Anarchy 85/Meliorism

76

“My contention is that one has to weigh the special cir­cum­stan­ces of each case, and cannot safely guide one’s conduct by hard-and-fast rules which know nothing of the cir­cum­stan­ces or charac­ter of the people concerned. Surely the duty of man is not to do what he can’t, but to do the best he can; and I believe that, by adop­ting ab­stract rules never to do this or that, never to use force, or money, or support a Govern­ment, or go to war, and by encum­ber­ing our con­scien­ces with line upon line and precept upon precept, we become less likely to behave reason­ably and rightly than if we atten­ded more to those next steps, the wisdom of which can be tested in daily life …”

—<span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: aylmer maude">aylmer maude, in criticism of Leo Tolstoy.  

s1

Meliorism

GEORGE MOLNAR

This talk is a plea for a revi­sion of the re­ceived liber­ta­rian atti­tude to melio­rism. By melio­rism I under­stand at­tempts to remedy or reform speci­fic grie­vances or defects in a demo­cra­tic society. Some of what I have to say arose out of re­flec­ting on a book of essays by Paul Goodman However this is not a paper on Goodman. I’ll refer to his views at the outset and also make exem­plary use of his work in some places. But my main interest is in pos­sible liber­ta­rian reac­tions to him, and beyond that, in the stan­dard liber­ta­rian atti­tude to melio­rism.

  Goodman calls himself a “utopian socio­lo­gist”, meaning of course to be iro­ni­cal. He is a self-confessed prag­ma­tist, strongly inter­ested in prac­tical goals and in getting things done. Al­though at heart he is a social critic, his avowed inten­tion is to combine des­truc­tive criti­cism with posi­tive pro­posals whose accep­tance would improve the object of criti­cism or even replace it alto­gether with some­thing better.

  “I seem to be able to write only prac­ti­cally, inven­ting expe­di­ents. … My way of writing a book of social theory has been to invent com­munity plans. My psy­cho­logy is a manual of thera­peu­tic exer­cises. A liter­ary study is a manual of prac­tical criti­cism. A dis­cus­sion of human nature is a program of peda­gogi­cal and poli­tical reforms. This present book is no excep­tion. It is social criti­cism, but almost in­vari­ably (except in moments of indig­na­tion) I find that I know what I don’t like only by con­trast with some con­crete pro­posal that makes more sense.”

  Goodman is not in the tradi­tion of 18th and 19th century refor­merso were ob­sessed with the idea of a Grand Plan to cure all ills of mankind at one stroke and forever. His thought is there­fore not to be com­pared to clas­sical anar­chism for he seems inter­ested solely in piece­meal reforms and changes. In modern American society thin­king men are faced with a moral di­lemma:

  “It is only by the usual tech­nolo­gical and orga­nisa­tio­nal proce­dures

77

that any­thing can be accom­plished. But with these proce­dures, and the motives and perso­nali­ties that belong to them, fresh ini­tia­tive is dis­cou­raged and funda­men­tal change is pre­ven­ted.”

  Goodman rejects the general vali­dity of the premi­ses from which this pes­simis­tic con­clu­sion is drawn. He believes that the short­comings and defects of the society in which he lives are in part due not to the absence of better alter­na­tives but to an un­wil­ling­ness seri­ously to con­sider and accept certain poli­cies—the poli­cies to which he gives the friend­ly-ironic label “utopian”. This un­wil­ling­ness is itself not an alto­gether un­change­able, rock-hard social fact on Good­man’s view. Resis­tance to novelty or to propo­sals which are or seem radical and dis­tur­bing, can itself be studied and under­stood, and some­times over­come. Goodman, conscious that all is not for the best in the best of all pos­sible worlds, be­lieves that “some­thing can be done about it”. He thinks that there exist means which, without being self-defea­ting, are apt to further modest but conse­quen­tial ends. He calls them “expe­di­ents”, and reminds us of Goethe’s objec­tive: “just to live on a little”. The con­trast with Marxist-historicist beliefs in the impos­sibi­lity of reform within capi­ta­lism could hardly be more complete.

  How do liber­ta­rians react to all this? Dif­feren­ces of inte­rest between Goodman and liber­ta­rians are obvious enough. He is much more catholic in his inte­rests that we are. He is con­cerned with town and com­mu­nity plan­ning, with the aes­the­tic quality of life and the sur­rounds of acti­vi­ties; he is inte­res­ted in the tech­no­logy and admi­nis­tra­tion of edu­ca­tion; in voca­tio­nal gui­dance; in psy­cho­the­rapy; in youth camps; and in many other things which to the liber­tarian-in-the-street are either so many un­knowns or else hobbies to be pursued unof­fi­cial­ly. Some of his pre­occu­pa­tions are then ab initio quite un­like­ly to arouse much enthu­siasm in our quar­ters. Never­the­less we should not over­stress the dif­feren­ces. For Goodman is among other things an anti-mili­ta­rist, a critic of super­sti­tious ide­olo­gies, an advo­cate of sexual freedom and of freedom of ex­pres­sion. We do have a lot in common with what ani­mates the man. In any case if this were less true, liber­ta­rians, in view of their social theory, would still have to accept and meet the chal­lenge of defi­ning their atti­tude to a re­for­mer of the Goodman mould. We can hardly ignore him just because his inte­rests differ from ours on so many points.

  I envi­sage the stan­dard liber­ta­rian res­ponse to Goodman as an ap­plica­tion to a parti­cular case of our general doc­trine of anti-refor­mism. Thus I expect most liber­ta­rians would be cri­ti­cal of Good­man’s style of thin­king, his prag­ma­tism. And I do not mean here criti­cism of his ex­ces­ses, his occa­sio­nal blun­ders and over-all super­fici­ality. I meen a deep-seated aver­sion. The reasons for this aver­sion fall into three rough cate­go­ries. (1) There is the thought that melio­rism is inef­fec­tive: it regu­lar­ly or cha­rac­teris­ti­cally fails of its

78

inten­ded effects, espe­cial­ly when the inten­ded effects are genu­inely liberal. (2) In addi­tion to inef­fec­tive­ness and perhaps more impor­tant than it, melio­rism regu­larly gene­rates unin­ten­ded and unwan­ted effects which blight the hope of refor­mers to have achieved a net im­prove­ment in the world by their efforts. (3) Finally, the result of melio­rism will be confu­sion in the mind and beha­viour of the refor­mer: his ends, being in con­flict, will fall into dis­array, and it is pre­dic­table that in such an even­tua­lity he will let go of his liberal inten­tions before letting go of his prac­tical stri­vings.

  Let me con­sider these points in turn (and not just with special refe­rence to Goodman). My general line will be to suggest that these criti­cisms are seve­rally over­stated and exag­ge­rated, and that the anti-melio­rism to which they add up is there­fore too indis­crimi­nate.

  In consi­der­ing the charge of inef­fec­tive­ness (utopi­anism in the un­friend­ly sense) we should dis­tin­guish the tech­ni­cal impos­sibi­lity of pro­posed poli­cies from their un­suit­abi­lity to the audi­ence. By tech­nical impos­sibi­lity I mean that there are, at the time and place in ques­tion, no phy­si­cal, tech­nolo­gical, or eco­nomic means to the ends envi­saged, nor are there any means to the means. Defects under the second heading include the fol­low­ing:

  There is no (effec­tive) audi­ence, e.g. Domain oratory.

  It is the wrong (irre­le­vant, impo­tent) audi­ence. Goodman himself pro­vides the example: there is some­thing dis­tinct­ly odd about propa­ganda for civic and poli­tical pro­po­sals being dis­semi­nated in lite­rary jour­nals.

  There are reasons to believe that the Policy is not accep­table to the (right) audi­ence.

  It would be patent­ly absurd to argue that all pro­po­sals for reform are tech­nical­ly im­pos­sible. Most of them, at any rate most of those nowa­days put forward by radi­cals, dis­sen­ters, libe­rals and demo­cra­tic socia­lists in our times are not in this class. In any case there is no ratio­nal way of judging the matter a priori. The pos­sibi­lity or impos­sibi­lity of pro­po­sals must be as­ses­sed as they came up, in the light of the situ­ation to which they are meant to apply. Some­what more guar­dedly the same can be said about the unac­cep­tabi­lity of meli­orist pro­po­sals. Whether a policy is or is not ac­cep­table is some­times a more or less open ques­tion which can be set­tled con­clu­sive­ly only by putting the policy forward and seeing hte public reac­tion. (Goodman implies this when he calls his utopian pro­po­sals “hypo­the­ses”.) Pre­scin­ding from ques­tions of un­cer­tain­ty, there is a second point to be made here. Suppose a pro­posal passes all reaso­nable tests, other than accep­tabi­lity to the appro­pri­ate audi­ence. Is advo­cacy of such a policy un­realis­tic simply because it is not imme­idate­ly accep­table to those con­cerned? The answer is not always yes. If the policy in ques­tion is not of the now-or-never type, if, that is, imme­di­ate accep­tance and imple­menta­tion is not of its essence, then even if it is now unac­cep­table there may be some point to advo­ca­ting the policy despite oppo­si­tion or indif­fe­rence.

  Through advoca­ting the policy at a certain time, some analogy

79

to it, or some part of it, may become more proba­ble than other­wise, espe­cial­ly at some subse­quent time. We know that many piece­meal changes are the result of the cumu­la­tive impact of advo­cacy (and other things) spread over a period. Nor is it neces­sary that these effects of one’s advo­cacy should be exactly calcu­lable.

<references>