Idea of Ideal Societies - Research Paper Example

IDEAL SOCIETY The idea of ideal societies or utopias have been with humans for as long as we have been around. People always believe that another better world is possible. However, throughout history the pursuit of utopias have led to human disasters. Politics, the process by which society is remodeled, is a complicated business and is best described as the art of the possible. Utopias are impossible and therefore extra-political means (usually killing large numbers of people) are required to try to create them. In the course of this essay, I will examine some thinkers' opinions on this issue, beginning with work in the 18th century. Plato was on of the first people to come up with the idea of an ideal state. He thought such a place could be created by letting philosopher kings, or those who love truth, govern everyone else. These people may have been wise, but they would clearly centralize power in their own hands. If they tried to direct the economy based on their own limited knowledge, they would cause serious problems. The notion of an all-knowing benevolent ruler who would create the perfect society is a fairy tale. This idea is sadly below someone like Plato's intelligence. But he was far from the last person to consider this issue. The Enlightenment was a remarkable time in human history. For many years, humans had lived in an intellectual or cultural “dark ages” where very little changed and people were wedded to their superstitions. Centuries went by and nothing really progressed. Instead of testing the world around them they simply accepted what clergymen or monarchs told them was true and left it at that. They didn’t test their limits; they just read old books and believed the facts in them. But this state of affairs could not last forever. There is an impulse, a curiosity, in humans that seeks sensible explanations. In the 17th century the Enlightenment began. Motivated by trade, the printing press, and a number of very significant intellectual leaders, this period of history saw a lot of the superstitions that guided people’s lives beaten back. Thinkers like Diderot, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson revolutionized the way we think about the world and our place in it. Scientific innovation was also telling us more and more about our world, was exposing the fact that it was not run by ghosts and gods. Things began to change dramatically. People believed that a better world could be created through reason. The first utopians became famous. The power of science was very important to the Enlightenment and to its idea that utopias were possible. Science was the process people used to explain the world to themselves and it was really coming into its own. People like Galileo had shown us that the moon was not a perfect sphere and that the patterns of the other planets were not quite as perfect as once thought. People began to think that the world was knowable not by divine revelation but through scientific reasoning and measurement. They took up their slide rules and went to their labs to try to explain things. This was a positive thing. But some people also began to applying strict science to things like politics or race—concepts that can easily be distorted by so-called “reason.” There is a very real argument that reason led directly to the horrors of Communism, for example. People went too far: they believed everything could be determined by reason and that reason could create a utopia. This is a powerful argument. Indeed, the Communists thought man was perfectible through reason. They thought they could socially engineer the world: take control of everyone’s choices and personal lives and decide what was right and what was wrong. Even today there are countries that promote and follow this principle. For example, China’s one-child policy is an excessive product of reason. The solution to a problem is to hand over all power to the government to fix it based on the latest scientific thinking. This Chinese policy has not worked and instead has caused a great deal of suffering. The problem occurs when people think they can know everything or that they know best. They become egomaniacal and try to control everything. This may not be a direct product of the Enlightenment—for example, these principles were followed by clergyman as well—but it is a unique and horrible aspect of humanity. We can see this present in certain countries to this day: such as North Korea, China, and Cuba. They have little or no respect for human rights and believe they have stripped away all the traditions and myths that held people back. In fact, they have created unliveable countries for their people. The truth is that utopias are unachievable. In his famous article, Max Weber explains why he believes politics is the art of the possible. Very few single-issue or ideological people can win top office because politics is largely about building coalitions. If you take power and only respond to a small group of the population and refuse to compromise or be pragmatic whatsoever, it is unlikely you will last very long. Additionally, he writes about the qualities required to be a good stateman. Weber also talks about the state as having a monopoly on the use of force, an idea that comes from Hobbes. We see this as especially true today in police states such as North Korea and Iran. In the course of this essay Weber talks about how a state can control its people. He looks at the mechanism and function of a polity’s administration. Organized domination, which calls for continuous administration, requires that human conduct be conditioned to obedience towards those masters who claim to be the bearers of legitimate power. On the other hand, by virtue of this obedience, organized domination requires the control of those material goods which in a given case are necessary for the use of physical violence (Weber 3). This is part of a great debate in political science: how much control should people cede to their government? How much control should the state take in the best interests of its people? Plato thought if you just gave smart philosopher kings all the power they would always make the right moves. Indeed, some people believe in socialism and that everyone must be made equal by the government, the tall cut down and the short pulled up; others believe in a meritocracy where those people who have talent and work hard are rewarded for their labours. Is there a way to combine these two ideas? It might be possible, but it is unlikely that this “best of both worlds” approach would yield a society as productive as one that fully embraced individual freedom and capitalism. Thomas Hobbes, for example, is most famous for his book Leviathan, and he is a writer who Weber relies on for some of his thought about state control and sovereignty. In Leviathan, Hobbes argued that a “war of all against all” existed in nature and that people were mostly motivated by fear and distrust and that peoples’ motivations all conflicted with each other. The only way for order to prevail, Hobbes argued, would be through an absolute sovereign. Only a figure of immense power could guarantee the sorts of contracts people required with one another to live in peace. As Hobbes wrote, “The passions that incline men to peace, are fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them” (Hobbes, 46). He believed that because people would do everything possible to preserve their lives and maximize their prosperity, there would be a constant battle between conflicting interests. In order to increase the order and prosperity of society as a whole, an absolute sovereign would have to make some minimum guarantees: namely, peace and the upholding of contracts. In this view of the world ethics must be imposed on human beings who are just animals red in tooth and claw and who live lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” While there is certainly some truth to what Hobbes says regarding human beings, other political thinkers have questioned elements of his vision. Indeed there are several flaws in this theory, but it shows us that it is not possible for people to effectively work as a commune. That does not mean we need a dictator to control things, but it does mean we need a strong rule of law to protect individual freedoms. The rule of law is effectively the latter-day sovereign. It serves the same purpose: it protects contracts and business and prevents the seizure of power by socialist radicals. This is a point that Weber mostly agrees with, but he focuses a bit more on how the state is administered at the top: does it make a difference, for example, is the top members of the government have a stake in the state or if all power is centralized in the figure of the king or president? There is no easy answer to this question. Sources Hobbes, Thomas. Excerpt from Leviathan. In Pojman, Louis P. The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Weber, Max. “Politics as Vocation.” White, Joseph. “Uncle Sam enters the debate.” Wall Street Journal. June 23, 2009. Read More