[Being some notes towards a talk I couldn’t give.]
There are two things that are commonly said about utopian thinking. These are: (a) that it is indispensable to progressive change – by which I just mean change for the better; and (b) that it is dangerous. So why don’t I begin by reiterating both of these things, because both of them are true.
(a) Sketching utopian alternatives to the present opens our minds to imaginative possibility, to ways in which we might live differently and better than we do now. This point might seem straightforward, but one must not underestimate how common it is for minds to be closed against radically different alternatives. For many of us the world we know is the only one we know; we can fall into taking it for granted that the ways of doing things in this world, its rules and structures, are the only conceivable ways or the only practicable or efficient ones. In what Marxists sometimes refer to as reification, we turn historically specific modes of life into universal realities or what we assume to be universal and unchangeable. Utopian thinking uses the devices of abstraction, projection, imagination, to challenge the power of the seemingly obvious.
Marx himself was dismissive of the practice of constructing detailed utopias – ‘writing receipts… for the cook-shops of the future’, as he once contemptuously put this – but there were undoubtedly utopian elements in his thinking. For example, there is his notion of a world that could inscribe on its banners the slogan ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ Or there is the idea of a society in which alienated labour could be overcome or at least much mitigated, so that human individuals could enjoy, all of us, a rounded existence, and if not exactly ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner’, then be able to engage in some range of activities, rather than being chained day in and day out to a single narrow function.
How far either of these ambitions is realizable – or indeed desirable – I won’t go into here, but it is an old and distinguished purpose of political philosophy (and of literature, science fiction, etc) to engage in this critical, sometimes utopian, exercise, in order to encourage us to question what we are familiar with and its seeming permanence and/or legitimacy.
(b) And utopian thinking can also be dangerous. The conditions in which it becomes so typically involve something like the following: when the partisans of utopia get their hands on political power and determine to carry out their will irrespective of, even against, the balance of popular opinion; in other words, when some would-be project of progressive change lacks democratic support and popular legitimacy and has become the work of a ‘vanguard’, it can do great mischief and destroy and ruin millions of lives. The pace of change is often then forced, and the impractical or impossible tried against the weight of experience, or what has been tested, or just elementary common sense. Yet because it is supposed to be utopia we have in prospect – the very ideal human society – nothing, according to its partisans, may be allowed to stand in its way. What price some few million lives when the solution of all human difficulties is on offer?
Except this never is on offer: the human condition is imperfect and problematic by its very nature; so we must beware every utopian dream that has become detached from the basic norms of democratic validation and respect for human lives and human rights and civil liberties now. If Marxism has had something to teach about the possible benefits of utopian thinking, it has also, in its more monstrous historical forms, taught us enough and too much about the risks and the costs of utopia when divorced from liberal and democratic norms.
Going beyond those two contrasting truths from which I’ve begun, I want now to argue briefly for what I think is the minimum condition of any acceptable utopia today, and insist that it has to include an anti-utopian element. The core of it is this: the recognition that human beings are not only not perfect, they should also not be conceived as being perfectible – neither morally perfectible nor perfectible in other ways. As a species we have shown ourselves capable of enormous achievements, both individual and collective, in every sphere: scientific, industrial, technological, aesthetic, cultural, medical. Morally, too, human beings have displayed the greatest in heroism, compassion, altruism, perseverence, and disinterested help to others.
At the same time, however, our moral nature is fragile and it is flawed. Human beings are also responsible for terrible levels of cruelty, evils that defy belief, callous indifference to the sufferings of others. This is not merely the occasional product of ‘bad’ social conditions; it is a permanent potentiality of our natures, and therefore no prospective utopia is worth even a rusty nail that doesn’t build restrictions and limits against that potentiality – not only but at least the traditional constraints of the rule of law and the standard liberal protections of the individual, of all individuals.
For in the very idea of utopia itself are linked both the marvels and the evils lying dormant within human nature. Everything is possible, says the soaring imagination, the imagination of beauty and creativity and wonder. In a manner of speaking, so it is. But everything is also possible at the wrong end, in the eye and the places of human depravity. It was a common wisdom of the Nazi camps: I did not know before that on the human stage everything happens; now I do know. It is a lesson not to be forgotten.