Category Archives: Utopia

Progress Ancient and Modern: The Oresteia

The Furies and Orestes

It is a modern conceit that ours is a morally progressed age when compared to the world of the ancients. At least that is the impression one gets from reading books such as Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, or Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God. Both Pinker and Wright, each in their own very different ways, give us insight into the brutality that was such a common, indeed daily, part of the lives of our premodern forebears- although they might quibble as to when our moral ascent away from this brutality and primitiveness began- with Pinker thinking it gained traction in the Enlightenment, and Wright pushing it further back to the appearance of the world religions.

There is also a tendency to see ourselves as more theologically or philosophically sophisticated than the ancients. How, for example, could the Greeks actually believe in those anthropomorphic gods who were thought to “live” on Mount Olympus and seemed to fill the Greeks with the twin illnesses of near continuous anxiety and misplaced hope.

I only wish that Pinker or Wright, or those who understand prayer to the gods as a version of “please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, you’re so big, you’re so big” (@24 min) as the science fiction writer David Brin did in a recent talk,  had read and wrestled with the Greek playwright Aeschylus. For what we find in Aeschylus are tales that push human consciousness in the direction of the confrontation between values which inspire social reflection and change. The end result being something we should very much call moral progress. We also find the whole concept of the “gods” at its deepest with divinities used to personify and bring into conflict the often opposing values and existential conditions that are found in human life. This is perhaps nowhere better on display than in Aeschylus’ tragedy- The Oresteia.

The Oresteia is a trilogy: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides that deals with the issues of love and hatred justice and revenge order and chaos. There would have been a fourth part to the Oresteia, a satyr play, but it is lost. The three surviving plays tell the story of the cursed and at the same time blest (because through them comes the expansion of the human moral imagination) family of the King of Argos -Agamemnon.

Upon returning home from victory in the Trojan War Agamemnon faces a coup plotted by his wife Clytemnestra in an adulterous alliance with his cousin Aegisthus. Both Clytemnestra’s and Aegisthus’ actions are driven by the most primitive manifestation of the human desire for justice- primal revenge. Clytemnestra seeks revenge for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter as “payment” to the gods for safe passage to Troy. Aegisthus is vengeful for other reasons; indeed, he is a human being created for the purpose of revenge itself, sired in incest, with his destiny to kill Agamemnon’s father Atreus for the cannibalistic murder of  his brothers.

It might seem strange to state this way, but the desire for revenge is perhaps the first rung on the long ladder of the human moral imagination (though it is not a step solely limited to humans for you can find it in other social animals as well). The idea of revenge, especially revenge for the harm inflicted on those close to us, demands that we take the rule violated or person harmed to be almost as important as ourselves for revenge comes with mortal risks to those that seek it.

In the Agamemnon revenge or “blood justice” has its due and the king of Argos is murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. But the characters here are, like those in Homer, mere puppets on a string their whole soul and character propelled to preserving the moral order of the cosmos which demands, in the Greek view, that murder, whether accidental or purposeful needs to be repaid with murder. A life exchanged for a life balances the moral scale that bounds mortal existence.

This is the kind of moral order that can be seen, I think, in the Biblical Book of Revelation or the Christian idea of Hell where, in the former, God avenges the evil of the unjust who have heretofore ruled the world, and in the latter, where every earthly sin has its corresponding punishment after death. And though the concept of blood justice might have become more sophisticated for a while under Christians, with the accidental homicide the Greeks thought had moral meaning no longer being placed on the scale of justice and the interior self- the idea of intention- bearing the moral significance of an act, Calvinists would abandon this sophistication with their idea of predestination, which, arguably, brought moral understanding back to the primitive type found in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, a level the ancient Greek Aeschylus in the remaining plays of  The Oresteia would transcend, a meaning hinted at in these lines from the opening of the Agamemnon:

Zeus has led us on to know,

    The Helmsman lays it down as law

    That we must suffer, suffer into truth.

    We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart

    the pain of pain remembered comes again,

    and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

    From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench

    there comes a violent love. (Lines 177-184)


The second play of The Oresteia, The Libation Bearers, tells the story of Orestes’, the only surviving son of Agamemnon, revenge against his mother and uncle for the murder of his father. The play begins with Orestes visit to Agamemnon’s grave where he secretly spies a group of women shrouded in black bearing libations- offerings to be poured in prayer. The women have come to the grave to find comfort for Clytemnestra who has been haunted by a dream of being strangled by a snake that suckles milk from her breasts. Accompanying the old women is Electra, the sister of Orestes who prays for justice in the name of her father. When Electra spots a lock of what she thinks might be her brother’s hair she cries these lines, which anyone who has ever escaped the grip of despair will understand in their heart:

We call on the gods and the gods well know the storms that torment us, sailors whirled to nothing. But if we are to live and reach a haven, one small seed could grow a mighty tree.  (Lines 201-204 )


When Orestes is reunited with Electra he is urged on by her and sanctioned by the god Apollo to seek justice against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Here the trilogy begins to gain new psychological and moral depth for intersecting in the mind of Orestes are two opposing systems of value- his natural maternal love and loyalty and his paternal bond to the memory of his deceased father. It is Apollo and his “new gods” that represent a new value perhaps best understood as a move beyond the moral ties born of blood to those born from the human capacity to make and keep promises. The crime Apollo seeks justice for is Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon to whom she was bound in marriage.

It is not so much in the act of murdering Clytemnestra that Orestes becomes fully conscious of these competing value systems, his mother after unsuccessfully pleading for her son’s mercy cries out:

“I must be spilling live tears on a tomb of stone”. (Lines 926 p. 219)

Rather, it is in the aftermath that Orestes recognizes the gravity of the decision he has made:

“ What bow could hit the crest of so much pain?” (Lines 1035 p. 224)  

It is in the last surviving play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, that Aeschylus brings all these elements together, and in the process brings the human moral imagination yet another step higher beyond the bounds of either blood ties or social contact.
In Eumenides Orestes is pursued by the Furies (pictured above). The Furies are deities dating back before Zeus overthrew the earth gods- the Titans. They have been given the task by a force more powerful than even the gods- Fate- to seek justice for murder and the breaking of sacred law. Contrasted with the concept of the Furies, the traditional dichotomy between good and evil found in modern religion seems almost simplistic. The Furies are certainly a force of darkness and yet their purpose is to restore the moral order through revenge against those who murder.

Over the victim’s burning head this chant this frenzy striking frenzy lightning crazing the mind this hymn of Fury  chaining the senses, ripping cross the lyre,withering lives of men! (Lines 328-333 )

Unable to find refuge from the Furies in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, Orestes, under the advice of Apollo and with the guidance of Hermes flees to Athens where he seeks refuge in the temple of Athena. The Furies delayed by being lulled to sleep by Apollo are eventually aroused by the ghost of Clytemnestra and renew their hunt. Animal like, they follow the scent of Clytemnestra’s blood on Orestes until they find him at the feet of the statue of Athena. When the goddess Athena appears she does something that had not been seen in the entire Oresteia up until now- rather than becoming partisan she shows both sides respect. She takes Orestes at his word that he may have been guilty of violating the letter but not spirit of the cosmic law for which the Furies seek his torment, but she also shows respect to the antiquity of the Furies and their rightful powers. She does not, as Apollo does, see the Furies as monstrous and unnatural- enemies of order- but as forces with a rightful place in the cosmos. Because of this respect the Furies ask Athena to judge Orestes’ case, and here Athena does something amazing. She asks a jury of mortal men to help her decide the matter.   

Too large a matter, some may think, for mortal men to judge.  (Lines 484-485)

Acknowledging that both Orestes and the Furies seem to have a strong case and that judgement in favor of either will have deep implications Athena muses:

So it stands a crisis either way.

 Embrace the one? expel the other? It defeats me.

 But since the matter comes to rest on us, I will appoint the judges

of manslaughter, swear them in, and found a tribunal  here

for all time to come. (Lines 495-499)

Something quite startling has happened here for Athena ( Aeschylus) has managed to make the rules of the gods subject to the reasoned judgement of mortal men. I am unaware of any such a leap anywhere else in religious history. Ultimately, their cases argued the jury tied with Athena breaking it in favor of  Orestes. The Furies feel the whole moral order has come crashing down and swear revenge against Athens for upending the eternal laws of justice.

All’s lost, our ancient powers torn away by their cunning,

ruthless hands, the gods so hard to wrestle down

obliterate us all (Lines 885-887)

Athena again tries to appease the ancient gods of the Furies with respect.

But if you have reverence for Persuasion,

the majesty of Persuasion,

the spell of my voice would appease your fury- (Lines 893-895 )

Athena offers the Furies a home in Athens. Their role to be the violent force behind the justice decided upon by the reasoned decisions of mortal men or the power behind their violent struggles with others. The Furies acceptance of this new and bounded role for their powers ends the trilogy.

The Oresteia thus represents something incredible as a piece of  literature, political philosophy, or religious reflection and I think we should consider it an example of all three. Not only as a great piece of literature does it give us insight into the human experience of injustice and the corresponding desire for revenge, it is also a tale of social evolution showing us how the violence natural to human societies which arises from this need for justice is contained with the establishment of political communities. But this isn’t just any political community- it is not Hobbes’ Leviathan terrorizing men into a state of peace. It is a community built around the active participation of citizens to decide upon and bound matters of justice. As a piece of religious reflection the Oresteia is revolutionary in that it subjects the gods to the reasoned judgement of  mortals even as it urges us to show respect to the wisdom and authority of ancient traditions.

To heed its lessons; now that’s what I would call progress!

The Dangers of Religious Rhetoric to the Trans-humanist Project

Thomas_Cole_-_Expulsion_from_the_Garden_of_Eden

When I saw that  the scientist and science-fiction novelist, David Brin, had given a talk at a recent Singularity Summit with the intriguing title “So you want to make gods?  Now why would that bother anybody?” my hopes for the current intellectual debate between science and religion and between rival versions of our human future were instantly raised. Here was a noted singularitarian, I thought, who might raise questions about how the framing of the philosophy surrounding the Singularity was not only alienating to persons of more traditional religious sentiments, but threatened to give rise to a 21st century version of the culture wars that would make current debates over teaching evolution in schools or the much more charged disputes over abortion look quaint, and that could ultimately derail us from many of the technological achievements that lie seemingly just over the horizon which promise to vastly improve and even transform the human condition.

Upon listening to Brin’s lecture those hopes were dashed.

Brin’s lecture is a seemingly lite talk to a friendly audience punctuated by jokes some of them lame, and therefore charming, but his topic is serious indeed. He defines the real purpose of his audience to be “would be god-makers” “indeed some of you want to become gods” and admonishes them to avoid the fate of their predecessors such as Giordano Bruno of being burned at the stake.

The suggestion Brin makes for  how singularitarians are to avoid the fate of Bruno, a way to prevent the conflict between religion and science seem, at first, like humanistic and common sense advice: Rather than outright rejection and even ridicule of the religious, singularitarians are admonished to actually understand the religious views of their would be opponents and especially the cultural keystone of their religious texts.

Yet the purpose of such understanding soon becomes clear.  Knowledge of the Bible, in the eyes of Brin, should give singularitarians the ability to reframe their objectives in Christian terms. Brin lays out some examples to explain his meaning. His suggestion that the mythological Adam’s first act of naming things defines the purpose of humankind as a co-creator with God is an interesting and probably largely non-controversial one. It’s when he steps into the larger Biblical narrative that things get tricky.

Brin finds the seeming justification for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to be particularly potent for singularitarians:

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever. Genesis 3:22 King James Bible


Brin thinks this passage can be used as a Biblical justification for the singularitarian aim of personal immortality and god-like powers. The debate he thinks is not over “can we?”, but merely a matter of “when should we?” attain these ultimate ends.

The other Biblical passage Brin thinks singularitarians can use to their advantage in their debate with Christians is found in the story of the Tower of Babel.  

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.  Genesis 11:6 King James Bible

As in the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Brin thinks the story of the Tower of Babel can be used to illustrate that human beings, according to Christianity’s  own scriptures, have innately god-like powers. What the debate between singularitarians and Christians is, therefore, largely a matter of when and how human beings reach their full God-given potential.

Much of Brin’s lecture is animated by an awareness of the current conflict between science and religion. He constructs a wider historical context to explain this current tension.  For him, new ideas and technologies have the effect of destabilizing hierarchy, and have always given rise in the past to a counter-revolution supported and egged on by counter-revolutionary oligarchs. The United States is experiencing another one of these oligarchic putsches as evidenced in books such as The Republican War on Science. Brin thinks that Fermi’s Paradox or the “silence” of the universe, the seeming lack of intelligent civilizations other than our own might be a consequence of the fact that counter-revolutionaries or “grouches” tend to win their struggle with the forces of progress. His hope is that our time has come and that this is the moment where those allied under the banner of progress might win.

The questions which gnawed at me after listening to Brin’s speech was whether or not his prescriptions really offered a path to diminishing the conflict between religion and science or were they merely a means to its further exacerbation?
The problem, I think, is that however brilliant a physicists and novelists Brin might be he is a rather poor religious scholar and even worse as a historian, political scientist or sociologist.

Part of the problem here stems from the fact that Brin appears less interested in opening up a dialogue between the singularitarians and other religious communities than he is at training them in his terms verbal “judo” so as to be able to neutralize and proselytize to their most vociferous theological opponents- fundamentalist Christians. The whole thing put me in mind of how the early Jesuits were taught to argue their non-Catholic opponents into the ground.  Be that as it may, the Christianity that Brin deals with is of a literalist sort in which stories such as the expulsion from the Garden of Eden or the Tower of Babel are to be taken as the actual word of God. But this literalism is primarily a feature of some versions of Protestantism not Christianity as a whole.

The idea that the book of Genesis is literally true is not the teaching of the Catholic, Anglican, or large parts of the Orthodox Church the three of which make up the bulk of Christians world-wide. Quoting scripture back at these groups won’t get a singularitarian  anywhere. Rather, they would likely find themselves in the discussion they should be having, a heated philosophical discussion over humankind’s role and place in the universe and where the very idea of “becoming a god” is ridiculous in the sense that God is understood in non-corporal, indefinable way, indeed as something that is sometimes more akin to our notion of “nothing” than it is to anything else we can speak of.  The story Karen Armstrong tells in her 2009, The Case for God.

The result of framing the singularitarian argument on literalist terms may result in the alienation of what should be considered more pro-science Christian groups who are much less interested in aligning the views and goals of science with those found directly in the Bible than in finding a way to navigate through our technologically evolving society in a way that keeps the essence of their particular culture of religious practice and the beliefs found in their ethical perspective developed over millenia intact.

If Brin goes astray in terms of his understanding of religion he misses even more essential elements when viewed through the eyes on an historian. He seems to think that doctrinal disputes over the meaning of religious text are less dangerous than disputes between different and non-communicating systems of belief, but that’s not what history shows. Protestants and Catholics murdered one another for centuries even when the basic outlines of their interpretations of the Bible were essentially the same. Today, it seems not a month goes by without some report of Sunni-Muslim on Shia-Muslim violence or vice versa. Once the initial shock for Christian fundamentalist of singularitarians quoting the Bible wears off, fundamentalists seem likely to be incensed that they are stealing “their” book, for a quite alien purpose.

It’s not just that Brin’s historical understanding of inter/intra-religious conflict is a little off, it’s that he perpetuates the myth of eternal conflict between science and religion in the supposed name of putting an end to it. The myth of the conflict between science and religion that includes the sad tale of the visionary Giordano Bruno whose fate Brin wants his listeners to avoid, dates no later than the late 19th century created by staunch secularists such as Robert Ingersoll and John William Draper. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, pp. 251-252)

Yes, it is true that the kinds of naturalistic explanations that constitute modern science emerged first within the context of the democratic city-states of ancient Greece, but if one takes the case of the biggest most important martyr for the freedom of thought in history, Socrates, as of any importance one sees that science and democracy are not partners that are of necessity glued to the hip. The relationship between science, democracy, and oligarchy in the early modern period is also complex and ambiguous.

Take the case of perhaps the most famous case of religions assault on religion- Galileo. The moons which Galileo discovered orbiting around Jupiter are known today as the Galilean moons. As was pointed out by Michael Nielsen, (@27 min) what is less widely known is that Galileo initially named them the medicean moons after his very oligarchic patrons in the Medici family.


Battles over science in the early modern period are better seen as conflicts between oligarchic groups rather than a conflict where science stood in the support of democratizing forces that oligarchs sought to contain. Science indeed benefited from this competition and some, such as Paul A. David, argue that the scientific revolution would have been unlikely without the kinds of elaborate forms of patronage by the wealthy of scientific experiments and more importantly- mass publication.

The “new science” that emerged in the early modern period did not necessarily give rise to liberation narratives either. Newton’s cosmology was used in England to justify the rule of the “higher” over the “lower” orders, just as the court of France’s Sun-king had its nobles placed in well defined “orbits” “circling” around their sovereign. (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God,  p. 216)

Brin’s history and his read of current and near future political and social development seems to be almost Marxist in the sense that the pursuit of scientific knowledge and technological advancement will inevitably lead to further democratization. Such a “faith” I believe to be dangerous. If science and technology prove to be democratizing forces it will be because we have chosen to make them so, but a backlash is indeed possible. Such a “counter-revolution” can most likely be averted not by technologists taking on yet more religious language and concepts and proselytizing to the non-converted. Rather, we can escape this fate by putting some distance between the religious rhetoric of singularitarians and those who believe in the liberating and humanist potential of emerging technologies. For if transhumanists frame their goals to be the extension of the healthy human lifespan to the longest length possible and the increase of available intelligence, both human and artificial, so as to navigate and solve the problems of our complex societies almost everyone would assent. Whereas if transhumanists continue to be dragged into fights with the religious over goals such as “immortality”, “becoming gods” or “building gods”(an idea that makes as much sense as saying you were going to build the Tao or design Goodness)  we might find ourselves in the 21st century version of a religious war.

Pinker, Foucault and Progress

Panopticon (1)

As readers may know, a little while back I wrote a piece on Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature a book that tries to make the case that violence has been on a steady decline throughout the modern era. Regardless of tragedies such as the horrendous school shooting at Newtown, Pinker wants to us know that things are not as bad as they might seem, that in the aggregate we live in the least violent society to have ever existed in human history, and that we should be thankful for that.

Pinker’s book is copiously researched and argued, but it leaves one with a host of questions. It is not merely that tragic incidents of violence that we see all around us seem to fly in the face of his argument, it is that his viewpoint, at least for me, always seems to be missing something, to have skipped over some important element that would challenge its premise or undermine its argument, a criticism that Pinker has by some sleight of hand skillfully managed to keep hidden from us.

I think an example of this can be seen in Pinker’s treatment of the decline of torture and fall in the rates of violent crime. Both of these developments, at least in Western countries, are undeniable. The question is how are these declines to be explained.  What puzzled me is that Pinker nowhere even mentions the work of the late philosopher, Michel Foucault,  a man who whatever the flaws and oversimplifications of his arguments, thought long  and hard about the questions of both torture and crime. In fact, Foucault is the scholar whose work is most associated with these questions.  It is a very strange oversight, for Pinker does not bring up Foucault even briefly to dismiss his views.

It seems, I am not the only person who asked this question for on his website addressing frequently asked questions Pinker gives the following explanation for ignoring Foucault:

Questioner: You obviously must discuss Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the book that explains the decline of judicial torture in Europe.

Pinker: Actually, I don’t. Despite being a guru in the modern humanities, Foucault is not the only scholar to have noticed that European states eliminated gruesome punishments, and his theory in particular strikes me as eccentric, tendentious, and poorly argued. See J. G. Merquior “Charting carceral society” in his book Foucault (UC Press, 1985), for a lucid deconstruction.

I wanted to see what this “lucid deconstruction” of Foucault by  Merquior (Pinker is nothing if not clever- Foucault is a patron saint to literary deconstructionist), so I checked it out.

Here is how Merquior introduces Foucault’s Discipline and Punish:

 Foucault once called it ‘my first book’ and not without reason: for it is a serious contender for first place among his books as far as language and structure, style of organization and ordering of parts go. It is not a bit less engrossing than Madness and Civilization, nor less original than the order of things.  Once again Foucault unearths the most unexpected of primary sources; once again his reinterpretation of the historical record is as bold as it is thought provoking.” ( Foucault p. 86)

This is the guy Pinker asks us to turn to for a rebuttal of Foucault?

Merquior does have some very valid arguments to make against Foucault, more on that towards the end, but first the views that Pinker does not discuss- Foucault’s view of the rise of the prison.

The theory that Foucault lays out in his Discipline and Punish which provides a philosophical history of the modern prison is essentially this: The prison emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries not as a humanitarian project of Enlightenment philosophes, but as a disciplinary apparatus of society in conjunction with other disciplinary institutions- the insane asylum, the workhouse, the factory, the reformatory, the school, and branches of knowledge- psychology, criminology, that had as their end what might be called the domestication of human beings. It might be hard for us to believe but the prison is a very modern institution- not much older than the 19th century. The idea that you should detain people convicted of a crime for long periods perhaps with the hope of “rehabilitating” them just hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind before then. Instead, punishment was almost immediate, whether execution, physical punishment or fines. With the birth of the prison,  gone was the emotive wildness of the prior era- the criminal wracked by sin and tortured for his transgression against his divine creator and human sovereign. In its place rose up the patient, “humane” transformation of the “abnormal”, “deviant” individual into a law and norm abiding member of society.

For Foucault, the culmination of all this, in a philosophical sense, is the Panopticon prison designed by Jeremy Bentham (pictured above). It is a structure that would give prison officials a 24/7 omniscient gaze into the activities of the individual prisoner and at the same time leaves the prisoner completely isolated and atomized. In the panopticon Foucault sees the metaphor for our own homogenizing conformist and totalizing society.

What Foucault succeeded in doing in Discipline and Punish was putting the horrific judicial torture of the pre-Enlightenment era and post-Enlightenment policy of mass imprisonment side-by-side. In doing this he goads us to ask whether the system we have to today is indeed as humane, as enlightened, compared to what came before as we are prone to believe.

This is exactly what Pinker responding to a question on imprisonment does not allow us to do:

Questioner:What about the American imprisonment craze?

Pinker: As unjust as many current American imprisonment practices are, they cannot be compared to the lethal sadism of criminal punishment in earlier centuries

Okay, true enough, but for me, this answer misses the point of the question. The underlying assumption behind the question seems to be “yes, violence might have declined, but isn’t locking up millions of people – six million to be exact – a number larger than those of Stalin’s gulag archipelago, 60 % of whom are there for nonviolent offenses, a form of violence?” Or perhaps “might the decline in violence be the result of mass imprisonment?” Admitting either would force Pinker to accept that the moral progress he details is perhaps not as unequivocal as he wants us to believe.

Here, I think, is where Pinker’s attachment to the Enlightenment idea of progress leads clearly to complacency. Pinker loves graphs, so here’s a graph:

U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate

It seems frankly obtuse to not connect the decline in crime with the sheer number of people now being locked up. It is tragic, but the connection between rising rates of imprisonment and declining crime rates can be seen even in Pinker’s vaunted Western Europe where the rate of imprisonment rose– though to nothing like the obscene rate it rose in the United States- and the crime rate fell in tandem.

Yet, unless the scale of imprisonment is put in context we are likely to see imprisonment of nonviolent offenders as less than morally problematic, and merely as an unfortunate consequence of the need to protect ourselves from violent crime by throwing the net of criminal justice as wide as it can be thrown, something Pinker seems to do when he states:

A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. (BA 122)

The strange thing here is that the uniquely American practice of locking up every law breaker without distinguishing between the risks posed by the accused is not only clearly disproportional and unjust it has makes no apparent effect on the actual rate of violent crime. The US incarcerates a whopping 743 persons per 100,00 whereas Great Britain lock up 154 per the same amount  and the US still has an intentional homicide rate 4 times higher than in the UK.

By seeing modern history almost exclusively through the lens of moral progress, Pinker blinds himself to the question of whether or not our own age is engaged in practices that a more progressive future will regard with horror.

The question of imprisonment and its relationship to the decline of crime is not the only place where Pinker in his Better Angels of Our Nature dismisses a messy, often harsh, reality in the name of a simplified Enlightenment notion of progress. This can be seen in Pinker’s notions regarding contemporary slavery and war.

In a strange way, Pinker’s insistence that we recognize the reality of moral and social progress might short-circuit our capacity for progress in the future. You can see this in his treatment of “human trafficking” a modern day euphemism for slavery. As always, Pinker wants to let us know that current figures are exaggerated, as always, he reminds us that what we have here is no comparison to the far crueler reality of slavery found in the past. But this viewpoint comes at the cost of continuity. Anti-slavery advocates such as those of the organization Free the Slaves assume a moral continuity between themselves and the earlier abolition movements- and well they should. But Pinker’s rhetoric is less “we have almost reached the summit” than one of undermining the moral worth of their struggle with his damned proportionality- that things are better than ever now because “proportional to world population” not as many people are murdered, die in war, or are enslaved.

Numbers off or not- anywhere even in the ballpark of 25 million slaves today- the high estimate- still constitute an enormous amount of human suffering- such as innumerable rapes, beatings, and forced labor (no doubt Pinker would try to put a number on them)- suffering Pinker does not explore.

What holds for slavery in Better Angels holds for war as well. He is at pains to point out the casualty figures of the most savage conflict of the last generation- a conflict most westerners have probably not even heard about- The Great War of Africa– are grossly exaggerated, that the war only killed 1.5 million- not the 5 million human beings often reported.

Pinker’s right about one thing- wars between the world’s most powerful states have, at least for the moment disappeared.Wars between the great powers have always been the greatest killers in history, and we haven’t had any of those since 1945, and the question is- why? Pinker will not allow the obvious answer to his question, namely, that the post 1945 era is the age of nuclear weapons, that for the first time in history, war between great powers meant inevitable suicide. His evidence against the “nuclear peace” is that more nations have abandoned nuclear weapons programs than have developed such weapons. The fact is perhaps surprising but nonetheless accurate. It becomes a little less surprising, and a little less encouraging in Pinker’s sense, when you actually look at the list of countries who have abandoned them and why. Three of them: Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine are former Soviet republics and were under enormous Russian and US pressure- not to mention financial incentives- to give up their weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two of them- South Africa and Libya- were attempting to escape the condition of being international pariahs. Another two- Iraq and Syria had their nuclear programs derailed by foreign powers. Three of them: Argentina, Brazil, and Algeria faced no external existential threat that would justify the expense and isolation that would come as a consequence of  their development of nuclear weapons and five others: Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Germany were woven tightly into the US security umbrella.

Countries that face a perceived existential threat from a nuclear power or conventionally advanced power (and Argentina never faced an existential threat from Great Britain, that is Britain never threatened to conquer the county during the Falklands War) would appear to have a pretty large incentive to develop nuclear weapons insofar as they do not possess strong security guarantees from one of the great powers.

Pinker believes that Kant’s democratic peace theory (that democracies tied together by links of trade and international organization do not fight one another) helps explain the decline of war, but that does not explain why the US and Soviet Union did not go to war or India and Pakistan, or Taiwan and China, or South and North Korea. He pins his hopes on the normative change against nuclear weapons found in a Global Zero a movement that includes an eclectic  group of foreign policy figures including realists such as Henry Kissinger that hopes to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

While I find the goal of a nuclear weapons free world laudable, the problem I see in this is that weaker powers lacking advanced conventional weapons could very well understand this movement as a way for the big powers to preserve the rationality of war. In fact, the worse thing imaginable would be for great power war to regain its plausibility. If the recent success of Israel’s  “Iron Dome” is any indication we may end up there even without the world abandoning its nuclear weapons. Great powers, such as the US and China, may be more likely to engage in brinkmanship if they start to think they could survive a nuclear exchange. Recent confrontations between China and its neighbors and East Asia’s quite disturbing military buildup do not portend well for 21st century pacifism.

Global Zero might with tragic irony prove more dangerous that the current quite messy regime if it is not followed in parallel with an effort to solve the world’s outstanding disputes and to build a post- US- as- sole- superpower security architecture-not to mention efforts to limit conventional weapons which while we were sleeping have become just as deadly as nuclear weapons as well. Where everyone feels safe there is no need for everyone to be armed to the teeth.  

Pinker recoils from messy explanations or morally ambiguous reality because he is wedded to the idea that the decline in violence was driven by a change in norms- a change that he thinks began with the Enlightenment. In his eyes, we are indeed morally superior to our predecessors in that we have a more inclusive and humane moral sense. Pinker turns to the ethical philosopher- Peter Singer- and his idea of the “escalator of reason” for a philosophical explanation of this normative change. Singer thinks that overtime human generations reason their way to inclusiveness and humanity by expanding our “circle of empathy”. Once only one’s close kin sat in the circle of concern, then fellow members of one’s state or faith, now perhaps all of humanity or, as Singer himself is most famous for in his Animal Liberation, the circle can be extended to non-human species.


Singer, however, is an odd duck to peg yourself to as a kind of philosophical backdrop for modern moral progress. A reader of Better Angels who did not know about Singer would be left unaware of just how controversial Singer’s views are. If memory serves me correctly, this fact that his views are something less than mainstream is tucked away in a footnote at the back of Pinker’s book.

Here is Singer from his  Writings on an Ethical Life:

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. (189)

I should be clear here that Singer is not talking about abortion, but infanticide, indeed he sees both practices as acceptable and morally equivalent:

That a fetus is known to be disabled is a widely accepted grounds for abortion. Yet in discussing abortion, we saw that birth does not mark a morally significant dividing line.  I can not see how one could defend the view that fetuses may be “replaced” before birth, but newborn infants may not be” (191)

If this is the escalator of reason I want to get off.

Much as with the case with Foucault, Pinker doesn’t spend even a page or two engaging with these ideas. With 802 pages to its name a few more pages would seem a small price to pay, but again they are ignored, perhaps largely because they detract from Pinker’s Enlightenment notions of moral progress. Even briefly grappling with these ideas, for me at least, seems to lead to all sorts of interesting and often quite disturbing possibilities that are outside the simplistic dichotomies of progress and anti-progress set up but Pinker and Foucault.

Our society has certainly made progress morally over past ages in its abolition of torture and slavery, in it’s extension of rights to the formerly oppressed , its inclusion of women in political, economic and intellectual life, its freedom of speech and thought,
not to mention the vast increases in our standards of living,  and yet…

May be our society has not so much progressed morally in the sense of empathy as it has become squeamish about violence, and physical coercion (real violence that is- media and video games seem to reveal an obsessive bloodlust).  What we have done is managed to effectively conceal violence, and wherever possible to have adopted social and psychological methods of manipulation and control- including surveillance– in place of, to use military speak, “kinetic” methods. Our factory farms kill and confine more animals than have ever suffered such a fate- only we never see it. (Perhaps that is part of the explanation for why our urbanizing world has become so squeamish about violence, the fact that so few of us are engaged in the violence against animals found in agricultural life). We do not physically torture but confine and conceal far more persons than were ever caught in the cruel but paltry nets of pre-modern states. Chattel slavery and its savagery are a thing of the past, but what we have now are millions of invisible slaves, kidnapped, locked in houses, people who are our very neighbors suffering the cruel tyranny of one human being over another.


Our wars are fought in regions deemed too dangerous to be covered by mainstream media and our images of them sanitized for prime-time viewing.  Our bloated and growing militaries represent bottled up potential energy that could level whole civilizations, indeed destroy the human species and the earth, should circumstances ever sweep us up and call it to burst forth. Yet, even our soldiers are averse to killing, so we are building machines capable of murdering more effectively and without conscience to replace them.

We do not expose our newborns on the rocks because they are girls or are disabled, but select against them in the womb so that 100 million girls have “gone missing” and whole categories of human beings are disappearing from the world, and some, such as the geneticist Julian Savulescu argue it is our “moral duty” to perform this “redesign” of the human species.

This returns me to the critic Merquior. Merquior makes the valid critique of Foucault that he is a sloppy historian, that he wants history to neatly fit his theory, which history can never do. Above all Merquior sees the flaws in Foucault’s argument stemming from his a prior position that the Enlightenment was less a humanitarian than a proto-totalitarian movement. This makes it impossible for Foucault to see the movement against torture and the creation of the modern prison system as anything more that an expression of a Nietzschean “will to power”.

But Merquior asks:

Why should the historian choose between the angelic image of a demo-liberal bourgeois order, unstained by class domination, and the hellish picture of ubiquitous coercion? Is not the actual historical record a mixed one, showing real libertarian and equalizing trends besides several configurations of class power and coercive cultural traits?  (98)  

Pinker might have done better had he employed Merquior’s critique of Foucault to himself, for, by seeing in modern developments the hand of progress from savagery to civilization, Pinker ends up blinding himself to the more complex historical picture as much as Foucault who saw in modern trends little but the move towards social totalitarianism. Indeed, Pinker could save his Better Angels by adding just one chapter as an afterward. The chapter would look at not where we have come from, but where we are and the struggles still left to us. It would provide a human face to the modern day suffering of those in our progressive age who are still enslaved and who continue to be killed and maimed by war. Those murdered and raped and those suffering behind bars for crimes that have harmed no one but themselves and those who love them. It would be a face Pinker had taken from them by turning them into numbers. It would seek to locate and avoid the many cliffs that might just plunge us downward, and say to all of us “we have just a little ways to go, but for the sake of our own enlightened legacy, we must have the forward thinking and endurance to climb onward, and above all, not to fall.”

* An earlier version of this post was published on December 30, 2011

How Copernicus Stole Christmas

Ancient and Modern Models of the Universe

Above are two pictures of the known universe roughly four centuries apart. The picture on the left is a beautiful illustration from the year 1661, found in Andreas Cellarius’ Harmonia Macrocosmica. The second is a composite image of the observable universe from 2008 created by NASA’S Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, one of a number of orbiting satellites meant to take the place of the undeniably awesome Hubble Space Telescope.  You might not think that either one of these images has anything to do with Christmas, but I’m afraid you would be wrong. * Let me explain:

The “true meaning of Christmas” as Linus from Peanuts can tell you is that, God, the  most perfect being imaginable, becomes a mere creature through human birth.There is a whole celebratory scene around this nativity with shepherds, angels, and three wise men from the east, but that shouldn’t distract from the reality that the king of the universe spends his first moments in a stable filled with barnyard animals.  This is a version of God that is truly imminent-  in the world- and not like some form of super baby from Krypton, but as a weak and vulnerable one, of earthly flesh and bones, a god who, in child friendly language, “poops and pees” like ourselves.

Step back for a second to grasp the utter strangeness of this idea. This human baby, one of the most vulnerable creatures in nature is, according to the tale, the creator of the universe. A child who can not even speak in fact the omniscient intelligence that knows everything that is known, will be known, or knowable. This “royal birth” in a stable reeking of animal feces is the sovereign of the world, the founder of nations, destroyer of civilizations, the ultimate source of justice.

I came to the recognition of wonder at the strangeness of this tale long after I had ceased being a Christian in even the nominal sense of the word. I was brought to it by what was a certainly less than five minute segment on NPR by the playwright Peter Sagal who was reflecting on the Christmas holiday as a Jewish man married to a Christian. A clip which I unfortunately have been unable to find, but which has stuck with me ever since.

It is true that Christianity wasn’t the first religion to turn God into a baby, but the Christian version of the story is the one that made it down to our own day. Why would people imagine this strange and beautiful story? Why think of a God so like ourselves?

These questions start to open up once one realizes the types of gods a human god was meant to replace. We tend to see the Greek god Zeus as a somewhat cartoonish figure, with his seduction (and rape) of human women, and his hurtling of lightning bolts, but he was every bit as real a god for his worshipers in the ancient world as gods are for people today. Zeus actually has a lot in common with his contemporary, Yahweh. Both had a penchant for destroying the world by flood when they thought human beings got out of hand. Both based their sovereignty over the universe on appeals to their power rather than their justice. Zeus was the king of the Olympians because he was the only one strong enough to succeed in a divine coup against the Titans. Yahweh’s answer to the accusations of Job that God does not act with justice are answered not with an explanation, but with a terrifying display of divine power.

If Western religions tended to see in human suffering some sort of divine architect with a higher purpose, Hinduism, which is less a single religions than a constellation of religious and philosophical traditions, tended to embrace the creative and destructive aspects of existence at once without a necessary design or purpose behind them. The creation of the new was the product of the destruction of the old so that all of its major deities, oversimplified as the difference between two of the major Hindu gods- Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer, who were both merely manifestations of the one all-embracing god- Brahman. Hinduism too, found need of a personal god, a human god, that bridged the gap between the both traditional gods such as Shiva, or deep and all embracing ideas such as Brahman and found it in the figure of Krishna a manifestation of Vishnu who enters the world as a human being to set it, for a time, aright.

Christ and Krishna are distinct in that the birth, life, crucifixion, resurrection,  and promised return of the messiah in the Christian telling represents a kind of play in which the destructive elements of existence are to be overcome once and for all. Unlike in the Krishna tales God shows up in person only only twice- once to begin the climax to the end of history and a final time to close the book.

This brings me back to those two models of the universe with which this post began. For the overthrow of the Ptolemaic version of the solar system by the heliocentric model of Copernicus had deep theological implications that would call into question the promise of Christianity that the nativity represented the beginning of a path that would bring to an end the endless cycle of creation and destruction- of birth and death- that were the existential features of the world in which human beings inhabited.

These theological implications were not at first grasped- at least not by most. Newton could sincerely believe that the model of the universe he was building atop the Copernican system was “proof” of the Christian version of God. The philosopher, Spinoza, seemed to grasp the theological implications of the new cosmology with a  much clearer eye seeing that in place of the moral architect found in Judaism and Christianity, the new science seemed to point towards a divinity that was both wondrous and beyond good and evil in the sense that all of its aspects- bountiful or destructive from the human perspective- were but different aspects of its same underlying reality.

But, it was the iconoclast, Giordano Bruno, who tried more than any other to grapple with the theological implications of the Copernican revolution for Christianity. Bruno almost immediately grasped what Copernicus never addressed that the end of the Ptolemaic system meant a universe that had to be much bigger than previously conceived, indeed it was likely infinite in space and time. This meant many suns like our own and therefore many earths like our own, and many intelligent creatures like ourselves. And what did Bruno think this meant for the nativity:

I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, but half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions. Therefore, either there is one unique Jesus who goes from one world to another, or there are an infinite number of Jesuses. Since a single Jesus visiting an infinite number of earths one at a time would take an infinite amount of time, there must be an infinite number of Jesuses. Therefore, God must create an infinite number of Christs.  *

It is the very scale of our new vision of the Universe that makes the idea of a singular salvation impossible. With up to a trillion galaxies between 10 sextillion and 1 septillion stars a conservative estimate, giving one planet for each star, would give us an equal number of planets, and even if only a tiny, tiny, fraction of those planets support life, and yet a smaller fraction of those have advanced civilizations we would still have many, many fellow creatures in the universe other than ourselves whom it would be greatly unjust for God, should he exist, to have offered neither a soul nor a path to salvation. Should God not have put other intelligent species in the Universe or made it all for “us” it would represent the most colossal waste of real estate imaginable.

The trouble with trying to wed the inexpressibly prolific Universe science has shown us with a Christian narrative that holds to the position that Christ is the primary or sole path to salvation can be seen in the life and work of the Christian technologist- Kevin Kelly.

Kelly had his modern “Road to Damascus” moment in  which he hit upon a “technological metaphor” for God  in 1986 while watching Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality enter the world he had created.

 I had this vision of the unbounded God binding himself to his creation. When we make these virtual worlds in the future—worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options—it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations. So I would begin there. For some technological people, that makes the faith a little more understandable.

Given his extensive travels in Asia, as shown in his beautiful website, Asia Grace, it somewhat amazes me that Kelly does not see in Krishna or the Buddha figures who attempt to “fix” the world in the same way as Kelly’s Christ. His conclusion, I think, was the wrong one to draw in being so narrow.

What the scientific version of the Universe has shown us is not, as someone like Lawrence Krauss, in his A Universe from Nothing would have it, that God doesn’t exist, or that spirituality is born of ignorance and exploitation as is the view of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, but that the scale of creation is so vast its possibilities and diversity so beyond human intelligence that any narrative we create to give it meaning can capture almost nothing of its fullness.  It supports not the clockwork demiurge God of Newton or the intelligent designer and miracle worker of literalists, but something more akin to the mystical tradition found in all the world’s religious faiths. It is the adoption of a perspective of deep humility regarding our own knowledge- both religious and scientific- and tolerance for those whose views are different than our own.

Copernicus may have stole Christmas, but he left it where we could find it.

* This post was a major adaptation from a post I wrote on December 20, 2011: God vs. The Big Brain, A Christmas Story
* This Bruno quote is reportedly from the Fifth Dialogue of his Cause Principle and Unity, but I have not been able while searching the text to find it. Any help would be appreciated.

Our Physicists Fetish

This week I’ve been enjoying listening to the latest Massey Lectures, a series of talks by the physicists, Neil Turok. For at least a certain segment of this blogs readers,these lectures are worth checking out. You can do so by clicking on the picture above. In his talks,Turok provides an overview of the history of humankind’s quest to understand the universe in which it lives from the ancient Greeks to our own day.

He also provides a vision of what he calls “our quantum future”. Turok states in his lecture and its accompanying book “We are analog beings,living in a digital world,facing a quantum future.” I was intrigued by what this phrase meant and was lucky enough to find an pre-lecture interview of Turok by the ever excellent Paul Kennedy of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s wonderful program- Ideas.

Turok’s point is that human beings have an analog form of intelligence whereas the current generation of computers that surround us are digital. (A distinction I touched on briefly in my post Turning and the Chinese Room 2 .) Turok sees digital computers and how they process information as essentially “stupid”. Our analog intelligence is built on a much more simple “digital” DNA, and what we’ve done in moving to the digital world is in some sense an evolutionary step backward.

Quantum computers, however, which Turok finds inevitable, will be an evolutionary advance of a whole different order, a new,and yet more natural form of intelligence. I am not quite sure how to imagine this, but my intuition is to imagine an intelligence that could write every possible book,compose every possible piece of music, solve any solvable problem in mathematics.

Turok seems to think that this new kind of intelligence will lack purpose and intentionality which will be the role of our analog minds that will exists within this sphere of quantum intelligence with us playing a role that is somewhat analogous to the role our genes play to our much more complex brains. Our genes provide us with imperatives “eat, mate, acquire, rule” and our brains are tasked with the particular job of figuring out how to do this. We will give quantum intelligence its intentionality, direction, purpose, the “what” it is to do, but the new form of intelligence will provide us with the how.

All fascinating stuff!

And yet, as I was watching Kennedy’s interview with Turok I found myself getting a little annoyed. A former student of the brilliant Marshall Mcluhan,Kennedy kept trying to have a conversation about how specialization had made it impossible for people of different knowledge domains to talk to one another, that the university had become a “multiversity” with people cordoned off into strict domains. Turok didn’t really seem to want to engage in this line of conversation and muttered something about an intellectual diversity of perspectives being good, but physics had to be “in the lead”, which sparked an association for me of how philosophy used to be called the “handmaiden” of theology. And that’s when I started to wonder if we were all, myself included, under the spell of what was little more than a new secular priesthood.

Why do we turn to physicists for meaning? Why are the religious views of an eminent scientist considered major news? Why do we think physicist are somehow able to divine the human future? Perhaps its because physics has taken over fundamental questions that used to be the domain of religion and philosophy: “how did the universe begin? how will it end?” Perhaps we are contaminated by a kind of intellectual radioactivity from that generation of scientist during the Second World War that, with the bomb, gave us the capability of destroying ourselves. Perhaps we are so overawed by the technology and rise in the standard of living science has given us that we think the intelligence behind this must be able to answer the existential questions of the human condition, must have access to some sort of divine wisdom.

I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that even the most brilliant of physicists have had a horrible track record when they stepped outside their domains. Isaac Newton’s intelligence was a gift to humanity, but he was nevertheless a horrible human being. His view of the future was based on his obsession with counting down the days to armageddon by applying numerology to the Bible. Einstein thought global catastrophe was imminent unless a world government was established immediately after World War II. The only surviving genius from the generation of scientist that gave us the bomb is Freeman Dyson who thinks global warming is nothing much to worry about.

Few of the most renowned scientists have been great in other domains of human thought and expression great philosophers, religious thinkers, poets, writers,composers or painters. Perhaps the only ones that fit the bill are Davinci and Goethe. The former a great anatomist, engineer and artist, the latter both a great scientist and a great writer. Human thought and expression is multifold and no domain should have a monopoly on meaning or purpose.

Physics here isn’t in the lead so much as it provides the background for the world we live in: “what is it?” “ how did it come to be?” “how will it end?” “what is possible within it?” Given the vast differences in timescales between human life and civilization and the “life-cycle” of the universe itself, the question of our future and role within the universe is not one that physicists are anymore qualified to answer than the rest of us.

Far too often, and Turok is as guilty here as any, physicists use the same deterministic language to describe the future of civilization as they do for the universe itself. Yet there is no real way of knowing this. Perhaps intelligent civilizations follow different paths and end up at as many different destinations as are possible within the boundaries of the laws of physics and biological evolution. This to me seems a more interesting prospect than every world following the same damned deterministic course to the Omega Point or Quantum intelligence or whathaveyou.

In any case, this speculation about the human future is a parlor game that all of us are free to play, but presenting a personal preference for a particular outcome for civilization as physics isn’t science- it’s setting oneself up as a modern day arbiter between us and the gods physicists have shown us are not there.

Iamus Returns

A reader, Dan Fair, kindly posted a link to the release of the full album composed by the artificial intelligence program, Iamus, on the comments section of my piece Turing and the Chinese Room Part 2 from several month back.

I took the time to listen to the whole album today (you can too by clicking on the picture above). Not being trained as a classical musician, or having much familiarity with the abstract style in which the album was composed makes it impossible for me to judge the quality of the work.

Over and above the question of quality, I am not sure how I feel about Iamus and “his”composition. As I mentioned to Dan, the optimistic side of me sees in this the potential to democratize human musical composition.

Yet, as I mentioned in the Turing post, the very knowledge that there is no emotional meaning being conveyed behind the work leaves it feeling emotionally dead and empty for me compared to to another composition composed, like those of Iamus, in honor of Alan Turing, this one created by a human being, Amanda Feery, entitled Turing’s Epitaph  that was gracefully shared by fellow blogger Andrew Gibson.

One way or another it seems, humans, and their ability to create and understand meaning will be necessary for the creations of machines to have anything real behind them.

But that’s what I think. What about you?

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.