The Tyranny of the Ideal

by Gerald Gaus

  Many of the remarks made by ideal theorists strongly suggest that The Choice is relatively easy—to achieve “reconciliation[,] … to calm our frustration and rage against society and history,” “to accept and affirm our social world positively, not merely be resigned to it,”78 we should orient ourselves by the ideal. But now we see that this is not obvious; by its very nature, when ideal theory is distinctive and plausible, it requires us to forgo local optimization, which typically has much clearer consequences. In the sort of moderately rugged landscapes that ideal theory implicitly assumes, there are highish peaks throughout the landscape (§II.2.4); so confronting The Choice should be understood as the standard case with which ideal theory is designed to cope. To forgo relatively clear and perhaps great improvements in justice so that we can seek out an ideal that one’s theory tells us lies away from these improvements is by no means an obvious way to reconcile ourselves to our social world. The Choice is by no means a trivial one.

  In figure 2-6 the ideal is outside of our neighborhood, and it lies in the opposite direction of the local optimum. This may seem simply an unfortunate case. Suppose instead that the global optimum is identical with the local optimum. Now the rankings derived from the Social Realizations Condition converge with the advice of the Orientation Condition. Surely this is the happiest of all cases for ideal theory.79 But a worry remains even here: how can we be confident that what we take as the global optimum is truly the global optimum? We know that we have a local optimum that seems ideal—presumably it scores very high on justice—but until we have good knowledge of the entire landscape, it will be exceedingly difficult to determine whether it is truly the global optimum, or whether it is a high local optimum that we have mistaken for the ideal, since the true global optimum lies beyond our ken. True utopia may well lie just beyond the horizon; as long as we are significantly constrained by our own neighborhood, we might never know.

  3.4 Progressive v. Wandering Utopianism

  Karl Popper recognized this problem and claimed it undermined utopian thought. If we accept that any perspective’s vision of an ideal that lies outside our current neighborhood is vague and subject to revision as we move toward it, we are apt to find that utopia moves as we approach it. The social world that we thought was the global optimum turns out to be on a gradient, and so we must revise our judgment as to where the ideal lies. But, Popper continues, as we learn more about the ideal we might well conclude that we must “change our direction.”80 Elster advances a similar criticism, implicitly drawing on the idea of a perspective. “From my present point of view,” he writes, “I have a full awareness of the front of all the objects in my visual field, but only a formal and empty awareness of the side that is hidden from my view. I know, that is, that they must have a backside, but I do not know how it appears in specific detail. Also from my present point of view I know that if I were to deplace [sic] myself to some other point in the field, new objects would become visible to me, even if I do not know which objects.”81 Applying this to the utopian analysis of seeking ideal possible worlds, Elster argues that one may know that worlds even better than the currently postulated ideal world most likely exist, but this fact is graspable only “in an empty and general manner.” Once we reach our current ideal, however, we will have a new horizon of possibility, with new possible ideals accessible us. Thus, he argues in support of the inherent intransitivity of reform (§II.1.3): we cannot jump directly to ideal u* from our current world, because until we get to the “proximate ideal” u, which we now appreciate given our current perspective as a describable ideal, we cannot even really see the better-than-that ideal u*. Thus we need to pass through u to even know what u* is.82

  Some utopians have accepted this and thus upheld what we might call progressive ideal theory. To complete chapter I’s epigraph from Oscar Wilde, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it sees a better country, and sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”83 This image of progress qua going from one ideal to the next makes sense if the search meets two constraints. (i) The new, even better ideal, must be visible once we reach our current ideal. In my explication of Elster’s analysis in the previous paragraph, I supposed that once we reach our current ideal, u, the next ideal, u*, will be graspable. Here progress from one utopia to the next seems intelligible. But it also could be that u* is not graspable from u; perhaps, say, our current ideal stressed social harmony to such a point that intellectual disagreement was lessened, and so we will miss the better ideal, u*, if—to employ the standard voyage imagery—we first land at “land” at u. If we fell short of u, our current ideal, and landed instead at some less-than-ideal world, perhaps we could glimpse u* from it. How, though, could we know this when we set out for u?

  (ii) The idea of “progress,” as opposed to wandering, requires that the new and better ideals are in some sense in the same direction as the ideal we are presently seeking. Again, the conception of a perspective on ideal justice is enlightening. If the new horizons of ideals are worlds where the world’s features (WF) are developments of the institutions and other features that we have brought about in our current quest for ideal justice, then Wilde’s image of setting sail again looks like “pushing onward.”84 But if, from our new vantage point, we see that we misunderstood the structures that we earlier rejected, which now must be reinstituted, our quest for the ideal looks more like wanderers searching back and forth across the landscape for the Holy Grail. In Sidgwick’s imagery, the pursuit of the ideal confronts us “with an illimitable cloudland surrounding us on all sides, in which we may construct any variety of pattern states.”85 It can pull us first in this way, and then in that, as we change our orientation to the ideal. This is no mere theoretical possibility. Up to the middle of the twentieth century mainstream socialism resolutely rejected markets: states that moved toward that socialist ideal developed state structures with tremendous authority and shrunk markets as far as was consistent with medium-term economic viability. When analytically and economically informed socialists (such as Elster) rediscovered market processes, two facts became evident. First, the states that had continued furthest along the old socialist path were less likely to appreciate these new insights, having systematically trained generations that they were illusions (point [i] above). Second, when they did appreciate economic analysis, these states were committed to reinstituting many of the features of market systems that the Soviet and Eastern European “People’s” regimes spent so much time and effort destroying. An ideal theory must be able to identify with great confidence the neighborhood in which the ideal lies. If it cannot do so, then we must wonder why, when we confront The Choice, we should turn our back on relatively clear local optimization to pursue what may well be a wandering search for the ideal—perhaps in the end the global optimum lies in the opposite direction we initially supposed, and so toward, not away from, our local optimum. Making The Choice to pursue the ideal looks irresponsible.

  This line of analysis led Popper to conclude that “the Utopian approach can be saved only by the Platonic belief in one absolute and unchanging ideal, together with two further assumptions, namely (a) that there are rational methods to determine once and for all what the ideal is and (b) what the best means of its realization are. Only such far-reaching assumptions could prevent us from declaring the Utopian methodology to be utterly futile.”86 This, I think, is rather too strong: a theory of the ideal need not identify at the outset a specific, unchanging, destination. Simmons is entirely correct that “for a while we can just aim ourselves in the general direction of the Himalayas, adjusting our paths more finely—between Everest and K2, say—only when we arrive in India” (§I.1.3).87 We do not need the precise location of the ideal before we set out, nor do we need to know every one of its features. However, a theory of the ideal that accepts the revisability of the ideal, but avoids wandering utopia
nism, must give strong grounds for believing that there is some neighborhood that contains the global optimum in which further searching should be concentrated, and that this will be so for a considerable period of time.

  Popper is, though, correct that all too often political theorists have been insufficiently attentive to integrating revisability into their theories of the ideal, being consistently attracted to principles and institutional schemes that settle matters of justice “once and for all.”88 The claim to accurate and precise knowledge of an unchanging ideal struck Popper as both absurd and dangerous—absurd because our limited knowledge of the workings of social institutions is always open to revision and what is best depends on circumstances;89 dangerous because those who are convinced that they have a perfect vision of an unchanging utopia are all too likely to give into the temptation to march us toward their promised land of justice, their “Paradise Island.” John Stuart Mill, another philosopher keenly sensitive to the limits of our knowledge and the need for experimentation, also was deeply wary of such utopian projects. In referring to the “revolutionary socialists” of the nineteenth century, possessed of a clear vision of the ideal that they sought to immediately implement (i.e., without tentative experimentation), Mill writes:

  It must be acknowledged that those who would play this game on the strength of their own private opinion, unconfirmed as yet by any experimental verification—who would forcibly deprive all who have now a comfortable physical existence of their only present means of preserving it, and would brave the frightful bloodshed and misery that would ensue if the attempt was resisted—must have a serene confidence in their own wisdom on the one hand and a recklessness of other people’s sufferings on the other, which Robespierre and St. Just, hitherto the typical instances of those united attributes, scarcely came up to.90

  A century witnessing Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot disastrously confirmed Mill’s judgment; Robespierre is insignificant compared to this utopian trinity. The worry that certain judgments of the unchanging ideal will give rise to recommendations for immediate implementation is by no means a “utopophobia” of the liberal fallibilist.

  4 INCREASING KNOWLEDGE OF THE LANDSCAPE AND EXPANDING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  4.1 Experiments in Just Social Worlds

  The problem confronting epistemically bounded creatures (and even ideal theorists are so bounded) is to devise ways to explore different parts of their perspective’s justice landscape without actually setting real societies and their populations on potentially wandering and destructive searches. A perspective worth taking seriously seeks reliable information about the justice of as many different social worlds as possible and hopefully gives good grounds for identifying the ideal or its neighborhood. The most straightforward method—one favored by Mill—is actual social experimentation. Given the variety of social worlds in the domain {X}, small-scale experiments might be conducted that seek empirical information about the ways in which principles, sets of rules and institutions, work out under certain background conditions.

  We might think of social experiments as starting with an initial situation: a set of initial parameters within which the experiment commences (§I.3.1). This can be seen as setting up a small-scale social world. This initial situation need not be in our current neighborhood: we might commence our experiment seeking to institute a rather distant social world (e.g., a social system designed along the lines of Cohen’s camping trip). Commencing from this initial situation, different experimental social systems (e.g., utopian communities) might then search alternative social worlds in the neighborhood of the initial situation and, perhaps, beyond, and so together, effectively explore significant areas of the perspective’s justice landscape. Each group may employ different procedures for selecting what they see as viable changes in the initial situation, which, they believe, will lead closer to the perspective’s ideal.

  Mill was a strong advocate of these sorts of social experiments in living. In contrast to his condemnation of “revolutionary” socialism (§II.3.4), Mill was supportive of socialist experiments along the lines of Robert Owen’s New Lanark community, and those inspired by Charles Fourier. All these proposals, he stressed, had the advantage of being subject to relatively small-scale experiments: they can be “tried first on a select population and extended to others as their education and cultivation permit.”91 Ideal theorists who appreciate the difficulties of knowing their entire justice landscape, and who agree with Mill that actual experiments are useful, will come to think of ideal theory as less of a political program than as a research agenda. Coping with the Neighborhood Constraint requires a diversity of communities exploring different parts of a perspective’s landscape and sharing their results. Here ideal theory does not suppose a fixed point providing a beacon in orienting improvements in justice, but conceives of itself as a quest to discover what and where the ideal—or at least the distinctly better—might be. If successful, over time Σ adherents’ knowledge of the terrain of justice could be greatly enhanced as different groups see how different social worlds might work.

  Despite Mill’s—and many current libertarians’—great attraction to local experimentation, conducting and then drawing inferences from these “social experiments” is extraordinarily difficult. Consider, for example, the fascinating experimental efforts of Robert Owen and his followers. Lenark was a village in Scotland, consisting of mills and workers’ dormitories, founded in 1786 by David Dale. Owen, Dale’s son-in-law, became manager and part owner by 1810 and set about reforming the community on something akin to socialist principles.92 Owen’s evaluative standards (ES) stressed rationality, cooperation, and minimizing competition, and his conceptions of the relevant features (WF) focused on the importance of social institutions in shaping personality as well as in producing more cooperative people and, especially, educating citizens to make them more rational, which, in turn, would render them more social. Owen’s fame from this initial experiment led to the establishment of a number of experimental Owenite communities in Great Britain and the United States—something like twenty-three in all.93 The great American experiment was New Harmony, Indiana, founded in 1825. Like most Owenite communities it was characterized by internal disputes, effectively breaking into three communities in 1826, with the experiment effectively ending in 1827. The Lanarkshire community lasted from 1825 to 1827; the one in Ralahine in Ireland from 1831 to 1833; and the one in Hampshire from 1839 to 1845, but it was riven with division by the end.94 Many other communities expired very quickly.

  That the communities did not persist by no means shows that they were not valuable as experiments; we might think that a good deal was discovered as how not to organize an Owenite social world.95 (Recall Thomas Edison’s remark about his long search for the incandescent light bulb: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”) The problem with drawing inferences from the communities’ failures is rather subtler. In order to view these as experiments seeking to fill out the Owenite perspective’s justice landscape, we have to see them as all seeking to base their pursuit of justice on Owenite evaluative standards and stressing the features of social worlds that Owen thought were relevant to achieving a just society. Thus the experimental aim would be to vary, say, the rules by which the various communities lived and the way they educated members, and then observe how well these realizations scored on Owenite standards. Owen clearly recognized that the variations and changes within communities needed to be constrained to social rules and not basic matters of justice (i.e., Owenite evaluative standards could not be challenged), and so he sought to restrict the ambit of committees running the experiments to nonbasic changes. But this restriction of the decision-making powers of the community—which was necessary if the experiments were to genuinely explore the Owenite perspective—was a critical cause of disputes that unraveled the communities, as some members sought to revise the evaluative standards (as in New Harmony, where inequality was a cause of dispute, leading to a splinter community, the C
ommunity of Equality).96 Thus in the end, restricting communities to exploring only the Owenite perspective, which was necessary to see them as actual Owenite experiments, was itself a critical source of failure. Residents rebelled against the limitations on their decision making that the very nature of a true experiment required. Perhaps Owen was not merely making excuses when, in 1840, he declared, “My principles have never been carried out.”97