What If Society Can't Get Much Better?
We have grown accustomed to judging society by its failures. Wars, violence, mental illness, loneliness, political radicalization, broken families, inequality, failing schools, drugs, crime. The list can be extended almost indefinitely. Open a newspaper in the morning and you could easily conclude that the experiment called civilization is approaching its final collapse.
But perhaps we are asking the wrong question.
We keep asking why society does not work better.
We might occasionally ask why it works at all.
The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe did not have an especially flattering view of human beings. He regarded human consciousness as something of an evolutionary excess. We possess mental capacities far beyond what an animal needs to eat, reproduce and avoid being eaten. We know that we are going to die. We can imagine future suffering, relive past suffering, and observe ourselves doing both.
A deer presumably does not stand in a field at three in the morning wondering whether it said something embarrassing at a Christmas party twelve years ago.
A human being can.
Zapffe believed that we therefore developed various strategies simply to endure our own consciousness. We repress, anchor ourselves in beliefs and institutions, keep ourselves busy, distract ourselves, sublimate. Work, family, religion, art, politics and perhaps even philosophy are not merely parts of life. They also help us cope with knowing what life is.
Perhaps psychological stability is not the natural condition of the human animal.
Perhaps it is already an achievement.
And then there is Freud.
Freud was equally suspicious of the idea that we merely had to improve social conditions and eventually happy people would live peacefully alongside one another. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he describes a conflict that cannot simply be organized away. Human beings possess desires, aggressions and impulses whose unrestricted satisfaction is incompatible with peaceful coexistence.
Civilization protects us from one another partly by restraining us.
Discontent, then, is not simply a defect of civilization. Some of it is the price of civilization.
That is an uncomfortable thought for an age inclined to regard almost every social problem as potentially solvable.
We no longer believe much in paradise. We believe rather strongly in reform.
If people are unhappy, something must be changed. If they are aggressive, something must be changed. If groups come into conflict, something must be changed. If inequalities emerge, something must be changed. If people feel lonely, overwhelmed or meaningless, somewhere a social mechanism must have been badly adjusted.
Often that is true.
But what if some of it cannot be fixed?
What if we are searching for institutional solutions to problems that arise partly from the construction of the human being itself?
We speak casually about creating a “better society.” It sounds so obviously reasonable that we hardly notice the assumption hidden inside it: that somewhere ahead of us lies a condition in which the great contradictions of human coexistence gradually disappear.
But why should they?
We can change property relations. We can write constitutions. We can improve education, increase prosperity and treat disease. We can build institutions that limit power and allow conflicts to be settled without violence.
But eventually we have to put human beings back into them.
And that is where the trouble starts.
Human beings are capable of extraordinary generosity and extraordinary cruelty. They can love strangers and hate neighbours. They can formulate universal principles of human dignity while being exquisitely sensitive to status, humiliation, territory and belonging. They form groups almost effortlessly and then become remarkably inventive at finding reasons why their group deserves more than another.
We have now given some of those groups nuclear weapons.
Considering the raw material, one might expect the experiment to have ended long ago.
And yet something almost absurd happens every morning.
Billions of people get up.
They make breakfast. They take their children to school. They go to work. Trains run. Aircraft land. Water comes out of taps. Food travels across continents. Contracts are honoured. Complete strangers transfer money to one another on the assumption that numbers stored in computers will still mean roughly the same thing tomorrow. Millions of people encounter one another every day without killing each other.
This sounds banal.
Perhaps it isn't.
We report a war because war is exceptional. We do not report that nearly two hundred countries failed to start a war with one another today.
We report a murder. We do not report the millions of conflicts that ended without one.
We report the collapse of a government. We do not report the thousands of institutions that functioned boringly and adequately for another day.
Civilization has a terrible public-relations problem.
Its greatest success consists largely of nothing happening.
Seen this way, Hobbes begins to look less primitive than we sometimes imagine. If human beings are not naturally harmonious creatures, the first achievement of political order is not happiness or self-realization. It is creating conditions under which people can live together without constantly resorting to violence.
Everything else comes afterwards.
That sounds like an embarrassingly low ambition. Historically, it is an astonishingly high one.
Our expectations have changed. We no longer expect society merely to provide peace, security and enough to eat. We expect freedom, recognition, equality, psychological well-being, meaningful lives, belonging and social justice.
There is nothing absurd about wanting these things.
But there is a paradox here.
The more successful a society becomes, the easier it may become to experience that society as a failure.
Once starvation becomes unusual, inequality becomes more visible. Once basic security is taken for granted, smaller risks become intolerable. Once rights expand, the rights still missing become more conspicuous. Once many forms of suffering have been reduced, the suffering that remains occupies more of our attention.
The standard moves with the achievement.
A society can become safer, wealthier, healthier and freer while its inhabitants become increasingly convinced that something is fundamentally wrong with it.
Not necessarily because they are foolish or ungrateful.
Because they are no longer comparing their society with the past.
They are comparing it with the possible.
And the possible has an unfair advantage.
It does not have to exist.
That may be the fundamental trick of utopian thinking. Every real society loses when compared with an imaginary one.
The imaginary society has no war, poverty, loneliness, prejudice, addiction, crime or people making catastrophic decisions despite having every opportunity not to.
It has one decisive advantage over every society that has ever existed.
Nobody actually lives there.
Perhaps we therefore need a more modest political philosophy.
Not the best of all possible worlds.
Not the end of history.
Not the perfectly just society that will one day require nothing more than occasional maintenance.
Perhaps a good enough society would already be an extraordinary achievement.
A good enough society does not assume that people are rational. It builds institutions capable of surviving the fact that they often are not.
It does not abolish conflict. It provides ways of conducting conflict without destroying everything around it.
It cannot eliminate aggression, envy, stupidity, fanaticism or despair. It merely prevents them, most of the time, from becoming socially catastrophic.
It does not promise that nobody will fail.
It makes failure survivable.
Perhaps that is already an enormous amount.
Of course societies can improve. History demonstrates that they can. Diseases have been defeated, rights expanded, prosperity increased and forms of oppression abolished that were once considered perfectly normal.
But it does not follow that this process ends somewhere in a perfected society.
We can improve the world without believing that the world can be solved.
That distinction matters.
Because the moment we become convinced that a perfectly rational, just and harmonious society is possible, an awkward question appears:
Why does it not exist?
And sooner or later the answer tends to become:
Because someone is preventing it.
Then the search for the guilty begins.
Perhaps we should therefore be suspicious of political visions that contain no tragedy: ideas in which every form of suffering has an identifiable cause, every cause can be removed, and enough reform will eventually produce a society populated by reasonable people.
Perhaps there is no final condition.
Perhaps there is only this extraordinarily improbable construction that begins again every morning.
Eight billion mortal, neurotic, loving, aggressive, generous, envious, hopeful and occasionally completely insane animals get out of bed and attempt to coexist for another day.
Sometimes they fail spectacularly.
Most of the time they don't.
Perhaps we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps we can still make this one considerably better.
But considering what we have to work with, another observation seems equally justified:
It could be a hell of a lot worse.
And perhaps, before declaring once again that society does not work, we should occasionally stop and wonder about something far stranger:
How the hell does it work at all?