Getting utopia right

As the second millennium came to a close, a time when many were pondering humanity’s past and prospects, historian Russell Jacoby was fretting over our inability to imagine a utopian future.

In a book that saw itself as bucking the trend of anti-utopian polemics that populated the post-war world, The End of Utopia was itself sharpened with a polemical edge. Looking at the intellectual state of the left in his home country of America and abroad, Jacoby saw a scarcity of dare and originality in the one area where historically it had enjoyed a monopoly: imagining society in a vastly different state than it is now.

Jacoby’s argument in The End of Utopia began by taking seriously a thesis few other leftists did, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history upon the wrapping up of the Cold War. Jacoby credited Fukuyama with indirectly hitting upon the staleness of a political scene robbed of utopian visions (the final paragraph of Fukuyama’s original essay). 'Today socialists and leftists do not dream of a future qualitatively different from the present’, Jacoby wrote. Instead their vision of the future is the present slightly modified.

The End of Utopia is not an exhaustive study of the utopian visions of the past. For that you’ll have to punish yourself via Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World. Instead Jacoby set out to interrogate the impoverished imagination of contemporary radicals. His targets were those writers who took to heart the attacks on utopian thinking by the likes of Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. Like all his books, Jacoby’s effort was short, tightly structured, full of punchy prose and ungenerous wit.

Upon first reading it several years ago, I was utterly persuaded by Jacoby’s argument, if not simply because his writing was so sharp and humorous. Jacoby also seemed not to take a firm political stance on any issue. He simply wanted his fellow leftists to dream big. ‘Something is missing’, he lamented. ‘A light has gone out. The world stripped of anticipation turns cold and grey.’

Without rejecting any of the sentiments expressed in this and a subsequent, more theoretical book Picture Imperfect, it’s easy for me to see now that Jacoby met the standards he set himself because they were placed relatively low. Defending our right to imagine grand schemes of societal change is not a tough task, no matter how many wisecracking centrists point to the Gulag. As put by Regis Debray, ‘It would be as stupid and sadistic to stop a society dreaming as it would be to stop an individual doing do so’.

Most opponents of utopian thinking, such as the philosopher John Gray, make their case on the basis of its harmful consequences. In books such as Straw Dogs and Black Mass, Gray indicts utopianism as one of the animating causes of most large-scale bloodbaths.  The calamities of 20^th century totalitarianism of both the fascist and communist variety can be traced back, in part, to the utopian propensity of imagining complete do-overs of existing arrangements. Thus the likes of More, Campanella, Condorcet, Fourier etc., are not simply foolish visionaries but sinister ones, whose plans for perfect societies echo too closely the dreams of Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc.

This has always been a questionable argument, as it poses a direct link between abstract ideas and physical harm which seems tendentious at best. Jacoby, and others like him, are right to call out attempts to blame the Enlightenment for the horrors of the 20^th century as historically and sociologically naive. Of course ideas have consequences, but rarely in a clean, direct path from abstract conception to concrete implementation.

It is unusual to find instances of mass-violence determined exclusively by philosophical systems or ruminations about what the ideal society looks like. More plausible as determining factors are group loyalties, blood feuds, resource scarcity and of course the good old-fashioned thirst for power. I think what people like Gray mean to say is that the utopian designs found in certain literary relics of the past resemble in some ways the totalitarian systems of the 20^th century. But that is far from saying that Utopian A has caused Atrocity B.

In light of this, what’s interesting is not to consider one of these standard arguments against utopian thinking but rather to look at a disarmingly nuanced one. In his book Shifting Involvements, Albert O. Hirschman also makes the charge that we have impoverished imaginations when it comes to imagining societal change. However what Hirschman means by impoverishment is the exact opposite of how Jacoby intends it. For Hirschman, it’s that we can only think of change in grand, utopian schemes, and not in a piecemeal fashion, that cripples us.

Hirschman writes that ‘attempts to imagine a better future have remained simplistic and schematic; they usually come up with a state of affairs that is, in some crucial respects, directly opposite to the present state, instead of being merely different from it’. Rather than characterise piecemeal reform as a sensible and commonplace notion, Hirschman instead characterises it as an act of imagination far more advanced than the utopian mindset. What’s more, Hirschman notes we’ve been historically conditioned, through the French and American Revolutions, to conceive of change in only one (totalising) way, and that it has been an act of intellectual will to iron out more mature patterns of thought.

This observation only takes up a small portion of the book, but is nonetheless striking for the cold contrast from Jacoby. Here we have two writers making the case that the dominant strain of history and philosophy is biased against one type of thinking, and loaded in favour of another. For Jacoby, the utopian is the underdog unfairly mocked by realists; for Hirschman, the reformist is marginalised through intellectual laziness. Both see their ideal-types as acting against the grain.

I don’t think we need to come down on either side here, of whether we should consider utopians as mavericks or dullards. They can be both, or neither. What is apparent to me now though, is that Hirschman’s is the more subtle position. It is plausible-sounding, if completely unprovable, that most people do seem to grasp for the totalising change more intuitively than piecemeal tinkering. It is certainly plausible to say so in today’s political environment, where both Trump and Sanders supporters pledge support for immoderate and unrealistic proposals to overhaul and replace existing institutions. Today’s radicals and reactionaries do not lack big visions or bold ideas.

But notice that Hirschman’s is not a direct condemnation of utopian thinking. What Hirschman is getting at in the context of Shifting Involvements is that having utopian aspirations inevitably results in disappointment with politics, and in turn leads to dropping out of public life. The person who takes politics seriously should look upon the utopian as counter-productive, not dangerous. The person who gets carried away with designs of the perfect society is not committing high treason against civilisation. But he or she is probably lacking a sophisticated understanding of politics, which, it must be said, is also not a crime.

All this is not to dismiss Jacoby’s reasoning: eradicate the utopian impulse, and you’ll create a lifeless, joyless society. A dystopia in fact. But grey hairs haven’t yet formed on my head, and I’m already getting a little tired of hearing the bugle call for revolution by people whose only talent is that they can play the bugle. Asking for bolder reformers and more circumspect utopians would be contradictory, but is it too much to ask that some sort of division of labour be worked out, so that the sensibilities of one don’t get drowned out by the passions of the other?