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jhuffman comments on Utopian hope versus reality - Less Wrong
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I don't know - imagine a time traveler going back 500 years, and trying to convince an average European nobleman about the benefits that would come from improvements in science and technology, by describing today's Western Europe - warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours! People live to eighty years old, with much less diseases and crippling injuries! Death by violence is rare and scandalous, and there haven't been any wars in Western Europe for over sixty years! Nearly everybody can read, and watch amazing shows from the comfort of his home!
It would probably sound like Utopia to him, and even more so to a peasant of the time. Current western civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history.
(Note that actually getting those results may not actually be a matter of science and technology; the progress we got may mostly come from things like improvements to agriculture which allowed a larger portion of the population to do something else - the actual causes of the great improvements we saw are debated)
As Eliezer wrote:
When I was very young, I was something of a Maoist. Nowadays, not so much. Nonetheless, are you familiar with the notion of labor-aristocracy?
I am imagining a hypothetical Spartan: "Current Laconic civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history."
He is, of course, ignoring the existence of Helots.
Certainly. However, do they not rely on cheap labor from other nations?
Are you saying we should not buy things from poor people?
I am certainly not saying that.
What I am saying is that many of the products we buy every day are produced by cheap laborers whose lives are not-so-great. (This is obvious, of course.) It is not apparent that Western Europe could have its quality of life without this cheap labor. To only take into account Western quality of life when deciding our current society's utopia-status without taking into account the quality of life of our foreign laborers is, well, just not cricket.
Obesity is a worldwide problem, not just a first world one. Imagine: we can now count as a problem having too much food. Food was rationed in Britain just sixty years ago. We have better problems than we did in living memory.
Certainly. I have no problem with modern global society being considered more utopian that all previous societies. Technology is cool like that.
Yes but this trade benefits both parties. While the labor is "cheap" it pays better than if there weren't so many foreign companies building factories in that labor market. So in terms of aggregate quality of life I do not think this can be much of an objection in itself - the fact that all sorts of exploitation typically accompanies such trade not withstanding.
I understand what you are saying though: the total cost in person-hours to maintain a particular standard of living should maybe be taken into account - although I think this can be misleading. For example in places where labor for personal servants is very cheap there are a lot more of them - some of my peers who are from India had several servants working in their home, driving their cars etc. It was almost looked at as an obligation to hire these people. In every other way to measure wealth they made more money after immigrating to the US but of course could not afford such services here.
I am not arguing against globalism. Let me try to make my point more clear.
I do not see our foreign laborers as being separable from our current society in such a way that our quality of life could be maintained. As such, when evaluating our society for utopia-status, the existence of these laborers should be taken into account. That is, given our society's current workings, these laborers should be considered members of our society. Under this interpretation, statements such as this:
are false. Now, I'm not saying that we are not a utopia. However, we certainly are less utopian than was implied by Emile's post.
tl;dr: Society is still a pyramid, the bottom half has now been exported overseas. One mustn't only examine the top half when evaluating for utopia-status.
Interestingly, slavery was a feature of Utopia as described in Thomas More's original book, which happens to have been written by a nobleman, about 500 years ago (it was published in 1516).
I'm not really making any claims about the utopia-status of our society, I'm merely saying that promises of Utopia are not inherently off-mark; the enlightenment people had a lot of mistakes in their expectations for the future, but overall, their optimism and enthusiasm was warranted (my argument depends more on what counts as a "promise of Utopia", rather than what counts as "Utopia").
It's admittedly easier to find examples of Utopias that went horribly horribly wrong (especially in the past century), but when something went right for a society, you can find people that were working towards that goal; the US founding fathers are another example, at that time, nobody expected the US to succeed as a republic (the established wisdom was that democracy may sometimes work for small city states, but of course it could never be functional for a large country).