We know from personal experience that good-quality food, just like good ideas, when consumed with prudence, can do us more good than harm. And so it was with the lunch my friend referred to. Besides the tasty fish, we tasted and decanted valuable ideas that day. Every time utopia is brought into question in a discussion by the protagonists of the debate—and that was the case—reasons, feelings, and emotions, on both sides, inhabit certain discourses, entrenched, always lying in wait for the moment when they will rise up to attain the argumentative status of science. Let us agree that this can create some difficulties when we aim to clarify certain questions, especially those set in motion by utopian thought itself.
When we confine ourselves to the term itself—and we do not usually pay due attention to words, let us be honest—we notice that “utopia” does not mean merely “a place that does not exist,” or even a social organization that could come into being, though we do not know when; here we are only skimming the surface. Let us deepen the argument a little. If we consider that utopia refers to a forthcoming social order, it is a work to be built. We then discern More’s problem from another position: an interrogation directed, in fact, not at the future—because that would be absurd, since there is nothing to inquire into about the unknown. When we weigh the fact that it projects a certain society as a non-place—since it does not yet exist—on the basis of what existed in its time, its question is directed at the present and the past. And what matters to us, if we are not indifferent to science in our arguments, is the question more than the answer. Incidentally, science is not the search for truth, but for new questions.
Let us return. What More’s problem illuminates is an axiomatic equivalence: in social and political matters, every projection of benefits is an operation of costs in the present. And what does that mean in our case? Let us try to understand the statement in parts. (i) The first shows that utopia cannot be confused with daydreams; these are individual, while that is always collective. (ii) The second tells us that in utopia there is a temporal problem: how to anticipate the future—which, in itself, is nonsense, as we have seen. (iii) The third denotes that utopia is, necessarily, a collective cost. Given the length of the text, let us confine ourselves to the fit between propositions i and iii. It is legitimate to suggest that in the face of an individual cost there is no problem in freely exercising floating imagination; even chimeras can be given substance, why not? But when the cost is collective, Jerusalem does not descend to earth. We need to deal with our problems with what we have, here and now: a relationship between certain scarcity of resources in the present and uncertain abundance in the future. Only in this way can we return More’s problem to its natural bed: in its benefits, the view from the future to the present requires realizing from the present to the future, in its costs. It is an inversion of perspective that allows us to penetrate the core of the Morean question, which is epistemological: what can we know?
To limit the treatment of the problem to two of the most notable figures, let us see what Hayek and Simon teach us on the matter: there is no knowledge available for achieving an optimal distribution of resources in any society. In other words, it is not possible to know a function that would enable the allocation of resources so as to obliterate the trade-offs in social and political questions. The opposite would require knowing all the alternatives of choices and their consequences. In short, our rationality is limited in transforming means that we can know into optimal benefits, which are unknown by nature.
And then we strike another side of the rock, where our shovel bends again: when the consequences are collective, given the premises of the social contract, there must be a criterion of choice distributed throughout society, one that is accessible to those concerned and knowable by them so as to be understandable. What is that criterion? There is only one: the experience accumulated by the generations. More knew this. Not for any other reason, as we have seen, his question is not directed at the future—would a society be possible in which the distribution of resources is not a function of a trade-off?—but at the present, based on the past.
Utopia, this being established, reveals itself beyond appearances: it concerns a problem of collective costs; it is not a matter of a distributivism of benefits. Thus, the more collective the cost, the more the choices on social and political questions must be structured by experience. It is then that values acquire prominence, for they are what make experience operationalizable as a criterion: what has more value and what has less, given its use—that which is more or less valued—prevails over the conjecturable as the device that allows the parameterization of a scale of preferences in decision-making. For this reason, any passage from the individual instance to the social, as is the case with utopia, shifts the problem from the realm of possibility to that of necessity. Once its substrate is removed—possible future benefits disregarding present costs in a context of limited rationality in the management of resources—the support of utopia erodes. It does not hold within the bounds of reason and science, in whose terms it even ceases to be conceivable.
It is legitimate to start from other bases in order to project the future. Sooner or later, however, our collective architectures, with foundations and operations that have not passed through the tribunal of reason and science, will come face to face with the unanticipated problem of mediations; we run the serious risk of suffering the revenge of consequences.
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