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Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

kirkcenter.org

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Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#51

Procedural arguments like this are silly. You have to judge things by what they are substantively. Feudalism and slavery were not utopian projects but they were clearly brutal. Nordic social democracy consciously set out to create a decent society for all and largely succeeded. I don't know what game the author is playing.

Nordic social democracy isn’t a utopian idea, though. It’s a progressive idea and an ambitious idea but it only really peeks out slightly from the normal range of market economies with welfare states, especially within Europe.

Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don’t come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#52
post #33

I don't strongly disagree on any particular point, per se, but the fact that the author's thoughts are rooted in a religious worldview felt like it was snuck in there at the end: "Moreover, this world is fallen, so it is by nature flawed...The utopian visions that animate real places...seek to remake humanity and society in someone’s image—and that is not the image of the Creator." For further context, the website it…

>this world is fallen Makes the entire article essentially meaningless. How can I trust somebody with such a bizarre and unconnected worldview?

It's a mistake to process these ideas on the basis of trust. True, the religious angle is shoehorned at the end. But the author cites secular books and ideas throughout; these ideas and the relationships between them are worth considering.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#53
That's because everybody forgets the only way to reliably create something good artificially is to engineer it carefully taking as much relevant real world phenomena as possible in account and keep applying well-engineered fixes as feedback arrives. Just building a set of facilities, proclaiming a set of rules and expecting everybody to play nicely treating those who don't as enemies rather than a rightful element of the puzzle is stupid. Politicians of whatever a kind tend to hate critique while failing to recognize it as a vital resource is a fatal mistake. Even biased critique and false accusations are important to analyze as these still highlight important issues indirectly (at least the fact there is a serious portion of people who are going to believe these for some reason that should be taken in account too).

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this world is fallen Makes the entire article essentially meaningless. How can I trust somebody with such a bizarre and unconnected worldview?

I’m not religious myself, but I think you’re letting some weird biases get in the way here. The point is that the world and the work of human beings is flawed, fallible, and imperfect. Whether or not heaven exists in heaven, it certainly doesn’t exist on earth and essentially never can.

Maybe "heaven" is more like a point of view than a place. It's when ability to appreciate meets with a good situation.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A utopia which purports to make everyone happy (shouldn't they all?) is one that assumes all people are the same or it endeavours to make them so. So the contrapositive is that because people differ all societies require some people to suffer? That's a great way to justify all sorts of exploitation. > In all of the utopias ... including Marx's Communist Manifesto Ah, the Chicago school framing. What's primarily a p…

That's a great way to justify all sorts of exploitation. Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as individuals. Humanity could have been a vast society of clones (like an ant colony) but it isn't. We take all of the good and all of the bad together when we accept our individuality. primarily a positive work describing existing material conditions and relations is utopian It sounds to me l…

> Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as individuals.

We have little means of empirically separating what is natural versus social construct (or even qualifying what such a distinction means) when it comes to human behavior and society. Claiming that our nature makes inevitable that societies require some significant portion of their constituents to suffer is not simple description, it's a conceit that, like most naturalistic fallacies, is consistently used to excuse and justify existing social order. Viz evopsych, etc.

The premise I'm contesting is that minimizing suffering due to social constructs necessitates homogeny, which is a condition that narratively pits potential social orders against the individual.

> It sounds to me like you're conflating the Communist Manifesto with Capital...It is not a critique of any extant society

The Manifesto contains the class struggle interpretation of history, the labor theory of value, excess value, the means of production, etc. Those are all models and critiques of extant society. It is not as descriptive or theoretical a work as Capital, but it primarily argues for a model of things as they are and have been. To my decades-old recollection only the third section is focused on ideal societies, and a large portion of that on contemporary political movements.

You can disagree with those models of extant society, or like me view them as historically significant but superseded theories, but you must admit the fundamental contrast to something like Moore's Utopia. They both have explicit normative perspective, but the Manifesto's are constructed out of an analysis of existing conditions, whereas Utopia is primarily concerned with describing the order of its hypothetical social ideal. Books like The Road to Serfdom are rarely framed as being utopian despite primarily being normative.

Politics is the art of the possible. Labeling perspectives on social order as "utopian" is a move designed to exclude them from the realm of possibility. I also first read the Manifesto in a political philosophy course as part of a unit on utopianism. It was only years later I realized the framing by the right-libertarian professor to demarcate it from serious political philosophy, despite post-Marxism having at least as comparable a profile as an academic philosophical tradition to the just-market apologetics that made up the remainder of the course.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#56

This amounts to arguing about definitions and it doesn't seem like the article proposes anything of real substance. In the introduction to The Utopia Reader , a compendium of utopian and dystopian literature, the following definitions are given: * Utopianism—social dreaming * Utopia—a nonexistent society described in detail and normally located in time and space * Eutopia or positive utopia—a utopia that the author i…

You're the one arguing definitions. This author is trying to make an actual argument, and you've introduced a non-standard vocabulary, and are judging the argument _with your vocabulary instead of the definitions the author made quite clear_. How do you pronounce "Utopia"? How does it differ from "Eutopia"? Your definitions are fine, internally consistent, and quite clear for serious in-depth discussion... But they a…

What the article seems to miss out is any mention of Plato's invention of the term, and its original meaning of "no place". From the very beginning unachievability was associated with the concept.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#57
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this world is fallen Makes the entire article essentially meaningless. How can I trust somebody with such a bizarre and unconnected worldview?

I mean, I would just translate to the secular equivalent, "perfection is not a real thing". More concerning is the "image of the Creator" language, which is a short step from exactly the kind of hyper-idealism that he's critiquing in the first place. He does at least acknowledge that trying to achieve perfection in the real (or "the present") world is folly, but still, it's from a very different perspective than the…

Sure, but it's a hyper-idealism which rejects the absolutely the idea of allowing a non-inclusive worldview of an individual to rule. Judeo-Christian is the author's specific worldview, but that's incidental to the stance.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#58
post #48
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's also worth noting the lifecycle of most optimizations, including the non-partisan variety: 1. Early on many benefit and costs are minimized per capita. 2. As the benefits diffuse across the population, smart/wily/greedy individuals push the optimization to squeeze more value for themselves. 3. Benefits begin to centralize among the smart/wily/greedy. Awareness of costs starts to grow. The general popula…

Using 'optimization' here makes it an odd construction where I don't think I've quite understood what you are trying to say. Is it synonymous with social change? Most social changes aren't optimisations, they are complicated changes to how resources are distributed; leading to unpredictable outcomes. Take social welfare. This can probably be considered a social optimisation and most reasonable people would agree that…

Optimization in the sense of optimizing for a specific (often ideological) outcome, rather than optimizing away an objective inefficiency.

Social welfare is a perfect example of "competing optimizations" precisely because there are so many different (and often mutually exclusive) organizational models and success metrics.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#59
post #33

I don't strongly disagree on any particular point, per se, but the fact that the author's thoughts are rooted in a religious worldview felt like it was snuck in there at the end: "Moreover, this world is fallen, so it is by nature flawed...The utopian visions that animate real places...seek to remake humanity and society in someone’s image—and that is not the image of the Creator." For further context, the website it…

Nothing straight can be built from crooked timber. -Kant

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I would just translate to the secular equivalent, "perfection is not a real thing". More concerning is the "image of the Creator" language, which is a short step from exactly the kind of hyper-idealism that he's critiquing in the first place. He does at least acknowledge that trying to achieve perfection in the real (or "the present") world is folly, but still, it's from a very different perspective than the…

Sure, but it's a hyper-idealism which rejects the absolutely the idea of allowing a non-inclusive worldview of an individual to rule. Judeo-Christian is the author's specific worldview, but that's incidental to the stance.

In theory. I know plenty of Christians who would agree with his statements about this world being fallen, but who still try to move their country towards a Christian pseudo-utopia where their own values are mandated on others. Of course we can't know whether the author falls into that camp or not.

EDIT: To be clear, I also know plenty of Christians who do not try and impose their values on society.

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