A mathematical quandary
What is the solution to x = 1/0?
The naive inductive logician argues that x is infinite. 1 divided by 0.1 is 10 and 1 divided by 0.001 is 1,000. As the denominator shrinks to zero, x seemingly surges towards infinity.
But the mature mathematician knows better: x is undefined, a contradiction at the limit.
Like the naive logician’s solution, utopia promises infinity: ceaseless joy, unbounded hope, and limitless love. Consider the Garden of Eden, where humans are free from evil, or Plato’s Kallipolis, where wise philosopher-kings rule with their omniscience. Any captivating and congruent utopian vision contains a sweet equilibrium end state, an eternal reward. Unsurprisingly, these utopian visions inspire social change.
However, in representing an infinite vision for a finite species, utopias represent potentialities rather than prescriptions, answering what could be rather than what should be. Naively pursuing utopian ideas or striving for the infinite in a finite world would reflect a fundamental error in inductive reasoning. But how do we change the world if not through our optimistic utopian ambitions?
A better approach
The mature mathematician presents a more appealing approach – both to finding the solution to the x = 1/0 problem, and to addressing the question of utopia. Her answer demonstrates a keen understanding that we can approach, perhaps even perceive, infinities — but never achieve them. Recent protopian thinkers have applied this wisdom to contemplating social change.
In the words of Kevin Kelly, founding editor at Wired Magazine, protopia is ‘a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better.’ To me, protopian thinking represents a careful and reasoned approach to changing the world: it focuses on tomorrow and looks into the far future without prescribing what the future is. In practice, this means making progress in the broadest sense — economic growth, technological development, urban rejuvenation, and educational reforms — but with consistent evaluation, optimisation, and reflection about where we are and what the road ahead should look like.
These alternative protopian ideas may initially appear drab in contrast to the striking and majestic utopian schemes. Is protopia the middle ground between utopia and dystopia, a place that inspires realistic change but not existential hope? Is protopia akin to the Asphodel Meadows, sprinkled with a hint of hope and the potentiality of betterment?
Perhaps. Yet the essence of the protopia, which considers the immediate rather than the infinite, is what a world mired in uncertainty and grounded in difference requires. In centuries past, there were low-hanging fruit to seize, basic sciences to learn, mathematical concepts to discover, and political systems to develop! In those olden times, the world needed utopian visionaries — Plato, Thomas More, and Karl Marx — to propel our societies towards the future.
But today, we find ourselves at the precipice of an increasingly uncertain future. In just the first twenty-four years of the twenty-first century, we’ve seen old norms defrocked, new technologies abound, and global societies reshaped. Conceptions of freedom, democracy, and justice, the old stimulants of social change, are engrossed by moral confusion. Questions of profound significance remain unresolved. Embrace or regulate technology? Growth or degrowth? Less or more?
Such profound uncertainty beckons us to contemplate social change at the margins, taking one proven step at a time rather than aiming to reach the broad sweeping-stroke utopian dreams so vividly portrayed by utopian thinkers. Instead of dreaming of a city where everyone is healthy and happy, protopians think about plans for improving public healthcare. Instead of contemplating system change to address poverty, protopians consider how to change housing and transport policies. The protopian approach translates high-minded utopian ideals into action plans and disciplines lofty ideas with modern-day constraints. Through rigorous consideration, planning, and completion of tasks that will launch us into the future, protopian ideas maintain an ambitious scope without falling into the familiar traps of utopian fantasies.
Against the utopia
The claim against utopian thinking today is that it simplifies complex moral questions into single, clear, and didactical premises, making it the perfect catalyst for ideology and extremism in an incongruent world. If happiness = 1/x, where x is evil, capital, inequality, religiosity, stagnation, selfishness, greed, or irrationality, the utopian’s straightforward task would be to reduce x ad infinitum for maximum happiness. History is replete with the dark consequences of misguided individuals and societies intoxicated by utopian ambitions or the mindless adherence to single-minded ideologies. Consider the Chinese emperors, obsessed with finding the elixir of immortality, only to die by their own hands from mercury poisoning. Reflect on the Roman Empire, whose lofty quest to expand without temperance caused its eventual collapse under its weight. And contemplate the totalitarian regimes that destroyed and murdered to feed their vile ambitions. Their perilous fixation on achieving misguided perfection sowed the seeds of human catastrophe and misery.
And these utopian tales are undeniably attractive! For better or worse, the beautiful stories of sunlit utopian lands are etched in our collective consciousness. Indulging in these utopian narratives can be comforting in a harsh society. They delineate right from wrong. But the most compelling driver is our inherent fascination with self-improvement. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau brilliantly argued in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality we have a drive to perfectibility; a belief that more is invariably better. One more util is desirable; a prophetic vision of ten, a thousand, infinite utils is irresistible! Questioning or deviating from these grand visions can appear unwise and downright irrational.
From these visions, we also tend to ‘Goodhart’ ourselves – to corrupt good measures of targets by allowing them to become targets themselves – into util-maximising oblivion through institutions and systems that optimise for facile objectives. I am reminded of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, in which the characters live infinitely mathematically optimised lives dictated by strict schedules. These characters exist in a collective utilitarian stupor masquerading as happiness — but is this true happiness or just a corrupted measure of it?
Instead, protopian ideas posit that social change should be (on the margins) more quotidian. We exchange the certainty of the perfectible yet unachievable society for the collective Rousseauvian yearning to improve our society slowly but surely. Protopian ambition is hope made humble, harnessing what we know we can do better without limiting us to a particular version of a ‘desirable’ future. Protopian thinking avoids the danger of oversimplification, a true pitfall of grandiose utopian narratives. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt observed that ‘ideological thinking orders facts into a logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.’ When cloaked in academic jargon and intertwined with political power and social capital, false utopian premises unwittingly escape the domain of reason and into the range of terror. The protopian view, with its inherent humility, avoids this danger.
The non-linear arc of progress
What I like most about protopian reasoning is that it considers our humanity — and the fickle nature of our personalities, ambitions, and desires — in aspiring for a better society. The linear movement towards utopia in a diverse and stochastic world is misguided. Karl Marx, envisioning a communist future, said that the ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ cannot be written today, acknowledging our limited prescience. Protopians recognise that changing the world is not progressing through levels in a game. It is not an optimisation problem. It is instead a continuous process of negotiation and renegotiation, constantly adapting to include different individuals, viewpoints, and ideas. It is adding variables to the denominator of our equation for happiness as we broaden our moral circle. Protopians consider the human condition for what it is rather than what it should be.
Utopian ambition provides a subtle sense of optimism and hope. Protopian thinkers should blend this optimistic, long-term spirit found in expansive utopian visions with the imperatives of the imminent. However, while experiencing the essence of utopian optimism is desirable, we must avoid intellectual and literal interpretations of these narratives. As Susan Sontag argues in her essay Against Interpretation, analysing and interpreting art ‘is to impoverish, to deplete the world… it is to turn the world into this world’. In the same way, we should view utopian narratives as bold and imaginative landscapes or magnificent cathedrals that inspire us and expand our horizons. From these visions, we should take a tinge of emotionality, a feeling for the infinite, but not a plan for future action.
Into the humble future
The human condition embodies a duality. Unadulterated ambition and desire for self-perfection intertwine with mortality and humanity, which are more beautiful and daunting than our ambition. Utopian ideals call for ambition without the corresponding humanity or humility. But we must remember that utopia is the non-existent edge case, the solution to x = 1/0 that should only exist in our callow dreams. Protopias offer a meaningful solution that embraces the utopian aspiration by tempering its associated dangers. It acknowledges that the most meaningful human project does not scope or desire everything, nor is it an unnatural race to the heavens. Instead, it is one in which we accept our finitude and steadily strive for a better, more humane, and more beautiful world.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 12: Utopia.
Matthew Chiu is a final-year Philosophy, Politics, and Economics student at the London School of Economics. He is interested in the political economy of innovation, the philosophy and economics of education, and political theory.