Q: What is the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision?
A: ...According to the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in
virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, and social arrangements must
acknowledge those limits. According to the Utopian vision, these
limits are "products" of our social arrangements, and we should strive
to overcome them in a better society of the future.
Out of this distinction come many right-left contrasts that would
otherwise have no common denominator. Rightists tend to like tradition
(because human nature does not change), small government (because no
leader is wise enough to plan society), a strong police and military
(because people will always be tempted by crime and conquest), and
free markets (because they convert individual selfishness into
collective wealth). Leftists believe that these positions are
defeatist and cynical, because if we change parenting, education, the
media, and social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and
more peaceable and generous.
http://www.isteve.com/2002_QA_Steven_Pinker.htm
Pinker aptly entitles it the “Utopian Vision,” as its holders believe
that by transforming social institutions, we can achieve heaven on
earth. In suggesting human freedom and perfectibility are limited,
evolutionary psychology and race realism strike at the core of the
Utopian Vision. If our personalities and abilities are largely decided
by our genetic makeup before we are even born, we have little ability
to choose who we are. Furthermore, if violence and selfishness are
innate human tendencies, changing social institutions will not get rid
of them. Nor will social engineering turn us all into intelligent and
high-minded model citizens; nor will it make the races equal in
abilities and behavior.
Pinker calls innatist views of human nature the “Tragic Vision,” but
this name is excessively gloomy and negative. A better name is the
“Realist Vision.” Partisans of the Realist Vision do not wish to
spread woe and sorrow among their fellow men; rather, they aim to
bring society into its maturity. Just as recognizing his limitations
is an essential part of the individual’s transition from adolescence
to adulthood, so a society as a whole has not achieved maturity until
it recognizes the limitations on its ability to shape human nature.
http://inverted-world.com/index.php/column/column/the_realist_vision/
Drawing on the work of the American economist Thomas Sowell, Pinker
suggests that there are two broad visions of what it is to be human:
the Tragic and the Utopian. The Tragic Vision recognises that humans
are 'inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom and virtue, and all
social arrangements must acknowledge those limits'. Such limitations
highlight the importance the importance of tradition: 'Religion, the
family, social customs, sexual mores and political institutions are a
distillation of time-tested techniques that let us work around the
shortcomings of human nature.' It is a vision associated with Thomas
Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman,
Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper - and now John Gray.
In the Utopian Vision, by contrast, 'psychological limitations are
artefacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not
allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better
world.' Traditions are regarded as 'the dead hand of the past, the
attempt to rule from the grave', and hence must be subject to the
scrutiny of reason. Only in this fashion have we rid ourselves of
practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery and patriarchy 'that were
once thought to be rooted in human nature'. It's a vision Pinker
attributes to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth
Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin.
'The new sciences of human nature', Pinker suggests, 'vindicate some
version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook'.
Science has revealed the primacy of family ties, the limited scope of
communal sharing, and the universality of violence, dominance and
ethnocentrism. It has shown human nature to be fixed, human beings to
be flawed and human politics constrained by the inadequacies of the
human psyche. Since 'our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent,
overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness', so Pinker suggests, 'we
should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because
in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another
person's loss. The best we can do is to trade off one cost against
another.' Or, as John Gray puts it, 'The good life is not found in
dreams of progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies.'
http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/pinker_gray.html
Are you Tragic or Utopian?
“One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the
same people line up on opposite sides of different issues,” begins
Thomas Sowell’s book, A Conflict of Visions. What causes such sharp
and well-defined faultlines between liberals and conservatives? It is
a common question, and I was reminded of it moments ago by a post on a
libertarian blog, The Examined Life. Its author postulated that
conservatives believe in “the fallibility of humans”, and all their
attitudes flow accordingly.
Sowell’s argument was a more sophisticated version of this, and was
summed up beautifully by Steven Pinker in his brilliant book, The
Blank Slate. Sowell had argued that there were two “visions” of
nature, which he called the Constrained Vision and Unconstrained
Vision, and Pinker called the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision.
Pinker wrote:
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge,
wisdom and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those
limits. “Mortal things suit mortals best,” wrote Pindar; “from the
crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” wrote
Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith,
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendall Holmes
Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the
philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar
Richard Posner.
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that
come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to
restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed
might be “Some people see things as they are and ask ‘why?’; I dream
things that never were and ask ‘why not?’” The quotation is often
attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F Kennedy, but it
was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who
also wrote, “There is nothing that can be changed more completely than
human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough”). The Utopian
Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas
Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith,
and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.
Needless to say, conservatives believe in the Tragic Vision while
liberals believe in the Utopian Vision. Pinker says that these beliefs
are hard-wired in us, “not … because attitudes are synthesised
directly from DNA but because they come naturally to people with
different temperaments”. He continues, “When it comes to attitudes
that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are
less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-
minded people.”
http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2004/12/are-you-tragic-or-utopian.html
Steven Pinker uses the crooked-timber quotation in The Blank Slate to
distinguish what he calls the Utopian Vision of human nature from the
Tragic Vision. Pinker himself comes down ?rmly on the Tragic side, and
includes as his intellectual company Hobbes, Burke, Adam Smith,
Alexander Hamilton, Madison, Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Popper, and Richard
Posner. Utopians include Rousseau and Marx, Godwin, Condorcet, Tom
Paine, Earl Warren, and Ronald Dworkin.
Rubin’s version of the Tragic Vision, like Pinker’s, does not depend
on refuting a simple caricature of the Utopian Vision. The Utopian
vision, as Pinker so nicely puts it, has set itself against customs,
laws, and practices that were once thought to be sanctioned by human
nature, and therefore possibly defended by proponents of the Tragic
Vision in their day: “the con?nement of women to the home, the stigma
against homosexuality and premarital sex, the superstitions of
religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation,” and such
practices as “absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy.” These
are all patterns of thought and behavior to struggle against, for
Rubin as for Pinker: there can be no ethical warrant to accept
punishing homosexuality, or accepting slavery or racism, even if it
could be shown that most human beings were disposed to do so by virtue
of some inherited preferences formed in hunter-gatherer existence. But
just in case there are such (to us today) undesirable preferences, it
behooves us to understand as clearly as possible their Pleistocene
genesis, present distribution, strength, factors that trigger them,
and the ways they can be blunted or accommodated in modern life. This
is not, pace the Utopian Vision, a matter of simply building a society
in which they are not generated and will therefore disappear. It is a
matter of working most effectively to build our political life in ways
that use the best of human nature and minimize, or render innocuous,
its worst.
http://denisdutton.com/rubin_review.htm
http://www.craigread.com/displayArticle.aspx?contentID=297&subgroupID=17
- The Tragic vs Utopian Conflict of Visions, Cluster of Ideas Around
Fixed vs Moldable
THE RIGHT-LEFT AXIS aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that
at first glance seem to have nothing in common. If you learn that
someone is in favor of a strong military, for example, it is a good
bet that the person is also in favor of judicial restraint rather than
judicial activism. If someone believes in the importance of religion,
chances are she will be tough on crime and in favor of lower taxes.
Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patriotism
and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young,
pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic
than egalitarian, gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business
rather than a university or government agency. The opposing positions
cluster just as reliably: if someone is sympathetic to rehabilitating
offenders, or to affirmative action, or to generous welfare programs,
or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good that he will also
be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a
secularist, and a professor or student.
Why on earth should people's beliefs about sex predict their beliefs
about the size of the military? What does religion have to do with
taxes? Whence the linkage between strict construction of the
Constitution and disdain for shocking art? Before we can understand
why beliefs about an innate human nature might cluster with liberal
beliefs or with conservative beliefs, we have to understand why
liberal beliefs cluster with other liberal beliefs and conservative
beliefs cluster with other conservative beliefs.
The meanings of the words are of no help. Marxists in the Soviet Union
and its aftermath were called conservatives; Reagan and Thatcher were
called revolutionaries. Liberals are liberal about sexual behavior but
not about business practices; conservatives want to conserve
communities and traditions, but they also favor the free market
economy that subverts them. People who call themselves "classical
liberals" are likely to be called "conservatives" by adherents of the
version of leftism known as political correctness.
Nor can most contemporary liberals and conservatives articulate the
cores of their belief systems. Liberals think that conservatives are
just amoral plutocrats, and conservatives think that if you are not a
liberal before you are twenty you have no heart but if you are a
liberal after you are twenty you have no brain (attributed variously
to Georges Clemenceau, Dean Inge, Benjamin Disraeli, and Maurice
Maeterlinck). Strategic alliances-such as the religious
fundamentalists and free-market technocrats on the right, or the
identity politicians and civil libertarians on the left-may frustrate
the search for any intellectual common denominator. Everyday political
debates, such as whether tax rates should be exactly what they are or
a few points higher or lower, are just as un-informative.
The most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension is Thomas
Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Not every ideological struggle fits
his scheme, but as we say in social science, he has identified a
factor that can account for a large proportion of the variance. Sowell
explains two "visions" of the nature of human beings that were
expressed in their purest forms by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the
patron of secular conservatism, and William Godwin (1756-1836), the
British counterpart to Rousseau. In earlier times they might have been
referred to as different visions of the perfectibility of man. Sowell
calls them the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision; I will
refer to them as the Tragic Vision (a term he uses in a later book)
and the Utopian Vision.
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge,
wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those
limits. "Mortal things suit mortals best," wrote Pindar; "from the
crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made," wrote
Kant. The Tragic Vision is associated with Hobbes, Burke, Smith,
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr., the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the
philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, and the legal scholar
Richard Posner.
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that
come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to
restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world. Its creed
might be "Some people see things as they are and ask 'why?'; I dream
things that never were and ask 'why not?'" The quotation is often
attributed to the icon of 1960s liberalism, Robert F. Kennedy, but it
was originally penned by the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw (who
also wrote, "There is nothing that can be changed more completely than
human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough"). The Utopian
Vision is also associated with Rousseau, Godwin, Condorcet, Thomas
Paine, the jurist Earl Warren, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith,
and to a lesser extent the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin.
In the Tragic Vision, our moral sentiments, no matter how beneficent,
overlie a deeper bedrock of selfishness. That selfishness is not the
cruelty or aggression of the psychopath, but a concern for our well-
being that is so much a part of our makeup that we seldom reflect on
it and would waste our time lamenting it or trying to erase it. In his
book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith remarked:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of
inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us
consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of
connection with that part of the world, would react upon receiving
intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of
all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that
unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the
precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of
man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too,
perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings
concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the
commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in
general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these
humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his
business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the
same ease and tranquillity as if no such accident had happened. The
most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a
more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow,
he would not sleep to-night; but provided he never saw them, he would
snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred
million of his brethren.
In the Tragic Vision, moreover, human nature has not changed.
Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores,
and political institutions are a distillation of time-tested
techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature.
They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they
developed, even if no one today can explain their rationale. However
imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and
deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an
imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that
more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it
up, because human nature always leaves us teetering on the brink of
barbarism. And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of
a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a
society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the
top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that
are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can
hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted
according to feedback about the sum of their good and bad
consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social
problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing
individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss. The best
we can do is trade off one cost against another. In Burke's famous
words, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution:
[One] should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a
father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise
prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their
country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and
put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous
weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal
constitution, and renovate their father's life.
In the Utopian Vision, human nature changes with social circumstances,
so traditional institutions have no inherent value. That was then,
this is now. Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to
rule from the grave. They must be stated explicitly so their rationale
can be scrutinized and their moral status evaluated. And by that test,
many traditions fail: the confinement of women to the home, the stigma
against homosexuality and premarital sex, the superstitions of
religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the dangers of
patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan "My country, right or
wrong." Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and
patriarchy once seemed inevitable but have disappeared or faded from
many parts of the world through changes in institutions that were once
thought to be rooted in human nature. Moreover, the existence of
suffering and injustice presents us with an undeniable moral
imperative. We don't know what we can achieve until we try, and the
alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of the
world, is unconscionable. At Robert Kennedy's funeral, his brother
Edward quoted from one of his recent speeches:
All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will
surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building
a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have
shaped that effort.
The future does not belong to those who are content with today,
apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and
fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will
belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal
commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.
Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond
our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate
nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our
own hands, matched to reason and principle, will determine our
destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also
experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.
Those with the Tragic Vision are unmoved by ringing declarations
attributed to the first-person plural we, our, and us. They are more
likely to use the pronouns as the cartoon possum Pogo did: We have met
the enemy, and he is us. We are all members of the same flawed
species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our
will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its
vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an
invitation to a calamity, all the worse when that power is directed at
a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. As the
conservative philosopher Michael Oakshott wrote, "To try to do
something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting
enterprise."
The two kinds 6f visionaries thereby line up on opposite sides of many
issues that would seem to have little in common. The Utopian Vision
seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them
directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty,
pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by
preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision
points to the self-interested motives of the people who would
implement these policies-namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic
fiefdoms-and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad
consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against
millions of people pursuing their own interests. Thus, say the Tragic
Visionaries, the Utopians fail to anticipate that welfare might
encourage dependency, or that a restriction on one pollutant might
force people to use another.
Instead, the Tragic Vision looks to systems that produce desirable
outcomes even when no member of the system is particularly wise or
virtuous. Market economies, in this vision, accomplish that goal:
remember Smith's butcher, brewer, and baker providing us with dinner
out of self-interest rather than benevolence. No mastermind has to
understand the intricate flow of goods and services that make up an
economy in order to anticipate who needs what, and when and where.
Property rights give people an incentive to work and produce;
contracts allow them to enjoy gains in trade. Prices convey
information about scarcity and demand to producers and consumers, so
they can react by following a few simple rules-make more of what is
profitable, buy less of what is expensive-and the "invisible hand"
will do the rest. The intelligence of the system is distributed across
millions of not-necessarily-intelligent producers and consumers, and
cannot be articulated by anyone in particular.
People with the Utopian Vision point to market failures that can
result from having a blind faith in free markets. They also call
attention to the unjust distribution of wealth that tends to be
produced by free markets. Opponents with the Tragic Vision argue that
the notion of justice makes sense only when applied to human decisions
within a framework of laws, not when applied to an abstraction called
"society." Friedrich Hayek wrote, "The manner in which the benefits
and burdens are apportioned by the market mechanism would in many
instances have to be regarded as very unjust if it were the result of
a deliberate allocation to particular people." But that concern with
social justice rests on a confusion, he claimed, because "the
particulars of [a spontaneous order] cannot be just or unjust."
Some of today's battles between left and right fall directly out of
these different philosophies: big versus small government, high versus
low taxes, protectionism versus free trade, measures that aim to
reduce undesirable outcomes (poverty, inequality, racial imbalance)
versus measures that merely level the playing field and enforce the
rules. Other battles follow in a less obvious way from the opposing
visions of human potential. The Tragic Vision stresses fiduciary
duties, even when the person executing them cannot see their immediate
value, because they allow imperfect beings who cannot be sure of their
virtue or foresight to participate in a tested system. The Utopian
Vision stresses social responsibility, where people hold their actions
to a higher ethical standard. In Lawrence Kohlberg's famous theory of
moral development, a willingness to ignore rules in favor of abstract
principles was literally identified as a "higher stage" (which,
perhaps tellingly, most people never reach).
The most obvious example is the debate on strict constructionism and
judicial restraint on one side and judicial activism in pursuit of
social justice on the other. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court from 1954 to 1969, was the prototypical judicial
activist, who led the court to implement desegregation and expand the
rights of the accused. He was known for interrupting lawyers in mid-
argument by asking, "Is it right? Is it good?" The opposing view was
stated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said his job was "to see that the
game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not." He
conceded that "to improve conditions of life and the race is the main
thing," and added, "But how the devil can I tell whether I am not
pulling it down more in some other place?" Those with the Tragic
Vision see judicial activism as an invitation to egotism and caprice
and as unfair to those who have played by the rules as they were
publicly stated. Those with the Utopian Vision see judicial restraint
as the mindless preservation of arbitrary injustices-as Dickens's Mr.
Bumble put it, "The law is an ass." An infamous example is the Dred
Scott decision of 1856, in which the Supreme Court ruled on narrow
legalistic grounds that a freed slave could not sue to make his
freedom official and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in
federal territories.
Radical political reform, like radical judicial reform, will be more
or less appealing depending on one's confidence in human intelligence
and wisdom. In the Utopian Vision, solutions to social problems are
readily available. Speaking in 1967 about the conditions that breed
violence, Lyndon Johnson said, "All of us know what those conditions
are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough
jobs." If we already know the solutions, all we have to do is choose
to implement them, and that requires only sincerity and dedication. By
the same logic, anyone opposing the solutions must be motivated by
blindness, dishonesty, and callousness. Those with the Tragic Vision
say instead that solutions to social problems are elusive. The
inherent conflicts of interest among people leave us with few options,
all of them imperfect. Opponents of radical reform are showing a wise
distrust of human hubris.
The political orientation of the universities is another manifestation
of conflicting visions of human potential. Adherents of the Tragic
Vision distrust knowledge stated in explicitly articulated and
verbally justified propositions, which is the stock-in-trade of
academics, pundits, and policy analysts. Instead they trust knowledge
that is distributed diffusely throughout a system (such as a market
economy or set of social mores) and which is tuned by adjustments by
many simple agents using feedback from the world. (Cognitive
scientists will be reminded of the distinction between symbolic
representations and distributed neural networks, and that is no
coincidence: Hayek, the foremost advocate of distributed intelligence
in societies, was an early neural network modeler.) For much of the
twentieth century, political conservatism had an anti-intellectual
streak, until conservatives decided to play catch-up in the battle for
hearts and minds and funded policy think tanks as a counterweight to
universities.
Finally, the disagreements on crime and war fall right out of the
conflicting theories of human nature. Given the obvious waste and
cruelty of war, those with the Utopian Vision see it as a kind of
pathology that arises from misunderstandings, shortsightedness, and
irrational passions. War is to be prevented by public expressions of
pacifist sentiments, better communication between potential enemies,
less saber-rattling rhetoric, fewer weapons and military alliances, a
de-emphasis on patriotism, and negotiating to avert war at any cost.
Adherents of the Tragic Vision, with their cynical view of human
nature, see war as a rational and tempting strategy for people who
think they can gain something for themselves or their nation. The
calculations might be mistaken in any instance, and they may be
morally deplorable because they give no weight to the suffering of the
losers, but they are not literally pathological or irrational. On this
view the only way to ensure peace is to raise the cost of war to
potential aggressors by developing weaponry, arousing patriotism,
rewarding bravery, flaunting one's might and resolve, and negotiating
from strength to deter blackmail.
The same arguments divide the visions on crime. Those with the Utopian
Vision see crime as inherently irrational and seek to prevent it by
identifying the root causes. Those with the Tragic Vision see crime as
inherently rational and believe that the root cause is all too
obvious: people rob banks because that's where the money is. The most
effective crime-prevention programs, they say, strike directly at the
rational incentives. A high probability of unpleasant punishment
raises the anticipated cost of crime. A public emphasis on personal
responsibility helps enforce the incentives by closing any loopholes
left open by the law. And strict parenting pract
ices allow children to internalize these contingencies early in life.
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate.html
