Noah Smith reposted an essay yesterday on his Substack that he originally wrote last year. He describes it as one of his favorite of his own pieces, and explains that a recent online debate that touched on similar themes prompted him to reshare it. I had missed the piece when it was first published, but I got a lot out of it this time, so I'm glad he re-shared it.
Basically, Smith in the piece is taking sides in the perennial debate between tech utopians and their critics (whom Smith dubs—not unfairly—the "romanticists"). Technologists—particularly those of the utopian variety—tend to regard most forms of human suffering as temporary challenges to be resolved by improvements in efficiency and technique.
Whereas the "romanticists" tend to respond that life would be cheapened in some way—made "shallower," in Smith's phrase—if we were to remove all age-old sources of pain. They contend that part of our dignity as a species comes from our confrontation with suffering—that to experience pain and overcome it is part of what gives us a sense of meaning—and that our lives would be less rich without it.
Call it the "Brave New World" problem: in a technocratic utopia that had abolished all pain, would we be happy? Can we imagine ourselves happy in such a setting? (Camus told us we must imagine Sisyphus happy, even with his boulder—but the question here then becomes: can we imagine Sisyphus happy without his boulder?)
George Orwell said no—because even in the perfect socialist utopia of equal property and justice, there would still be toothache.
Which is funny—because within a few decades after Orwell wrote this, we had not yet achieved a socialist utopia, but we had more or less abolished toothache.
What Orwell took to be a part of the human condition—perhaps even an irremediable flaw in our nature that lent dignity and richness to our experience—turned out instead to be a quintessential example of a mere technological problem—a flaw not in the human destiny, but in mid-twentieth century British dental hygiene.
So—the techno-optimists would ask—might not all these supposedly "timeless" human problems turn out to be like that? Might it not be possible after all to eventually abolish disease and suffering—and maybe even mortality itself?
And suppose we did so—would our lives actually be cheapened by this? Or would they be vastly improved? Would we really lose all forms of meaning and beauty and dignity in the human experience? Or would our lives not actually be enriched by removing the age-old forms of human suffering and heartbreak?
Noah Smith argues for the latter possibility—pointing out that the track record of human history so far suggests that we don't actually need the various forms of human suffering that our modern technology and medicine have enabled us to eliminate (no more than we turned out to need Orwell's toothache):
The passions of people raised in a kinder, gentler world may be alien and incomprehensible to the older generation, [he concedes,] but they are no less intense, and the culture around them is no less complex. Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure.
Beautifully put—but I still find it impossible to shake some of my own "romanticism" in the face of this argument. There remains to me something vertiginous and terrifying in the prospect of living in a world of pain-free immortals.
Orwell's observation that every description of utopia ever penned sounds vaguely horrifying has a ring of truth. Anyone who can read—say—Stephen Spender's prophecy (written in his 1930s Stalinist phase, before his later recantation) of the coming "golden singing hive" of the Marxist utopian future—and not experience a shudder—seems to be missing something.
And Noah Smith's contention that we would all be just fine—indeed, improved—if we could live in the pain-free Brave New World—and that he sees no problem with it—puts me in mind of the colorless bureaucrats' concluding words in W.H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen," when they are asked whether a member of their technocracy is happy or free: "The question is absurd:/ Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard."
But I also have to agree with Smith that meaning in life comes from working against suffering. "Heroism is always self-destroying"—he writes. One generation of heroes works to solve a problem so that the coming generation will no longer face it—in other words, so that they will not have to be heroes themselves. We develop the courage to conquer disease or end war so that those who come after us will not have cause to discover in themselves the same courage.
As Brecht put it in a famous poem, written "To Those Born Later," one generation faces hardship or violence in part in the hope that those who come after them will not have to face the same struggle—and will be able to cultivate gentler virtues.
But does this mean, then, that as one problem after another is solved, life really does require less and less courage and heroism with each generation? Do we then inevitably become shallower people over time?
I think not. I think, honestly, the whole debate whether suffering is necessary is ultimately pointless—because we never will abolish suffering. We will never reach utopia—so we don't have to worry about what we would do if we ever got there. The solution of one generation's problem will always create the next one; solving some forms of scarcity will introduce new diseases of abundance; one form of heroism will lay the groundwork for the necessity of another (solving humanity's age-old energy deficit by burning fossil fuels, e.g., is now baking the planet—a problem future generations will have to figure out how to solve in turn.)
And so—as Saul Alinsky put it—life does not resemble a hill we can surmount so much as a mountain with no summit. We can move upward over time. We can in fact make progress directionally. But we will never reach a destination of a world of perfect justice—that "Dell / Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell" of which the young Coleridge wrote. There is no pantisocratic utopia waiting for us at the top of the mountain; so we don't have to worry whether we could actually be happy there, or how we would entertain ourselves in such a place without getting bored. We will always still be climbing upward.
But that is also not to say we are ever standing still.
And that to my mind is how we can reach a synthesis of what the techno-utopian and the romanticist are each trying to tell us. We certainly should never stop trying; we should never let ourselves sit down where we are on the mountain and give up on the climb, because we fear where it could lead. The meaning of life may come in part from the confrontation with problems (to the romanticist's point), but it also requires that we actually do confront them—not passively accept them (to the techno-utopians' point).
As Alinsky put it, in the passage that gave us his image of the "endless mountain":
Simply, this is the very nature of life — that it is a climb — and that the resolution of each issue in turn creates other issues, born of plights which are unimaginable today. The pursuit of happiness is never-ending; happiness lies in the pursuit.
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