The Fatal Flaw in Technocratic Utopias

“Baltimore needs Christ.” So posted one of my Facebook friends, a priest, as that city convulsed from the 2015 police killing of Freddie Gray. Although many of my friends had been expressing the same sentiment, I remember this post in particular because of its brevity and, more importantly, because of one of the comments left in reply. The original comment has long since vanished, but it went something like this: “Baltimore does not need Christ. It needs rebuilt infrastructure, affordable housing, a better-funded school system, and better-trained police force.”

The commenter was pretty clearly antagonistic towards Christianity, which I don’t find all that interesting. What I do find interesting is his approach. Almost all of the online interactions I can remember from that period consisted of calls from my conservative friends for spiritual renewal, or else calls from my progressive friends for us to purge our own racist attitudes. This comment, however, implied that society’s fundamental problems are technical in nature. In other words, we can precisely define these problems and then solve them by judicious application of our best techniques and science. Repair the roads, bring down housing costs, equip students with marketable skills, and train the police in improved de-escalation measures, and eventually you will end up with a city too prosperous to be at war with itself. Once we rebuild the bridge to Eden, society’s problems will all magically vanish.

I’ll admit to some sympathy with this mindset. I live just north of St. Louis, a former manufacturing hub ravaged like many others by the Midwest’s deindustrialization over the last six or seven decades. It’s clear that St. Louis needs better integration into the global information economy, a complex undertaking that nonetheless seems more technical rather than spiritual in nature. In other words, St. Louis’s survival hinges on planning, management, and science; the role played by faith seems indirect at best.

To my mind, this technocratic impulse receives its supreme literary expression in Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi magnum opus, the Foundation trilogy, and in particular the eponymous first novel. Foundation (published in 1951 and adapted in recent years into an okay Apple TV show) is set during the declining years of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire. The Empire is falling apart for all the usual reasons: greed, corruption, self-important bureaucracies, and intellectual laziness.

While the Empire itself is long past saving, mathematics prodigy Hari Seldon has hit upon a way of shortening the coming dark ages. Seldon is the founder of “psychohistory,” a fictional combination of statistics and psychology which allows its practitioners to predict the behavior of sufficiently large human populations with a high degree of precision. By establishing the titular Foundation on a remote planet, Seldon sets into motion a Plan (usually capitalized in the trilogy) designed to restore order to the galaxy as quickly as possible.

The Seldon Plan works with the grain of human nature, never assuming that people will somehow become better than what they are. Foundation is not populated by the humans of Star Trek, most of whom choose their better angels more often than not. In fact, one of psychohistory’s axioms is that “human reactions to stimuli would remain constant.” With the right application of science, the old human flaws — greed, corruption, and all the rest — can be worked around or even exploited to good ends. In Asimov’s galaxy, the problems plaguing the human race are ultimately technical in the purest possible form: they can be expressed and solved as mathematical equations. No spiritual or even moral transformation is necessary for the return to a galactic Eden.

Foundation is a technocratic dream. Of course, it’s nothing more than a dream. Never mind the questionable politics of a handful of mathematicians steering the course of the entire human race, and the science of “psychohistory” gets the same kind of hand-waving treatment that sci-fi typically gives the details of faster-than-light travel. In the real world, while the human race has made astonishing scientific and technical progress since around 1800, we have yet to develop a tool or technique that will ensure a happy outcome for our species.

But let’s imagine that we did. Let’s say that by some miracle we have banished our old enemies like war, poverty, and disease to the past. Would a collective return to Eden also bring about the end to our own personal exiles?

Back in 2004, David Bazan released his last Pedro the Lion album before going on hiatus for the next fifteen years, Achilles Heel. It’s a characteristic blend of ruminations on the difficulties of faith (Bazan was a year away from his “break-up with God,” as NPR would later put it) and macabre musical short stories. The album’s ninth track, “A Simple Plan,” falls squarely in the latter category. “A Simple Plan” opens with Bazan’s narrator describing a socialist utopia that has established universal equality and prosperity. “The class war is over, and everyone wins,” the narrator explains, implying that not even the kulaks had to be liquidated. Not only are people equal, they are now good; in this narrative universe, clearly inspired by old-school Marxism, the nasty side of human behavior was a byproduct of flawed economic systems. Now that capitalism has been exorcized from the world and replaced by competent central planning, everything has turned out alright. [1]

Or, as it turns out, almost everything. The narrator, who has spent the past decade fighting “corruption and greed,” now finds himself staring down a vast and growing emptiness. Not even thoughts of his family fill the chasm. The narrator eventually succumbs to despair, darkly hinting at a “simple plan” to relieve his pain.

I imagine the authorities of Bazan’s utopia would write this up as a sad case of mental instability; the advance of medicine and psychology will prevent such tragedies in the future. And maybe they’d be right. Maybe our own individual exiles are amenable to the same scientific tools that have ended our collective one.

But I don’t think so. The longer I live, the greater my conviction that what’s out of joint about us — what Francis Spufford calls the “human propensity to [foul] things up” — is outside of our grasp. We can ameliorate the damage (sometimes tremendously!) but we can’t quite get at the source.

Starting from an objective standpoint, it’s a pretty good bet that the self-perfecting projects of flawed beings will themselves be flawed. Even if we were purely physical beings, and even if our science could comprehensively lay hold of the physical world, our applications of this knowledge would fail in important ways. Attacking human greed, fear, and selfishness at their biological or psychological roots would surely have unintended consequences. Shifting the burden of decision making to artificial intelligences only pushes the problem back another step; however powerful their computational power, they are, and must be, tools created by fallible humans.

But what really convinces me of the human inability to fix ourselves at a fundamental level is my own experience. I’ve found that therapy, medicine, exercise, community, family, and all the rest help in taking the edge off of life, and I am deeply grateful for all of these gifts. What remains, however, is something that feels like both an inability and a refusal to choose what I know is right and good. I live with a sniveling, cynical, self-preserving, self-loathing undercurrent within me that will occasionally sleep, but that will not die.

But die it must. This is why Christianity speaks so often of dying and rising with Christ as realities that take place not only in the future but in this world as well. And even if it is difficult to define analytically what these words mean, our condition is such that only death and resurrection take it seriously enough. There is no other answer to the void within us that sabotages (subtly or openly) everything good in our lives.

Our societies need technical solutions. You and I need Christ. Our tools can build us shelters, perhaps even on a galactic scale, but only he can bring us home.

[1] Early Marxism thought of itself less as an ideology and more as a sober, scientific approach to analyzing and even predicting human behavior on a major scale. Given human nature, the problems of production and distribution would necessarily result in the downfall of capitalism; whether Marx himself believed that a communist utopia is inevitable is less clear.