Author: Ophelia Benson

And now Norm emails to point out an article of his on this very subject. Very apropos, and full of good points. I want to quote and quote…

Notwithstanding any of this, however, it remains true that from the outset socialism was utopian. It was a distant land, another moral universe. It was radically other vis-a-vis the order of things it aspired to replace. And that is what it still is. A society beyond exploitation is in the realm of the ideal.

And the thing is…well, my colleague will doubtless disagree, but I can’t help thinking that those distant lands we imagine, those other moral universes – those thought experiments and counterfactuals and what ifs – are good for us, if only to get us to realize that the way things are is not necessarily the one and only way they possibly could be. Yes, it can be risky to think that way (al Qaeda dreams its dreams too, as do the people who would like to make the ‘Ten Commandments’ the law of the land, as do white supremacists, as do – ), but it can also be productive.

We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians…nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable…The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.

There is minimum utopia and there is maximum – and even maximum notions have their place, but minimum utopia should be the goal.

There is an interesting column by Ishtiaq Ahmed in Pakistan’s Daily Times that talks about a related subject: revolution as forward-looking, progressive, and revolution as ‘restoration of some normal or pristine state of the past.’

In the dogmatic Islamic conception of time, the pinnacle of human achievements was the Madinese state of the Prophet and his pious caliphs (in the case of the Shias only the period of Hazrat Ali). Since then society is understood to have deviated from that perfect model and has gone completely astray in the current times. Consequently the Wahhabi movement of the 18th century and its current peddlers aim at a revolutionary restoration of early Islam.

Dreams of the lost Golden Age are indeed another version of utopia – and a very scary one for people who are attached to their modern liberties and comforts. I’m a woman, and I don’t want to go back to the 8th century and be locked away for the rest of my life, thanks. I have a perverse fondness for autonomy, for being able to decide all by myself what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go. Most women throughout history and geography have been flatly automatically denied such autonomy, as a matter of course. So have most peasants, surfs, peons, coolies, lower castes, slaves, farm laborers – most people, in fact. And then – autonomy of course is all bound up with time, and who has time if it takes eighteen hours a day just to get the most basic work done? So electricity, running water, refrigeration, various kinds of soap, supermarkets – those are all part of our relative autonomy too; hence facing backward, as Meera Nanda calls it, is not an appealing form of utopianism – except maybe to the people who won’t be doing the drudgery.

So there’s the crux again. Utopia can be a good thing – if it’s the right kind of utopia, but there are other utopian dreamers whose dreams are everyone else’s nightmares.

It’s a depressing thought, really. No getting around it. It’s depressing and discouraging – in fact it’s tragic – to think that our best qualities are so inseparable from our worst. That (if this idea has anything right about it) we can’t even aim to make things better, do great things, right wrongs, improve the world, without risking turning into a butcher or an apologist for butchers. But it seems difficult to deny. Of course some people manage it, of course there have been improvers who don’t become homicidal maniacs or their lackeys. But the inherent risk of it seems difficult to deny – I suppose because the two seem to be actually the same thing only in different forms. What the Romantics valued as intensity, what Hume and James Mill suspected or scorned as enthusiasm. Passion. The Stoics were very wary of it, too. Horatio is a Stoic. ‘Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,’ says Hamlet admiringly, ‘and I will wear him at my heart’s core.’ But we don’t love Horatio, we love Hamlet, and with good reason. He cares – and not just about himself, though some productions give that impression; no, he cares about the world, about the something rotten in Denmark; he cares about love and memory and loyalty and truth. As he should. And yet what havoc he wreaks – as people who care often do.

No, the safest course is to take things as they are, to roll with the punches, to be laid-back, to eat what’s put on your plate. Montaigne knew that, living as he did in the midst of a bloody civil war about (in reality) nothing – disagreements over theology. But…

But this is where the hesitant good word for utopia comes in. There is some obstinate core in me somewhere that thinks we shouldn’t just take things as they are, shouldn’t just settle for the world as it is. That we should want to and try to make things better. And yet I know how quickly and easily that kind of thing can run amok – into orthodoxy-imposing and heresy-hunting, persecution and excommunication, and thinking of people as large abstract units to be shoved around or eliminated and then forgotten. It seems safer to cultiver the old jardin and let it go at that. But then – that thought ‘could do better’ returns. We could be less selfish, less greedy, less trivial…Yes and be more like Ted Kasczynski, I suppose. Ted, meet Osama; Osama, Ted. Have a nice day.

Normblog pointed out a review by David Aaronovitch in the New Statesman the other day (read the NS item promptly because it will go subscription soon). It’s about a familiar but permanently mysterious fact of recent history: the willingness of the Stalinist and Leninist left to ignore or explain away or deny or justify mass murder. Thus it’s also about one of the starkest examples on record of the phenomenon B&W was set up to document and examine: the way ideology can distort the ability to think properly. B&W is primarily about the way ideology can warp judgments of the truth about the world, but moral judgments play a part in that process too. The denial of Stalin’s crimes was a moral denial as well as a factual one. In fact it was the usual sort of cover-all-bases defense of the desperate. I wasn’t even in the room, I didn’t break it, it was already cracked, everybody hated it anyway. There were no mass murders in the Soviet Union and they were a damn good thing.

How did it happen? Aaronovitch asks.

…for 20 years, this question has come to bother me more and more. Why did so many on the British left do it? Was it the case that they somehow didn’t know that the trials were rigged, the executed comrades were innocent, that the whole thing was a vast, foul set-up, until Nikita Khrushchev gave them permission to know in 1956?…And what now should we make of their credulity? Could such wilful blindness be repeated?

Any time, one can’t help thinking. Nothing easier. In fact one sees a fair amount of wilful blindness around even now.

What is revealed brilliantly through Beckett’s compassionate and well-researched account is this strange state of simultaneously knowing and not knowing. The communists looked at the beast, saw its claws and fangs, and loved it still, as people are required to love their own youth. They excused, explained, justified, denied, ignored, defended and forgot what everyone else knew.

Norm has a second post yesterday with a very good quotation on the subject from Maxime Rodinson, which I will just quote in my turn.

[T]he deeper reason for the delay in registering disillusionment is simply the visceral need not to renounce a commitment that has illuminated one’s life, given it meaning, and for which many sacrifices have often been made. Hence the reluctance to recognise the most obvious facts, the desperate paralogical guile to which one resorts in an effort to avoid the required conclusion…

Just so. Just so. We’ve talked about these things before, I think – quite often. How double-edged things like commitments and meaning can be – how destructive as well as beneficent they can be. How they can motivate courage, self-sacrifice, dedication, hard work, generosity; but they can also motivate fanaticism, cruelty, ruthlessness, lying, vindictiveness, hatred. Exactly the same ambivalence came up in that discussion of religion a few months ago, when Chris at Crooked Timber said the reason he couldn’t agree with my hostility to religion had to do with religion’s power to motivate. I saw his point, and agreed (and still do), but also pointed out, as did Norm, that it cuts both ways. I think it’s an unresolvable issue, really. I do think commitments are a good thing (though some commitments are vastly better than others, of course, and one can always judge among and between them), but I also think they are potentially and often actually terribly dangerous. There’s not even any need to name examples of highly committed, motivated people in the world today whose commitments are dangerous in various ways. People can be for instance deeply committed to taking away other people’s rights, to subordinating and exploiting other people, or just to getting rid of them entirely; to demarcating who is inferior and who is not and then acting accordingly. People can find that a very meaningful activity. Can and do.

This idea relates to the idea of utopia, I think. My colleague and I were talking about utopia recently (I forget why). I said a good word for the idea, and he commented that we may have a basic disagreement on the subject. Maybe, but maybe not. My good word for the idea is a very limited, hedged, cautious one. It’s the sort of good word I just said about commitments and motivation. Ideas of utopia can inspire – but they can inspire to appalling things as well as to good ones. It may be that the only disagreement we have is on how inevitable the appalling possibility is – and I’m not really even sure I disagree about that. It may be that I do think the road to utopia leads straight to the basement of the Lubyanka.

Okay, that was fun, picking fights with my colleague is good entertainment but it’s a luxury, a rare, truffle-like item that only occurs once every few years. Life is not all holiday, as Niall Ferguson has just been reminding us, so it’s time for me to get back to the hard graft of saying something substantive. Well no not substantive – I don’t know how to do that – but anyway not frivolously internecine.

Check out this piece of reactionary nonsense from the aforementioned Ferguson. I’d seen links to it here and there but didn’t bother reading it, because the links merely talked about Europe and holidays and laziness and how much better the US is – and I’ve seen that kind of thing often enough before, thanks, I don’t feel much need to read it yet again. But José del Solar informed me that there’s more to it than that, so I changed my mind.

No doubt Ferguson is just doing it to get a rise out of people like me – or doing it for other reasons too but confidently hoping also to get a rise out of predictable people like me. He must be, because it’s such a silly thing to say. Such a correlation not causation remark. He can’t mean it all that seriously…surely. Weber notwithstanding.

The article starts from the (as I mentioned) unoriginal observation that Europeans get longer holidays and better coverage for illness than Americans do. He regards this as a terrible vice in the Europeans rather than as a respect for people’s needs, and he regards the contrasting frenzied overwork of Americans as a splendid thing rather than as a horrible necessity caused by having ruthless bastards as employers, who are aided by lobbyists who prevent the government from enacting worker-protections by paying large ‘campaign contributions’ i.e. bribes.

This is the nicest bit:

In the U.S., of course, the approach is different. Workers who consistently miss work because they are feeling under the weather are given the chance to miss it on a permanent basis — by being fired.

He says that with approval, note, not with revulsion or even regret. A pretty sentiment. But then he goes from the ruthless to the peculiar.

You see, the most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in religiosity, both in terms of observance and belief…[M]ore than twice as many North Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more. I do not say this is the sole explanation for the fact that London today is lethargic while New York toils away as usual. But there is surely something more than coincidental about the simultaneous rise of unbelief in Europe and the decline of Weber’s work ethic.

And? What follows from that? Perhaps that godbothering employers think they have encouragement from a deity to gouge every bit of work out of their employees that they possibly can, while atheists have an idea that while the factory and office are great fun, still, there are other things it is desirable to do in life and a walk in the Alps might be nice at this time of year.