I brought this material together after coming across several of the shorter passages below in the form of epigraphs to chapters in David Estlund’s bracingly original and brilliant book, Utopophobia: On the Limits (if any) of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2020). “Beyond Practicalism” is the title of one of the final chapters in Utopophobia.
“There are recognizable barriers from which men have always sought to emancipate themselves, in order to obtain access to something, and appropriate something, that is conceived time and again in the ideas of freedom, joy, happiness, etc., which no cynical irony can expunge. The inexhaustible possibilities of human nature, which themselves increase with cultural progress, are the innermost material of all utopias, and moreover a very real, and in no way immaterial material at that. They inevitably lead to the desire to transform human life.” —Rudolf Bahro
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“For [Ernst] Bloch, the enemies of hope are confusion, anxiety, fear, renunciation, passivity, failure and nothingness. Fascism was their apotheosis. But since all individuals daydream, they also hope. It is necessary to strip this dreaming of self-delusion and escapism, to enrich and expand it and to base it in the actual movement of society. Hope, in other words, must be both educated and objectively grounded; an insight drawn from Marx’s great discovery: ‘the subjective and objective hope-contents of the world.’ The Principle of Hope is an encyclopaedic account of dreams of a better existence: from the most simple to the most complex; from idle daydreams to sophisticated images of perfection. It develops a positive sense of the category ‘utopian,’ denuded of unworldliness and abstraction, as forward dreaming and anticipation. [….] This then is Bloch’s great masterpiece. His achievement was to see that utopianism is not confined to intellectuals and their various blueprints of a better life. He saw that, in countless ways, individuals are expressing unfulfilled dreams and aspirations—that in song, dance, plants and plaster, church and theater, utopia waits.” — Vincent Geoghegan
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“Gandhi’s fascination as a thinker lies in his inward battle between two opposing attitudes—the Tolstoyan socialist belief that the Kingdom of Heaven is attainable on earth and the Dostoevskian mystical conviction that it can never be materialized. The modern Hindu standpoint has generally been anti-utopian: Rama Rajya lies in the bygone Satya Yuga, and Kali Yuga [the period in which we are living today] is the age of unavoidable coercion. Gandhi began by challenging this view under the influence of Tolstoy, but he ended his life with more of a Dostoevskian pessimism. This does not mean that he abandoned either his imaginative, utopian, political vision or what he called his practical idealism in concrete programs of immediate action. He did not feel that he was wrong to urge men to set themselves, as he did in his own life, seemingly impossible standards, but he came closer to seeing that it is wrong to expect them to do so. In July 1947, six months before his assassination, he felt that he had been betrayed by Congress leaders and let down by many of his countrymen. But he did not blame them for not living up to standards that he had set them but which they never chose or really accepted for themselves.
‘Euclidean’ models—of the satyagrahi, of a society based upon satya and ahimsa, of Rama Rajya—are not without their value in political theory, but they must not be mistaken for definitely realizable concretions. In Santayana’s apt words:
‘Ideal society belongs entirely to this realm of kindly illusion, for it is the society of symbols. Whenever religion, art, or science presents us with an image or a formula, involving no matter how momentous a truth, there is something delusive in the representation. It needs translation into the detailed experience which it sums up in our own past or prophecies elsewhere. This eventual change in form, far from nullifying our knowledge, can alone legitimize it…. And yet there is another aspect to the matter. Symbols are presences, and they are those particularly congenial presences which we have inwardly evoked and cast in a form intelligible and familiar to human thinking. Their function is to give flat experience a rational perspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and making it representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, not only for their representative or practical value, implying useful adjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for their immediate or aesthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit they enlighten and exercise.’
Gandhi’s concepts of satya, ahimsa and satyagraha, of tapas, and above all, of the satyagrahi, are such ideal constructions—‘Euclidean models’ as he himself called them. They do involve a ‘momentous truth,’ but they are also deceptive representations, in a sense [as are all ‘idealizations’]. In constructing these, Gandhi was in the oldest political tradition that goes back to classical Chinese and Indian thinkers, and to Plato in the West. They could serve in the serious task of civic education (paideia) provided they are not taken to represent decisively the political realities of the future [as when utopias are mistaken for ‘blueprints’ or political programs]. Gandhi’s literalness in regard to his own creations was characteristic of his tenacity as a politician, his single-mindedness as a saint, and his severity as an ascetic [some intriguing similarities in this regard with Simone Weil]. His understandable zeal in this respect does not detract from the universal import of his political ethic. Every society must choose its own mode of transmission of this ethic into the detailed experience which it sums up in its past. All moral advance is continuous with past efforts to lead the good life, and must respect the quintessential goodness of classical traditions which have come to be drained of their vitality. There is no secular or sectarian guarantee of survival or cultural self-renewal. In seeing beyond the confinements of past creeds and present isms, Gandhi drew from the reservoirs of the untapped moral energies of mankind, and pointed to the spiritual foundations of the civilization of the future.” — Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi
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“The classic utopia anticipates and criticizes. Its alternative fundamentally interrogates the present, piercing through existing societies’ defensive mechanisms—common sense, realism, positivism and scientism. Its unabashed and flagrant otherness gives it a power which is lacking in other analytical devices. By playing fast and loose with time and space, logic and morality, and by thinking the unthinkable, a utopia asks the most awkward, the most embarrassing questions. As an imaginative construction of a whole society, the utopia can bring into play the rich critical apparatus of the literary form and a sensitivity to the holistic nature of society, enabling it to mock, satirize, reduce the prominent parts, to illuminate and emphasize the neglected, shadowy, hidden parts—and to show the interrelatedness—of the existing system. Utopia can be seen as the good alternative, the outline of a better future, an ‘ought’ to the current ‘is.’ The possibility of such a future helps undermine the complacency and overcome the inertia of existing society by showing that it is neither eternal nor archetypal but merely one form amongst many. This need not lead to teleology (i.e. ‘this is your future’), for the alternative has many shapes.” — Vincent Geoghegan
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“Until we bring ourselves to conceive how this could happen, it can’t happen.” — John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political, Not Metaphysical”
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“I do not laugh at the content of our wishes that go not only beyond the actual and what we take to be feasible in the future, but even beyond the possible; nor do I wish to denigrate fantasy, or minimize the pangs of being limited to the possible.” — Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
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“Man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached for the impossible.” — Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”
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“And because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes
keep building up impossible hopes
impossible things are happening every day!” — Rodgers and Hammerstein, “Impossible,” from Cinderella
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“I felt the expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out—preferably one that could garner a sixty-vote majority in the Senate. There was a kind of insanity to this—like telling doctors to only diagnose that which they could immediately and effortlessly cure.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
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… [M]an is perfectible. This proposition needs some explanation. By perfectible, it is not meant that he is capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement; and in this sense it is here to be understood. The term perfectible, thus explained, not only does not imply the capacity of being brought to perfection, but stands in express opposition to it. If we could arrive at perfection, there would be an end to our improvement. There is, however, one thing of great importance that it does imply: every perfection or excellence that human beings are competent to conceive, human beings, unless in cases that are palpably and unequivocally excluded by their frame, are competent to attain.” — William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
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“Utopias are images of ideal communities; utopian thought tries to make explicit and to justify the principles on the basis of which communities are said to be ideal. [….] [T]he philosophical importance of utopias rests on utopian thought, although the practical effect of a utopia may be quite independent of its philosophic merits [….] Utopian thought performs three related political functions. First, it guides our deliberation, whether in devising courses of action or in choosing among exogenously defined alternatives with which we are confronted. Second, it justifies our actions; the grounds of action are reasons that others ought to accept and—given openness and the freedom to reflect—can be led to accept. Third, it serves as the basis for the evaluation of existing institutions and practices. The locus classicus is the Republic, in which the completed ideal is deployed in Plato’s memorable critique of imperfect regimes.
Utopian thought attempts to specify and justify the principles of a comprehensively good political order. Typically, the goodness of that order rests on the desirability of the way of life enjoyed by the individuals within it; less frequently, its merits rely on organic features that cannot be reduced to individuals. Whatever their basis, the principles of the political good share certain general features:
- First, utopian principles are in their intention universally valid, temporally and geographically.
- Second, the idea of the good order arises out of our experience but does not mirror it in any simple way and is not circumscribed by it. Imagination may combine elements of experience into a new totality that has never existed; reason, seeking to reconcile the contradictions of experience, may transmute its elements.
- Third, utopias exist in speech; they are ‘cities of words.’ This does not mean that they cannot exist but only that they need not ever. This ‘counterfactuality’ of utopia in no way impedes its evaluative function.
- Fourth, utopian principles may come to be realized in history, and it may be possible to point to real forces pushing in that direction. But our approval of a utopia is not logically linked to the claim that history is bringing us closer to it or that we can identify an existing basis for the transformative actions that would bring it into being. Conversely, history cannot by itself validate principles. The movement of history (if it is a meaningful totality in any sense at all) may be from the most desirable to the less; the proverbial dustbin may contain much of enduring worth.
- Fifth, although not confined to actual existence, the practical intention of utopia requires that it be constrained by possibility. Utopia is realistic in that it assumes human and material preconditions that are neither logically nor empirically impossible, even though their simultaneous co-presence may be both unlikely and largely beyond human control to effect.
- Sixth, although utopia is a guide for action, it is not in any simple sense a program of In nearly all cases, important human or material preconditions for good politics will be lacking. Political practice consists in striving for the best results achievable in particular circumstances. The relation between the ideal and the best achievable is not deductive. [….]
Thus, the incompleteness of utopia, far from constituting a criticism of it, is inherent in precisely the features that give it evaluative force. As has been recognized at least since Aristotle, the gap between utopian principles and specific strategic/tactical programs can be bridged only through an inquiry different in kind and content from that leading to the principles themselves. If so, the demand that utopian thought contain within itself the conditions of its actualization leads to a sterile hybrid that is neither an adequate basis for rational evaluation nor an accurate analysis of existing conditions.” — William A. Galston, Justice and the Human Good (1980)
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“Democracy may be viewed as an ideal, a method, and a process. From all three standpoints, it has a fundamental purpose which gives it a value of its own and makes it seem—like liberty—an end in itself. This purpose is political education in the widest and best sense, a strong commitment to training the populace in the arts of individual citizenship and collective coexistence. As an ideal, it is a system of self-rule that makes no distinction between the government and the governed on the personal, local, or national planes of decision-making. This ideal being unattainable on a large-scale or at the existing level of individual [moral psychological and intellectual] development, pure democracy remains a logical construction, a notional norm, a conceptual model. The reconciliation of this remote yet powerful frame of reference with existing realities has necessitated popular myths and political fictions as well as a host of pragmatic devices and social conventions. The myth of popular sovereignty, the fiction of the general will, the device of representative government, and the convention that distinguishes the State from the government, are obvious examples.” — Raghavan Iyer, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man
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“Wishful thinking—the longing to bend the present world into a different and better future—is often mocked, but the plain fact is that it is a regular feature of the human condition.* Whenever we refer to the world around us in language, we habitually allude to thing that are absent. We conjecture, we say things that miss the mark, or that express yearnings for things to be other than they are. We live by our illusions. The language through which we speak is an unending sort of short little dreams in the course of which we sometimes fashion new ways of seeing things, using words that are remarkably apposite and strangely inspiring to others. The feminine dēmokratia was one of those tiny terms that sprang from a little dream, with grand effect. It was to rouse millions of people in all four corners of the world—and give them a grip on their world by changing it in ways so profound they remain undervalued and misunderstood. [….]
The roots of the family of terms that make up the language of democracy, and exactly where and when the word was first used, remain a mystery. Democracy carefully guards her secrets. Through the fog of the past only random clues appear, in the guise of wild-looking ungroomed figures bearing suggestive names like Demonax of Mantinea, the bearded, robed, sandal-shod lawmaker who was summoned (around 550 BCE) by the women of the Oracle of Delphi to grant the people of Cyrene, a Greek-speaking farming town on the Libyan coast, the right to resist the tyranny of the limping, stuttering King Battus III, and the right to gather in their own assembly to govern themselves under their own laws. Demonax may have been among the first public figures to describe himself as a friend of democracy, but we cannot be sure. None of his writings or speeches or laws has survived. That makes him a fitting symbol of the way democracy carefully guards her own mysteries against those who think they know her every way. The subject of democracy is full of enigmas, confusions, things that are supposed to be true. It harbors not a few surprises, including the certainty … that it was not a Greek invention. The belief that democracy is or could be a universal Western value, a gift of Europe to the world, dies hard. [….] The claim put forward within most Greek plays, poems and philosophical tracts, that fifth century Athens wins the prize for creating both the idea and the practice of democracy, seemed plausible to contemporaries. It continues until this day to be repeated by most observers. But it is false.” — John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy
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Wishing (Will Make It So)
Wishing will make it so
Just keep on wishing and care will go
Dreamers tell us dreams come true
It’s no mistake
And wishes are the dreams we dream
When we’re awake
The curtain of night will part
If you are certain within your heart
So if you wish long enough wish strong enough
You will come to know
Wishing will make it so
Sung by Frank Sinatra (among others)
Songwriter: Jeff Lynne
* Keane describes here but one species of such thinking, a benign or beneficial sort, rather different from the deleterious or pernicious form that is clearly contrary to our (well-considered) self-interests and capacity for acting rationally. The kind of wishful thinking Keane is referring to is in the spirit of utopian imagination and occasionally acts on the order of a self-fulfilling prophecy, while the harmful variety, as Jon Elster explains, involves “the shaping of belief by wants, making us think the world in fact is how we want it to be.” Adaptive preference formation is in some respects the converse of benign or beneficial wishful thinking, for it adjusts our wants to possibilities. G.A. Cohen explains it like this: “The agent’s assessment ordering bends round to favour what (he thinks) is in the feasible set.” Cohen admits some possible good effects from this response (e.g., ‘it may prevent fruitless lamentation and wasted effort’), but generally speaking, “Adaptive Preference also has great destructive potential, since it means losing standards that may be needed to guide criticism of the status quo, and it dissolves the faith to which a future with ampler possibilities may yet be hospitable. If you cannot bear to remember the goodness of the goal that you sought and which is not now attainable, you may fail to pursue it should it come within reach, and you will not try to bring it within reach. When the fox succeeds in convincing himself that the grapes are sour, he does not build the ladder that might enable him to get at them.” Thus this kind of wishful thinking makes for the sour grapes syndrome. Wishful thinking, when not baneful or against our true self-interests, can have, in spite of its distance from the real world (from facts or what is ‘true’), and as a by-product, side-effect, or spillover effect, what have you, a mysterious role in motivating us to struggle in concert with others, in steeling our resolve, in giving us courage, in fortifying our commitments to and for “the Good.” A caveat, however: it seems we cannot (consciously) will ourselves into wishful thinking, for it operates, as we say, behind our backs, as a sub-conscious or unconscious cognitive and psychological phenomenon that serves to irrationally resolve conflicts between beliefs and desires. Nonetheless, some psychologists believe, along the lines suggested above, that wishful thinking can “positively influence behavior and so bring about … results” that otherwise are unobtainable. “This is called the ‘Pygmalion effect.’” I hope at some point in the future to introduce wishful thinking and wishes from a strictly psychoanalytic perspective.
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