Utopia: A Brief Critique
By Bogumil Jarmulak
Posted by Theopolis, March 5, 2015
Utopia is often accompanied by such
adjectives as impossible, unrealistic, and impractical. In spite of that, it is
not so hard to find some renowned people who actually maintain that is a very
helpful and practical concept. Zygmunt Bauman (Socialism: The Active Utopia)
argues that “utopian thinking belongs in the same category as invention” and
invention is what a society needs in time of crises when all traditional
solutions fail tragically. It also needs hope to cope with the crises and
utopia provides just that. But even in normal times utopia is very useful since
it “is an integral element of the critical attitude,” something that the
conservative mind lacks dramatically. Last but not least, utopias “exert
enormous influence on the actual course of historical events,” as they not only
motivate human action but also guide it.
Also Ruth Levitas (Being in Utopia)
speaks favorably of utopia. According to her, “imagining ourselves otherwise is
a central element of the utopian project.” And the utopian project serves to
find “a better way of being and a better way of living.” So for her utopia is
not so much a goal of human action but rather a method of reconstitution of
society. “Hope and imagination are central to this.” Hope energizes the action
and imagination “allows people to understand their own potential to change.” In
this context, Levitas speaks about “prophetic identity,” which is
“self-understanding in terms of who we might become.” This prophetic identity
should be the goal of education.
But not only people whom we associate
with the left political spectrum advocate utopian thinking. A libertarian
philosopher, Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia), argues for
meta-utopia, i.e. a minimal state and a society based on free market and
voluntary associations. That’s the only possible utopia since utopia is “the
best world imaginable, for each of us.”
It should not surprise that the vast
majority of those who have a rather critical attitude towards utopia comes from
the conservative corner. Thomas Molnar (Myth and Utopia) traces the
roots of utopian thinking to ancient perception of reality. Ancient societies
believed that they needed to re-immerse themselves in “the original outpouring
of being” whenever they felt that they were not longer able to function. This
re-immersion took form of rituals and festivals based of myths dealing with
“the original outpouring of being.” Molnar notices that modern society has
little room for myths, which however does not mean that they vanish. Instead,
the myth “undergoes a succession of metamorphoses until the ‘true story’ turns
into a ‘false story,’” where “false story” is a “second reality,” the only true
reality. This “false story” is a pseudo-myth, a shadow of myth, also known as
utopia.
According to Molnar this change from
myth to utopia is connected with the rise of Christianity and its linear
conception of history, which makes it impossible to return to “the original
outpouring of being.” Nevertheless, modern societies are still caught by
nostalgia. “The utopian designer . . . holds dear the images of Paradise, but
only as fragments of a coarse myth: freedom from work, nudity, sexual
gratification, the destruction of time and of rationality.” The linear
perception of history makes him believe that utopia lies in an undefined
future, which means that “the most important element of the myth, experience,
is absent from utopia; in fact, its building blocks are the negation of the
structure of the real.”
This last observation leads us to Karl
Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies) who, trying to
explain utopia, also goes back to the ancients but this time to Plato and finds
common elements in the Platonic approach and in utopian engineering. Both can
be described as total approaches since both believe that for any action to be
rational, one has to choose the end first. In this case the end is a blueprint
for the Ideal State. And this is exactly the problem that Popper points at.
“Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a
blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale.” Another problem is that
“the Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as
a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which
therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship.” Moreover, utopian social
engineers must face the question of succession: how to ensure that the next
generation of leaders will be willing to pursue the same project as they do?
According to Popper these problems can
be solved only if the “Platonic belief in one absolute and unchanging ideal” is
true and “that there are rational methods to determine once and for all what
this ideal is.” However, even Plato himself would admit that this is not
possible. The chase after the impossible doesn’t pay off, because it stands in
the way of what Popper calls “piecemeal engineering,” which adopts “the method
of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of
society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate
good.”
Popper believes that the ultimate source
of all utopian thinking can be found in aesthetic perception of reality. “Plato
was an artist; and like many of the best artists, he tried to visualize a
model, the ‘divine original’ of his work, and to ‘copy’ it faithfully.” This is
why any “artist-politicians” who follow Plato has to start with
“canvas-cleaning.” “He must eradicate the existing institutions and traditions.
He must purify, purge, expel, banish, and kill.” But when doing this, the
“artist-politician” has to get rid of himself, too, since he is a part of the
canvas which has to be cleaned. To construct a fully other social order, one
has to transcend it, but this is something that no man can actually do. “The
political artist clamors, like Archimedes, for a place outside the social world
on which he can take his stand, in order to lever it off its hinges. But such a
place does not exist.”
Aurel Kolnai’s (The Utopian Mind)
argument against utopia is similar to Popper’s. “Utopias are in fact intrinsically
at war with the basic structure of reality.” First of all, utopian thinking
ascribes to men divine like abilities, what should not surprise us, since any
utopian project aims at constructing a new world: not so much with the
materials acquired from the old one, but ex nihilo. This however
contradicts our experience. “Real [human] power is always somehow divided,
finite, and hampered. . . . It remains subject to mundane barriers and
limitations. . . . It is part of history and depends on contingency.”
Another headache with utopia is its
perfectionism which leads to what Kolnai calls “the utopian contradiction.”
Utopia is a “monistic conception,” and as such it is not only all embracing but
also shielded from any external evaluation and reality. It is also not aimed at
“getting rid of a definite evil” or “realizing a definite good” but instead “it
hankers after deductive and necessary truths in preference to contingent facts
and empirical discoveries.” The end result is that utopia disdains what people
actually want and need.
Roger Scruton agrees with Kolnai that
utopian thinking is stained with contradiction but, like Popper, adds that the
most important criticism of utopia is that “it destroys the institutions that
enable us to solve our conflicts one by one” (The Uses of Pessimism).
The solutions to our problems do not exist as any blueprint but are discovered
one by one, over generations, and are preserved in customs and traditions. But
these are exactly what utopian mind abhors. It does so because it is
intoxicated by “a prelapsarian bliss,” which “urges people to destroy the
structures that stand in the way of a recovered innocence.”
All the above criticism of utopian
thinking may be called commonsensical. But there is also a distinctively
Christian criticism of utopia. As Lyman Tower Sargent (Utopianism: A Very
Short Introduction) observes, the most common Christian objection against
utopia is the Fall of Adam. “The theological argument against utopianism is
much simpler than the one in favor of it because it is based on the common
assumption that utopianism is rooted in the denial of original sin”. Since men
are fallen, it should not be expected that they can build a utopia or be able
to live in it.
But there are more arguments than that.
It is true that there is what could be called a utopian element in Christian
faith, namely the Kingdom of God. However, as Wolfhart Pannenberg (Basic
Questions in Theology, Vol. 2) observed, the Kingdom of God is bestowed on
us by God and is not something we can build on our own. This means that the
Kingdom itself is not our ultimate hope, but God is, or rather our communion
with Him. This also means that as Christian we are called not so much to build
the Kingdom, as if we had some blueprint for it and all the needed resources,
but to receive it with gratitude and obedience.
Hans Urs von Balthasar (Christianity
as Utopia) adds that the Christian hope, as much as it is dissatisfied with
the present earthly conditions, does not despise the world we live in, so the
hope is not otherworldly. It is rather a hope for the redemption of the fallen
world. Even if we are called to give up this life and this world, we do it so
that we can regain it or, to be more precise, receive it anew. This way the
Christian hope is based not so much on any longing for an entirely different
reality, but rather on the promise to redeem the present reality and this
promise is confirmed by the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ.
Jürgen Moltmann (Theology of Hope)
speaks in the same manner. He admits that hope is a crucial element of the
Christian faith and it has critical effects upon history, even to the point of
shaping it. He also concurs that there are similarities between utopia and the
Christian hope. Both share a deep dissatisfaction with the present reality and
a deep longing for a better future. But what distinguishes the Christian hope
from any utopian longing is the person and history of Jesus Christ. “Without
faith’s knowledge of Christ, hope becomes a utopia and remains hanging in the
air.”
Bogumil Jarmulak is pastor of
Evangelical Reformed Church (CREC) in Poznan, Poland. His PhD is from Christian
Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.
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Original Sin Lands on Humans When They Are Babies
Babies Prefer Individuals Who Harm
Those That Aren’t Like Them
Infants as young as nine months old prefer individuals who are nice to
people like them and mean to people who aren’t like them, according to a new
study published in Psychological
Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
In our social lives, we tend to gravitate toward people who have things in
common with us, whether it’s growing up in the same town, disliking the same
foods, or even sharing the same birthday. And research suggests that babies
evaluate people in much the same way, preferring people who like the same
foods, clothes, and toys that they like.
This preference helps us to form social bonds, but it can also have a dark side.
Disliking people who are different than us may lead us to mistreat them, and
excuse — or even applaud — cases in which others mistreat people who are
different than us.
Are the roots of such tendencies present in infancy?
To find out, psychological scientist Kiley Hamlin, now a professor at the
The researchers had 9- and 14-month-old infants choose which food they preferred:
graham crackers or green beans. The infants then watched a puppet show in which
one puppet preferred graham crackers, while another preferred green beans. That
is, one puppet demonstrated that its food preference was the same as the
infant’s, while the other demonstrated that its food preference was different
from the infant’s.
After the puppets chose their foods, infants then watched another puppet
show, in which either the similar puppet or the dissimilar puppet dropped its
ball and wanted it back. On alternating events, infants saw that one character
always helped the ball-less puppet by returning the ball to him, while another
character always harmed the ball-less puppet by stealing the ball away.
Finally, infants were given the chance to choose between the helper (giving)
and harmer (stealing) puppets.
Unsurprisingly, infants’ choices revealed that almost all the infants in
both the 9- and 14-month-old groups preferred the character who helped the
similar puppet over the character who harmed the similar puppet. Previous
research has shown that infants like people who are nice to totally unknown
individuals, so it makes sense that they would also like people who are nice to
individuals who are similar to them.
Far more surprising was that almost all the infants at both ages preferred
the character who harmed the dissimilar puppet over the character who helped
him. Infants’ preference for those who harmed dissimilar others was just as
strong as their preference for those who helped similar ones.
According to Hamlin, these findings suggest that "like adults, infants
incorporate information about not only what people do (e.g., acting nicely or
meanly) but also whom they do it to (e.g., a person who is liked or disliked)
when they make social evaluations."
The researchers confirmed these results in a second experiment, which
included a neutral puppet that had demonstrated no food preference and no
helpful or harmful behaviors.
This time, the 14-month-olds — but not the 9-month-olds — preferred the character
that harmed the dissimilar puppet over the neutral puppet, and the neutral
puppet over the helper of the dissimilar puppet. These results suggest that
when a dissimilar individual is in need, 14-month-olds generate both positive
feelings toward those who harm that individual and negative feelings toward
those who help him. The researchers suggest that between 9 and 14 months,
infants develop reasoning abilities that lead to these more nuanced social
evaluations.
These results highlight the fundamental mechanisms that underlie our
interactions with similar and dissimilar people.
"The fact that infants show these social biases before they can even
speak suggests that the biases aren’t solely the result of experiencing a
divided social world, but are based in part on basic aspects of human social
evaluation," says Hamlin.
But the exact reasons for infants’ biased evaluations are still unknown.
"Infants might experience something like schadenfreude [literally joy
at the suffering of others, the German word for "resentment"] at the
suffering of an individual they dislike," Hamlin notes. "Or perhaps
they recognize the alliances that are implied by social interactions,
identifying an ‘enemy of their enemy’ (i.e., the harmer of a dissimilar puppet)
as their friend."
Hamlin emphasizes that even if these kinds of social biases are
"basic," it doesn’t mean that more extreme outcomes, like xenophobia
and intergroup conflict, are inevitable.
"Rather, this research points to the importance of socialization
practices that recognize just how basic these social biases might be and
confront them head-on," she concludes.
Co-authors on this research include Neha Mahajan of
This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0921515
and National Institutes of Health Grant R01-MH-081877 to Karen Wynn.
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Videos of the experimental procedure are available
at: http://cic.psych.ubc.ca/Media_Videos.htmlFor
more information about this study, please contact: Kiley Hamlin at
kiley.hamlin@psych.ubc.ca or Karen Wynn at karen.wynn@yale.edu.
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Link for the entire above article: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/babies-prefer-individuals-who-harm-those-that-arent-like-them.html
