Utopia As Deception
One frequently repeated theme in our history is that of utopia. We love it. Or rather them, since many have been posited and quite few survive. Utopias relieve us of having to deal with the messiness of actual day to day life. They inoculate us against our frailties. We use them in a variety of ways. We compare the world around us to an ideal and note its shortfall. Somehow the ideal is always just a little better, or more perfect, no matter how hard we try. We acknowledge that it is just an imagined entity, but we persist in comparison. We, thus persist in falling short. We cannot help ourselves, we are human after all.
Why do we bother with this silliness?
We all know the world is imperfect. Why create utopias in order to rub that nasty fact in our own faces?
One reason is tyranny. We can oppress others by pummeling them with visions of their evident imperfection. Work harder. Pray harder. Think harder. Give up those earthbound ways and you too can aspire to perfection. Well, not really since you are a mere human, but give it a shot. Oh, and I have the necessary method conveniently at hand. Believe me. Pay me. Follow me. I will open the way to your perfection. Grovel before the ideal and see in yourself the flaws that can never be fully undone.
Classic. Evil.
Why do I ponder this all now?
Because establishing a utopia can sometimes cause you to trip up.
As in contemporary politics.
We live in an era of founding father cult worship. They have been elevated onto a pedestal. They can do no wrong. They were perfect so the nation they began must also be perfect. That it has fallen from the ideal is due to the messiness injected by subsequent impure thinking. We must work to restore it to its pristine, pre-decline, state.
This means undoing the Democratic Party agenda, since the twaddle about perfection flows from the minds of the right. Especially the Tea Party right. The current malaise that America has fallen into is a direct result of the silliness of the New Deal. In earlier times, when America more closely resembled its pure original state, Americans were free. They were unencumbered by the evils of big government. This went awry when FDR solved the Great Depression, not by allowing the purgative effects of the free market to cleanse the impurities away in some Schumpeterian cataclysm, but by invoking the decidedly un-American, and thus inextricably impure, policies of Keynes. Instead of an apocalypse and subsequent redemption, we experienced a sullied, much less than pure recovery. Reason, and not faith, led us forward. That is always an error for utopians. They depend upon faith. Since utopias are inventions of the mind and have no concrete manifestation we must accept them on faith. Faith and utopia go hand in hand.
Ever since FDR utopians have been busily re-writing history to make him into a failure. Or they have simply created alternative faith based narratives that argue that all would have been well had we only persevered with our faith. Free market faith.
Sometimes the faith based run slap into reality and are thrown into a tizzy. What are they to do when their utopia is exposed as having flaws?
As in when we discover the founders were an anti-democratic bunch of hide bound slave owners who created a strong central government to offset the hooligan and near anarchic republic that existed immediately prior to the production and acceptance of the constitution.
It gets ugly when a major argument of the faith based, that big government is an affront to the founding father’s vision, runs afoul of the proclivity those same founders had for centralized government. George Washington was, after all, mightily upset at the tardiness of the states in providing cash to support his army. He openly admired the British with their central banking system and its apparently unlimited ability to borrow money. George, you see, liked government debt. He despised with a passion the constant grumbling and pouting of the states.
And this, as you can imagine, is a problem to those who view him as a saint whose name can be invoked to deride, criticize, and otherwise upbraid anyone arguing that government indebtedness is not always and irrevocably a bad thing.
We won’t mention slavery here, but it does rather throw a large bomb into the pristine image that the faith based have of their heroes.
I suppose utopias are not so bad if handled carefully. Perhaps they are useful as guideposts. But they are never handled carefully, so they should all be tossed out. People are always getting them muddled up with reality. Sometimes they even aspire to make utopia on earth. That’s when the faith based get particularly mischievous.
As in when neo-classical economists mistake their vision – another utopia – as representing something concrete as opposed to an utterly unattainable fib. These folks have erected such a castle in the sky that practically anything that goes on in real life fails to measure up. This means that all those shortfalls need explanation. They end up as “market failures”. Note that the real world is not called the real world. It is a failure. It is condemned at birth to be inadequate. This gives the faith based economists who preach this gospel an opening to explain to the unwashed – you and me – what we must do to allow the utopian forces they imagine to come into play here on earth.
Usually this means accepting recession and lower wages in order to allow the beloved market to come back into its mythic equilibrium whence we can power onwards once more. Only from a position of destitution, since the fall must precede the recovery. Anyway: we brought it all on ourselves because lost faith in the great market mechanism in the sky. So we deserve a bit of bother. It will help purge us of our erroneous ways.
These two utopian themes: the founding fathers as saints, and the free market as pure systemic genius, have coalesced in the letter day Republican party. They fit well together. They appeal to anyone in search of a faith based explanation of the world. And the Tea Party has lots of faith. It also allows the libertarians to adhere to a group that they might otherwise be suspicious of: all that social re-engineering that the Tea Party advocate would appear to be an intrusion into the sanctity of the self so central to the libertarians. Hey, but if we band together to get rid of the satanic central government and set ourselves free, that bargain with that particular devil is fine. Temporarily at least.
Oh darn.
The founding fathers were not saints. They had slaves. That’s not cool. What to do?
Michelle Bachmann has the perfect answer. She misrepresents who the founding fathers were. She makes the “mistake” of including John Quincy Adams – an avowed anti-slavery guy – instead of his father John Adams – not so much. Problem resolved.
That might sound like cheating to you and I. But utopia gives you great license. You can change the pantheon any time you want. It’s all made up anyway. So swapping in a good guy, and dropping a bad guy, or re-writying things to make sure your saints were in fact saints the way you want them to be, is both legitimate and time honored. Faith based folks do that kind of thing all the time. Stuff that encumbers you and I, facts for instance, are all malleable, not solid. They can be moved about like furniture to make sure the latest version of the ideal remains viable. Utopias are a kind of intellectual Feng Shui, that permit reality to be brought into accordance with the imaginary world.
And a black man in the White House? Who ever heard of such nonsense. I am sure the founding fathers would never allow that!
Actually we all agree on that one.
But that’s another story. One that conflicts with the utopia of the Tea Party.
What will they make up next?
