Vanishing Utopias

We all know that utopias cannot ever exist. But, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we keep getting closer to it. In fact, our approach to it is accelerating.

It is a long book, almost 500 pages, but it covers the entirety of human prehistory and history, up until the present day, which for the author was 2014. You will not find lists of empires and dates. In this way, it is almost the exact opposite of what is still perhaps the most famous overview of world history, the Outline of History by H. G. Wells.

Instead, the author seeks general trends and explanations for everything that has happened. Here is an example. Why did human evolution seem to proceed so slowly before the arrival of modern humans? For example, Homo ergaster stone tools in Africa remained unchanged for a million years. Harari says that all other animal species, and all humans before Homo sapiens, have or had a biological constraint on their ability to think of new ways of living. Before the human lineage could make any progress, we needed an innovation, invisible in bones and DNA, which allowed us to imagine the future. Neanderthals, for example, he said, did not have “the ability to compose fiction.”

But the author suffers from the delusion of technological optimism, which is very common among writers of popular sociology. Here are two examples which considerably erode the credibility of the conclusion of the book.

First, he seems to assume we will never run out of energy. This is because we invest some of the profits from the old kinds of energy into developing new ones. This has, in fact, happened. One obvious example is that England was running out of wood, so they invested money and research into using coal, which required the invention of the steam engine. Before modern times, all energy was either from burning wood or from human and animal muscle power. Medieval people did not even imagine steam, hydroelectric, or atomic power.

But this will happen only if we deliberately invest in new technology. Right now we need to invest in green technologies such as wind and solar energy. We have done so, but powerful ideological and political forces oppose the adoption of green technology. Donald Trump has made it very clear that his solution to our future energy needs is to pump more oil. Technology will not save us, because Trump will lead us boldly into the twentieth century.

Harari also speculated that wars were becoming rare. It is true that there were fewer wars in 2014 than there had ever been in the past. This was easy to believe in the balmy days of the Obama administration. But almost as soon as Harari’s book was published, Putin decided to invade the Ukraine, for reasons that are not clear even to his supporters, who do not dare to have an independent opinion; and Harari’s own country, Israel, is waging what many observers claim to be a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Harari even speculated about how to be happy. Happiness is, he said, the product of serotonin levels in the brain. No matter what your external circumstances happen to be, no matter if you are in pain or slavery, you will be happy if you have a lot of serotonin. I think this opinion is a product of the author’s scarcely-hidden admiration for Buddhism. And, he implies, serotonin levels are not only biologically determined—you are either a happy or a depressed person—but also remain unchanged during your life. But this is true only for people who are clinically depressed. They need more serotonin but I do not. Also, I am certain that I am happier now, having completed so many of my life goals, than I was back when I had no idea if my future would be successful.

We need to admit that lots of things are getting better—the same message as Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature—but that we still have a lot of work to do and our success is not assured.

We all live in imagined realities. Despite the absence of evidence for spiritual realities, we will be individually unhappy and collective failures if we live in the way the apostle Paul described in one of his epistles: Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die. We have to at least imagine that we can make the world better.

Poverty and Blame: A Message from Fluff the Cottonwood

Hello, this is Fluff the Cottonwood Tree near Stan’s house in Tulsa. He has given me permission to post these observations on his blog. My previous message was on September 8 on Stan’s science blog.

The Dutch writer Rutger Bregman wrote a book called Utopia for Realists which is a best seller in English translation. Part of everyone’s vision of what a utopia would be like is that there would be no poverty or homelessness. But solving the problem/s of poverty seem hopelessly complex at least for you humans.

Bregman’s solution to poverty, however, is simple and realistic. It is simply to give everyone a guaranteed minimum income even for doing nothing. Free money for everybody, that is. It sounds too simple to be true, but something similar to this has been tried in many countries, especially in Europe, where Bregman lives. For example, in France, a country Stan knows something about. A guaranteed minimum income has not eliminated poverty, but it has greatly reduced it. France has much less poverty per capita than the United States.

The line of reasoning that makes sense to most people is that, if you guarantee a minimum income, then everyone would just lay or lie around and not work. But that is not what happened in France and other European countries. The reason is that most people do not want to just barely survive at the poverty level. They want to earn more money and are willing to work for it. There are a few people who are, however, willing to live in poverty without working.

Poverty, it seems to me (I am no expert; I am just a cottonwood tree) has three causes. First, the environment—simply not having enough money. The second is human nature. Some people are just lazy. These are often people who are mentally challenged. Third is the interaction. That is, when there is not enough money, the mentally challenged people will suffer more than the people who are capable of handling the complexities of everyday life. These mentally challenged people prefer to raid garbage cans and leave piles of garbage to mark their territories. I have seen this many times, since I live right at the ede of a ditch called Joe Creek in Tulsa. Here is one of Stan’s photos from 2018.

Giving free money to everyone seems like just a way of throwing away money. But here is why this is not true.

First. The American approach is to distinguish between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. What the United States does at all levels of government is to spend a lot of money, a lot, to hunt down the undeserving poor, such as welfare cheats. They even hire people to search Facebook to see if any welfare recipients are spending money on things that they should not. This is the approach upon which conservatives insist.

Second. If someone lies around without food or water or shelter, they might die. We will not let this happen. If a homeless person (or, as the French say, sans-abri, shelterless) is dying, we (usually the local government) sends out emergency rescue.

When you add those two things together, the costs of hunting down and penalizing the undeserving and of emergency rescue, add up to a lot more money than would be wasted by just giving everyone a minimum income. That is, the conservative approach (don’t give anyone free money) is more expensive than giving them free money.

Let me tell you a story of what I saw. A homeless man, who was obviously mentally challenged, was laying or lying down in a pile of garbage right at the base of my trunk. It was not clear whether he had passed out, suffered a stroke, or was simply sleeping. Someone must have called the emergency number, because a big fire truck came roaring and jangling out to him. He got up and started jumping and yelling and telling the emergency crew that he was just sleeping. They left, this time without sirens.

It is nearly certain that the administrative costs (keeping police and welfare records) plus the cost of those big fire engines must greatly exceed the amount of money that would be spent just giving the man a couple of thousand dollars a month.

Hunting down the undeserving poor and blaming them seems like the right thing to do. It seems unfair to give people money for doing nothing. Blaming lazy people may be the right and just thing to do, but it is more expensive than just handing out money. The right solution may be to kick lazy people off of public assistance, but the practical solution is just to give them enough money to barely survive.

A couple of days after the homeless man left his trash nest by my trunk, the city spent a few thousand more dollars to send out trucks to clean up the garbage he left behind. Three trucks and about six men. And they didn’t get all the trash. They left a lot. Your tax dollars at work!

Yours, not mine. I’m just a cottonwood tree. I make my own food from sunlight and from the nutrients that leach out from the garbage on the ground.

Thanks, Stan, for letting me post on your blog.

Starting Humanity Over

Only a few decades later than the rest of you, I finally got around to reading Lord of the Flies by William Golding. This is the classic novel of a bunch of young boys on a desert island in the Pacific who did not know whether they would ever be rescued. They chose a chief, who tried to get them to build a fire on the mountaintop as a signal to passing ships. However, a renegade chief influenced most of the boys to murder two of the others and to pursue the original chief in order to, it is implied, impale him on a stick. In the process of becoming murderers, the boys also burned down the forests of their island which were their only source of food.

This story directly addresses the question of whether violence is a natural part of the human mind or is something that is learned, a very hot debate at the time Golding wrote the novel and, strangely enough, still debated. Those who thought (or think) that violence is learned might have guessed that these innocent boys would have developed into a peaceful society. But the boys created a society more vicious than the war-torn world from which they had come. The clear message is that hitting the reset button, starting over, in human history, even if it were possible, would not create a utopia, and would be very likely to produce something much worse than modern civilization which at least has a few traditions that restrain savagery.

The Bible has very similar stories. Adam and Eve were in a perfect garden (in which the only thing to eat was fruit) very much like Golding’s island. Adam and Eve could not be satisfied there, however. And, as in Golding’s novel, one of the results of the rejection of paradise is hunting and meat consumption. So humankind started over, this time outside the Garden. Perhaps the most famous Bible story of all was about God pressing the reset button on humankind by destroying everyone in the world except Noah’s family, whom he considered to be perfectly righteous. But this didn’t work. Very soon after Noah’s family emerged from the Ark, Noah got drunk and his family was torn apart by intrigue (with a sexual overtone). Then God pressed the reset button again: this time, destroying Sodom and Gomorrah while rescuing Lot and his daughters. But they had hardly escaped into the mountains before they involved themselves in intrigues presumably as bad as anything they had left behind in the wicked cities. Then God pressed the reset button again, leading the Israelites out of captivity and into the wilderness to start their own new and righteous society, which failed at every step. Finally, God pressing the reset button to start Israel over again in the time of Nehemiah worked about as well as the previous attempts. These stories are some of the epic tales upon which western civilization is based.

Our evolutionary ancestry assures that every human society, large or small, isolated from or connected to others, will have conflict that results from competition and the desire for domination. Leaving a burning hulk of Earth behind and starting over on a new planet somewhere else in the galaxy would likewise fail. Evolutionary science has at least revealed to us that these destructive behaviors are not mindless evil but are the result of natural selection and are therefore understandable even if not excusable.

Thomas More and Communism, part two

In the previous essay, I described how the sixteenth-century Catholic scholar Sir Thomas More proposed (indirectly, through a fictitious traveler named Raphael Hythloday) a perfect, communistic society. But More went further than just describing the perfect society. He criticized European societies, including the England in which he lived.

European societies, More indicated, made common people suffer. More asked whether having someone on their knees before you make your knees hurt less. How can someone else’s pain lessen yours?

More described the people of Utopia as doing things that would even today draw sharp criticism from conservatives. People voted for their church leaders and there were even a few female priests (something that even today the Catholic Church does not do). Utopia had state-sanctioned euthanasia. Adultery was punished but divorce permitted, thus removing the need for lawyers. (More was a lawyer.) More even admired Utopian courtship. Before marriage, the affianced partners got to look at each other naked so that they would know what they are getting.

War was unknown in Utopia. How did the Utopians manage this? They offered rewards to people from enemy nations who would betray the enemy.

More said that the Utopians were originally pagans but embraced Christianity. However, they banished any Christians who were intolerant of other viewpoints.

Above all, Utopia was a communist society, just like early Christian communities described in the second chapter of Acts. “Though no man owns anything, yet every man is rich.” And yet the rich in England, said More, were not as happy as any of the Utopians. Many sins die when money dies, said More. Wherever people starve, he said, the rich have full barns. He said that it was better “…to be rid of innumerable cares and troubles than to be besieged with great riches.” In England, wealth was measured by how much discomfort it causes to others. He described the love of wealth as a “hell-hound” that “creeps into men’s hearts…”

More has the fictitious Raphael Hythloday criticize sixteenth-century England in these words: “For what justice is this, that a rich…userer [banker]…or to be brief, any one of those who either do nothing at all, or else something that is not very necessary to the commonwealth, should have a pleasant and wealthy living, either in idleness, or in unnecessary business, when meanwhile poor laborers, carters, ironsmiths, carpenters, and plowmen, by such great and continual toil, as beasts of burden are scarce able to sustain, and again such necessary toil that without it no commonwealth would be able to continue and endure one year, yet get so hard and poor a living and live so wretched and miserable a life that the state and condition of the laboring beasts may seem much better and more comfortable? [That was one sentence, but a powerful one.—HA] For they [the animals] are not put to such continual labor, nor is there living much worse; yea, for them it is much pleasanter, for they take no thought in the meantime for the future. But these ignorant, poor wretches [humans] are now tormented with barren and unfruitful labor, and the remembrance of their poor, indigent, and beggarly old age kills them off. For their daily wage is so little that it will not suffice for the same day, much less yield any overplus that may daily be laid up for the relief of old age.”

Of course, More could simply say, “Oh, Raphael said that; I just wrote down his words.” Take that, Harry.

To summarize, More (through Hythloday) is saying, Rich people do very little that is valuable to the nation as a whole, while the poor work as hard as they can, doing jobs that are necessary for the survival of our nation, under conditions that would be considered abusive to animals, and cannot even earn a living wage, much less save up for retirement. The only thing missing from this statement to make it applicable almost five hundred years after it was written is that today the rich people accuse the poor of being lazy. Or at least, in Mitt Romney’s case, 47 percent of them. Today, as in 1516, bankers play around with other people’s money and lose a lot of it, woopsie, and still receive million-dollar bonuses.

I realize that there is likely to be no way that natural selection, whether biological or cultural, could produce a sustainable state of communism. More’s Utopia is a fantasy land easily invasible (I think that’s a word) by selfish people. But it might work on a small scale. More, after all, based his Utopia on vague stories he had heard about Native American tribes. My Cherokee ancestors really did hold all their land in common. More even located Utopia in a vaguely American geographical location.

If you have a better idea, leave a comment. Let’s talk.

Thomas More and Communism, part one

As I explained in an essay on another blog, The world appears to be heading toward a nation and world in which rich people do little work, and poor people are desperate. What can we do to prevent this? The only solution just might be communism.

I do not mean Marxist communism. Marx’s ideas have been demonstrated to be wrong. And both Leninist and Maoist communism failed. One important reason that they failed is that they were not really communism. They were simply oppression. Stalin and Mao lived in luxury. The only thing Marxist about them is that they should have quoted Groucho Marx and said that they would refuse to join any club that would have them as members.

No, the kind of communism that I refer to was described by one of the most famous Catholic scholars of all time: Sir Thomas More (St. Thomas More to you Catholics). You have heard of him. He was the scholar who would not consent to Henry VIII divorcing Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Ann Boleyn. Fat King Harry would not just leave More alone in the silence that he maintained on the subject, but had him beheaded. You can learn about this story by watching the best movie ever made, A Man for All Seasons. The Paul Scofield version is infinitely better than the Charleton Heston version.

Catholics have not generally (except for some Liberation Theologians) been associated with communism. Nor, before Pope Francis, were they likely to criticize rich capitalists. But wait till you hear this.

In his 1516 book Utopia, Thomas More described a fictitious land in which life was perfect, something that More said he wished more than hoped for. This book is where the term “utopia” came from, and it could mean either “good place” or “noplace” depending on which Greek derivation you chose. More meant it both ways. More put his opinions into the mouth of the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, rather than to publish them as his own opinion. That way More could claim that he was simply reporting what this man told him about Utopia and what this man said about England. Below, when I refer to what More said, I mean that he said them through Hythloday.

Utopia was a city in which every man has abundance. More modeled the city of Utopia after the Biblical city foursquare but also after Marco Polo’s Hangzhou, with wide streets, bridges and canals. As in Plato’s utopia, nobody locked their doors. At the time, England had 15-hour workdays, from 5 am to 8 pm, but in More’s Utopia they only worked six hours (this is still more than they worked in Oz). Despite such short workdays, all the necessary work got done because nobody was idle—there were no monks or nobles sitting around and consuming resources while producing nothing of value. Only the essentials were produced, nothing superfluous. The recreation of the Utopian people was learning at home. And there were socially-imposed population limits. If a family had too many kids they had to leave Utopia. Everything was free at the markets since nobody took more than he needed. Hospitals were ample and clean, with isolation wards to prevent contagion. They all ate together in cafeterias, because they loved to eat good food together rather than bad food at home. Even in hospitals, women nursed their own children (unlike B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two). Everyone needed permission to travel, but if a visitor stayed more than a day, he had to work where he was visiting. Nobody had much privacy in More’s Utopia (this sounds like Cuba to me). There was no bank credit, only public credit. Gold had no value to them, unlike iron, air, water, and earth, which are useful. In Utopia, diamonds were for kids to play with. Foreign ambassadors would come wearing a lot of gold, and were mistaken for fools. More pointed out that in England someone with the wits of an ass could rule good people because he had gold. More pointed out that Plato and Francis Bacon also said gold is worthless. Why should anyone admire gold, opined More. Everyone can enjoy the sun and stars for free! Why should anyone admire wool? A sheep once wore it. The counterfeit jewel looks the same as the real one. The Utopians did not wear fancy clothes. With fancy clothes, said More, you “do doubly err,” thinking your clothes are better (which is mere convention) and thinking yourself better for wearing them.

In the next essay, I will continue describing Thomas More’s view of a perfect society, and which might be the only society that can allow the world to avoid massive future crisis.