by Rand Paul
The word “Utopia,” though, is much older than socialism; it comes to us from Thomas More’s book by that name, written in 1516. The word is translated from the Greek as “no place.” Interestingly, the word also phonetically sounds like “eu” topia, which would mean true or good place. More may have intended to make a double entendre when he created the word. Critics are still debating which meaning he intended as the primary definition.
Nor do critics agree on whether More’s work was meant to be satire or instruction. Controversy still exists as to whether More presents a road map to a “perfect” place or a satirical look at an undesirable one.
The same can be said of Plato’s Republic. Is his idealized Republic, Kallipolis—run by guardians or philosopher-kings—to be taken literally? If so, as in More’s Utopia, it is hard to explain the defense of slavery, government-regulated reproduction, and total central planning in Plato’s Republic.
Perhaps the most destructive aspect of utopian philosophy is its claim to be inevitable, that as history unfolds a utopian version of paradise is the endpoint.
In The Republic, Plato presents a utopian inevitability of history, the idea that history is linear and going somewhere. Plato puts forward that government will evolve from timocracy (a ruling class of warriors, like ancient Sparta) to oligarchy (rule by the wealthy few) to democracy to tyranny.
In Kallipolis, the philosopher-kings rule as disinterested persons, not for their own selfish interests but for the good of the whole. But the dilemma is that such selfless philosopher-kings defy human nature, leading to false and impractical expectations.
Plato’s Republic, in a way, foretells the fatal flaw of the twentieth-century totalitarian disasters. If we give up our freedom to a strong central government, Plato promises that we will receive philosopher-kings as selfless rulers. But in reality, we wind up with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
Over time, the word “utopia” or “utopian” has become not an ideal but a pejorative. No one wants their ideas to be called utopian because it means they are impractical, unworkable, naive.
Did Plato, or More for that matter, really see their utopias as models for perfection to be aspired to, or did they intend for them to be interpreted satirically as warnings? It is particularly hard to imagine that More wanted us to interpret his Utopia literally since it allowed slavery and condoned divorce (More was later executed for opposing, among other things, King Henry VIII’s divorce).
Because humankind is not selfless (and even if it were, no two people would ever agree on what the utopian ideal would be), the standards for a utopia are naive. The leaders would have to be superhuman to overcome natural self-interest and find agreement on what exactly the ideal striven for by all would be.
Richard Kilminster summarizes the argument in Chad Walsh’s From Utopia to Nightmare: “the traditional articles of faith underpinning all utopian thinking are that man is good and perfectible and can live in harmony ruled by rulers who will not be corrupted by power.”1
Herein lies the real danger of utopia. Karl Popper explains: “[T]he Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint of society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of the few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship. . . .”2
Writing toward the end of World War II in 1944, the philosopher Ludwig von Mises makes a similar point in his Omnipotent Government: “At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines lies the belief that the rulers are wiser and loftier than their subjects and that they therefore know better what benefits those ruled than they know themselves.” Essentially, those who would presume to plan society are, at their core, elitists.3
Popper’s writing came of age during World War II, when the world was becoming aware of the authoritarian nature of Nazi and Stalinist socialism. Intriguingly, the bogeymen of today’s politics—Charles Koch on the right and George Soros on the left—both profess admiration for Karl Popper.
Koch admired Popper’s conclusion that to be scientific, a theory must be falsifiable. As Popper put it: “A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific.” Popper maintained that the “genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability.” To Popper, Marxism was a pseudoscience because Marx’s argument of the inevitability of class warfare and ultimately of communism was untestable and really on par with a religious belief.4
Soros, though seen now as the “Daddy Warbucks” of the left, for many years used his Open Society Foundations to oppose totalitarianism. Soros agreed with Popper that historical determinism leads to closed societies ruled by authoritarians.
Popper’s observations about determinism, therefore, garnered praise from all across the ideological spectrum. Popper, while not necessarily a defender of laissez-faire capitalism, was a fellow traveler of the Austrian free-market advocates and was a colleague and friend of Hayek at the London School of Economics.
One of Popper’s great contributions is showing the link between central planning and state violence. Popper explained that once it is accepted that government will centrally plan society, “any difference of opinion between utopian engineers must therefore lead, in the absence of rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence.”5
Popper felt that Plato advocated in The Republic for a version of Sparta where the needs of the collective trumped the rights of the individual. In Sparta, the state selected out and eliminated weaklings by tossing infants off a cliff or into a pit of water. Males were separated from parents and introduced into military training at a young age. Slavery was accepted and censorship was common. Popper believed that it was not coincidental that the Nazis idolized the Spartans.6
Utopian visions are naive because they require a perfect society with perfect leaders. Utopias are dangerous because humankind is not perfect. Indeed, utopias require leaders willing to wield absolute power to conquer man’s true nature, to take and redistribute his property. Consequently, utopias select not for perfectly selfless leaders but for the opposite—people who are capable, willing, and unrestrained in their use of force to achieve utopian ends.
Popper recognized that utopians who proposed that they knew which direction history needed to go and wanted to push history in that direction would inevitably have to use force and violence to achieve their goals.
Think about the concept of history having a direction for a moment. Think about your own life. When you do, see if you agree with me that history is directional or linear only in retrospect. Looking back, we tend to see purpose and pattern resulting from our own desire to put order and meaning to the events of the past.
Tolstoy put it this way: “Every man lives for himself, making use of his free-will for attainment of his own objects, and feels in his whole being that he can do or not do any action. But as soon as he does anything, that act, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irrevocable and is the property of history, in which it has a significance, predestined and not subject to free choice.”7
Tolstoy, like others in the nineteenth century, thought the answer to history’s progress was the discovery of the cyclical nature of history with a healthy dose of divine intervention. Free will was subjugated to a vast, inevitable fate called “Progress.”
In The Whig Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield articulates why those who see history as a progression or linear development are naive or utopian in their outlook. He wrote that the “historian can draw lines through certain events, . . . and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation. The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present—all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress.”8
Why is it a big deal to believe or not believe in the l
inearity of history or in historical determinism?
Because utopias are often built on the notion that they are the apotheosis of history’s unfolding, that they are inevitable. Marx certainly believed that the class struggle was inevitable but would produce a paradise or utopia where the state would wither away. Believing that history has an inexorable course takes a great leap of faith. The ramifications of perceiving history to have some linear purpose are a big deal, probably much bigger than most of us realize. To believe that history has a direction and that any one individual or government should assist history along that path is not only utopian but ultimately dangerous. Just ask the victims of the gulag or Auschwitz. The eventual ends always justify the temporary means, however horrible.
Both the Soviets and the Nazis believed that they were creating their version of paradise on earth. For the Soviets it was to be a workers’ paradise. For the Nazis a monoracial utopia.
It is said that those who fail to grasp history are in danger of repeating history. Understanding utopian ideas ensures that nobody forgets the millions of lives lost to utopian nonsense.
Karl Popper understood that the utopianism of historical determinism and tyranny are not benign but rather are directly related to the millions of people who were killed by Stalin, by Hitler, by Mao. These genocides all came about as a result of utopian ideas and a utopian concept of history.
Popper dedicated his 1957 book, The Poverty of Historicism, thus:
To the memory of the countless men, women, and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in the Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.
A friend of mine, William J. Murray, writes in the dedication of his book Utopian Road to Hell:
To the tens of millions who lost their lives to the misguided twentieth-century efforts to create Utopia here on earth, whether that be the Nazi “Thousand-Year Reich” or the failed Soviet experiment with communalism, and to hundreds of millions more who suffered through starvation and enslavement.
The science of Marxism required the acceptance of the utopian notion that selfless guardians will rule in the interests of the nation and that selfless citizens will accept this rule without question. It did not take long to discover that the prerequisites for this utopia defied the nature of man.
The Soviets acknowledged that Marxism would require a breed of men and women with new traits and expectations. So they sought to create a new type of person, the “New Soviet Man.”
Leon Trotsky described the “man of the future” like so:
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.9
As Murray N. Rothbard describes it: “the Marxian cadre, the possessors of the special knowledge of the laws of history . . . will proceed to transform mankind into the new socialist man by the use of force.”10
Nikolay Chernyshevsky and other radicals of the mid-nineteenth century acknowledged that man’s nature, his inherent selfishness, might be an impediment to their utopia. So they created a “new man” who would see “service to mankind” as in his selfish interest. Chernyshevsky wrote in What Is to Be Done? of a “new” man who would find “rational selfish” pleasure in serving the interests of society.11
Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground as a direct response to Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Dostoyevsky, like Chernyshevsky, had been greatly influenced by the radicals or nihilists of the day. Both he and Chernyshevsky had been sentenced to the firing squad only to be given a last-minute reprieve.
Such an experience would no doubt have a lasting effect on anyone. Add four years of hard labor in Siberian exile and you have the recipe for a life-changing experience. Dostoyevsky the nihilist sympathizer became Dostoyevsky the critic. Dostoyevsky came home from prison aware that a slavish submission to reason did not leave a place for the individual.
Chapter 32
Progress Comes from Rebels and Dreamers
In the 1850s, Dostoyevsky visited the Crystal Palace in England. For him, the Crystal Palace became a symbol of the godless, man-made utopia. It was built in 1851 as part of the Great Exhibition. It was nearly a million square feet under a cast-iron and plate-glass ceiling.1
In “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” Dostoyevsky writes of the crowds gathered to gawk at the Crystal Palace: “that a terrible force . . . has united all the people . . . into a single herd. You become aware of a gigantic idea; you feel that here something has already been achieved.” Dostoyevsky fears that what has been achieved is the “ultimate” and if recognized as such, leaves nothing left to strive for.2
In Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky rejects the modern, man-made Crystal Palace as a symbol of the nihilist or socialist desire to plan man’s future with rational mathematical certainty. The Underground Man worries that when the Crystal Palace comes it will be “frightfully dull (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational.”3
The Crystal Palace, like the anthill, once completed leaves nothing left to be attained. The Underground Man argues that central to man’s nature is a desire to create, a predestination to strive. In fact, “the process” of creating may be even more important than what is created.
But how will man continue to strive if he is simply an automaton destined to fulfill a mathematical equation of self-interest? Perhaps the “only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining . . . in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained.”4
The rationalists argued that free will does not exist and that man acts in a calculated fashion to accomplish what is in his or her self-interest.
Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man argues that anyone who believes men will act in unison in their best interest ignores an aspect of man’s nature that is inescapable:
“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very ‘most advantageous advantage’ which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.”5
Sarah J. Young, the author of two scholarly books on Dostoyevsky, points out that the Underground Man has two answers to the Crystal Palace utopia: “you can behave gratuitously, i.e. perform a pointless irrational act: you can stick out your tongue,” or you can act in a destructive way—“throw stones at it.”
The fact that atheism was intermixed with nihilism and socialism also pushed Dostoyevsky in the opposite direction. While the Underground Man rails against a world rigidly structured by reason, he also endlessly considers the need for faith. Some critics even classify Dostoyevsky as a “Christian novelist.”
The three brothers Karamazov represent the spectrum from doubt to fervent belief, but Dostoyevsky so masterfully develops each brother’s point of view that some critics still debate whether he sides more with Ivan and the Inquisitor than with Christ.
One criticism of Ayn Rand, and Chernyshevsky as well, for that matter, is the one-dimensionality of their characters. The characters are archetypes rather than realistic, conflicted individuals. Dostoyevsky’s characters, however, are rich in depth and not always definable or categorical.
Young attributes “these very significant ambiguities” to what makes “Dostoevsky such a complex and interesting writer.”
The radicals and socialists of the time were
also known as nihilists. Young writes: “Contrary to the Nihilists’ view of human nature as rational,” Dostoyevsky believed “that human beings are full of contradictions and dualities” that are irrational.
Dostoyevsky saw Chernyshevsky’s Crystal Palace as a false utopia. Today few people have heard of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? although it is said to have been Lenin’s favorite book.
Notes from Underground may have begun as Dostoyevsky’s response to Chernyshevsky’s rationalistic and altruistic world, but it was also, as scholar Adrian Wanner describes, an expression of Dostoyevsky’s distaste for “scientific positivism.”
Positivism argues that history can be examined objectively, just like physics and math. Opponents such as Popper argued that it is impossible to quantify much of what history studies. History cannot develop experiments or mathematical models, and there are no general laws of history.
While the Underground Man hated the idea of a Crystal Palace world, Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin envisioned a future community where everyone already lives in one. His novel, We, does not explicitly refer to the Crystal Palace, but Zamyatin’s citizens live in vast glass buildings that may be his reimagining of it.
When Zamyatin wrote We, the Bolshevik regime was still in its infancy. Despite having been a supporter of the Bolsheviks, Zamyatin presciently understood what would happen when the rights of the individual were made subservient to the needs of the collective. We is the grandfather of all twentieth-century dystopian novels but has its roots in the dispute between Dostoyevsky and the mid-nineteenth-century socialist writers.
In We, the people live in buildings made entirely of glass. Zamyatin’s narrator, D-503, describes the scene with almost religious fervor: “On days like this the whole world is cast of the same impregnable, eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see the bluest depth of things, their hitherto unknown, astonishing equations. . . .”6