Many of us have a rough idea of what an ideal society would look like. An interesting question is whether or not this idea should govern our assessment of a state of affairs and our view about what should be done to improve it.[1] On this, opinions are likely to differ. I’ve been recently reminded of this while reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s last novel The Ministry for the Future. I’ve only started the book so it’s too soon to give my opinion on it – I can just say that it reads fairly well and is engaging. It is nonetheless clear that the book carries a political message and Robinson’s writing is straightforward about this. In one of the early chapters, Robinson directly addresses the reader about how it is possible to make eight billion people live together on our planet. The message is limpid, and is well summarized in the last paragraph of the chapter:
“To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall. Also, a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast – or better.”[2]
These lines initially caught my attention because of the remark about billionaires – a topic on which I’ve written recently. I’ll not return to the subject here. What is interesting in this paragraph is that it expresses a very clear view of an ideal society, an ideal that would not be only nice to reach but that in Robinson’s (and many others') mind must guide us for the coming decades, on pain of a civilizational collapse.
When we’re reasoning from such an ideal, an obvious difficulty is that while the endpoint may be well-defined, the path to reach it from where we are is generally unclear. Worse, we have no certainty that the ideal society is feasible or – that is the same thing – that there is a feasible path to reach it. What we can call ideal reasoning then presents us with significant danger. Pursuing the ideal comes at the risk of embarking on a path leading us to be locked-in in a bad state of affairs, a path we cannot take backward.
Opposite to ideal reasoning is the comparative mindset. Having a comparative mindset means searching for local improvements based on what Karl Popper was calling “piecemeal engineering”. The comparative mindset displays the following characteristics:
· It is sensible to opportunity costs and tradeoffs of any social change (broadly conceived, i.e., including economic, political, and cultural changes).
· It privileges incremental changes whose marginal welfare and other effects can be assessed with relative confidence.
· Such changes should be triggered and evaluated first through experiments at relatively small scales.
· An eventual idea state does not figure as a piece of relevant information to assess current and feasible states of affairs.
This last point has been especially argued by Amartya Sen in his comparison of “transcendental” and “comparative” theories of justice, the former related to the social contract tradition, the latter constitutive of the social choice approach of normative economists.[3] Sen makes his point with an analogy:
“The possibility of having an identifiable perfect alternative does not indicate that it is necessary, or indeed useful, to refer to it in judging the relative merits of two other alternatives; for example, we may indeed be willing to accept, with great certainty, that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world, completely unbeatable in terms of stature by any other peak, but that understanding is neither needed, nor particularly helpful, in comparing the peak heights of, say, Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley. There would be something deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of supreme alternative.”[4]
If we stick to this analogy, we may add that the situation needs not to worry the ideal reasoner. Indeed, in this case, the “value” of the options (the height of the mountains) and their “distance” with respect to the ideal point (the highest mountain) are captured by a single measure. By implementing “local improvements”, you’re also getting closer to the ideal. But this does not have to be the case and it is probably not with complex systems as human societies and their many dimensions. Here, we may easily imagine that pairwise comparisons leading to local improvements do not at the same time reduce the distance between society and the ideal point.
In this configuration, the comparative mindset may be viewed as contentious. Focusing on local improvements at the margin may engage society on a suboptimal path. Proceeding this way, one can argue, will not make us closer to Robinson’s ideal society because to reach this point, massive and simultaneous changes should be brought. This is of course a traditional argument in favor of the claim that significant and relevant social change must be triggered by revolution.
What are the reasons to favor the comparative mindset then? At least two come to mind. First, as a matter of fact, there will generally be a pervasive disagreement about where the ideal point is located in the multidimensional space that captures the wide range of societies that can be imagined. Disagreement tends to be less important regarding the comparison of neighboring societies. Second, the level of uncertainty is such that we cannot know in advance what are the exact properties of alternative societies, nor of the range of societies potentially feasible. We only perceive a tiny part of the multidimensional space – meaning that our ideal points are only ideal with respect to that part. Even for the societies located in this part, we may disagree about their assessment. Quite significantly, we may also be unable to assess their degree of stability, i.e., whether or not it is possible to “stay” durably at the corresponding coordinate in the space. These factors gain in strength as we are considering societies that are farther from our own that, by definition, we know best.
All this may sound overly conservative, especially when faced with the risk of a civilizational collapse. But that’s precisely the challenge that liberal democracies are now facing. The pursuit of the ideal is hardly compatible with the deep moral and political pluralism of open societies. The (public) justification of policies and institutional change in such a context can only be achieved through the comparative mindset. The resulting changes may be (too) slow and not bring us in what is ultimately the right “direction”. The “tyranny of the ideal” is a threat that many liberal authors of the 20th century have identified. The novelty is that this tyranny is today partially triggered by factors that are no longer under our control. The challenge for 21st-century liberal democracies will be to keep on with the comparative mindset, the one that has brought so much progress for two centuries while responding to the urgency of finding the right path to avoid an environmental catastrophe.
[1] This general question is explored in detail in Gerald Gaus’s book, The Tyranny of the Ideal (Princeton University Press, 2016). I have already discussed Gaus’s account on this issue in a previous post.
[2] K.S. Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), p. 58.
[3] A. Sen, The Idea of Justice (Penguin, 2010).
[4] Ibid., p. 101.
Another great post, Cyril. I really enjoy your writing here.