Which isn’t far from an even more secular version of my point. Utopian ideologies often rely upon a superior “master race” or “new Soviet man” who has overcome the perceived imperfections and limitations of nature and who can assume a role in the world to come. In that sense, utopia itself is highly reminiscent of religious ideas, except with the addition of crucial missteps.
The substantive value of the idea that humans are imperfect or “fallen” is to caution against these kinds of expectations in the first place.
And there are real examples of this. It is humanly impossible—not necessarily mathematically or logically impossible, but humanly impossible—to achieve 100% success at any metric in the long run. I can’t design a 100% available distributed system at meaningful scale. An airline can’t have 100% of their planes arrive on time. A basketball player can’t make 100% of his free throws over a meaningful career. People miss, people fall short, people make mistakes, and it doesn’t require religion or Utopianism to imagine even attainable improvements.
So my problem with doing away with the notion of perfection at all is that it goes too far. Will there ever be a world where no part of AWS ever has an outage? Probably not. When the next AWS outage happens, will we be able to imagine, in great detail, a world where that particular outage wouldn’t have happened? That’s the job. And so rather than resigning ourselves to the notion that perfection is meaningless, let’s instead accept that perfection is an unattainable goal. That way we can dismiss the fanatics who demand actually attaining perfection while still admitting to the possibility of improvement.
Utopia is not about arbitrary metrics. Maximizing choice is more critical than having trains show up on time, to the nanosecond.
"A Utopia (/juːˈtoʊpiə/ yoo-TOH-pee-ə) is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia
Suggesting all metrics must be at 100% is thus clearly a straw man. The end to starvation is very much a realistic and Utopian goal out of reach for our ancestors.
> The end to starvation is very much a realistic and Utopian goal out of reach for our ancestors.
That is also an "arbitrary metric": you've set the rate of "people not starving" to 100%. That's what it means when you say "the end of starvation", rather than "reducing starvation" or "minimizing starvation". If you want to end starvation, that means 0 starvation and 100% non-starvation. Not a single person anywhere on earth is starving.
Let's think realistically about what this means. You can probably get a few nines pretty easily, but to get all the way to 100%, you also have to make sure nobody is willing or able to go on a hunger strike, or suffering from anorexia, or in need of a competent caregiver (in cases of severe disability). You have to make sure that there isn't a parent anywhere on earth who neglects their child to the point of starvation. You have to make sure that someone is checking in on every elderly shut-in in the world, in case they've fallen and broken their leg and can't reach the kitchen. Sometimes people starve to death when they're lost at sea or in the wilderness, so now you have to achieve 100% success at search and rescue across the entire world.
And this is exactly my point. I'm sure you didn't mean all of these implications by "the end of starvation". I'm sure you meant something more realistic and attainable. But that's not really what anybody means by utopia, because by that standard, much of the world is arguably already living in it compared to the ancients. But that's not because anyone had an a priori utopian vision that they put into practice; it was through a process of gradual and incremental change that will continue as long as humanity exists. And part of that process is that there will always be perceptible imperfections.
You can solve world hunger while ignoring hunger strikes. You’re pricing an arbitrary metric of what people eat vs their ability to eat food. As many religious traditions involve fasting, your metric would also require them to be erased. That’s very much out of scope when people talk about Utopia and why no she uses the term 100% in the definition.
PS: Bringing up straw man arguments is not part of meaningful dialogue.
Please read my comment again, make a good faith attempt to comprehend all of it, and try to respond to the whole thing rather than the first couple of sentences. Being an impatient skim-reader isn’t part of meaningful dialogue, either.
And once you’ve done that—would you agree that, by the “reasonable” standard that you are touting, that most developed countries including the United States are “utopian” in the sense of solving the problem of hunger? If not, why?
I did, in a famine people are unable to get enough food. Saying that some people are being unwilling to eat is the same as them being unable to eat is disingenuous.
I'm sure you meant something more realistic and attainable. But that's not really what anybody means by utopia, because by that standard, much of the world is arguably already living in it compared to the ancients.
We don’t have a vast surplus of food by accident. A vast number of people devoted their lives to improving the global food supply. You can read many peoples accounts of trying to build a better world and pretend they where not aiming for utopia, but only if you also ignore what people mean by the term.
Clearly, we think of utopia as more than just sufficient food, the rule of law etc etc, but just because you are used to a better world does not mean those people achieved nothing.
PS: Consider what the world would be if everyone in history said utopia is unobtainable, so let’s burn the world.
That sounds a bit strong - I was going for "you can't verify that better worlds exist, therefore you can't say with any conviction this world is fallen unless you choose to avoid logic"
If you just squint hard enough, nothing is a flaw. "oh, this can be very useful for self-destruction and suffering, or collapsing under its own weight"
>Which logically would mean it’s the universe that’s flawed not humans.
Logically you can argue either way. Logically one can say the universe doesn't give a fuck, so can't be flawed any more than a rock is.
Humans however both crave unity and love and compassion and so on (and know those things for good), and also do the cheating, lying, killing, bullying, racism, and so on. So, one can justifyably call them broken.
Heck, tons of our books, movies, and songs call us just that.
Path finding algorithms optimize for the least cost path. That does not mean such a path is good, nor a zero weight path from start to finish is perfection.
In that context just because humans seek something does not inherently make it good. Religions for example often prohibit some gratifying behavior.
Is an eternal state of pure bliss perfection, or little more than a drugged out meaningless existence? Individuals may prefer one state to another, but it's not clear that the state of maximized preference is thus perfection.
Flawed compared to what? Perfect meaning what? Humans are also infamous for never being content due to constantly shifting goalposts. The reason the religious can claim imperfection is they have an "existence proof" of perfection, but I am sceptical if such a proof exists.
Perhaps we can always improve and be better then we were. Which is a bit more of an optimistic statement.
Where a crystal may have ‘defects’ that’s meaningless for a pile of sand. Further, defects can be more useful than a perfect crystalline structure.
So, to say perfection is unobtainable requires a strict definition of perfection and absolute proof it’s impossible. Both, are very high hurdles.