evolution- unable as I am to imagine any form of true intelligence that was truly fully formed to begin with and not the product of prior events or social in nature. Unless, that is, if he is thinking about the kinds of imagined intelligence found in immortals.

In his ninth and final proposition Kant seems to sum the whole thing up:

Much more than all this is attained by the idea of Human History viewed as founded upon the assumption of a universal plan in Nature. For this idea gives us a new ground of hope as it opens up to us a consoling view of the future in which the human species is represented in the far distance as having at last worked itself up to a condition in which all the germs implanted in it by Nature may be fully developed and its destination here on earth fulfilled.

In other words, Kant dreams that we will someday arrive in utopia, our potential fulfilled, our worst characteristics reformed.

There are intimations here not just of Kevin Kelly, and my fellow bloggers, but of Hegel, and Teilhard de Chardin, and Condorcet, and Francis Fukuyama, and Robert Wright, and Ray Kurzweil, and now, as I started this post, with Steven Pinker.

But here is where I have a bone to pick with Pinker who uses Kant as a launching point for his own progressive view of human history. For, the assumption found throughout Better Angels of Our Nature is that he (Pinker) and the and other prophet of progress who share his liberalism do real history, have a handle on reality, and are free from dangerous assumptions, while those “other guys”, the prophets of progress that he deems il-liberal, such as Marx or the French Revolutionaries, among others do “utopia”,  imagine a world which never was and can never be, and by even attempting to make it so show themselves to be lunatic, dangerous. But there is something not quite right about this view of ,and so, it is will be to this selective anti-utopianism on the part of Pinker that I will turn next time…    

The Utopian Moment

Sometimes great utopias are written during periods of enormous political, economic, intellectual or technological transitions. Plato’s Republic and his other lesser utopian works are written as a kind of anti-imperialist critique and alternative path just as the Western world was about to move definitively away from the dominance of city-states and into the age of empires. Thomas More’s Utopia has this transitional quality as well with his own world hurtling away from the feudal age of knights and the Universal Church towards an uncertain prot-capitalist and religiously heterogeneous Europe divided into nation-states.

Utopia doesn’t even have to be inspired by these great political changes, but can be written as a kind of laying out of a position within a debate that is largely intellectual and moral. Such was the case with Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis which both helped define and took the side of the scientific revolution in the 1500s-1600s  against the stranglehold of the philosophy of Aristotle over European thought.

These utopias might be said to represent what to borrow from the historian J.G.A Pocock could be called a utopian moment, a period in history where circumstances have lead to the verge of a major transition in the way human beings relate to one another and the world, a change that, at least for a time, seems to open up a path to realizing utopian hopes and therefore encourages a rearticulation of them.

A much lesser known utopia than the ones mentioned above, written at the very beginning of what was to become the industrial revolution, a book entitled Equality: a history of Lithconia, is, I think, representative of just such a utopian moment. Let me explain:

Equality was published as a serial in 1802 in Philadelphia by the deist journal Temple of Reason. The title of the journal, of course, was taken from the absurd and ultimately failed attempt by the French revolutionary, Robespierre, to supplant the country’s traditional Catholicism with an Enlightenment inspired “cult of the Supreme Being”.

[As a totally side note- the diversity and number of intellectual clubs, journals, scientific associations and philosophical societies found in both Europe, and America from roughly the late 1500s until the 1800s is something so fascinating to me, and something that given the lower barriers to publishing and discussion enabled today by the internet today, I think, puts our own era to shame. My hope is that we can recapture something like that in our own time, but for now I should return to my original subject.]

The author of Equality is unknown, though it is thought to have been written by the political writer Dr. James Reynolds. Regardless of who ultimately wrote the novel, it is considered the first utopia written and printed by an American, a fact that in and of itself would make it important. The book is presented as a discovered manuscript of a now dead ship’s captain describing the otherwise unknown island of Lithconia. The island is said to lie at one of the poles, which shouldn’t be surprising given that the poles, and perhaps the heart of Africa, were the only places yet to be explored, the only “final frontier” at this time. A factual sort of event horizon used by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein as well.

The author sets out to describe the utopian political economic and political system and how it emerged within the context of his own version of universal history. What makes this in many ways silly little book so fascinating to me is that you can almost feel its author, sitting at the very beginning of the industrial revolution, grappling with its utopian implications. For, whoever Equality’s author was, he or she was no luddite, and fully embraced industrialization for egalitarian ends.  The captain thinks of Lithconia:

This whole island has the appearance of one vast manufactory guided by one mind;(19)
The island is interlaced with roads and canals linking it together in one great productive unit. Centralized warehouses are the place where goods are “bought and sold”. I put that in quotes because Lithconia doesn’t use money: goods are provided to citizens based upon their needs. The island, therefore, knows neither rich nor poor nor charity.
The author of Equality was writing before steam power really became apparent as the wave of the future, but he realizes that machines are the way of the future and promise an unparalleled growth in productivity. The author understands that the future belongs to the miracle of the mechanical crank, though being unacquainted with the wonders of the steam engine, or the much farther in the future internal combustion engine, he imagines industrial production driven by water (26), and much more amazing depicts what I can only describe as a human-powered automobile (32).

Innovation is not just accepted in Lithconia, it is positively encouraged by the state with inventors winning not money but fame and the right to abstain from otherwise mandatory labor.

What are the social consequences of this new mechanized and continually innovative form of society? In Lithconia work hours are reduced to four hours a day. The society has become far too productive for much more. Persons begin work at the tender age of five, but this is mild work, more in the spirit of education and character building. The hours gradually build up until a persons maxes out at four hours around the age of twenty.

Lithconians are masters of group coordination, and not just in the economic sphere. Their army, a purely defensive force, is a supremely organized national militia. Its navy, considered an offensive force has been deliberately burnt to ashes. (38-41)They are coordinated in terms of art as well throwing concerts with up to a thousand musicians and singers performing in harmony. (35)

Lithconia is a gerontocracy where age counts much more than any kind of expertise. At the age of 50 persons become exempted from any sort of manual labor and take administrative positions in the economy. At 60 people retire from work altogether, though they do compose the actual government of Lithconia, and sit on its judgeless jurries.

The real social revolution of Lithconia is the abolition of the family, in my view, one of the very unhealthy legacies utopias have inherited from Plato. The author’s logic is that universal economic prosperity would end the economic need for the family, and that marriage would be replaced by something more like cohabitation, which, if someone looks at a relatively egalitarian society today, like Sweden, might be one prediction in the novel that has actually been born out by events.

In addition to all of this, the author gives us a version of universal history from the creation of the solar system until the founding of the Lithconia’s utopian society. The author depicts the first hunter-gatherer stage of human history as being one of widespread  prosperity an “age of innocence”. Amazing enough for a reader today this age was said to have ended and the age of scarcity begun with the onset of climate change brought about by geological and oceanic events. You might wisely think I was just bringing my modern prejudice to the book, so here’s the quote- speaking of geological and oceanic change:

This caused a great inequality, and changed the climates from temperate to a greater degree of heat and cold. Summers became intense and winters severe. During the age of innocence men multiplied prodigiously on the earth; a greater amount of foresight was necessary to provide against future contingencies. The necessities of man increased faster than his knowledge-  (49)
Only with the development of the mechanized and innovative type of society created by Lithconia was the general prosperity found in the age of innocence recovered and the devastating effects of scarcity brought on by climate change: slavery and serfdom, starvation and war, finally undone.
The historical irony here leaves me spinning. The author of Equality, poised at the very start of the industrial revolution, sees it as the means of return to the conditions of paradise, a paradise humankind was expelled from, not because of any sin against God, but because of a drastic change in the world’s climate. And here we sit, two centuries in from beginning of the industrial revolution, a revolution that itself threatens to return us to conditions of extreme scarcity by changes in climate it has brought, and more importantly, will bring in our century and the one that follows.

Still, the most important issues the author of Equality: a history of Lithconia was grappling with were the implications of mechanization, innovation, and coordination for our economic life. Almost none of the author’s hopes came true, even over the long term. The most glaring example of this is the average number of hours worked per day. The author thinks the modernization of the economic system would result in the 4 hour day.  This number might at first seem way too low at first glance, until one remembers that British farmers averaged 6 hrs of work per day  at the time the author was writing Equality.

By 1820, however, American factory workers, rather than having reduced daily hours of work, saw their hours skyrocket to around 17 hrs per day. Overtime, this insane number of hours would be gradually reduced both by legislation and by changes in social norms, but even today, average hours are double what the author of Equality predicted what is now 210 years ago. What gives?

The revolutionary increases in productivity the author of Equality saw coming over the horizon were real, and would prove even more profound than its author could have imagined. It seems to me that you can only do a select number of things with such radical changes in output: You can assume, as the author did, that the upper limit of human consumption has been reached, and use the new productivity to both spread that upper limit throughout the population and reduce the average number of hours worked. Or, you can increase the population to the extent that the new level of production can be absorbed, and this increase in population could come either by increasing the birth rate, decreasing the death rate (increasing longevity), or both. This increase of the population can also run parallel to more widespread consumption both on the low end and the high end of the economic scale.

It is quite clear to me that we largely ignored the prescriptions of the author of Equality and took the latter course. The world population was approximately 1 billion in 1800, whereas today it is approaching 9 billion.  The average life expectancy in the US in 1850 (the earliest year available) was less than 40, roughly half of today’s. The US consumed less than 1 quadrillion BTUS of energy in 1800 compared to today’ 35 quadrillion BTUS.

The fact that we may be on the verge of yet another revolutionary change in productivity, this time driven not by dumb machines, but by intelligent ones, able to perform perhaps the majority of the tasks now done by human beings is an issue explored in a recent TED Talk by Andrew McAfee entitled “Are droids taking our jobs?”  McAfee point is that robots and algorithms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and are taking over jobs that were once considered the permanent domain of skilled labor.

This point was also made, and more extensively  by Martin Ford in his Lights at the End of the Tunnel.  Advanced algorithms now effectively run our financial markets, and this despite their corrosive effects on the public will expressed through democracy. Intelligent machines are now increasingly called upon to fight our wars despite the ethical and political implications of using such machines in this way. Artificial intelligence can now win trivia games, or more disturbingly for some, write symphonies.

As McAfee points out in his talk, given the likely continuation of Moore’s Law, we are at the mere beginning of this revolution. What I think many miss is that even if we never achieve the feat of creating a human type of intelligence in a machine, or remain much farther out from the goal than many insist- a point recently made by David Deutsch, it many not matter all that much in terms of the looming economic impact of ubiquitous robotics and AI.  For, even machines much less sophisticated than the generalist intelligence of human beings might prove, indeed have already proven, better than humans in performing many quite sophisticated tasks. From beating human beings at chess to driving cars.

If this robotics and weak AI revolution is for real, then the question becomes what will we do with the increased productivity the use of such technology will most likely bring? The paths we followed after the industrial revolution: increased consumption and increased population seem closed to us. What I mean by that is this:

An increase in the population growth rate, as occurred after the industrial revolution, from the current slowing one would seem to invite environmental catastrophe. Using these new technologies to increase consumption doesn’t seem all that wise, or even necessary, either: How much more can the world’s uber-consumers, the Americans, really be expected to consume? How much larger can our homes, our cars, even our bodies become? Whereas the spread of American like living standards to the world’s poor is in many, many respects a good thing, can we really expect the entire world’s population to live like Americans? Such a goal, too, would seem to court environmental disaster.

In addition to this we are facing a situation where the jobs of the young will be increasingly automated while the old hold onto their own employment through seniority until the very last minute, and then spend a generation supported by a shrinking working age population below them.

How strange is it then that a utopian fairy-tale by an anonymous author two centuries ago would point to some ways through these dilemmas.  Not more consumption, but more equally spread consumption kept at the same level for those in the most advanced societies would be a wise way forward. Not longer hours for more stuff, but shorter hours and increased time for actually living would be the humanistic way to benefit from any new revolution in productivity.

Lastly, perhaps the old should not sit idle throughout the last quarter century of their lives, but be brought fully into the service of government and society. It would be a way both for the old to step aside and leave dynamism to the young in the private sphere while society taps their experience to teach their grandchildren, to care for the society they will soon leave behind,  and to guide the state with their prudence and natural conservatism. That would qualify as seizing our utopian moment.

Looking Backward

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario taking place today: A, to this point failed, novelist writes an updated version of Rip-Van Winkle where his protagonists falls asleep to be awakened a century or so in the future. Through this protagonist the reader is then given a tour through a future in which the social problems of his own day have been completely resolved, the linchpin of their solution being a new and revolutionary economic system.  To add a human element to the story the protagonist finds love in this future-world in the form of the great-great granddaughter of the woman he loved a century in the past, a love that his coma had tragically stopped short.

My guess is that today such a novel would be judged, though not in these words, a mere “ fairy tale of social felicity” (Bellamy)  If it was lucky, it would find itself on the shelf at Barnes and Noble next to works by J.R. Tolkien, or J.K. Rowling. What is most unlikely is that the book would become the third largest best seller in US history, and that it would spawn the formation of “clubs” throughout the country where professionals: doctors, lawyers, professors, and scientists would gather round to discuss whether the book offered a blueprint for solving society’s economic and political ills. It would seem out of the ordinary for such a book today to engender actual debate among political theorists, let alone in the form of other utopian novels that tried to play out rival versions of the future. Nor would it seem likely that real-world revolutionaries would take such a piece of pulp-fiction seriously. I mean Rip-Van Winkle? Come on!

And yet, all these things were precisely what happened to Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. The novel tells the story of Julian West who falls into a coma like sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. The world in which Julian awakes is one which has solved the endemic problems of capitalism: class war, economic instability, and inequality and constitutes a socialist utopia where the means of production are under the centralized control of the federal government. Something Bellamy, almost a half-century before Hitler would steal the phrase, called “national socialism”.

Bellamy got at least the general outlines of some future economic and technological developments right, though his Victorianism gives his vision of the future a decidedly cyberpunk feel. He imagines goods being bought in centralized warehouses tied together in a complex, super-fast, and efficient nation-spanning logistics system: a system managers at Wal- Mart and Amazon would certainly recognize. Bellamy envisions a kind of telephone/radio that would allow live performances to be piped in from anywhere in the country to anyone’s home. He imagines all purchases being made with something like a credit card. Although, because this income comes from the government, it has a stronger resemblance to the “Access Cards” given to the needy to purchase food, medical care, and other necessities.

What meaning this Victorian tale could have for today is discussed in an excellent recent essay in Lapham’s Quarterly by, Ben Tarnoff, entitled “Magical Thinking”. (The picture above is taken from that article).  Tarnoff thinks we can take away two things by considering Looking Backward. The first is how the novel, and the spirit which it represents, can be contrasted with our own anti-utopian sentiments, the product he thinks, of our encounter with the most horrific versions of “utopianism” in the early 20th century. The second is that Tarnoff sees the novel as emerging out of the problems of capitalism. Problems that Bellamy in his own way was trying to solve, and which we ourselves relate to in a much different way.

Rather than having ever solved those problems Tarnoff believes we have come to accept them:

The twenty-first century bears little resemblance to Bellamy’s future; the closer comparison would be to his present, to the late nineteenth century that the hero of his novel happily escapes. This was a society defined by tremendous income inequality, financial uncertainty, sleazy politics—in other words, much like our own. The contradictions of modern capitalism haven’t resolved themselves, as Bellamy assumed. Rather, they’ve become deeply embedded in American life, and the new economic world created after the Civil War has come to feel so natural, so inescapable, that even many of its staunchest critics have trouble imagining an alternative.

I agree with Tarnoff’s first point, that our ability to imagine alternatives is stunted compared to the very creative era in which Bellamy lived, but I want to qualify Tarnoff’s second point that this lack of imagination can be explained by the fact that we’ve somehow come to live with the kinds of problems Bellamy thought just couldn’t go on without giving rise to the demand for an alternative.

In our own era utopian science-fiction and political philosophy, let alone economic theory have seemingly completely parted company. There are exceptions to this- Ayn Rand has a cult following among libertarians, and Ursula Le Guin has captured the hearts of anarchists, but these are exceptions. (If anyone has other examples please, please share in the comments section).

The very word utopian is a kind of intellectual insult that means you just aren’t serious about what you are saying and need better acquaintance with the limiting reality of facts.

Taroff believes we have come to this stunted imagination because we have come to accept the kinds of economic and political conditions that Bellamy found intolerable, but this position becomes somewhat less clear when we take the longer view.

Bellamy was writing during a period of intense economic dislocation, labor unrest, and stagnating economic growth that began during the 1870’s and is known as the Long Depression. In her book Imperialism (book 2 of the Origins of Totalitarianism) the political theorist, Hannah Arendt, credits this economic crisis with the great wave of largely European imperialism at the end of the 19th century. Imperialism didn’t solve the economic crisis, and what occurred instead is that the crisis was met by a whole series of measures starting in the United States to solve some of the the endemic problems of “late capitalism”, by for instance, preventing the rise of monopolies.

Yet, truly revolutionary forces pushing towards an alternative economic system to capitalism would only come to the fore in the aftermath of the First World War, in the collapsed Russian Empire, forces that would gain traction in Western countries with the collapse of the world economy in the Great Depression. Thereafter, public policy, even in a society convinced of the virtues of free-enterprise, such as the United States, would push in the direction of a “tamed” capitalism and a more equal society in which the abuses, instabilities and inequality of capitalism were contained. Technological and demographic developments would dovetail with these efforts and result in an unprecedented period of widespread prosperity and economic calm, though perhaps also one lacking economic innovation, and certainly one of endemic inflation and general stagnation.

When this age of growth began to peter-out in the 1970s the logic seemed to be that the way back to more innovative and less inflationary growth would be to return to at least some of the conditions of capitalism in the era of Bellamy: a return to less regulated markets, tougher competition between labor- including American workers with lower paid workers abroad- a less generous welfare-state, and an acceptance of inequality as the byproduct of success in economic competition.

It should not come as a surprise at all that the kind of utopianism found in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t really proposing an alternative form of society and economics, but instead was a super-technological, Popular Mechanics, version of the consumer society that had, after all, only just come into being after the horrors of Depression and War. Nor, should it seem shocking that utopianism, again as  a serious alternative version of the current economic and political order, was so silent after the 1970s. The spirit of the times was that it was our utopian aspirations that had gotten us into the mess we were in in the first place.

Christian Caryl, in an excellent article for the magazine Foreign Policy, 1979: The Great Backlash offers the argument that the contemporary era, whatever we might choose to call it, should be dated not from the end of the Cold War or 9/11, but the year 1979. Caryl pools together some of the most seemingly different cast of characters in modern history: Margaret Thatcher, Deng Zhou Ping (the post Mao premier of China), the Ayatollah  Khomeini, and Pope John Paul II. Ronald Reagan would join this crew with his election in 1981.  Caryl contends that all of  these figures, in their very different ways pushed the world in the direction of a common goal:

The counterrevolutionaries of 1979 attacked what had been the era’s most deeply held belief: the faith in a “progressive” vision of an attainable political order that would be perfectly rational, egalitarian, and just. The collapse of the European empires after World War I and the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the triumph of wartime bureaucracy and planning during World War II all gave forward thrust to this vision; postwar decolonization and the rapid spread of Marxist regimes around the world amplified it. By the 1970s, however, disillusionment had begun to set in, with a growing sense in many countries that heartless (and in some cases violent) elites had tried to impose a false, mechanistic vision on their countries, running roughshod over traditional sensibilities, beliefs, and freedoms. As a result of the late 1970s revolt, we live today in a world defined by pragmatic and traditional values rather than utopian ones.

For three decades we have lived in this world where the utopian imagination has been expelled from the intellectual field. For my money, the question is: do we still live in this world?

We might answer this question by looking at the current state of the counter-revolutions of 1979.  The Thatcher-Reagan revolution that pushed the idea of a less regulated market based society seems to have hit a wall with the 2008 financial crisis. Even before then, the idea that unleashing market forces would result in a general prosperity, rather than serve to heighten economic inequality, was already in doubt. A Romney-Ryan victory in the elections might give these ideas a new lease on life, for a time, but their administration is unlikely to solve the problems at the root of the current crisis because their philosophy itself was born out of a distinct set of economic and social problems that either no longer exist or are not the real problem: runaway inflation, the stranglehold of powerful unions, stifling regulation of the financial markets, welfare dependency. (It should be added that a continued Obama-Biden administration has no real solutions to our current problems either.)

It also seems quite clear that the capitalist revolution begun by Deng Zhou Ping in China seems to have played itself out. China is facing daunting demographic, environmental, political and socio-economic challenges that undermine its model of export led growth and one-party dictatorship. China cannot continue its rate of blistering growth because its disastrous one-child-policy has resulted in a society “that may grow old before it becomes rich”, even the slower growth it has been experiencing of late may be too fast for its fragile environment to sustain. The one-party dictatorship rather than representing the rule of wise, red-robed  mandarins is rot-through with corruption and increasingly incapable of rational decisions- China builds bullet trains, but fails to build the practical infrastructure of a city like Beijing, so that the city experiences dangerous floods in which hundreds are killed.

Post-Khomeini Iran is a basket case in terms of its economy. It is unable to engage in needed reforms- as witnessed when it crushed the Green Revolution, and though it might have gained a huge strategic windfall with the American’s foolish overthrow of Iran’s worse enemy- Saddam Hussein’s Iraq- it has seeming squandered these gains. It has squandered the goodwill of the Arab populace in the wider region by supporting its murderous ally in Syria, and by obstinately pursuing the technology for atomic weaponry which alienates Arab governments, has resulted in the US strangling the country economically, and may result in an actual attack by Israeli or US forces- or both, which will further set back this great and historic people.

Lastly, the Catholic Church which saw the charismatic John Paul II succeeded by the papal bureaucrat of Pope Benedict, has seen its moral authority eroded by its secretive response to the tragedy of child sexual abuse by its clergy. The very conservatism that
served the Church so well when it fought against communism threatens now to not so much destroy the Church as radically shrink it. Rather than focus its energies on the real problem of rapidly disappearing numbers of priests, which might be solved by embracing women, and/or allowing priest to marry, it rewrites the liturgy to make it more historically authentic. American Bishops even goes so far as to threaten Church members who do not fully embrace politically all of the Church’s thinking with “soft-excommunication” in the form of being banned from receiving communion.

A good case can be therefore be made that the anti-utopian counter-revolution begun in 1979, is in many respects, a spent force.

There are ways in which the critical observations of late 19th century society offered up by Bellamy in Looking Backward eerily resemble the problems of our own day. The novel begins with the narrator lamenting the sad state of the relations between labor and capital.

Strikes had become so common at that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular grounds In one department of industry or another they had been nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of laborers pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a time.

What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation between the workingman and the employer between labor and capital appeared in some unaccountable manner to have become dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very generally become infected with a profound discontent with their condition and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go about it On every side with one accord they preferred demands for higher pay shorter hours better dwellings better educational advantages and a share in the refinements and luxuries of life demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it then was.  (LB-19-21)

Bellamy describes the relationship between the minority of the rich and the majority of the poor in the 1880s as that of the rich seated in a coach being pulled by an army of the poor.

The driver was hunger and permitted no lagging though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road the top was covered with passengers who never got down even at the steepest ascents.

Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen everyone seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. (LB 11-12)

How did the rich feel about the condition of the poor?

Was not their very luxury intolerable to them by comparison with the of their brothers and sisters in the harness the knowledge that their own weight added their toil? Had they no compassion for beings from whom fortune only them? Oh yes commiseration was expressed by those who rode for those had to pull the coach especially when vehicle came to a bad place in the road it was constantly doing or to a steep hill.

It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over This relief was not indeed wholly on account of the team for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers sense of the value of their seats upon the coach and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top it is probable that beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach. (LB 13-15).   

The financial panic of 1873 and the economic depression that followed, the conditions which inspired Bellamy to write Looking Backward,  have been replaced in our imagination by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Aside from economic historians, few people probably even known that there was a collapse of financial markets in the 1870s ,or that it was followed by a period of very slow growth that saw acute struggles between capital and labor for society’s diminishing returns. This lack of historical knowledge is sad because it blinds us to the historical scenario that is perhaps the best analogy to our own. Whereas the Great Depression saw a financial crisis followed by severe unemployment, the Long Depression began with a financial crisis in 1873 and was followed by a generation of mass underemployment and deflation. This point that 1873 and its aftermath are the better analogy to our own day has been made by many economists-including Paul Krugman.  

The times, therefore, might be ripe for an upsurge in utopian imagination, a utopianism conscious of its own colossal failures and the crimes committed in its name.

Looking Backward: 2100-2012, anyone?

Ameritopia Revisited

Ameritopia is a recent book by the conservative political writer and radio commentator Mark Levin. Though the book made the New York Times bestseller list, it has largely been ignored by mainstream media. This is a shame, not because Levin provides us with anything radically new on the subject of utopia, but because his view is poised to become the prism through which a large number of Americans define the very idea of utopia, and therefore what this idea means to America’s past, present and future. A more balanced reading of America’s utopian history might permit Americans, whatever their political stripe, to take something positive from our utopian heritage.

Levin structures his book by taking four authors as exemplary of the utopian mind-set: Plato, Thomas More, Hobbes and Karl Marx and contrasting them to what he believes to be thinkers in the anti-utopian camp: Montesquieu, John Locke, James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville. Plato, More, Hobbes and Marx respectively represent rule by an intellectual elite (guardians), the suppression of human ambition and inequality, total control by the state, and the abolition of property. Their counterpoise respectively represent the separation of powers as a means to prevent tyranny, natural right and God given rights as the basis of a necessarily limited government power, the idea of American government as a limited form of government, the dangers of pursuing economic equality as opposed to the necessary equality of political and legal rights.

Levin uses selected writings of Montesquieu, Locke, Madison and De Tocqueville to define what he understands to be the American philosophical and political tradition a tradition that views utopianism such that:

Looked at another way, the utopian models of Plato’s republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes Leviathan, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto could not be more repugnant to America’s philosophical and political foundation. Each of these utopias, in their own way, are models for totalitarian regimes that rule over men as subjects. 122

Right around the same time I was slogging my way through Ameritopia the Canadian novelist, Margaret Atwood, had a piece in the New York Times with the fanciful title: Hello, Martians. Let Moby-Dick Explain.  In the article Atwood is having an imaginary discussion with a group of Martians who are asking her to explain the United States.  Even though she is Canadian she gives it a shot with the following:

“America has always been different from Europe,” I said, “having begun as a utopian religious community. Some have seen it as a dream world where you can be what you choose, others as a mirage that lures, exploits and disappoints. Some see it as a land of spiritual potential, others as a place of crass and vulgar materialism. Some see it as a mecca for creative entrepreneurs, others as a corporate oligarchy where the big eat the small and inventions helpful to the world are stifled. Some see it as the home of freedom of expression, others as a land of timorous conformity and mob-opinion rule.”

Thing is, while Levin sees America as the heroic anti-utopia that through its political traditions and institutions has resisted utopian fantasies that have reigned elsewhere, Atwood sees America as the land of utopia defined by that dream more than any other society. Both can’t be right, or can they?

Soon after I finished Ameritopia and read Atwood’s article I began to compile a list of American utopias or strands of utopian thought in America. The list soon became so long and tedious that I was afraid I’d lull my poor readers to sleep if I actually wrote the whole thing out. There had to be a better way to get all this information across, so I decided to make a slideshow.

Immediately below is what I take to be a general history of utopia in America.  Anyone interested in specifics can consult the slideshow. It should be noted from the outset that I probably missed more than I included and may have made some errors on multiple points. Any suggestions for corrections would be of help.

The idea of America has been intertwined with the idea of utopia from the day Europeans discovered the New World. The discovery of the Americas became tied to anticipation and anxiety about the end of the world and the beginning of the reign of Christ on earth, it inspired a new golden age of utopian literature beginning with Thomas Moore, it became one of the main vectors through which the myth of the noble savage became popular in Europe. Many of the initial European settlements in the Americas either were themselves utopian experiments or gave rise to such experiments. America was seen as the place where utopian aspirations such as the end of poverty could in fact be realized, and the American republic was built from utopian themes such as equality.

Throughout the early 19th century the United States was the primary location for utopian communities seeking to overcome the problems associated with industrial civilization. By the end of that century large numbers of Americans had placed their utopian hopes with technology and government control over the economy, a position that was not fundamentally shaken until the late 1960s when utopian aspirations in the United States flowered and took on a more communitarian, spiritual, liberation, and environment centric form.

The end of the Cold War saw a further upsurge in utopian thought this time seen as an end to history and a further acceleration of wealth. Both aspirations were done in by political events such as 9-11, and the crash of stock market bubbles in 2000 and 2008.
Even in such technologically advanced times apocalyptic utopianism remained a major strain of American thought, a new breed of secular utopians and technophiles had also emerged that held their own idea of an approaching technological apocalypse. Lastly,
the era since the economic collapse has seen the rise of political movements which exhibit a combination of ideas from America’s utopian past. The story of utopia in America is not over…

Click on image above to watch the slideshow.

Given all this it is fair to ask how Levin could have gotten things so horribly wrong.

Sometimes we are wrong about something precisely because we are right about something closely related to it. And Levin is write about this: that the founders well aware that they were engaged in a kind of bold continental sized experiment wanted to make sure that experiments of such a scale would be incredibly difficult to initiate in the future. They were especially leery of national experiments that might originate from the two major strands of utopian thinking in the past- economic and religious.

Here is the primary architect of the American system of government, James Madison, in Federalist Number 10:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

No matter how critical we are of the gridlock of today which prohibits necessary systematic change it was probably one of the factors that helped prevent the radicalization of American society during the tumultuous first half of the 20th century- a period that saw much of the rest of the world succumb to fascist and communist dictatorships. For all its flaws, the system probably still keeps us safe from the extremes on either side of the political spectrum, and we should therefore be aware of what we are doing when we try to change it.

Be that as it may, Levin gets this right and as a consequence misses the actual legacy of utopian thought in America. When large scale social and political experiments go wrong they can hurt a lot of people, the Soviet Union was one such experiment as is the European Union whose ultimate fate is today in doubt. The United States itself almost failed in its Civil War, which was the point made by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure”.

Small scale utopias or even imagined utopias are much less dangerous. When they fail, as almost all do, they burn a lot less people. At the same time they serve as laboratories in which new ways of being in the world can be tested. The aspirations inspired by purely imagined utopias often spur real reform in society in which the real tries to meet the standard of the dreamed.

In many ways the utopian tradition helped give rise to the society we have today. Certainly not utopia, but much more humane and just than the America these utopias were responding to in the 18th and 19th centuries. That is Ameritopia.

The Sixth Age

An almost universal myth found in agricultural civilizations is that of a lost paradise or golden age placed in the beginning of human history, or if still supposed to be in existence, beyond the sprawl of civilization, a prehistoric utopia frozen in amber.

The paradise myth we are most familiar with, of course, is that of the Biblical Garden of Eden and the story of the Fall. Yet, there were other myths similar in content that exist elsewhere. In the West, the biggest rival to the story of Adam and Eve and their paradise was that of the Greek poet Hesiod (sometime between 750-650 B.C.E) and his Ages of Man, a concept found in his Works and Days.  It was a myth once as well known as that of the Garden of Eden, but isn’t much talked about now. That’s a shame, because it has some very important things to tell us. So let me try…

The first of Hesiod’s ages, the Golden Age was a period when:

First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.

It was all downhill from there.

How exactly this golden age ends isn’t precisely clear, but, Zeus, the new head of the universe after his Titan predecessor, Cronos, is deposed ends up destroying the human race of the Golden Age. The people of the Silver Age that follows are neither as long lived or as content as their golden ancestors. For the first time human beings are forced to seek shelter from the elements and build houses. They are also forced to work for a living and start fighting among themselves. Understandably, the people of the Silver Age are also less than deferential to the gods, and Zeus ends up destroying them too.

The Bronze Age that followed ends up being even more violent than the Silver. Human beings were in a constant state of war and strife. Like turtles or hermit crabs they take shelter from one another in hard houses, made of bronze, of course. Even the none- too- compassionate Zeus was appalled by their barbarity. Yahweh like, he destroyed them in a flood.

There is a pause in the seemingly endless degeneration of humanity with the Heroic Age that follows the Bronze. People here are pious and brave if still violent, and this is the period that we see the world’s heroes, such as Achilles take the stage. But, make no mistake this is only a pause.

The age which follows, the age in which Hesiod finds himself, is the Iron Age. It is the worst yet of the lot for men here are destined to labor to preserve their existence, and continue their strife, with even parents and children coming to blows. If the people of the Golden Age lived long lives, and died peacefully by the end of the Iron Age people will be born with grey hair and die soon after.

Hesiod seems to hold out hope that something better will follow.  At least that is how I understand him when he says:

Thereafter, would that I had not been born in the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterward.

But Hesiod gives us no insight into what the sixth age of man will be like.

For me, one of the things I find fascinating is just how many features Hesiod’s Works and Days and the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis share.  Both see the movement from paradise into the world as a metamorphosis from a life of ease to a life of labor. Both seem to take a certain negative stance towards knowledge. Genesis against the knowledge of good and evil, and Hesiod against technology. If one thought Yahweh was cruel for cursing humankind to live “by the sweat of his brow” he has nothing on Zeus, who along with his court of Olympian gods:

…keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working.

What a strange idea- that what has made the mysteries of nature so difficult to discover and control is that they have been hidden by the gods. Here, I think, a seed had been sown in the Western mind. The return to paradise would entail the discovery of the “means of life” that had been hidden by the gods. It was a seed that when full grown would give us science and the power over nature, but I will leave that subject for the future.

Instrumental in this “knowledge war” between Zeus and humanity are the characters of Prometheus and Pandora. Again, like Genesis, Works and Days is really not one story but two.

The myth of Prometheus is found in Hesiod’s Works and Days along with his Theogony. The essence of the story is this: Prometheus, the only one of the Titans that had taken Zeus’s side in coup d’état against Cronos had a special place in his heart for human beings having, according to some legends, created them. Not only had Prometheus created humans, who the Greeks with their sharp wisdom called mortals, he was also the one who, when all the useful gifts of nature had seemingly been handed out to the other animals before humans had got to the front of the line, decided to give mortals an upright posture, just like the gods, and that most special gift of all- fire.

Prometheus was up to something.

Having a special place in his heart for the mortals, and a special disdain for Zeus and his cronies who had destroyed his fellow Titans, Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting worthless bones wrapped in fat rather than the prime parts of an animal for sacrifice, which human would thereafter keep for themselves.  Incensed by this trick Zeus took not only fire from the mortals, but hid from them the ways of nature casting them into a world of unending scarcity.

Prometheus is punished by being chained for eternity to a rock. His liver pecked out daily by an eagle only to regenerate during the nights on account of his nature as an immortal like the medical fantasies of nanotechnologist.

The other famous character in Hesiod’s story is Pandora.  In yet another way that Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony resemble the first chapters of Genesis, Hesiod manages to blame women for all of humankind’s problems. It appears that women didn’t exist before the gods got it into their heads to payback the mortals for Prometheus’ trick with the sacrificial meat. The gods create the beautiful figure of the first woman Pandora, who with her famous box, would bring upon humanity all of its ills with the gift of hope remaining when Pandora shut the lid.

Hesiod’s understanding of the arc of history no doubt strikes modern ears as strange. We are apt to see history as progressive rather than regressive. Longevity increases rather than decreases, material goods and ease increase not decrease, the present is better than the past and the future will be better still. The Golden Age is in front of us rather than, in Hesiod’s scheme, in our distant past.

In recent years the case for general progress has been made by a whole slew of thinkers who, if they take the current crisis into account at all, see it as a mere bump on the road to an inexorably improving  human condition. Steven Pinker, for example, in his
Better Angels of Our Nature argues that, despite the news, violence and discrimination have been in steep decline since the Enlightenment. Not only are a lesser number of human beings injured or killed by one another, relative to the population, but the last few centuries have seen the end of slavery, the emancipation of women, the disappearance of state sponsored racism, the recognition of the rights of homosexuals, and the acknowledgement of the rights of animals.

Another recent book, this one by Stephen Moore and called It’s Getting Better All the Time makes a similar case that the world since the beginning of the 20th century has witnessed unprecedented progress. The book has an interesting back story in that Moore crafted the book from the notes of the late Julian Simon who is famous for his bet with the modern day Malthusian Paul Erlich. Erlich’s dystopian work The Population Bomb   predicted a Malthusian crisis for the end of the 20th century as the explosive  growth of the human population, he thought, would lead to an era of starvation, scarcity and environmental catastrophe. Simon and Erlich wagered on the price of five commodities, Simon predicting that their price would fall, Erlich that they would rise.
Erlich lost the bet, but the argument continues, and Malthusians continue to make quite reasonable arguments that we are headed off the end of a cliff. It’s just taking longer than expected to fall.

It is easy to see this argument tracing its way back to Hesiod. Those who side with technology are in the camp of Prometheus, and those who see our golden age in the primitive, unspoiled past, like Hesiod take the side of Zeus.

Whether the Sixth Age will represent a permanent end to Zeus’ curse or yet another movement away from paradise- only the future will tell.

Accelerando II

Were it merely the case that all Charles Stross was offering in his novel Accelerando was a kind of critique of contemporary economic trends veiled in an exquisitely Swiftian story the book would be interesting enough, but what he gives us transcends that. What it offers up is a model for how technological civilizations might evolve which manages to combine the views of several of his predecessors in a fascinating and unique way.

Underlying Stross’s novel is an idea of how technological civilizations develop known as the Kardashev scale.  It is an idea put forward by the Russian physicists Nikolai Kardashev in the early 1960s. Kardashev postulated that civilizations go through different technological phases based on their capacity to tap energy resources. A Type I civilization is able to tap the equivalent of the solar radiation present its home planet, and he thought that civilization as of 1964 had reached that level. A Type II civilization in his scheme is able to tap an amount of energy equivalent to the amount put out by its parent star, and a Type III civilization able to tap the energy equivalent to its entire galaxy. Type IV and Type V civilizations able to tap the energy of the entire universe or even multiverse have been speculated upon that would transcend even the scope of Kardashev’s broad vision.  Civilizations of this scale and power would indeed be little different from gods, and in fact would be more powerful than any god human beings have ever imagined.

Kardashev lays most of his argument out in an article On the Inevitability and Possible Structures of Supercivilizations.   It is a fascinating piece, and I encourage you to follow the link and check it out. The article was published in 1984, a poignant year given Orwell’s dystopia, and at the apex of the Second Cold War, with tensions running high between the superpowers. Kardashev, of course, has no idea that within a few short years the Soviet Empire will be no more. Beneath his essay one can find lurking certain Marxist assumptions about technological capacity and the cult of bigness. He seems to think that the dynamic of civilization will require bigger and bigger solutions to problems, and that there is no natural limit to how big such solutions could become. Technological civilizations could expand indefinitely and would re-engineer the solar system, galaxy, or even the universe to their purposes.

Yet, this “bigger is better” ideology is just that, an ideology, not a truth. It is the ideology that led the Soviets to pump out more and more steel without asking themselves “steel for what?” The idea of throwing more and more resources at a problem might have saved Russia during the Second World War, but in its aftermath it resulted in an extremely complex and inefficient machine that was beyond the capacity of intelligent direction, which ultimately proved itself incapable of providing a standard of living on par with the West. We are, thankfully, no longer enthralled to such gigantism.

Stross, for his part, does not challenge these assumptions, but rather build’s his story upon them.  Three other ideas serve as the prominent backdrop of the story: Dyson Sphere’s, Matrioshka Brains, and the Singularity. Let me take each in turn.

In Accelerando, as human civilization rapidly advances towards the Singularity it deconstructs the inner planets and constructs a series of spheres around the sun in order to capture all of the sun’s energy. These, so called, Dyson Sphere’s are an idea Stross borrows from the physicist Freeman Dyson, an idea that Kardashev directly cites in his On the Inevitability and Possible Structures of Supercivilizations.  Dyson developed his idea back in 1960 in his article Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation, which proposed 24 years before Kardashev, that one of the best ways to find extraterrestrial intelligence would be to look for signs that solar systems had undergone similar sorts of engineering.  Dyson himself found the inspiration for his sphere’s in Olaf Stapledon’s brilliant 1937 novel Star Maker, which was one of the first novels to tackle the question of the evolution of technological society and the universe.

A second major idea that serves as a backdrop of Stross’s novel is that of a Matrioshka Brain. This was an idea proposed by the computer scientist and longevity proponent, Robert Bradbury, who in sad irony, died in 2011 at the early age of 54. It is also rather telling and tragic that in light of his dream of eventually uploading his mind into the eternal electronic cloud, all of the links I could find to his former longevity focused entity Aeiveos appear to be dead links, seeming evidence that our personhood really does remain embodied and disappears with the end of the body.

Matrioshka Brains builds off of the idea of Dyson Spheres, but while the point of the latter is to extract energy the point of the former is to act as vast spheres of computation nestled one inside the other like the Russian dolls after which the Matrioshka Brain is named. In Accelerando, human-machine civilization has deconstructed the inner planets not just to capture energy, but to serve as computers of massive scale.

Both of these ideas, Dyson Sphere’s and Matrioshka Brain put me in mind of the idea of the crystal spheres which the ancients imagined surrounded and circled the earth and held the planets and stars. It would be the greatest of ironies if the very science which had been born when men such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo overthrew this conception of the cosmos gave rise to an engineered solar system that resembled it.

The major backdrop of Accelerando is, of course, the movement of human begun technological civilization towards the Singularity. In essence the idea of the Singularity is that at some point the intelligence of machines that originated with human technological civilization will eventually exceed human intelligence. Just as human beings were able to design machines that were smarter than themselves, machines will be able to design machines smarter than themselves, and this process will accelerate to an increasing degree with the time between the creation of one level of intelligence and the next falling to shorter and shorter intervals.  At some point the reality that emerges from this growth of intelligence becomes unimaginable to current human intelligence- like a slug trying to understand humanity and its civilization. This is the point of the singularity- an idea Vernor Vinge in his 1993 article The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era, borrowed from the physics of black holes. It is the point over the event horizon over which no information can pass.

If you follow any link in this article I would highly recommend that you read Vinge’s piece, for unlike the optimist Ray Kurzweil, Vinge is fully conscious of the existential risks that the Singularity poses and the philosophical questions it raises.

Stross’s novel, in its own wonderful way, also raises, but does not grapple, with these risks and questions. They remain for us to think our way through before our thinking is done for us.