My friend David Konstan was prompted by a post I wrote entitled “Utopias” to expand my view in a particularly elegant way that showed the humanities could be systematic and cumulative. I had said that utopias (and dystopias) were forms of society that had abolished the distinction between public and private life. Plato’s Republic is a place where the types of people correspond to the types of roles provided in the society. “1984” shows that the private impulse to have sex is the great danger to Big Brother’s society. David had elaborated this view so that individuality is always a critique of utopias and dystopias. Moreover, among his many nuanced ideas about the way an individual can struggle with both utopias and dystopias, is the observation that most of these erstwhile antagonists are of familiar types, like the loner who roamed the western frontier but was transplanted into a post-apocalyptic environment and who had not changed because of this new environment. Konstan is engaging with a prime idea of utopias and dystopias: people will be changed, a new person, a New Soviet Man or a Winston beaten down and newly dedicated to Big Brother. The question for utopias, then, is whether people are transformed. Otherwise it isn’t really a utopia.
A way to expand the idea of utopia is to remember that an institution short of being an entire society can be considered utopian and so has the characteristic of collapsing private and public life into one another. That is certainly the case with the military even if there are other glamorous lives, organized as corporate entities, that do not construct that collapse. Baseball, for example, is an exemplary life that offers both fame and money, but where players work at managing their family lives even if there is a delay at doing so because there are so many pleasures at playing the field. Academics also allow the coordination of personal family life with career life, even if doing so requires moving the family from one place to another so as to secure an ever more prestigious position. Military life also shunts around families from one base to another, but what makes military life so utopian is the fact that most military figures are devoted to the tasks undertaken when they are on duty. That means that the various positions cooperate with one another in a smooth enough way so that competition is put aside to get their tasks done, and so a naval flotilla is like a regiment or on the bridge of the Starship “Enterprise”. There is an all for one, onme for all atmosphere of camaraderie and mutual self sacrifice. Such well oiled machines are made to think that they are idealized, are utopian, the commanders each looking after the subordinates. It is exhilarating to see such cohesion and so is rightly thought of as a Utopian endeavor come to real life even if, outside the ship, people are bereft of their families and private life. The same exhilaration might be found in a tightly welded congregation, its members highlighting their solidarity as members of their congregation as opposed to being families resting in family pews, the position earned for wealth or prestige. If the members of the “Wellfleet'' going to Plymouth Rock or a generations long spaceship going to another star were organized, as they would have to be, they would be a community or a colony rather than a utopia.
There is another sense of utopianism, and this one does entirely scuttle individuality. A military officer, for example, becomes an instrument of his organization. He or she may be creative in obeying orders, but his object is to do the orders as best possible, even to the extent of dying while doing so. An officer is expected to destroy his secret devices if his plane is captured even if it means the officer is less likely to escape. We can think of the procedures he has trained to employ as rules or laws to govern him or her even if the rules or laws have not been fully explicated, only indicated, as what to do in a tight pickle. So the rules or laws aren’t customs or rituals; they are ways to guide prospective behavior to accomplish a predetermined task that has been said previously by someone in command. Discretion is not an expression of individuality; it is, instead, the way to adjust a past and fast rule to present unanticipated circumstances without altering the intention that remains from the past. A person is, in this sense, lacking individuality in that the person is an instrument of both the order and of the order from the past, even if that is a piece of paper or an oral command or a sense of what these gods at one time said in a whisper.
Law itself is an institution in society that restricts individuality, even to the purposes of imprisonment and death, so as to accomplish a limited view of utopianism. The law is uplifted out of ordinary customs, manners and other ways of having ways to salve social friction by creating an ultimate and transcendent set of edicts by which to make the world a considerably better place. People under law are in the opposite position of those who are in anarchy, and that is better because life in anarchy would be bitter, short and cruel. Law is imposed on people rather than discovered as part of the natural order of things, so most people would say, while there are a few that think law is unnecessary because people in perhaps some South Sea Island can cooperate out of their natural felicity and good will. As to the rest, law will not make them a utopia but a comfortable lot where people are sure of what they own, including their lives and the sexual partners with which they associate.
The first is in Plato’s “The Laws”. It is the basis for most enlightened Western thinking ever since. It consists of deriving the need for law from the elemental passions of fear and courage. Plato carefully develops why there might be a need for law and characteristically makes the transition from a set of emotions to an institution that is beyond a particular emotion with education, where people are schooled to be good citizens. The purpose of laws is to provide for the benefits of the citizenry, a calculus of avoiding pain and added pleasures as well as to avoid the excesses of pleasure and so makes Plato very utilitarian, though Plato, just struggling to make society emerge from personal emotions, has not crafted the need to provide rights, which are self-limitations of laws, so as to give citizens some freedom from the state as well as suit the needs of the state and its citizens.Also, every nation or people have a peculiar character, as if Plato had done as Aristotle did, which is make a comparative analysis of institutions, and the laws are also suited to what we would call the culture of a nation. “The Laws'' propounds that laws are a way to elevate or better perfect the society so that its members can better suit their lives as not could be done otherwise and so is utopian even if practical because to some degree this is established and that without law crass emotions might prevail. Law is a necessity for a better world even if people can imagine not to have laws and so are batted about instead by arbitrary leaders and arbitrary and coarse emotions. That is trying to get at the bedrock of social life: to overcome states to make government and people better, and that remains the quality of what Western government is about.
A very different basis for establishing law as the partial elevation of people to a more perfect union is provided in “Exodus'', where the Ten Commandments offer very brief imprecations of what should not happen rather than what should happen so as to get praise or wisdom. The law is a set of brief words that are, therefore, neither a description nor an explanation for why these orders should be as they are even if philosophers are so used to the Western tradition that they make the Ten Commandments functional in that they speak to what has to be done if there is to be social order in a society. All societies have to acknowledge life and property and not mess with other people’s wives unless anarchy will prevail. But societies before the arrival of Moses on Mt. Sinai must have appreciated that beforehand. Egyptians did not think people could engage in unjustified murder. What had been added? My suggestion is that God was elevating the Israelites into a higher order than had existed previously by overtly stating these demands on social order. God was elevating that society was more perfect by making it subject to the abstractions of these laws, just as More had made Utopia a better place because he gave names to laws that had previously only been customs or the ways of practice. Giving a custom or practice as a name makes the social life under this law a matter of choice, morality, self-consciousness and therefore more perfect. So all laws therefore make the society more perfect by making them subscribe or obey what otherwise people might not think is a requirement and even more a law in the sense that a rule promulgated in the past, by God or by legislators, applies forward even if circumstances seem not quite right in the application of the laws to the present instance. The law makes life serene even if it is a heavy yoke, and so leads to the paradox that utopians, or the everyday acquaintance with law as it is, both elevates the membership of a society even as it can test them or betray them because of evil leaders, which is just what Plato was concerned about when he was developing the idea of the need for laws as a different level of social order.
The very radical idea of rejecting legality as a modified version of utopianism emerges at the turn into the Twentieth Century in the thought of G. E. Moore, the British analytic philosopher, so radical is he that he is simply dismissed as not discussing morality at all because Moore finds logically unsatisfactory the idea that morality is based on a sense of obligation. In his “Principia Ethica'', Moore makes cogent and what seem to me to be irrefutable objects to law as the basis of morality. He says that, first, whatever law is enunciated is a generosity that has to be applied to a particular. If a person proclaims that “thou shalt not kill”, then you have to interpret the law to apply to a case, so that a mistake or a military killing is excused. No law is without its application and so there are endless appeals to the application of a law. And, second of all, the system as a whole is also subject to question because some philosophical or sociological system has to be justified or proven to hold and so a person is engaged in something other than morals as the basis of finding that the moral system obtains, and this is no longer moral argument but something else, such as saying that the customs and laws of a well ordered and mature society have claims on citizens to comply with these customs and laws, a person having to parse what “mature” means and what customs have authority and those who are merely fads which do not. Is privacy a custom and only slightly a law? It is no wonder that morality, so Moore thinks, is more akin to an aesthetic sense than to a rule or law because an aesthetic sense-- whether a painting is beautiful or a play well crafted or not-- comes close to the experience of morality, which is a sense that it is distasteful to get into someone else’s business or to wish to spend time with a murderer. Individualism, therefore, as a particular person heeding one’s own lights, a taste for a person’s own insights and judgments, all of which stand aside from morality understood as a sense of law. That yields not anarchy or nihilism but rather morality based on its direct response to a feeling of what seems proper or attractive as a way to conduct one’s person. To G. E. Moore, there is no utopianism; there is just individuality.