Andrey Madison. Ditties about utopia. Quatrain third

Ditties about utopia. Quatrain third
Andrei Madison

Date of publication: September 28, 2000

Sergei Zemlyanoy √
with greetings from sunny Nigdeya

If you look at humanity from the hummock of diachrony, that is, simply look back at its history, you can, if you do not make efforts to interpret it, discover that it, this history, is a consistent arena of struggle, and therefore the interaction of two tendencies.

One is progressive, insisting on movement for the sake of movement, on a continuous change of objects of attention for the sake of new impressions and, accordingly, the stimulation of new thoughts, actions and inventions, on the fact that obstacles must be taken, and not given in to them, contemplated or avoided. That is, this is the most active, predominantly extensive position. It is usually associated with the broadly understood Western mentality.

Another tendency is protective, focused not on continuous growth, but on maintaining balance, on “dynamic equilibrium”, preferring deepening into any one of them to changing impressions, accordingly, less active, in “working” with obstacles, inclined towards negotiations or waiting for them to naturally disappear on their own. And it is traditionally associated with the Eastern mentality (although it is not its prerogative).

If you try to summarize both trends into some visually tangible pictures, then it will more or less come down to imagining the first trend in the form of a whip, and the second in the form of reins.

In connection with the dichotomy just outlined, it makes sense to recall another one, namely the dichotomy of positive sum and zero sum. The concept of zero sum, which goes back to game theory, reflects the game situation in a closed system, where the amount of capital is constant and the gain of one can only come at the expense of the loss of others. A clear example of zero sum is recent joint stock companies with their notorious “pyramid”. Unlike zero, a positive sum is possible only in an open system, where the gain of one does not automatically entail the loss of another, but is a consequence of the enrichment of the system itself. It was the positive sum that was the basis of the idea of ​​progress, which made progress the criterion of moral judgments. Adam Smith was the first to recognize and describe this situation.

Slaves, Smith wrote, worked as hard as a civilized man, but were poor. Now, that is, at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, even the poorest worker is provided with the essentials of life.

The philosophical and ethical basis for Smith's reasoning was given by Immanuel Kant, who believed that the antisocial sides of human nature, such as vanity or the thirst for power, are the potential for progress. He believed that civil society was the conductor of this potential. Comparing members of society with trees in the forest, he said that each tree, fighting for air and sun for itself, stimulates other trees to such a fight: as a result, they all “grow slender and beautiful.” Here we must involuntarily note that Kant, apparently “due to an oversight,” forgot to mention the fate of those trees that die in this struggle. Not to mention the fact that his mental experiment did not take into account such a disturbing factor as human intervention.

Another position is represented in the European tradition by the names of Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville and Rousseau.

Thomas Hobbes can be called the forerunner of modern environmental alarmists. Emphasizing silence and safety as the only worthy values, he shunned and was afraid of any changes. To be fair, it must be said that this fear did not stem from cowardice, but from an awareness of the fact that any political changes are predominantly superficial. For example, Hobbes opposed the nascent democracy, defending the more familiar monarchy. Here is the course of his reasoning: “When private citizens, that is, subjects, demand freedom, they essentially, speaking about freedom, demand for themselves not freedom, but domination , without even suspecting this due to their ignorance. After all, if everyone provided others with the same freedom, which he wants for himself..., then that state of nature would return again, in which everyone has the right to do everything, and if people knew that such a state is worse than any submission, they would reject it. But if someone demands freedom only for himself, denying it to everyone else, isn't this a demand for domination? After all, he who is free from all bonds is the master of all others who are fettered by them. Consequently, in a people's, democratic state, the freedom of citizens is no more than in a monarchical" . By the way, Hobbes asked the defenders of democracy, understood as a cystitis of the ease of extraordinary self-expression (with the natural transformation of the television box not even into a Pandora's box, but into a kind of vessel ), by the way, not to worry.

Hobbes' compatriot John Locke was also an enemy of change. His labor theory of value was nothing more than an ethical protest against injustice. Locke's labor is not differentiated, but hard physical labor represents an absolute value for him and is identified with labor in general. In addition, it is deprived of a dynamic component in the form of money, which acts as an absolute evil, outside of its progressive, from the point of view of the same Adam Smith, function. Locke's protective worldview was reflected not only in politics and economics, but also in his theory of education, which in general had a great influence on European pedagogy. Here is a typical passage from Locke's Thoughts on Education: "The pain caused by the rod, once it has been necessary to apply this measure, must be continued to be increased until it prevails; it must first of all break the stubbornness of the child and establish parental authority, and then prudence, combined with affection, should secure it forever.”

Another English thinker, Bernard Mandeville, taking an ethically opposite position, moved, although only partly, in Smith's direction. He justified the unequal income by the level of workers' needs. They are only interested in a piece of bread, said Mandeville, and would work no more than four hours a day if their labor were valued more. Mandeville believed that at the worker-capitalist level it is a zero-sum game.

In the opinion of Adam Smith, who opposed them all, workers strive for prosperity in the same way as capitalists, and just like them, they benefit from progress. In his opinion, high wages in developed countries do not in any way reduce labor productivity, and poverty in backward countries is combined with extremely low productivity there.

Hobbes, Locke and Mandeville, and, perhaps, other critics of capitalism are united by a fear of the unpredictable nature of the changes inherent in the transition to it, a sense of the absolute opposition of the material and moral dimensions of life, and an attitude towards social inequality as a consequence of social inequality.

The originality of Rousseau's thinking gave him the opportunity to break through the stereotypes of his time to understand the nature of the cultural process. Jean-Jacques believed that the natural intellectual inequality of people is primarily “to blame” for their unequal abilities to achieve well-being in life. Arguing that material progress reinforces this inequality, he thereby characterized progress as a phenomenon inseparable from human intellectual development.

However, it was precisely the latter, that is, this very “intellectual development” that was questioned - and by none other than Rousseau’s colleague in the Age of Enlightenment, Marie Francois Voltaire. Most of the immensely large and tediously voluminous thing that he wrote is already outdated, apparently forever, but the rust of time is unlikely to soon touch his tiniest work - “The Story of a Brahmin”, which to retell would only spoil it, which I do not I’ll think about doing it, although, of course, I am aware that this is a hidden form of advertising. (She, however, like the people, is far from the technique that one St. Petersburg newspaper used in 1905: first it published the slogan “Long live the r┘!”, then “Long live the r┘!”, then “Long live the roar┘!” " and finally, "Long live the Revel sprat!" The newspaper's circulation during this time jumped fabulously.)

The problem posed by Voltaire is one of those that humanity has been solving throughout its history. On the one hand, Ecclesiastes with his “all is vanity of vanities” and “in much wisdom there is much sorrow,” on the other hand, the Chinese god of happiness, round, shining, for whom no matter what happens, everyone is happy. Who to be? The Utopians believed that they could unambiguously deal with this problem by simply removing the contradiction by an effort of will. In their own minds, constructing projects for utopian societies, they ascribed unfading happiness to their members, guided, apparently, by something like Barmaley’s final threat in “Aibolit-66”: they say, either you will all be happy, or we will burn the ram’s horn.

For example, Charles Fourier, at first glance, was sadly aware that people “will always be guided only by the love of wealth and pleasure.” Nevertheless, he immediately asserted that “a people so deceitful and so rude under the structure of civilization,” if organized on the principles he proposed, would certainly become “sparkling with truthfulness and courtesy.” Fourier states: “Every worker is at war with the masses and is unfavorable due to personal interest. The doctor wishes his fellow citizens good fevers, and the attorney wishes good litigation in every family.”

Fourier intends to cope with all these “civilized” vices by causing artificial discord, provoked disagreements, which then, once resolved, will lead to universal agreement. Which, in particular and in turn, will be expressed in the fact that in his communes, which he called “phalanxes,” “our idle lovers, even dandies, will be on their feet from four o’clock in the morning, in winter as in summer, in order to eagerly devote themselves to useful work - caring for gardens and poultry houses, housekeeping, factory production and others, in relation to which the mechanism of building civilization disgusts the entire rich class."

Gracchus Babeuf is somewhat more prosaic in his attitude to human quality in the ideal society he depicts. Claiming that it is being started “in order to guarantee every member of society a state of sustainable prosperity” (quite the ideal of a consumer society), he allows himself to significantly clarify what he said - they say, “no one will be allowed to live at the expense of others, there will be no drones in the Republic "It will not be at all difficult to establish surveillance over them, which will deter them."

Babeuf either did not realize, or realized it too well, that by “establishing surveillance,” that is, by legitimizing snitching, he was building a society not of “sustainable prosperity,” but of stable suspicion. Likewise, Fourier has no explanation regarding the vacancy of an arbitrator in resolving disagreements. The usual situation in such cases (genetically dating back to courtyard conflicts) is when one insists on the authority of Ivan, the other on the authority of Peter. Which ultimately gives, instead of one conflict, at least two. How can we be here?

One of the scholars of utopianism, Leon Sargent, writes about this, as well as about two other famous utopians: “Skinner thinks Walden II is a good society, but I am not so sure. Most of my students are horrified by the world Bellamy depicts, and Bellamy likes him."

Let me remind you that “Walden,” so to speak, “alone,” was written by Henry David Thoreau - and he did not invent it, but naturally (in the literal sense of the word) lived it. Being alone, Thoreau calmly realized what for Pushkin was almost a neurosis (“long ago, a tired slave, I planned to escape,” etc.). At the same time, he without hesitation rejected the opportunity to realize a collectivist version of utopia in the Brook Farm commune. A principled absenteeist, Thoreau preferred the right to mental reflection to the right to elect and be elected. What does this mean for utopias?

At least one thing: a project of social structure that comes from reality and is oriented towards reality must take into account the presence of such people (although it is generally troublesome to take them into account). Second: any project that ignores the interests of certain people or groups thereby turns out to be utopian to one degree or another. Third: both taking into account the interests of everyone and suppressing these interests in the name of a uniform principle lead to social statics. In this sense, realized democracy and the “City of the Sun” are no different from each other. Fourth, as a consequence of the above: maintaining social dynamics requires society to suppress some and elevate others. The specific content of “one” and “other” is of greatest importance from the point of view of interaction with other societies. That is why all previous utopias are autonomous, and that is why the modern utopia project, should it appear, will most likely include several subprojects: there is no longer a “place that does not exist,” but there are political technologies that are invaluable as a literary device for creating any utopias anywhere.

Eduard Limonov, having covered the Soviet Union with a smooth white crust in one of his stories, left the States and Solzhenitsyn without work. This is, so to speak, “pure literature.” However, you can approach the matter politically technologically: cover not the crust, but the subcortex with something smooth , and then arrange citizens in the right society, taking into account the most popular convolutions among them.

The shortest way, however, is collective insight. But how?