Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Dostoevsky Ponders the Fate of Humanity Amidst Riches

Notes from the Underground, Chapter VIII:

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat. . . . 

Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? 

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. 

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? 

Ever since modernity opened up the prospect of a world without want, people have been asking what such a world would be like. A great many of them have agreed with Dostoyevsky: that we would blow up the whole thing rather than let social engineers contrive our happiness.

I am not sure how true that is, but it is certainly true in part. Our relationship to peace and prosperity is complicated and sometimes perverse. 

If you consider science fiction, you find that the optimistic kind is mostly about exploration: sailing between stars, these authors suggest, we will find wonders and horrors enough to keep us from blowing our civilization to pieces. Staying on earth with replicators and holodecks is too awful to contemplate.

You might consider Asimov's Foundation series a response to this passage; what if our learning were so great that we could really predict our future? That we could even predict when we would rebel against the predictions and try to overthrow them? Because we absolutely would.

One reason I sometimes find my fellow human baffling is that I believe, very deeply, that we are not capable of perfection. I hope for a better world; I believe in working for a better world. But I find the idea of perfection both impossible and intolerable. Whenever anyone says something like G.W. Bush's "we will rid the world of evil" or a call to "eliminate sexism" I shudder. But "Let's strive to keep our problems within reasonable bounds" doesn't make much of a battle cry.

I have an acquaintance who is a revolutionary socialist. He seems, so far as I can tell, to be a mostly reasonable person. He has acknowledged, in response to my prodding, that past revolutions have at best achieved modest gains in welfare at very high cost. He admits that many revolutions have made the world worse. And yet he continues to believe we must have another, because he finds the current state of the world intolerable. He finds it unbearable that anyone goes hungry in a world with billionaires, that any woman anywhere is kept from her dreams by male oppression, that any child is abused, that any species be driven to extinction. Since our current system cannot fix these problems, we must have a revolution, and if that fails we must keep having them until the suffering is over.

Talking to him makes me feel callous and cruel. What is my excuse for not being constantly angry about the state of the world, for not devoting my every waking moment to improving it? But I have to admit that I do not find the dream of utopia appealing at any level. Even if we could achieve it, which I do not believe we could, we would just blow it up and start over again, because struggling is what we do.

3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

If you consider science fiction, you find that the optimistic kind is mostly about exploration: sailing between stars, these authors suggest, we will find wonders and horrors enough to keep us from blowing our civilization to pieces. Staying on earth with replicators and holodecks is too awful to contemplate.

This is a very flawed read on science fiction, or at least on the specific example provided.

In Star Trek, the vast bulk of people DO just stay on earth (or other comparable planets) with replicators and holodecks, and they find their lives anything BUT awful.

Only a very small percentage of people in the Federation join the Federation Starfleet. They are the most ambitious, most driven, most restless individuals who want either to have a little "adventure" or to achieve some specific personal goal - usually in the vein of exploratory or research endeavors.

The population numbers in a fictional universe naturally vary depending on who is writing what story at what point in time, but readily available information suggests that the Federation as a whole (encompassing all the various races across 150+ planets) has somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion citizens in the later eras of the series.

Starfleet itself only has a few tens of thousands of ships at most - some very large with crews reaching several thousand at the highest end, but most much smaller, with crews ranging in the hundreds down to the dozens. Even if we generously assume the average crew size is 500 and the total fleet size is 30,000 ships, that only gives you 15,000,000 crew members. If we are further generous and assume another 15,000,000 in support personnel operating starbases, shipyards, administrative centers, etc, that still only brings us up to 30 million people in Star Fleet.

Divide 30 million into 1 trillion, and you get 0.003% of the population in Starfleet.

Statistically speaking, you have to be an incredibly rare kind of person to NOT prefer to just stay at home with your replicators and holodecks, living in an idyllic utopia where you can pursue literally any interest you wish at a whim, unbeholden to the restrictions of finances, resources, or even physics itself.

G. Verloren said...

1/2

Talking to him makes me feel callous and cruel. What is my excuse for not being constantly angry about the state of the world, for not devoting my every waking moment to improving it? But I have to admit that I do not find the dream of utopia appealing at any level. Even if we could achieve it, which I do not believe we could, we would just blow it up and start over again, because struggling is what we do.

"Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."

Let's say we manage to create, and then soon after blow up, a utopia. So what?

Isn't a utopia that exists for a short time, and the lessons learned in its creation and destruction, far better than stagnation and ignorance? Isn't striving for betterment, even if it impossible to reach "perfection", far better than apathy and indifference to human misery and evils?

You don't find utopia appealing on any level? I find that hard to believe.

Every year, over nine million people worldwide starve to death - three million of them children. "Utopia" would feed those people and save their lives. Does that honestly have no appeal to you? I don't want to believe that could possibly be true about you. I think you are just not looking beyond your own tidy, comfortable little life, and considering how improving the lives of others might in turn benefit you.

But let's consider just your own life - suppose aliens showed up tomorrow and enforced global peace and gave us technology to eliminate scarcity, effectively handing us utopia on a silver platter. How could that -possibly- negatively affect your life as it stands?

You are an archaeologist who enjoys his vocation. How could a post-scarcity situation negatively impact your work? If anything, it would make your job easier - surely there are many projects you have wished you could undertake (or undertake faster / more thoroughly / etc) that would benefit from having effectively unlimited resources? What discoveries could you make, what knowledge could you uncover, if you didn't have to worry so much about budgets and equipment, and if you had far more manpower to assist (provided by all the would-be archaeologists out there who were never able to pursue such a career because of their own scarcity-induced life obstacles, but who could do so given the freedom of a utopia)?

You are married and have children. How could a post-scarcity situation negatively impact your family life? If anything, it would contribute positively to it - not having to dedicate untold hours of your lives to the daily grind of life, and instead having time to devote to more meaningful interpersonal matters. What hobbies or studies would your loved ones pursue if scarcity was no longer a concern? Where in the world would your family like to travel to, not needing to spend the majority of your time winning bread and paying bills?

Can you honestly going to tell me you prefer a life devoted to the rat race, where you have to compromise on all the people and things you care about most in order to earn a paycheck, fill your pantry, and keep a roof over your head? That utopia holds no appeal to you personally, let alone the appeal of living in a world where millions of innocent children don't starve to death annually?

No, I prefer to think you suffer from a failure of imagination, rather than a failure of morality or empathy. Utopia in no way would lessen your life - it could only improve upon it or leave it exactly as it already is - so I can't comprehend how it could actually hold no appeal to your at all.

Even if "struggling is what we do", there's nothing stopping you from finding plenty of things to struggle with even within a utopia.

G. Verloren said...

2/2

To continue the Star Trek metaphor, consider the opening scenes of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. We see Captain Kirk spending his free time in Yosemite National park, free climbing El Capitan, simply for the sake of doing it. "I'm not trying to break any records", he explains to Spock, who is hovering effortless in midair upon a pair of jetboots, "I'm doing this because I enjoy it. Not to mention the most important reason for climbing a mountain ... Because it's there."

Kirk is struggling to climb a mountain with his bare hands, devoid of any climbing gear or even protective equipment, risking his own death at the first slip, despite the fact that he could have a pair of jetboots just like Spock's, or could simply use a transporter to be beamed directly to the summit of the mountain, or could be safe and sound doing the exact same thing virtually in a holodeck. Why? Precisely because he wants the very struggle you seem to romanticize!

Does utopia get in the way of him getting his struggle? No! You makes his own challenges! He sets the bar where he chooses, imposing his own obstacles and limitations, rather than having them thrust upon him from outside by circumstance, scarcity, deprivation, and misfortune! Kirk is a man with ready access to every material good he could want, and yet he doesn't suffer from a lack of challenge! He has a monstrous thirst for adventure that he fulfills for himself.

He's a man who doesn't believe in a no-win scenario; a man who prefers to write his own rules, and who is able to do so precisely because he isn't held back by dystopia. If you took Kirk out of his utopian society and dropped him off on present day Earth, he'd certainly not suffer from a lack of challenge, but he wouldn't be anywhere near as fulfilled, because the challenges would be devoid of meaning.

Working nine to five in the daily grind to pay the bills? Putting aside money every paycheck to go toward the mortgage on his house? Spending forty minutes a day commuting to and from work, stopping for gas, stopping for groceries, picking up the kids from school, etc? Kirk wouldn't find such things to be "challenges", but annoyances keeping him from pursuing goals he actually cares about!

No one is "challenged" by the tedium and meniality of daily life! If you could have a replicator in your home and a transporter to send you anywhere on the planet in seconds, you would absolutely leap at the chance, because it eliminates the unfulfilling parts of life and leaves more time to spend on what actually matters.