Utopia gets nowhere
if they don’t know what they don’t know
Such a sentiment would
strongly accord with the views of Marx, Engels and other communists who put
stress on scientific socialism. At least
if they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’ in the sense of not knowing the nature
of their ignorance or lack of knowledge.
In
fact Marxists saw their approach as an advance over those they described as
utopian socialists, such as Wilfred Owen: rather than say what your ideal
society should look like, when you can’t possibly know, try advancing through
the scientific analysis of existing society.
The
problem about possible utopian societies is how long can they survive? The Australian aborigines lived for millennia
in a society which appeared stable and indeed worked an amazingly short week, I
believe 14 hours or so, but collapsed the moment the Europeans arrived. But now we know that the southern clans
gradually expanded north leaving only the north of Northern Territory and
Western Australia to other groups. The
Moriori of the Chatham Islands to the east of New Zealand (hence balancing
Australia!) now number 300 or so, none full-blooded, who ‘lived by a code of
non-violence and passive resistance’ (wiki).
Fortunately their language is well documented, and they are gradually
rediscovering their identity after the arrival of the Maori on their island.
Could
my model of socialism – see above - be the basis of a Utopia? Embedded in it are skills, and perhaps
scientific socialism. This is precisely
the domain of knowledge of what one does and doesn’t know.
Well,
I for one like to think I know what I don’t know – a very ambiguous phrase – so
tomorrow I’m off to a conference on Logic, Knowledge and Language (in memory of
the Belgian logician Paul Gochet), and so this brief contribution. I have only intermittently studied the
philosophy and logic of knowledge, so maybe I shall learn something.
Martin
Prior
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Utopia' Issue 44
