Slow Tuesday Night

[I]t being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil. — Machiavelli

If you found yourself in Utopia, would you know it? How long do you think it would take before the recognition dawned? By what signs or tokens would you recognize it? What if the streets weren’t paved with gold?

What about Utopia’s natives? Would they know better than you? Or would you gain something from an outsider’s perspective? Would you go around saying “This is Utopia” while they laughed behind their gold-embroidered sleeves, convinced that their homeland, while fortunate, certainly couldn’t be the best? Or would they believe, correctly, that it really was Utopia — and would you disagree — and who would do the laughing then?

Even in Utopia, there might remain insoluble problems — problems not answered by any application of the political arts, or even by any social technology. Or by any virtuous act of will. A society could have optimized all three, and yet problems could remain.

Indeed, they would remain. The nature of man is to have unfulfilled desires. Is it not? Would Utopia not be populated by humans? Could it only be populated by gods? If there are humans in Utopia, then which desires go unfulfilled? To posit a New Man for the New Society is to beg the question. Would the New Man not need… anything? Would he still be a man?

It is one thing to have many of one’s desires fulfilled. It is another thing not to desire in the first place. (Would a place without desires be Nirvana rather than Utopia?)

It is a third, clearly impossible thing, beyond having no desires, beyond having most of one’s desires fulfilled, to have all of one’s desires fulfilled. In Utopia, does your stomach fill the moment it empties? But then how would you feel the exquisite and indeed pleasurable hunger that comes before an excellent meal? What if you desired that? Yes, we desire to desire. At least those of us who haven’t reached Nirvana.

Now imagine that you were set down in 99% Utopia. Would you know that it wasn’t Utopia? Would you know that the 1% of remaining difference represented a failure of politics, or technology, or will — and would you be able to differentiate these failures from the merely insoluble problems of human desiring?

These are silly questions. Their point is not that we might live in Utopia without knowing it. Nor is it that an ideality of politics, technology, or will is impossible. It is that we do not necessarily know what such an ideality would look like. And yet much political thought is premised on just the opposite.

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First, some definitions.

• A value is something on balance worth having, at least up to a point.
• An optimum is the point where more of a value isn’t helpful. A pint full of ice cream is great. A house full of ice cream is a disaster. Optimums consider the relevant tradeoffs — not one value in isolation, but the interplay of competing values.
• A direction is a change in the amount of the valued thing that we obtain.

Voters (and, in turn, politicians) are motivated by values, not by optimums, because voters are rarely inclined to ask where the optimum might lie. If they can be motivated to ask about optimums, they find a nearly intractable problem. If they offer a solution anyway, someone else will usually have a different solution. Political organization around a claimed optimum is difficult; political organization around a value is easy.

Organization around a value doesn’t produce consensus about an optimum. It usually just produces a direction. “More” or “less” — i.e., “we should move in this direction” — seem to contain implicit optimum claims, but they don’t. As a result, we always need more spending on education. We always need more spending on defense. We always need more spending on the War on Drugs. And so forth.

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