Ole Rogeberg writes:
Recently read your blogpost on Pinker’s views regarding red and blue states. This might help you see where he’s coming from: The “conflict of visions” thing that Pinker repeats to likely refers to Thomas Sowell’s work in the books “Conflict of Visions” and “Visions of the anointed.” The “Conflict of visions” book is on his top-5 favorite book list and in a Q&A interview he explains it as follows:
Q: What is the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision?
A: They are the different visions of human nature that underlie left-wing and right-wing ideologies. The distinction comes from the economist Thomas Sowell in his wonderful book “A Conflict of Visions.” According to the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, and social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. According to the Utopian vision, these limits are “products†of our social arrangements, and we should strive to overcome them in a better society of the future. Out of this distinction come many right-left contrasts that would otherwise have no common denominator. Rightists tend to like tradition (because human nature does not change), small government (because no leader is wise enough to plan society), a strong police and military (because people will always be tempted by crime and conquest), and free markets (because they convert individual selfishness into collective wealth). Leftists believe that these positions are defeatist and cynical, because if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and more peaceable and generous.
My reply:
As with Pinker’s writing on red and blue states, I think Pinker is lacking some historical perspective here. I do not think it’s all correct to say that “rightists like small government.” I think it’s more accurate to say that rightists like large government when it’s controlled by the right, and leftists like large government when it’s controlled by the left. And how do you classify, for example, right-wing clerical governments? Do they have the tragic vision (because they are conservative) or the utopian vision (because they want a single church to be in control)?
And then there is the conjunction between “small government” and “a strong police and military.” Guatemala for many years ago had small government (for one thing, the people who ran the country did not want to pay taxes) and a strong police and military. Put these together and you get a demonstration of “the tragic vision”: the strong police and military killed hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans. More generally, what does it mean to have a strong police and military with a small government? Who then is in charge of all these armed men?
Pinker’s characterization of leftism seems to miss something too. Try taking his statement, “if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and more peaceable and generous” and flipping it around: “if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become more foolish, nasty, warlike, and selfish.” After all, if people can be changed in one direction, why not in the other direction?
Also, I agree with Pinker that lots of issues get grouped into left and right, but I don’t see tragic vs. utopian as so central. For example, lots of conservatives want to restrict birth control and abortion. I don’t see this fitting into a tragic vision of human nature. Perhaps it is a utopian vision (all potential babies deserve to be born) or a conservative vision (the roles of men and women should remain traditional).
As with many such binary divides, I think this classification tells us more about the person doing the classifying than about the reality that is being classified.
P.S. Just to clarify a few things:
The relevance of Guatemala was to question Pinker’s claims that rightists like small government because “no leader is wise enough to plan society” and that rightists like a strong police and military because “people will always be tempted by crime and conquest.” This might be the case in the U.S., but in Guatemala my impression is that rightists liked small government because they wanted low taxes and they didn’t want to share power, and the police and military had nothing to do with people being tempted by crime and conquest. So I’m questioning the generality of Pinker’s claims. It’s not about whether the Guatemalan government policies were good or bad; rather, I’m questioning his claim of a common denominator.
Similarly with issues of birth control and abortion. These are big left-right issues but I don’t see them fitting into the tragic vision thing.
Finally, the last sentence of the post (right before the P.S.) is not intended to be ad hominem innuendo. I sincerely believe that these sorts of classifications are often an expression of the classifier more than a description of external reality. This is not a personal argument, it’s just my impression: there are so many different ways of slicing the world, that the way one chooses to slice can be informative. Some people would describe politics as a struggle between generations, or social classes, or economic classes. Others would point to a divide between urban and rural, or metropole vs. colonies. Others might describe an ideological struggle between progress and reaction. Pinker talks about the tragic vs. utopian vision, and I think that choice says something about how he views politics.
Try taking his statement, “if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and more peaceable and generous” and flipping it around: “if we change parenting, education, the media, and social expectations, people could become more foolish, nasty, warlike, and selfish.” After all, if people can be changed in one direction, why not in the other direction?
I think this is where the difference lies. The Tragic Vision is indeed the acknowledgement that it could go either way, regardless of the intentions those instituting the change. Or at least that would be the ex post evaluation of the change. Instead, therefore, you don’t try to change things by changing humans — we don’t know how to do that. We instead change institutions (which is hard enough!) to cabin the unruly humanity which lies underneath.
I have to agree with Professor Gelman on Pinker. Pinker has made a nice living attacking the “Standard Social Science Model,” the idea that people are blank slates for whom anything is possible. Does that mean that he believes that there is no such thing as free will, that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that nothing can be done to make people better (for example, does he believe that it’s pointless to teach evolutionary psychology to undergraduates because of various cognitive biases people suffer from)? Of course not. He takes a middle position, a view that people are constrained but still have some freedom, a perspective that is both hardheaded in its acknowledgment of reality yet humanistic in its belief in the potential for progress. This remarkably bold stance is only held by 99.9% of humanity.
No, the substance of Pinker’s views are not found in grand views of human nature, but in the specifics. There are areas where he believes in the possibility for human improvement and areas where he does not.
Andrew,
What do you think about the related framing Mike Konczal laid out in “Against Law, For Order”?
Mark:
What Konczal writes seems reasonable to me. I take his point to be similar to that made by commenter Popeye above: all of us in our political philosophies have some mix of the tragic and utopian visions; the interesting questions come in the specifics.
Good example about Guatemala. I like to browse in my 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica and I recently read its article on Guatemala. The EB always tried to look on the positive side of things, but even they couldn’t up with anything to say about the ruling class of Guatemala that didn’t sound like a dystopian nightmare.
The Utopian Vision v. Tragic Vision goes back to the Rousseau v. Burke argument over the French Revolution.
I used to be fascinated by that argument (I wrote a long paper in college on whether Rousseau or Burke had more influence on Wordsworth). But in the very long run perspective, Rousseau and Burke seem more similar than different: two Enlightenment intellectuals who were ahead of their time in being harbingers of the coming Romantic Age of the early 19th Century that neither lived to see. They both had brilliant rhetorical skills and were more aesthetically than purely logically inclined. Rousseau, who composed an opera that is still occasionally mounted, wrote most of the Encylopedia’s articles on music. Burke came up with the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime that resonated with 19th Century artists.
Burke’s great prediction in 1790 of the course of the then-moderate French Revolution over the next decade — regicide, terror, inflation, and ending in military dictatorship — is justly famous, but he arrived at it less through deduction than through his intuitive genius.
Similarly, Rousseau more or less dreamed up a number of the distinctive elements of modern culture, such as progressive education and the purportedly frank tell-all autobiography.
In practice, Rousseau was more conservative than in his theoretical works (asked to draft a new constitution for the notoriously dysfunctional government of Poland, he came up with a prudent plan); and in practice Burke, a leading Whig, was a great reformer (he did much by his example to clean up corruption in British government), and tried to reform British control of India and forge a more decentralized relationship with the 13 colonies to head off the War of Independence).
Rousseau was kind of crazy for most of his life (an old girlfriend summed him up as “an interesting madman”) and Burke went kind of crazy at the end of his life in the 1790s under the huge strain of resisting the French Revolution.
So, there is some “narcissism of small differences” at work in the traditional Rousseau v. Burke dichotomy.