There are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis: If your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world?
…Moreover, imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for a perfect world and just don’t get with the program. They might oppose you in bringing heaven to Earth. How evil are they? They’re the only thing standing in the way of an infinitely good world. Well, you do the math.
I think that it is the conservatives who are most willing to see extreme, utopian ideology as a threat can only be stopped by government leadership. Conservatives emphasize the barbarism in human nature and the need for institutions to protect civilization. Progressives are less worried about utopian ideology, because they tend to see humans as inherently good but held back by oppression. Libertarians see human nature as flawed, but they are reluctant to endorse strong government for protection. Instead, they believe that coercion in any form, including government, is more of a problem than a solution.
In fact, some conservatives fear that libertarianism is itself a utopian ideology. Remember Whitaker Chambers thinking that Ayn Rand’s subliminal message was “To a gas chamber–go!”
Where I think Chambers is on to something, at least as a warning, is Rand’s strong “us” (the smart, productive, useful) vs “them” (the stupid, envious, grasping) vision.
That doesn’t lead to gas chambers in a straight line, but anytime you have a view which divides society into factions which loathe each other, and realize the other faction as in their way, there is a kind of dark seed there.
You could go off and hide yourself in a magically invisible city of “Us’s”, or…
As a libertarian-turned-conservative, I agree with Chambers. Libertarianism, it seems to me, rests on the harm principle. But the harm principle leaves the definition of harm to the actor. This ignores the wisdom inherent in social norms, and it ignores their function as a social lubricant that allows people to coexist peacefully and beneficially. That’s real liberty.
+1
“That’s real liberty.”
But sometimes there are multiple candidates for the norms. Looking out from your certain knowledge of what the real liberty is it can naturally seem strange to you that people prefer institutions which allow other points of view to coexist under libertarian-style minimal-interference rules, perhaps as strange as your self-serving notion of real liberty seems to be from the point of view of someone who thinks there are multiple plausible candidates for the best way to live and enough variations in individual preferences that indeed there might be no one-size-fits-all best way. Since you are capable of knowing that state imposition of your norm is real liberty, and since we aren’t capable of following your thought processes, it’s hard for us to reach agreement with you about what is morally right. But perhaps we can more nearly reach pragmatic agreement on what works out well in practice, ridiculously wrong though it may be in principle from the viewpoint of someone with your true knowledge. The frictional costs of something like the Thirty Years War can be significant, and even things like the revocation of the Edict of Nantes look less like “peacefully and beneficially” than ignorant zealots sometimes fondly imagine. Pragmatic revulsion at such painful consequences, not just abstract intellectual distaste at the spectacle of self-satisfied closedminded stupid zealotry enshrined into law, seems to have been the main reason that for some centuries Western norms veered away from that model of tolerating arrogant zealots enforcing the idea that following their dictates is the only real liberty. The costs and benefits of such tolerance have been observed in various circumstances (notably: in lurches back toward the usual world history norm of official privilege for official dogmas, including in the modern experiments not just religious belief systems but many secular or nominally secular belief systems) seems to have a reasonably good track record compared to enforcing Protestantism or enforcing Catholicism or enforcing some other point of view (Green Wiccanism, overwhelmingly beneficial diversity of those demographic groups which manage to become much more powerful in the national or state Democratic Party than their rivals, Communism, whatever) in which both of those may be foul heresy.
A radical libertarian would argue that the same coercive apparatus (government) a conservative would use to quell dangerous Utopian agendas can just as easily be used to impose them. Yes, humans are deeply flawed and often irrational. It doesn’t follow we should champion a mechanism that allows humans to impose their flawed and irrational ideals on millions. And even if the ideals are noble, there’s always a great chance the imposition of the ideals will be flawed and irrational.
Furthmore, when you factor in the perverse incentive mechanisms inherent within government and democracy, the notion that governing bodies can successfully maintain and promote civil society begins to look utopian itself.
Obviously, this line of reasoning won’t appear super compelling to those who don’t already share libertarian priors, but the point I’m trying to make is this: it’s very possible to be incredibly cynical about human nature and still espouse libertarianism. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of extreme cultural conservatives espouse anarcho-capitalism simply because they believe it would allow them to preserve and maintain their own microcosm of civilization more securely than the alternatives.
A flip side of the utopian is the apocalyptic. Anything can be justified to bring about heaven, and anything can also be justified to even give a tiny increase in the chance of preventing hell. One frequently encounters the latter type of rhetoric today in defense of the most extreme policies proposed by climate alarmists, and in the past it was other environmental issues or some related to nuclear technology. I think the aversive impulse arises instinctively anytime a skeptic is exposed to a purported moral imperative of this nature with no logical limiting principle and no natural stopping point.
Relatedly, ‘utopian’ is a bit a loaded word when describing the conservative critique of Libertarianism, especially its contemporary manifestation in the US. Instead, there is the recognition of a kind of sanctimonious and priggish unreasonableness and fiat justitia ruat caelum type of glibly radical attitude with an obsessive attention to a particular ideological cynosure which leaves no room for competing values and indeed necessarily denigrates those rival claims.
Indeed. I’m not much of a utopian, but I sure don’t want to wreck things. I think what we’ve got works pretty well. Most attempts to improve on it don’t seem to have much experiential or theoretical backing that make the risk worth it.
Take the most obvious, open borders. I think it will turn the west into a new Africa, Middle East, or Mexico, places I don’t want my country to be like and my kids to grow up in. I find defenses of this idea absurd (importing violent, clannish, low IQ third worlders isn’t going to double world GDP). They won’t assimilate. When and if they give up Islam its only to take up a vague kind of secular underclass life of petty crime and welfare dependence, and they are only ever one ISIS recruitment video away from shooting up the place. The second and third generations are actually worse in this regard.
And of course one day in the future. 2050, 2100, who really cares when, they will be 51% of the electorate and force their way of life on us, whether of the Islamic or just general clannish low IQ big man government kind. And long before that they will exert incredible and growing influence on institutions public and private. The whole reason conservative and libertarians (and note, none of those people are very libertarian) lose elections is because there are more NAM voters. If it were just whites, Democrats would lose fifty states. If it were just Reagan era demographics Romney would have carrier 48 states.
Keyhole citizenship voting? Magic constitutional protections we are already ignoring now? Diversity leading to “less government” not also leading to a low trust anarchy-tyranny type society? Immigrant groups with no track record of assimilating actually assimilating?
It’s all nonsense. Total nonsense. Our children and their children will be forced to live in broken dysfunctional third world shitholes. And all for what. An experiment? Idealogical fervor? Wanting to fit in with your set?
I’m not much of a utopian. I’m pretty disengaged from politics, and think its kind of a virtue to do so. I haven’t voted in a long time. But if there is no alternative, is the alternative is my descendants growing up in third world hellholes and cursing my name, I guess I’ll have to go with the trashy reality TV star and casino owner likely to end his presidency in disgrace. After all, all the options are about that terrible anyway, at least he’ll build a wall. At least there is some hope for the future. Right now, only total hopelessness. I expect Trump will be about as far from utopia as you can get, but he’s better then the alternative.
There are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis
So are things like the actual War on Drugs and the proposed war on guns Utopian?