The Heroic v. The Utopian

What Is It That Makes People Tick? 2

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing….Progress is the realisation of Utopias. –Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”¹

In an earlier post, “What Is It That Makes People Tick?” (April 8), I described two views of human motivation—the Material View, which emphasizes the maximizing of rational utility, and the Social View, which emphasizes competition for status. The first dwells upon individual self-interest while the second tends to see the family and its position as the ultimate bearer of regard. Modern intellectuals, including Marxists, have tended to see the Material View as more pessimistic than the Social View, but I made the point that, in fact, the Social View is more discouraging because status competition is a zero-sum game. If having enough of everything is the goal, everyone could possibly achieve it; if being socially superior is the goal, we can’t all be superior at the same time—except in Lake Woebegone, where everybody is above average.

Both of these views are associated with historical social and economic forms. Modern capitalism is the quintessential expression of the Material View while the traditional heroic-aristocratic culture that dominated the premodern world is the quintessential expression of the Social View. The situation becomes more complicated, though, when we recognize that the two forms of social life have a common enemy, the powerful strain of utopian thinking that starts with Plato and includes Thomas More, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, H. G. Wells, and many others. Utopian thinkers have great differences among them but all of them share a powerful critique of heroic culture. Scholars of utopianism, of which there are many, tend to see it, rather blandly, as an expression of hope for a better world. My belief is that one can’t understand utopianism, and politics in general, without grasping the conflict between utopianism, with its intense philosophical and moral passion, and the resistance of its chief enemy—heroic culture—along with its late-arriving materialist successor, capitalism.

The utopian philosopher, supposing that the means of happiness should belong to all, looks at the world and sees how many people have so much more than they need while others lack basic necessities. Sees the vanity, triviality, and luxury of the great, and that the value of what they strive for resides not in enjoying what they have but in having what others lack. Sees the absurdity of a social hierarchy based on family, wealth, or the arrangements of the feudal past. Sees the miseries of the poor and how money enters into every relationship, distorting the choices of love and profession without bringing happiness. Sees the unfair dominance of men over women, and the supreme value placed on the least reasonable of human activities, war and destruction. Sees society being guided by heroic narratives of family, tribe, race, and nation instead of objective truth. Sees literature and art glorifying the struggles and reveling in the chaos of an irrational existence. Sees the modern replacement of feudal-aristocratic culture with capitalist individualism as only a minor change in the score-keeping between the lowly and the great.

For utopians, hierarchical societies and the values that sustain them are brutal and mad, designed only to create conflict and misery and the abuse of freedom. Added to this is the irony that aristocrats and captains of industry do not even benefit from most of their resources except as these resources set them above others in esteem. It is the hunger for status, the hunger to appear great in the eyes of others, not material self-interest, that drives the masters of society to accumulate so much more than they need. To make fame and grandeur in the eyes of others the principal objects of human aspiration is to worship at the altar of inequality. W. B. Yeats formulated the crucial objection to the heroic frame of mind which erects distinction as the central human value.

A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream. (“Fergus and the Druid”)

The utopian concludes that the only solution for this aristocratic culture of folly must be an intentionally implemented scheme of rational, truth-centered happiness for all based on the absolute value of good things, not their relative value based upon who has what. Its form will be a city or state with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the frailties of human nature. Only by such means will human beings escape their irrationality and enslavement to the past. The scheme will inevitably include a thorough remaking of citizens, through education or even breeding, and a reform of the incentives that shape everyone’s behavior. It will rely upon the wisdom of the system, not the qualities of individuals. It will be a world without heroes or the need for them.

The utopian critique of heroic and competitive societies has great moral force. It builds on the painful but inescapable insights developed by major authors ancient and modern. But taken as a practical program, it generates resistance from two sources. One is that designed societies, to keep them from disaster, need designers not only of superhuman intellect but also of superhuman virtue. The task is beyond the powers of any single legislator of the kind imagined in the ancient Greek city-states. What would be needed is a whole class of rulers lasting from generation to generation, and such superhuman lawgivers and administrators have not been forthcoming. Instead, reformers in power have too often set themselves up as new, exploitative elites. This is the political problem of utopia. It has bedeviled just about every utopian scheme that has been tried on a sizable scale, making political utopianism look like a recipe for its very opposite—dystopia.

The second source of resistance to the utopian vision is perplexing in a different way. It is the ethical problem of utopia, using “ethical” in the broad sense that includes not only morality but also wider questions, preeminently the question how to live. To state it briefly, even if a rational social order could be achieved through political and administrative design, would it be a true answer to human striving? Can heroic psychology, which sets fame, respect, and social position above all other goods, and demands the freedom to pursue them, be successfully replaced by an order in which the good things of life are equally available to all? The heroic point of view says no—that without the struggle for competitive distinction, human existence would lack meaning and interest. A life in which the means of happiness are reliably administered to all would be beneath human dignity. King Lear, grieving at the removal of his cherished retinue of knights, passionately states the case that such symbolic values cannot be dismissed merely because they serve no practical need. “O, reason not the need!” he says.

	                                   Our basest beggars
               Are in the poorest things superfluous;
               Allow not nature more than nature needs,
               Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. (King Lear, Act 2, scene 2.)

There is a touch of paradox in Lear’s attitude. He is being told that he has enough of everything he needs, but he replies that having enough is never enough, that even the poorest creatures require something which goes beyond necessity. That thing is distinction, dignity, respect—the marks of a king. Lear “wastes his blood to be another’s dream” and does so willingly. The alternative would be a loss of humanity—a stripping down to “the thing itself,” to “unaccommodated man,” a “poor, bare, forked animal” (King Lear, Act 3, scene 4). For the heroic ethos, the need to have more, the need to be more, is fundamental. Without it, Lear would not be himself. He would be bereft of his identity.

Lear’s heroic perspective mounts a powerful challenge to the view that happiness consists of having the good things of life, the things that utopians would distribute in fair proportion if they could. In fact, for the defenders of heroic psychology, the spoils of victory are not the key to happiness. It is taste for the competition itself, and for the struggles it demands, which are the bass notes of human sensibility, typically conceived, of course, in a distinctively masculine manner. The competition and the glory of it, not the prize, is the answer to human desire. True happiness requires struggle, just as true solidarity requires a common enemy. Worlds without struggle and without the heroes that emerge from struggle, worlds blessed with systemic happiness, look so tedious as to be unendurable. Wallace Stevens puts the heroic complaint with unforgettable vividness. Without the heroic imagination, he says, without “the human revery and poem of death,” human beings would be “Castratos of moon-mash” (“Men Made Out of Words”).

The freedom from difficulty, therefore, which is the very goal of utopia, is actually, from the heroic point of view, its greatest drawback. And it is a disquieting point against the utopian position that when human beings are free to amuse themselves and poets and writers set out to entertain them, it is misery, strife, and struggle which they use all their powers to evoke. Storytelling, whether historical or fictive, dwells overwhelmingly upon violence, passion, and change. It thrives, in other words, upon just those costs of grandiosity and folly which utopias aim to eliminate. This is why utopian literature struggles to rise above the banality of goodness. By the very token of its validity as a rational scheme of life, utopia lacks everything that appeals to the storytelling imagination. As Mustafa Mond, the Controller of Western Europe in Brave New World, explains, “Happiness is never grand.”

Insofar as imaginative interest, then, is an indicator of what people desire from life, utopia is lacking. Literary visions of the happiness of others can please in modest, lyric doses, or at the end of a comedy of errors, when the happy couples must be ushered off-stage as quickly as possible before their felicity begins to cloy. But the appetite for the spectacle of others’ suffering seems to be insatiable, making it look as though human beings really are dystopians at heart. If it is true that one person’s paradise can be another’s hell, the compensations of the dystopian imagination make it look like one person’s hell can be another’s paradise.

From the utopian point of view, of course, the heroic protest against happiness looks like an insane combination of sadism and masochism. If you don’t like peace and order, the utopian might ask, why settle for just a little struggle and adventure? Why not opt for total chaos? This looks like a devastating argument, but the true defender of the heroic has a reply: Let us have war and the poetry of war. Hasn’t war always been the noblest field of heroic aspiration? Doesn’t great art require spectacles of struggle and self-sacrifice? And isn’t the utopian mission also a heroic one, requiring its own, overmastering elite? Doesn’t the appeal of revolution depend just a little on unseating and doing violence to one’s enemies? Isn’t it, in fact, only in war and disaster that the collective unity longed for by utopians is ever realized? As committed a utopian as the Marxist Fredric Jameson seems to admit this when, ruefully, he refers to World War II as “the great American utopia.” The ironies of this would take many pages to unpack.²

The dilemma produced by the collision of heroic psychology with utopian philosophy leads to an endless dialectic, an intellectual back and forth between two apparently valid but mutually incompatible views of happiness, each deeply grounded in human nature and experience. There are essential values on both sides—fairness about the basic necessities of life on the one side, distinction and the freedom to pursue it on the other. Neither of these can be written off. As an ethical position, the heroic view, being grounded in the belief that human societies must be fundamentally unequal, is difficult to defend, but as a view of what is essential to human psychology, it is difficult to evade. The evidence in its favor turns out to be the very same irrational pattern of social life targeted by the utopian critique, but it asks us to imagine a world in which this pattern does not hold while still being a recognizably human world. It would be a world without vanity, without dignity, without distinction, a world in which people are not motivated by the need to be respected and favorably compared with others, either as individuals or in groups. From the utopian point of view, the heroic world looks inhumane. From the heroic point of view, the utopian world looks inhuman.

This dilemma finds clear expression in modern politics. The utopian and heroic modes mark the extremes of the political scale, with communism and its dream of equality on the side of the utopian and fascism with its aesthetics of violence and its nostalgia for the past on the side of the heroic. But what makes the dilemma especially painful and exhausting is that, under conditions of polarization, it seems to engulf the middle zone of politics. This has been painfully obvious in the Age of Trump, with the heroic rhetoric of MAGA pitted against the utopian Left, with middle ground very hard to find.

I personally believe that social hope embodied in utopian dreaming is essential to any tolerable prospect for the future, as the famous words of Oscar Wilde in my epigraph suggest, but the utopian impulse must also take account of the dilemma it creates. I tried to shed light on this subject in my The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination (2023) by surveying the conflict between heroic and utopian positions as a crucial fault line in the political culture of the west, visible across a broad selection of major utopian and dystopian writings in literature and political theory. My account begins and ends with pairings of the most absolute defenders of the rival positions—Plato versus Homer, Anthony Burgess versus B. F. Skinner. But for the most part, the dilemma did not lead the authors I discuss to pitched battles. Rather, the dilemma itself is at the heart of the story. The majority of those who confront it, beginning with Thomas More, the inventor of utopia as a literary genre, feel the cutting power of both the dilemma’s horns.

In future posts, I will be taking up the tension between utopian and heroic ideas, stances, and values as a powerfully generative stimulus for some of the seminal figures of the western intellectual tradition. Diogenes, Bacon, Swift, Rousseau, Marx, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Huxley, and Orwell will be points of reference. I will also show how the utopian dilemma is brilliantly dramatized in Ursula K. LeGuin’s story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a realization I failed to arrive at while writing my book.

Other related questions that I hope to address are

Where does religion come into all this?

How do non-western traditions like China’s differ on the issue?

Is happiness all it’s cracked up to be?

1. Photo of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony. Public domain.

2. Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Verso, 2016), p. 21.