How to get to Utopia
Creating “the best” society has been a goal and promise of almost all “great” societies, religions, philanthropists and political movements. Given their incredibly diverse spectrum of ideas and prescriptions about how to get there, they all have a stunning similarity: inevitably, they created horrible suffering.
Why did they all fail spectacularly?
We saw in my latest post that facts can not be used as justification for moral norms. We are the designers of our moral systems. But unfortunately, nothing can take that burdening decision away from us. Even if we didn’t choose consciously in favor for a certain system, we’d be choosing and accepting the resulting anomie.
We just can’t not choose a system.
So if we have to choose something, what should it be? For millenia people have proposed certain moral guidelines to get to the best society.
We have got a lot of different answers: sacrificing children, beheading the infidels, burning the witches, starving the Kulaks, following the Fuehrer.
Incomprehensible suffering has been brought on the world in pursuit of the good. How can human beings get it so wrong? How can they be so blind? How can they be so monstrous?
There are different attempts to explaining this: certain explanations, like ascribing a certain kind of wickedness to the perpetrators are convenient. “I would never do anything like that! So they must be evil!”. Well, I can’t read minds, but it seems pretty obviously to me, that those perpetrators didn’t do something they were convinced was evil and morally rotten. So were their reasoning capacities somehow defective? Possibly. But it seems statistically rather unlikely to me, that brains of millions of people were suddenly all damaged in a way so similar, that the they ended up with the same defective moral system, yet were able to maintain a functioning society. Not impossible, but rather unlikely.
So if they were not born evil and didn’t all have defective brains, how did they end up doing all that evil stuff anyway?
There are a lot of factors that are likely contributors; certain societal dynamics, recently suffered societal trauma, the state of technology, randomly preexisting myths, rumors, superstitions and stereotypes, climatic changes, natural disasters. The list could go on and on for possible co-founding variables. Given enough variables, I think it will be easy to construct plausible sounding explanations for any particular historical badness. And we will be right back to where we started; having no idea what we could do differently or how we could make sure that we are not caught in our own bubble of groupthink and societal inertia and doing things that later generations will find inexplicably and inexcusably horrible, while we see nothing wrong with it at all.
Possible candidates for the developed world in 2020: how we treat animals, people and especially children in the developing world, our natural habitat, addicts and people of low economic value.
It’s sobering to imagine that our great-grandchildren might look at the way we live our lives with the same disgust we have for the denizens of the era of slavery.
Of course I will not get away with criticizing a certain set of explanations for the failure of utopian movements to produce anything but blood and tears, without offering something else. So here we go: I think all those movements failed, because they committed a categorical error:
They used goals instead of systems
What I mean by that is that all of them had a preconceived notion of a far distant state of society they imagined to be ideal for producing human happiness. It would be just Aryan or egalitarian or pious enough to bring about Utopia.
Once the goal was set — and who in their right mind could argue against achieving Utopia? — all sacrifices were worth it. What is temporary suffering compared to eternal bliss or a workers’ paradise? How can we tolerate witches in our midst just one more second? And so people began to work towards the realization of societies’ goals with the full thrust of righteous motivation.
But how did they measure where they were going? How did they test their ideas? If your goal is eternal bliss in the afterlife, how do you even know, if you are moving in the right direction? Is a plague that literally decimates your population, a horrible event of epical proportions? Or is it godly intervention for immoral life styles?
Are millions of deaths worth it to achieve socialism (national or international)? How many sacrifices would you want to tolerate to get to the workers’ paradise? What amount of deaths are you willing to tolerate? Name your number!
A rigid goal set by a small elite for some time far in the future, which “unfortunately demands sacrifices” in the here and now is a humongously stupid idea. I am not saying the people pursuing these ideals are stupid. I am not even saying it doesn’t sound appealing or that some utopian ideas don’t have any sway over me: how cool will a full-fletched Dyson swarm with trillions of O’Neill cylinders be? Or even more gigantic mega-structures? A world without hunger? A world without war? Sign me up!
But we need to be careful, if we don’t want to repeat the failure of the past and I propose to borrow a battle tested idea from economists:
Discounting
If you remind yourself that a dollar today is a dollar, but a dollar tomorrow is slightly less, you will see that a dollar, or other potential benefit, in 1, 100, or 1000 years might not be as valuable, as you initially think it is.
Applying this method will emphasize tangible effects today in contrast to potential things that might happen sometime in an undefined and undefinable future.
Another idea from the realm of economics is prioritization:
Given limited resources, do what matters most.
And to dodge the criticism that this is hollow, I’ll argue, in line with Karl Popper and John Rawls, that not focusing on producing the greatest possible human happiness, but reducing the worst suffering will yield the best results.
Great sources of human suffering like food insecurity, lack of access to portable water, medical services, sanitation and education, political disenfranchisement, parasites and communicable diseases or pollutants are easily identifiable and relatable. Add things like war and changing climate patterns and you got yourself an awful long list of horrible things that need fixing.
It is encouraging to see the rise of movements like William MacAskill’s “Doing Good Better” or the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which try to prioritize the most urgent needs: distributing vitamins to children, eradicating tuberculosis, getting women access to family planning, paying parents to keep their children in school etc.
It is sometimes frustrating to realize how cheap it would be to fix some of the things on that list. But I am very grateful that these organizations exist and do their work despite sometimes fierce opposition.
Why is this approach better? Because it is a system! I can’t do better than Scott Adams in “How to fail at almost everything and still win big” to describe the benefits of a system, but here are the main points:
You can work on it every day,
each contribution brings an immediate, measurable effect,
you are automatically working on the most urgent things that need fixing, if you discount the costs and benefits.
you are flexible enough to adapt to new technologies and challenges
Is it ideal? Of course not!
You will have fierce debates about how to “correctly measure” the suffering or the “exact” cost-benefit analysis of a certain intervention like accelerating HIV vaccine research vs. working on implementing a carbon tax. MacAskill for example is often citing a measure, which I happen to find particularly useful: the QALY, or quality-adjusted life year. It is an empirically adjusted measure that asks sufferers of different conditions, how they would rate their life experience. If the average blind person rates it at let’s say 40% and we can provide a blind 20 year old with a surgery to make him see, that individual will statistically live for another 50 years with an expected quality increase of 60% points. So this surgery would generate 30 QALY. On the other hand a person living with AIDS and without antiretroviral therapy might rate her life at 50% and and give a rating of 90% to living with HIV and the therapy. You might increase the life expectancy of a 40 year old by 5 years, which would give you 90% x 5y = 4.5 QALY.
We can’t predict the future. So we will never be exactly right with our costs and benefits estimates. And once we change our behavior, we will never be able to establish what would have happened, had we acted differently. We just don’t have access to alternative versions of history and reality.
What matters is that we don’t get it too wrong. We need to be directionally accurate.
But debate is healthy. It changes the frame from imagining a perfect world, where all problems can be tackled simultaneously and without resource constraints to a more realistic setting, where not everything that might be desirable can be done.
It will force people to do research and conduct randomized trails to gain credible numbers for succeeding in the debate, as everybody will want to scrutinize the data of whatever other solutions got ranked higher.
It will turn philanthropy and development assistance into something more reminiscent of a scientific and empirical endeavor.
So how do we get to a better place? By implementing a system that eliminates the greatest sources of suffering!
It will take time. It will use methods you did not anticipate of even necessarily like. But it will get you there. Each and every day.
Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?