Review : Utopia For Realists

I can't bear to end the year on a negative note, so let's offset the pointlessness that was Radicals Chasing Utopia with Rutger Bregman's infinitely better Utopia For Realists. 

This is everything I wanted it to be. Unlike RCU, UFR focuses on the goal, not the people seeking it. It's well-researched, comprehensive yet succinct, immensely readable, highly persuasive, and - perhaps most importantly - focuses on achievable, consistent visions of the future instead of a bunch of random nutters. And unlike the slightly deranged Stephen Pinker, Bregman understands that statistics shouldn't be cherry-picked to reveal whatever you want them to say, and, more importantly, that although progress has indeed been made, there's far more to life than the absolute standards of living conditions.

I don't have any major criticisms of this book. The worst I can say is that at times it feels a little bit like a confused, breathless mess, somewhat underdeveloped and contradictory - but only slightly. For the most part it stays on point, and seems (at least to me) carefully designed to appeal across the political spectrum. Bregman doesn't want to end capitalism or send us all back to living in the trees, but neither does he deny the real problems facing us. He explicitly views Utopian ideology as useful in shaping our behaviour, unlike Pinker who actually inhabits a Utopian fantasy-fallacy land. Overall, I give it a thoroughly excellent 8/10. Maybe 8.5.

Here's my selection of the main take-home messages. For the details, you should buy the book yourself.

Universal Basic Income

If there's a real downside to this book it's that there's nothing much new here, but the countering strength to this is that it's an excellent summary and bibliography. Bregman attacks all the classical arguments against (U)BI in force, especially the idea that free money makes people lazy. He cites study after study after study showing that they do not; the evidence on this point is overwhelming. My suspicion is that maybe extreme wealth can do this*, but at a very much higher threshold than basic subsistence. People fundamentally need more than mere resources to give their lives meaning, but they do need resources to have any prospect of a meaningful life. As he quotes an economist, "You can't pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you have no boots."

* But not necessarily. Whatever you think of Bezos or Musk, they do at least work hard.

The basic premise seems pretty watertight to me. People are generally good at making decisions that directly impact their own lives - it's only when those decisions affect others as well that they come unstuck. Bregman is not at all keen on what he calls the "surveillance state", here not meaning data harvesting but something more akin to the "nanny state" in the worse sense. That is, welfare programs have become highly centralised and bureaucratic. It's not that welfare is inherently bad - far from it, if anything funding needs to be increased - but it does matter how people access it. The left don't believe that money makes people lazy, but they do believe that they know what poor people need best - and which ones deserve it. This means enacting barriers between the deserving and undeserving poor, whereas in Bregman's view there should be no distinction at all : being poor is inherently a bad thing. Better by far to just give everyone money and let them make their own choices. This not only works but slashes masses of red tape and useless government bureaucracy in the process.

(In essence, both left and right have good points here, but the compromise they've reached is an unholy worst of both worlds. Bregman's view is that what's needed is more welfare, not less, but also far less government meddling : more welfare, less state.)

For my part I'm sold on the idea of replacing targeted welfare programs with simple cash handouts*. I'm less sold (meaning still very much open-minded) that we should give money to absolutely everyone, mainly due to how much this might cost. Bregman is far too hand-wavy when it comes to how much getting rid of all this red tape would really save.

* Not all, obviously. Giving people cash doesn't help them if there aren't any hospitals or schools to go to.

The need for greater wealth equality

Or rather, significantly less inequality - I fully agree that total equality is undesirable. Bregman makes a very solid case indeed here for the need to raise everyone out of poverty, and it's here he makes his greatest contribution against Pinkerism. He shows that sheer GDP per capita (that is, absolute standard of living) is a good proxy for the social health of a country but only up to a point. Beyond that, it's inequality that matters. And it's bad for everyone : this stratification of society causing problems for the rich as well as the poor. The root of it seems to be hyper-competitiveness, with everyone worrying more and more about where they are in the pecking order, resulting in more bullying, suspicion, depression, and loneliness. Yes, you need a certain basic standard, but this is a necessity, not a sufficiency : above the threshold very real problems still occur. You can't ignore these on the grounds that no-one is dying of hunger any more, unless you want to add your own pointless ceiling to the human condition.

One of the most interesting observations here is that poverty decreases mental bandwidth. The poor are very, very good at short-term thinking to make ends meet, but they aren't much use at long-term thinking. This is not a cause but a direct consequence of their lack of wealth, with there being measurable differences in IQ of the same people when they're wealthy and when they're less fortunate. Wealth, it seems, has a direct effect on the functioning of the brain. 

There are two reasons, then, why targeted programs (like better education) often fail : (1) excessive barriers make them very difficult for struggling people to access them, with the conditions of poverty making this literally too mentally taxing; (2) they tackle the symptoms but not the cause. The solution is blindingly simple : just give everyone more money. They won't become lazy : they'll be far more willing and able to work for themselves.

“Look…how would you make sure everyone in the world was well fed?” she demanded.

“Me? Oh, well, I…” The oh god spluttered for a moment. “I suppose you’d have to think about the prevalent political systems, and the proper division and cultivation of arable land, and—”

“Yes, yes. But he’d just give everyone a good meal,” said Susan.

“Oh, I see. Very impractical. Hah, it’s as silly as saying you could clothe the naked by, well, giving them some clothes.” 

—Terry Pratchett, Hogfather 

Bregman's underlying view is that avoiding poverty should be regarded as a basic right. We should stop blaming people for being poor and accept that they need help overcoming their situation, just like with a broken leg or an unpleasant disease. Kicking a man when he's down never does him any good : offer him a hand up instead. 

Work smarter, not harder

One thing that this book got me thinking about was what a true Utopia would feel like. Never mind the numbers for a moment, people ought to be aware of being in a demi-paradise. And clearly we're not, so we aren't. Happiness, Bregman points out in contrast to Pinker, is not really an accurate indicator of people living meaningful, satisfied lives, and anyway a society that was fully happy would be stagnant and apathetic.

Bregman's vision of a Utopia is one in which we work significantly less (though not never). Leisure, like a money, would be regarded as an essential human right, not something you have to earn. With a twenty-hour work week, people would only need to do meaningful jobs (as opposed to bullshit bureaucracy and the like) and, with a UBI providing most of their necessities, more people could be employed rather than less. This prevents any decrease in company-wide productivity (the total number of hours worked remaining at least constant) whilst ensuring that the wealth is far more evenly and fairly distributed. So long as their basic needs are provided for, says Bregman, it's not unemployment per se that causes social ills (alcoholism, depression, etc.), but the exact opposite : the stress of too much work, not too little. And individual productivity peaks at around six hours per day anyway, with real-world examples showing that exceeding this causes a gain that lasts only a few weeks before burnout starts kicking in.

I'm glossing over a lot of nuances that Bregman does at least acknowledge : that not every job is meaningless or unfulfilling (mine certainly isn't either !), that there is huge individual variation from person to person, and that not every job is better done by splitting tasks amongst more people. But there are a few points here that I'm a bit more skeptical of. 

For one, he's rather anti-TV, without giving much of a hint as to what leisure activities he thinks are more appropriate. For another, I'm not sold on the idea that merely changing our educational priorities will guarantee that (say) the next generation will have a huge job market for historians or zoologists; it doesn't follow that the skills we give people will automatically shape market demand. I share the sentiment that we should focus on more on what we want tomorrows' society to be like instead of trying to guess its future needs, but I don't buy the argument that we have such strict control over the future. Nor am I sold on the unavoidability of technologically-induced unemployment; Bregman acknowledges the legion of similar flawed predictions of the past, but fails to draw the lesson that predicting future jobs is very, very hard. And a worrying indication of all these bullshit jobs we do today is that maybe this will continue into the future : unless we're careful, less employment will only lead to more pointless "Hunger Wall" make-work programs.

Conclusion : Politics

These caveats notwithstanding, overall the book is well-informed by philosophy and history. It also reaches across the political divides. While many of the policies will naturally appeal to the left, Bregman cites plenty of examples of how they've been endorsed by the right. Alaska has a UBI (if only a small one), while Utah has a similar program to tackle homelessness. Nixon's failed attempt at UBI can be traced to flawed information on a previous endeavour in 18th-century England rather than (entirely) ideological opposition, with the Democrats ultimately ending what looked like a guaranteed success.

Bregman does an excellent job of reminding us of the need for Utopian thinking, especially in a historical concept. It wasn't that long ago that shorter working weeks and basic income were widely seen not as merely inevitable, but desirable : that work is, essentially, a matter for machines, whereas living is for people. Bregman affords no small measure of blame to the left, not only for the "surveillance state", but also in giving in to certain hard-line factions among the right. Rather than fighting back with their own narrative, he sees the left as now restricting themselves to damage limitation at most. He cites a program of "chastity training" enacted by the Clinton government as being the epitome of the hollowing-out of the welfare state. Personally I found this appraisal of the left and right a much-needed eye-opener.

Bregman contends that one of the root problems is narcissism. The message "you're special" is damaging because everyone innately wants to believe that it's true - which is exactly why it's so dismally successful. The problem is that when things go wrong, this leads people to despair for themselves and to blaming others for problems not of their own making. An especially insidious difficulty is that the real progress that has been made makes it all the easier to fool people that a better life is theirs for the taking, and that it's their fault if they haven't achieved all their goals. And thus we get people saying that people asking for more holidays are "entitled", as though that were somehow a bad thing : you damn well should feel entitled to rest and relaxation, you shouldn't have to work yourself to the bone for a few measly days off each year.

It's time to fight back. Politics, Bregman says, is traditionally the province of progressive left, but the left has become unbearably dull. It doesn't have to be like this, and indeed, until very recently it wasn't. Taking lessons right out of Blair's playbook, he says that the left almost seem to prefer losing to winning over their demonised opponents. Instead of concessions and damage limitation, the left should be arguing more forcefully for their ideals, not less : since you'll usually get less than what you're after, aiming for something ahead of your true goal is just common sense. 

Perhaps societies narcissistic tendencies can give us a clue about how to tackle all this. Widespread narcissism is itself, ironically, not the fault of the average man in the street making bad choices, but due to relentless consumerist marketing and political rhetoricians. Before we can conjure grand narratives of more collective responsibility, maybe we should start with this very same simpler, more appealing message : it's not your fault. Yes, you matter, and you're special, but you're not the Chosen One. You don't have magical powers and you can't be expected to win if the odds are so fully stacked against you. With further irony, the way to achieve a better world may be to stop setting unrealistic goals for ourselves - and start setting them for society at large instead.

Review : Radials Chasing Utopia

The collapse of Arecibo, the imminent arrival of Christmas, and a splurge on VR games have all kept me from blogging or checking any kind of social media much of late. But I will break radio silence to complete my review of Jamie Bartlett's "Radicals Chasing Utopia".

I've already covered his downright weird and wrong-headed chapter on blaming anti-racist activists for the prevalence of racism. Still, I thought there might be enough in the rest to warrant a separate post or two before doing a longer write-up, but there really isn't. It's a tremendously shallow book : lots of breadth, virtually no depth, few attempts at generalisation, little clarity about what the author actually thinks  - and plenty of hypocrisy when he does. Honestly, what's the point of spending so much time and research actually being immersed in so many radical cultures (an undeniably arduous and time-consuming task) only to reduce it to a pathetically thin scraping in a book like this ? Sigh. I give it 6/10 overall, mostly because it's extremely readable.

The Activists Paradox

There is one chapter I liked very much though : "The Activists Paradox", which has some flashes of brilliance. Here he focuses mainly on environmental activism, but - for once - ventures to describe some more general conditions. For example, he nicely distinguishes between (let's call them) career activists and nimbyists (Not In My Backyard) :

Activists are the pros : they roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. They are the people for whom being an activist is part of their identity and social life. It's like being 'a hacker' or 'a foodie' : not just something you do but something that you are. Nimbys are different : they are the ordinaries who are upset about something in their own backyard. They don't have a subculture. They're just angry.

This goes some way to explaining why both are, for quite different reasons, often unpopular and  unsuccessful. A career activist makes an entire lifestyle out of being against things rather than in favour of anything in particular. In that sense they are similar to some of the things they most vitriolically oppose : they define themselves only by things they're opposed to. Their outrage is, to some degree, manufactured and not taken seriously. And their subculture is highly developed and - albeit quite unintentionally - inclusive only of a very particular sort of person :

No other group I spent time with invested the same amount of time or effort trying to get people involved in decision-making or being more diverse. The problem is that activists confuse the ends with the means : they have elevated the procedure and language to the level of a religious sacrament... the result is usually an obsession with language and procedure rather than results. Everyone here very carefully, very deliberately, used the correct hand gestures and appropriate words. And yet nearly everyone was still a white graduate type.

Traditionally right-wing voters worried about the environment would, in theory, share much in common with activists. But they might not see past the obsession with intersectionality or anti-capitalist tropes about open borders and corporatism. This is why direct-action environmentalists seem to elicit such disdain from their opponents. It's not the ideas or the arguments they object to, so much as the type of people they are. It's a visceral dislike rather than an intellectual one.

He provides a very nice first-hand example of this when taking part in an "action" against a coal mine. Both the protestors and the miners got along amicably, with the miners worried for the activists safety. The protestors don't come across as crazed lunatics and the miners aren't shown as capitalist pigs. Indeed, the miners actually support clean energy, but, as one put it, "this lot are against everything". It's not that they don't want renewable energy, it's that they don't see it as currently practical (of course we can debate to what extent this is accurate, but this is a very different prospect to being fundamentally opposed to renewables in principle). There are no heroes and villains here, just ordinary, flawed people.

The tragic thing about activism is that it feels almost inevitable. It's inevitable that only activists get sufficiently motivated by abstract global problems to risk arrest; inevitable that they create a tight subculture; inevitable that this subculture keeps the movement motivated but smaller than it could be.

 Nimbys, however, have an extremely powerful secret weapon : scones.

The anti-fracking movement is not inclusive because its supporters use the word 'cis' instead of male or female; it's because they happen to be naturally welcoming. Consensus decision-making is very attractive at the theoretical level, but at the subconscious level cups of tea and home-made scones will beat it every time.

I suspect one could here go on an extended rant about angry "woke" people on Twitter, but let's leave that for now. More to the point : why are some protest movements successful, at least in terms of numbers, while others remain confined to the hardcore ? Bartlett uses the example of the coal mining incident :

Contrary to popular belief, people don't commit to a cause based solely on a rational or objective consideration of statistics and facts. If they did, there would have been 10,000 people at Ffos-y-fran, not 3,00. People also sign up because they think it will be fulfilling or because their friends are in it or it looks like their sort of thing... they include things that on first sight appear frivolous - language, dress sense, accents, social background, class, skin colour and a thousand small things - but which help people find self-realisation, belonging and fulfilment.

This is partly why the activists at Ffos-y-fran were so homogenous and limited in numbers. The cultural framing created a ceiling. Even their attempts to mitigate the problem through micro-procedure was itself part of the frame. By contrast, the cultural framing of the name Bette or Tina or Maureen [from the "Nanas" group of anti-fracking protestors] is an ordinary and concerned grandmother, not a university-educated professional activist.

He goes to point out that while the Nanas are every bit as informed as the professionals, no-one feels excluded by a worried grandmother. But nimbys in general have a different problem than career activists : their cause is often (by definition) very much local and of no concern to anyone outside their particular area. And as an indirect result they're not taken very seriously. After all, new housing or power plants do have to be built somewhere, so nimbys have to work extremely hard to show why their particular backyard is indeed a special case.

But sometimes, the interests of nimbyists and career activists are closely aligned. And that can potentially lead to real success, as in the case of the anti-fracking movement. Here, then, is at least a partial formula for successful action. You need the training an commitment of the professionals, but you also need the everyday mass appeal of the nimbys. And you want focus. You don't want a movement against carbon emissions to broaden into one against capitalism - no, not even if capitalism really is itself the root cause. The more things you oppose, the more you make the movement about activism itself, the more people you'll alienate and the less successful you'll be.

Overall

Unfortunately the activism section is the only one I really got anything much out of. The others are somewhat educational and generally fairly interesting in terms of specific topics (transhumanism, psychedelics, libertarianism, the far right, commune dwellers) but Bartlett makes no effort to draw any more generalised conclusions. He rarely ventures his own opinion on the different groups, ironically to an extent I found distracting : I want to know what the author thinks of the people he spent so long with ! It's such an obvious thing to expect that it was notable by its absence.

Worse, most of the radicals come across as low-intelligence nutters. I don't think that was his intent, but by passing no more comments than frequent skepticism and stereotypical platitudes, that's what they become reduced to. It feels less of impartial perspective and more a rudderless, aimless meandering; a fair level of description but pretty nearly zero explanation or analysis.

Personally I would far, far prefer to have someone make a good solid argument for or against a position, otherwise it's a meaningless information dump. Put some spin on it, for god's sake man ! I won't hold you to it ! I just want to have a staring position to explore this issue. And - and I can't begin to stress how much this annoys me - PUT ANY COMMENTARY FOOTNOTES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE. AND IF THEY'RE TOO LONG, WORK THEM IN TO THE MAIN BODY OF THE TEXT. I DON'T WANT TO KEEP FLICKING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THE MAIN TEXT AND A SECTION AT THE BACK BECAUSE THAT IS JUST SO FUCKING STUPID. STOP IT.

(Honestly, this is the worst book for footnote-flicking I've ever read. And that's saying something.)

Now that I've got that off my chest, the final thing I have to mention is that the conclusion section feels downright hypocritical. Throughout the book, Bartlett has overwhelmingly adopted a skeptical position - not one of outright denial, but definitely one that's less than enthusiastic for just about any of the people he's been with. Very rarely indeed does he have a good thing to say about the ideas he investigates (even though he's more considerate regarding the people themselves). So when he advocates in favour of having a society that tolerates and to some degree encourages radicals, I find two faults with his logic - not his conclusion at all, just his reasoning. First, the hypocrisy :

Most people will probably go along with this reasonably inoffensive argument... but they will usually find some sophisticated reason as to why this should not apply to ideas with which they strongly disagree. I heard this often : "not those radicals".

Wait, so you mean exactly as you yourself have just spent the entire bloody book disparaging ? If you thought any of the radicals here actually might be right, you certainly fooled me. And the thing is, his choice of radicals does feel extremely odd. Transhumanism doesn't even advocate for any specific course of action, it just believes certain things are going to happen somehow. True, nation-states are not the only way to organise societies, but I think they've existed (at least in a basic form) a lot longer than Bartlett gives them credit for. While his criticism of anti-terrorism measures seems valid, he presentex exactly zero alternatives and so comes across as a complete berk. And sure, sometimes cults do become fully-fledged world religions, but nothing in the commune he investigates persuades me that it has the slightest chance of avoiding the fate of 99.99% of such endeavours and dying a forgotten death. So why choose this one ?

The thing is, there are plenty of other radical ideas he could have pursued that might have stood a better chance. Re-usable rocketry now looks like it has a real shot at drastically slashing the cost of access to space. Movements for a Universal Basic Income are growing. Calls for Open Borders are still fringe, but surely this is far more plausible than actually doing away with the state entirely. And  while I commend him for getting up close and personal with the far right, to avoid examining the far left feels unfair. 

So yes, I agree with the sentiment that radicals might be right, but I see no problem at all in saying "not these particular nutters". Granted it's less extreme than comparing a Flat Earth conspiracy video with an online university course, but the principle is the same. Not every radical is right, and some are a lot more plausible than others.

The second fault I find with his endorsement of the ideas he doesn't believe is altogether worse and weirder.

Tommy Robinson and Pegida-UK are necessary for the existence of its opposite. Their presence forces us to examine our ideas, work out what we believe, why we believe it and mobilise. If Pegida did not exist, the arguments against it - in this case in favour of multiculturalism, or an authentic British Islam - would lose their vitality and strength. Similarly, the existence of radical Islam, and the fundamental threat it poses to liberal democracy, gives life and meaning to the arguments in defence of individual liberty.

I call absolute bullshit. Yes, we need contrary ideas. No, we don't need to have innocent people suffer in order that we ourselves might not. Sure, the voices for liberty and democracy are (logically) loudest in places which don't have them (because who shouts for things they already have ?) but the idea that we need Nazi-level ideologies to remind us of just how good we have it... sorry, no. This basically says, "you innocent people, you lot all the way over there... your suffering is good because it makes us happier and more secure in our own situation". And that's a whole lot of nope.

Next on my reading list : Utopia For Realists. Improving society surely isn't the province only of nutters, so I'm hoping that will be a lot more me.