Recently my wife and her sister and I were in downtown Edmonton and I stopped by a second hand bookstore. I managed to snag a copy of Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity, a book I did not yet have in my collection. I've now read the first two essays and they lay out with great clarity his argument for value-pluralism and his argument against utopianism. In this essay I summarize his argument for the latter.
In his essay The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West, Isaiah Berlin doesn't just lay out the history of the ideas behind utopianism. He makes a powerful case against utopianism.
The utopian ideal, he argues, is "the idea of a perfect society." (21) Utopias are fictional constructs where their creator imagines a world of bliss:
a society [that] lives in a state of pure harmony, in which all its members live in peace, love one another, are free from physical danger, from want of any kind, from insecurity, from degrading work, from envy, from frustration, experience no injustice or violence, live in perpetual even light, in a temperate climate, in the midst of infinitely fruitful, generous nature.
But the most telling feature of utopias "is the fact that they are static. Nothing in them alters, for they have reached perfection: there is no need for novelty or change; no one can wish to alter a condition in which all natural human wishes are fulfilled."
Most utopias, Berlin suggests, look back to a golden age in the past, a mythical place of perfection that has since disappeared. He lists a number of them but perhaps the best known are the myths of Atlantis and the earthly biblical paradise of Adam and Eve. But these sorts of myths are also reflected in Homer and Plato and Virgil.
Besides these myths of a lost and perfect past, there are those who write of "the golden age that is yet to come." (22) The prophet Isaiah spoke of the final days when men "shall beat their swords into plowshares" and war shall be no more. "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid," and so on. All of these utopias, whether conceived as earthly or beyond the grave, "display a static perfection in which human nature is finally fully realized, and all is still and immutable and eternal." (23)
He discusses anarchist utopias, worlds so perfect that governments are not necessary. "Zeno the Stoic conceives an anarchist society in which all rational beings live in perfect peace, equality and happiness without the benefit of institutions." (23) Zeno was the first in a long line of anarchist utopians.
But the utopian ideal declined in the Middle Ages as Christianity took the view that "man cannot achieve perfection by his own unaided efforts." (24) The only utopia achievable by man is in the afterlife. Heaven is a utopian ideal.
Utopias are about lost worlds. Life is viewed, particularly by the Gnostics, "as an agonized effort to piece together the broken fragments of the perfect whole with which the universe began, and to which it may yet return." (25) This idea, Berlin continues, "is a central strand in the whole of Western thought."
At the risk of over-simplifying the idea, he lists three pillars of utopian thought.
To all genuine questions there can only be one correct answer, all the other answers being incorrect.
A method exists for the discovery of these correct answers. ... [The answers to genuine questions] must, in principle, be knowable.
All the correct answers must, at the very least, be compatible with one another. ... All correct answers embody or rest on truths; therefore none of the correct answers ... whether they answer questions concerned with facts or with values (and for thinkers who believe this third proposition, questions of value are, in some sense, questions of fact)—can ever be in conflict with one another.
Berlin goes on to say that "these truths will logically entail one another in a single, systematic, interconnected whole; at the very least, they will be consistent with one another: that is, they will form a harmonious whole." (26)
Thus, if we have "all the correct answers to all the central questions of human life," you will have the "knowledge needed to lead the perfect life."
Whether mankind can ever attain such knowledge is often debated, but the point is that "in principle such knowledge can be conceived, even if no one has ever achieved it or is ever likely to do so." (26) In principle we can attain "perfect knowledge." (27)
As to who can provide us with such perfect knowledge, opinions vary greatly. Berlin writes that
There is almost no view about the sources of true knowledge that has not been passionately held and dogmatically asserted in the course of conscious meditation about this problem in the Hellenic and Judeo-Christian tradition. (28)
Utopianism had a revival during the Renaissance with "the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman classics, which were thought to embody truths forgotten" during the Middle Ages. It reflected the view "that virtue was knowledge" and ultimately, "that knowledge alone offered spiritual and moral and political salvation." (29) The truth will set you free, so to speak.
After elaborating on this theme, including the idea that crime is a result of error and ignorance, Berlin sums up the argument thus:
"Virtue is knowledge" means that if you know the good for man, you cannot, if you are a rational being, live in any way other than that whereby fulfilment is that towards which all desires, hopes, prayers, aspirations are directed: that is what is meant by calling them hopes. To distinguish reality from appearance, to distinguish that which will truly fulfil a man from that which merely appears to promise to do so, that is knowledge, and that alone will save him. (30)
It is this grand Platonic view of the good, perceived by reason, which "animates the great utopias of the Renaissance," from More's Utopia to Bacon's New Atlantis and so on. This reflected an "absolute faith in rational solutions" leading to a proliferation of idealistic philosophies for the next two hundred years.
These included primitivist views as well as scientific speculation. "The doctrine common to all these views and movements is the notion that there exist universal truths, true for all men, everywhere, at all times, and that these truths are expressed in universal rules." (31)
And although there were occasional skeptics such as Montesquieu, the most formidable assault on these utopian assumptions came from Machiavelli. What Machiavelli did was to challenge the view "that all true answers to serious questions must be compatible." (33)
This twist in Machiavelli was largely ignored but it forms the core of Berlin's own thinking. What Berlin found revolutionary was that Machiavelli argued that legitimate values could clash. He argued in The Prince
that the Christian and the pagan answers to moral or political questions might both be correct given the premises from which they start; that these premises were not demonstrably false, only incompatible; and that no single overarching standard or criterion was available to decide between, or reconcile, these wholly opposed moralities. (33)
Berlin does not go into great detail on this interpretation of Machiavelli but he did cover it in another essay, The Originality of Machiavelli, which I wrote about elsewhere. Nevertheless, Berlin argues that this was the first major crack in the view that all moral truths are compatible. And it led to Berlin's own widely known argument for value-pluralism. (Which he discusses in the essay The Pursuit of the Ideal which I will cover in another essay.)
The next nail in the coffin of the utopian view was driven by the rise of nationalism. This nationalism arose in he aftermath of the Reformation with the rise of the nation state.
Different nations, different roots, different laws, different peoples, different communities, different ideals. Each had its own way of living—what right had one to dictate to the others? Least of all the Pope, whose claim to spiritual authority the reformers denied. (34)
Relativism appeared "and with it the beginning of the dissolution of faith in the very concept of universally valid goals, at least in the social and political sphere." (35)
This new nationalism was coeval with the rise of science. And so new utopian ideals arose, couched in the language of science. With the efforts of men like Galileo and Newton and other scientific revolutionaries, "the external world was seen as a single cosmos."
"For the first time it became possible to organize a chaotic mass of observational data into a single, coherent, perfectly orderly system." (35) So the question naturally arose:
Why should not the same methods be applied to human matters, to morals, to politics, to the organization of society, with equal success? Why should it be assumed that men belong to some order outside the system of nature? ... Why cannot one create a science or sciences of man and here also provide solutions as clear and certain as those obtained in the sciences of the external world? (35)
And so scientific ways of thinking gave rise to the Enlightenment, a scientific examination of man's nature. While there were many and varied approaches to Enlightenment thinking, from Rousseau's noble savage to Locke's natural rights, to the communist theorizing of Karl Marx, all Enlightenment thinkers believed they had discovered a scientific understanding of human nature.
But "this great wave of rationalism led to an inevitable reaction." (36) Berlin believes that this 'backlash' "springs from that which is irrational in man." This sort of reaction happened in ancient Greece, led to the fall of the Roman Empire, and on through history whenever a rational system was devised. In modern times this reaction arose primarily in Germany.
Berlin mentions the cause of this reaction, namely that "German-speaking countries found themselves, for reasons which I do not have the competence to discuss, culturally inferior to their neighbours across the Rhine." (37) Suffice to say, there arose a wave of counter-Enlightenment philosophy in the German states. In Freedom and Its Betrayal, Berlin examines the German nationalism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. But in the essay under discussion, he looks at the nationalism of Johan Gottfried Herder.
Herder argued "that values were not universal; every human society, every people, indeed every age and civilization, possesses its own unique ideals, standards, way of living and thought and action. There are no immutable, universal, eternal rules or criteria of judgement." (39) To put Herder's view in the vernacular as he might have thought it, "Damn it! The French are not better than we Germans!" My wording, not Berlin's. Berlin goes into a long description which amounts to the same thing.
Most importantly, Herder believed that "every nation has its own centre of moral gravity, which differs from that of every other."
Theis attitude may be better understood when couched in personal terms. As Berlin describes it, this seems to be almost an argument for individualism as applied to nations.
One man's attitude towards another is, or should be, based on perceiving what he is in himself, uniquely, not what he has in common with all other men; only the natural sciences abstract what is common, generalize. Human relations are founded on recognition of individuality, which can, perhaps, never be exhaustively described, still less analysed; so it is with understanding communities, cultures, epochs. (40)
Berlin continues to elaborate on Herder's view. "Our culture is our own; cultures are incommensurable; each is as it is, each of infinite value, as souls are in the sight of God." The destruction of cultures and civilizations "is a monstrous crime against the right to be oneself, to live in the light of one's own ideals."
There are many things which men do have in common, but that is not what matters most. What individualizes them, makes them what they are, makes communication possible is what they do not have in common with all the others. Differences, peculiarities, nuances, individual character are all in all. (40-41)
Germans are not Chinese or Portuguese. Or any other culture for that matter. And no culture is superior to any other. They are "merely different." (41) And despite the allusions to individualism, Herder's view is very parochial and conservative.
Men can develop their full powers only by continuing to live where they and their ancestors were born, to speak their language, live their lives within the framework of the customs of their society and culture. Men are not self-created: they are born into a stream of tradition, above all of language, which shapes their thoughts and feelings, which they cannot shed or change, which forms their inner life. (41)
Not surprisingly, Herder famously said, "I am not here to think, but to feel, live!" Berlin writes that for Herder "the natural unit ... is what he calls das Volk." (42)
This radical doctrine, Berlin argues, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the French Enlightenment that "all true values are immutable and timeless and universal." But it challenged the ideal of a perfect society not from the usual critiques that such perfection was unattainable, but that "the idea of a single, perfect society of all mankind must be internally self-contradictory."
This parochial nationalism, Berlin suggests, "is the beginning of the modern attack on the notion of Utopia, Utopia as such."
This led to the view that "man is, above all, a creature endowed not only with reason but with will." (43) And will is creativity. This was the view of the Romantics like Fichte.
The Romantics held that the creative will is the essential component of great art. Whereas art had been representational, a recreation of what is seen, for the Romantics, "the painter creates; he does not copy. He does not imitate; he does not follow rules; he makes them. Values are not discovered, they are created; not found, but made by an act of imaginative, creative will, as works of art." (44)
Berlin elaborates on this, noting, among other things, that this concept of the self as will led to the identification of "this self with some other superpersonal spirit or force." For Rousseau it became the general will. For Hegel, the State. For Marx, one's class.
In any event, the upshot of the nationalist and romantic theories was a rejection of utopian thinking, a rejection of "the notion that there exists a celestial, crystalline sphere, unaffected by the world of change and appearance, in which mathematical truths and moral or aesthetic values form a perfect harmony, guaranteed by indestructible logical links." (45) Their ideal is a world of "stormy Promethean heroes who reject the laws of society, determined to achieve self-realisation and free self-expression against whatever odds." (45-46)
The idea of "unalterable objective truths ... has been thrown on the defensive in the face of the attacks of relativists, pluralists, irrationalists, pragmatists, subjectivists, and certain types of empiricism." (47)
Utopias were seen as "trying to foist an artificial order on a reluctant humanity, of trying to fit human beings, like bricks, into a preconceived structure." And indeed, the vision of some utopians like Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, lent weight to this view. And it led to a series of anti-utopian novels, those of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin. And not mentioned by Berlin, Ira Levin's This Perfect Day and Ayn Rand's Anthem also fits the bill.
These anti-utopias, Berlin avers, "paint a horrifying picture of a frictionless society in which differences between human beings are, as far as possible, eliminated, or at least reduced, and the multi-colored pattern of the variety of human temperaments, inclinations, ideals—in short, the flow of life—is brutally reduced to uniformity, pressed into a social and political straitjacket which hurts and maims and ends by crushing men in the name of a monistic theory, a dream of a perfect, static order." (47)
Berlin notes that Tocqueville and J.S. Mill in particular, protested against this "uniformitarian despotism." They declared that
uniformity kills; that men can live full lives only in societies with an open texture, in which variety is not merely tolerated but is approved and encouraged; that the richest development of human potentialities can occur only in societies in which there is a wide spectrum of opinions—the freedom for what J.S. Mill called 'experiments in living'—in which there is liberty of thought and of expression, views and opinions clash with each other, societies in which friction and even conflict are permitted, albeit with rules to control them and prevent destruction and violence; that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality. (48)
For advocates of this sort of "romantically tinged individualism, what matters is not the common base but the differences, not the one but the many; for them the craving for unity ... is an infantile and dangerous delusion: to crush all diversity and even conflict in the interest of uniformity is, for them, to crush life itself." (49)
These doctrines, Berlin avers, "are not compatible with one another." They are manifested today in strongly held but contrary goals in society. He lists some:
industrial organization versus human rights
bureaucratic rules versus 'doing one's own thing'
good government versus self-government
security versus freedom
And sometimes "a demand turns into its opposite." Again he gives some examples, one of which is that "measures to establish social equality crush self-determination and stifle individual genius."
Berlin argues that the "age-old dream" for a "final solution to all human ills" where "all, or the vast majority, of men will be virtuous and happy, wise and good and free," if it were possible and attainable, leads such utopian thinkers to the view that "surely no price is too heavy to pay for it; no amount of oppression, cruelty, repression, coercion will be too high, if this, and this alone, is the price for ultimate salvation of all men." It is a "license to inflict suffering on other men."
But if one rejects this utopian view (as Berlin does), if one believes (as Berlin does) that "the very notion of an ideal world ... to be a conceptual (and not merely practical) impossibility," then the best one can hope for is
some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different aspirations of differing groups of human beings.—at the very least to prevent them from attempting to exterminate each other, and, as far as possible, to prevent them from hurting each other—and to promote the maximum practicable degree of sympathy and understanding, never likely to be complete, between them. (50)
And while such an objective might not seem like "a wildly exciting programme," one might even call it boring, nevertheless, a system "designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm" while "giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is one which "might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world." Berlin concludes thus:
No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment, and failure.
Postscript: Berlin's essay was published in 1978. You can see allusions to Karl Popper's arguments in The Open Society and Its Enemies here. And while it predates Steven Pinker's works, it anticipates his view of politics as an ongoing experiment. (Mill's "experiments in living")
The question that arises from Berlin's analysis is whether libertarianism (at least the absolutist version based on the non-aggression principle) and Objectivism are utopian philosophies. And if they are, can they lead to authoritarian conclusions? Would they result in the statis Berlin argues that utopias lead to? I'll cover that in another post.
Berlin cites Tocqueville and Mills as two counterpoints to both the utopian and the the illiberal aspects of the counter-Enlightenment. I've only read bits and pieces of Mills' On Liberty and Tocqueville's Democracy in America, but have decided to read them now. Today I received my Amazon order of Tocqueville's classic, an abridged version of all the books in the series edited by Richard D. Heffner. I've just read Heffner's introduction where he notes that Tocqueville's great concern was the tyranny of the majority. Another concern of Tocqueville's was that democracy could lead to a bland uniformity of thought.
Tocqueville was only thirty when he wrote Democracy in America after spending nine months observing American life in 1835. He was an intuitive and brilliant observer and chronicler of the American scene. And while noting the weaknesses of democracy, he also suggested ways to counter these tendencies. I'll try and write about the book as I progress though it
A while back when I subscribed to the libertarian utopian vision, I started thinking about what a libertarian utopia would look like. And I came to an interesting conclusion. What if the non-aggression principle was not just a philosophical principle but a metaphysical one? We're all familiar with the sci-fi notion of deflector shields such as those used by the Starship Enterprise in the Star Trek TV series. The idea of impenetrable shields has long been with us in science fiction. So what if, I hypothesized, someone were to invent a protective force field that could be adapted to individuals as well as larger objects? What if everyone had a personal force field with the consequence being that the initiation of physical force would be impossible? In other words, people in this world would be libertarians by default as coercion would be physically impossible.
So I started writing a novel called Helleaven about a planet in which this personal force field was a reality. It would be heaven for peace loving libertarians but hell for those who wanted to initiate force and enslave people. I wrote a few chapters and was going to have a revolt of statists who wanted to reintroduce government in this anarchist utopia. But I couldn't think of how such a rebellion could be effected so I put that aside unfinished. Then I started an origins story about ho the force field was invented. Never got that finished either though it had a promising beginning and I may yet finish it some time.
But I did write a short novella. I had decided to enter the annual three day novel writing competition so I wrote Jokk Vete's Diary, the diary of the inventor of the force field. It covers around 5000 years on the planet Fornuft. Interestingly, Vete's company was called Harmony Corporation. And the force field was called Aura. I published it on Amazon Kindle.
As novels go, it is a piece of crap. Great ideas, but I am not a novelist. But you might find it an interesting read. Don't go and buy it. I'll send a copy free to anyone who requests one.
This essay is being published simultaneously on The Pendulum and on The Jolly Libertarian.
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