A Few Good Words, If You Don’t Mind, for An Instrumental Utopianism. And Who Better to Frame the Case in the Fewest Words Possible Than the Late Ernest Becker?
If memory is right, my first exposure to the late Ernest Becker was his Pulitzer-Prize-winning (awarded posthumously, in the height of irony, two months after his own death at age 49) The Denial of Death. One phrase from that book has stayed with me because it says more about the condition of us humans than any other phrase I’ve ever read. Our plight, said the learned Canadian cultural anthropologist, is that we are all “gods who shit.”
Another of his books that I read back in my formative years again crossed my path this week. I had forgotten the Beckerian plainspokenness in a work published a couple of years earlier than The Denial of Death about the sciences of sociology and anthropology, The Lost Science of Man. There, he wrote:
“I don’t see how it can be denied that the science of man is, historically and by its very nature, a utopian science. Plato saw this right at the beginning of Western history, and Rousseau revived his vision at the beginning of the modern epoch. But today we understand something these men did not: that the Platonic and Enlightenment utopianism is simply not possible; we cannot bring into being a world in which sanity can unchallengeably reign, and in which self-expansive human pleasure can be assured for the masses of men. At least, this is what seems to be the lesson of our time: that the social arena is one of struggle, inequality, and irrationality; and there seems no way to overcome this, except by revolution, which in turn leads to a centralized statism that itself crushes the human spirit.
“But this does not mean that a utopian stance by the science of man is unrealistic or unseemly. On the contrary, we must believe more strongly than ever in the ‘instrumental utopianism’ which stems from 2500 years of Western thought: that we must become as rational and critical as possible in our social arrangements, and that we must continue to design, rework, and uphold an ideal vision for the masses of men. We know this will not achieve the great community of man, but it is an instrumental utopianism that alone can prevent the disaster and the death of mankind.”
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Becker’s books are available here:
The Denial of Death
The Lost Science of Man
