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Procedural arguments like this are silly. You have to judge things by what they are substantively. Feudalism and slavery were not utopian projects but they were

Procedural arguments like this are silly. You have to judge things by what they are substantively. Feudalism and slavery were not utopian projects but they were clearly brutal. Nordic social democracy consciously set out to create a decent society for all and largely succeeded. I don't know what game the author is playing.

philwelch 8y ago
Nordic social democracy isn’t a utopian idea, though. It’s a progressive idea and an ambitious idea but it only really peeks out slightly from the normal range of market economies with welfare states, especially within Europe. Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don’t come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
  > Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don’t come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century. By that I assume you're largely referring to the Soviet Union and China during the cultural revolution? Yeah sure, those were bad, but it's hard for me to say whether they were particularly better or worse than slavery (at least from the perspective of a slave). Moreover, I think that the assumption that those 20th century projects failed because they were utopian is unsourced. I think I could equally validly claim that they failed because of a fundamental failure to understand basic economics and/or a deep lack of empathy or realism on the part of national leadership.
  - blotter_paper 8y ago
    I think you could argue that the horrors of this last century have been crueler than all the others simply because there were so many more humans to thrust them upon. I'm not convinced that it had a higher horror per capita, though.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      Per unit time, certainly. Though this may also be because slavery persisted for centuries and the e.g. Khmer Rouge would have never been capable of that.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    It took centuries for the slave trade to approximate the death toll of communist regimes. Fascism and national socialism were also utopian projects. Under all of these projects, millions of people were enslaved, imprisoned, persecuted, and murdered in vast numbers. I’m not saying the aggregate amount of human misery is the same, but the amount of misery inflicted in a given year was dramatically higher. “Utopian” is used in this context to refer to efforts to rebuild society from the ground up on logical principles chosen in isolation.
    - pimmen 8y ago
      That's mostly because we were billions of people when the 20th century utopian projects started, something we've only been for the past 200 years or so. The population of Ancient Egypt was about 1 million at the start of recorded history and about 5 million during the Roman conquest. Yet, even though the number of Egyptians in slavery were only in the millions at its highest it was crime that was very widespread in relation to the population.
      - philwelch 8y ago
        How many Russians were effectively living in slavery under Stalin? Or Cambodians under Pol Pot? All of them? Certainly a very high proportion. 1/3 of the world’s Jewish population was wiped out in a decade. At least 1/10th of the population of Ukraine starved in the two year Holodomor. Double-digit percentages of the entire populations of the Soviet Union, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia perished in the Second World War as did about 8% of all Germans. 1/4 of Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. All within brief periods of time.
        pimmen 8y ago
        It's estimated around 80% of the population of Egypt at any time was in some sort of slavery, whether chattel slavery, bond slavery or through forced labor the latter of which is what I would stretch including the citizens of the USSR into.
  - _0ffh 8y ago
    >I think that the assumption that those 20th century projects failed because they were utopian is unsourced Yes, but this is not about their eventual failure, but about their Dystopianism, which was part of their programme. Lenin explicitly stated that his "Jacobian party would never reject terror, nor could it do so". Lenin espoused state terror and mass murder, justified by "the greater good". If that is not idealism causing Dystopia right here, I don't know what is. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
- mikeash 8y ago
  Was placing tens of millions in inheritable bondage really not close? Especially considering that the total world population was much lower.
- lumberjack 8y ago
  Communism for all its faults was infinitely better than slavery and even a huge improvement over feudalism.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    That was Pol Pot’s theory. He was warned away from his utopian, revolutionary “Year Zero” program by Chinese communists who understood that a level of pragmatism and gradualism was necessary. He scoffed at this advice and a quarter of his countrymen died. It’s fair to say that when communism was merely awful rather than utterly catastrophic, it was merely because at those specific times and places, it was still pursued with at least a nod to pragmatic concerns. It’s no coincidence that the best form of communism—Deng’s “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”—was the most explicitly pragmatic variation of communism.
lapinot 8y ago
This. They are talking about "dystopia" and "utopia" which more or less mean "good"/"bad" society, it would be astonishing if any amoral (eg substantive) arguments could come out. Their conclusion (ie please don't be idealistic, it'll always lead to something bad) can be summarized as defending order, eg an institution that is legitimate per se. This kind of moral authoritarian argument is akin to the "do exclude violence", "don't promote radical ideas" (in the sense of largely differing from the status quo) and we long know that this rhetoric is used to elude the question of the frame of political confrontations, which is mostly what political negotiation should be about. Once the frame is set, the orientation is already fixed. I'm not about defending what we commonly refer to as revolutions (or more precisely insurrections), i'm just saying i don't believe institutions have any legitimacy per se and as such it is authoritarian conservatism to exclude critical thinking using moral arguments. The first and foremost rule of a democratic organization should be the "political (moral) license": being able to break the laws maintaining current order if you are about questioning it.

philwelch 8y ago

Nordic social democracy isn’t a utopian idea, though. It’s a progressive idea and an ambitious idea but it only really peeks out slightly from the normal range of market economies with welfare states, especially within Europe. Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don’t come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
> Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don’t come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century. By that I assume you're largely referring to the Soviet Union and China during the cultural revolution? Yeah sure, those were bad, but it's hard for me to say whether they were particularly better or worse than slavery (at least from the perspective of a slave). Moreover, I think that the assumption that those 20th century projects failed because they were utopian is unsourced. I think I could equally validly claim that they failed because of a fundamental failure to understand basic economics and/or a deep lack of empathy or realism on the part of national leadership.
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  I think you could argue that the horrors of this last century have been crueler than all the others simply because there were so many more humans to thrust them upon. I'm not convinced that it had a higher horror per capita, though.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    Per unit time, certainly. Though this may also be because slavery persisted for centuries and the e.g. Khmer Rouge would have never been capable of that.
- philwelch 8y ago
  It took centuries for the slave trade to approximate the death toll of communist regimes. Fascism and national socialism were also utopian projects. Under all of these projects, millions of people were enslaved, imprisoned, persecuted, and murdered in vast numbers. I’m not saying the aggregate amount of human misery is the same, but the amount of misery inflicted in a given year was dramatically higher. “Utopian” is used in this context to refer to efforts to rebuild society from the ground up on logical principles chosen in isolation.
  - pimmen 8y ago
    That's mostly because we were billions of people when the 20th century utopian projects started, something we've only been for the past 200 years or so. The population of Ancient Egypt was about 1 million at the start of recorded history and about 5 million during the Roman conquest. Yet, even though the number of Egyptians in slavery were only in the millions at its highest it was crime that was very widespread in relation to the population.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      How many Russians were effectively living in slavery under Stalin? Or Cambodians under Pol Pot? All of them? Certainly a very high proportion. 1/3 of the world’s Jewish population was wiped out in a decade. At least 1/10th of the population of Ukraine starved in the two year Holodomor. Double-digit percentages of the entire populations of the Soviet Union, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia perished in the Second World War as did about 8% of all Germans. 1/4 of Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. All within brief periods of time.
      - pimmen 8y ago
        It's estimated around 80% of the population of Egypt at any time was in some sort of slavery, whether chattel slavery, bond slavery or through forced labor the latter of which is what I would stretch including the citizens of the USSR into.
- _0ffh 8y ago
  >I think that the assumption that those 20th century projects failed because they were utopian is unsourced Yes, but this is not about their eventual failure, but about their Dystopianism, which was part of their programme. Lenin explicitly stated that his "Jacobian party would never reject terror, nor could it do so". Lenin espoused state terror and mass murder, justified by "the greater good". If that is not idealism causing Dystopia right here, I don't know what is. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
mikeash 8y ago
Was placing tens of millions in inheritable bondage really not close? Especially considering that the total world population was much lower.
lumberjack 8y ago
Communism for all its faults was infinitely better than slavery and even a huge improvement over feudalism.
- philwelch 8y ago
  That was Pol Pot’s theory. He was warned away from his utopian, revolutionary “Year Zero” program by Chinese communists who understood that a level of pragmatism and gradualism was necessary. He scoffed at this advice and a quarter of his countrymen died. It’s fair to say that when communism was merely awful rather than utterly catastrophic, it was merely because at those specific times and places, it was still pursued with at least a nod to pragmatic concerns. It’s no coincidence that the best form of communism—Deng’s “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”—was the most explicitly pragmatic variation of communism.

lapinot 8y ago

This. They are talking about "dystopia" and "utopia" which more or less mean "good"/"bad" society, it would be astonishing if any amoral (eg substantive) arguments could come out. Their conclusion (ie please don't be idealistic, it'll always lead to something bad) can be summarized as defending order, eg an institution that is legitimate per se. This kind of moral authoritarian argument is akin to the "do exclude violence", "don't promote radical ideas" (in the sense of largely differing from the status quo) and we long know that this rhetoric is used to elude the question of the frame of political confrontations, which is mostly what political negotiation should be about. Once the frame is set, the orientation is already fixed. I'm not about defending what we commonly refer to as revolutions (or more precisely insurrections), i'm just saying i don't believe institutions have any legitimacy per se and as such it is authoritarian conservatism to exclude critical thinking using moral arguments. The first and foremost rule of a democratic organization should be the "political (moral) license": being able to break the laws maintaining current order if you are about questioning it.