“since the 1980s, we’ve been obsessed by utopia’s absence, using a hopeful-sounding word to mark our sense of loss.”
“Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516, just over 500 years ago; 250 years later, in 1766, Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was born.”
“More and Malthus, and their works, have become so significant and symbolic that people talk about them without knowing exactly what they’re talking about.”
“Frequently, ‘utopianism’ now implies the improvement of our condition while ‘Malthusianism’ means the opposite: doom.”
“Many people have used ‘Utopia’ (originally in Latin), ‘utopian’ (coined in 1551) and ‘utopianism’ (1649) to describe societies they’d like to live in – or that seem too good to be true. For not quite so long, ‘Malthusian’ (1805) and ‘Malthusianism’ (1833) have described societies in which most people would rather not live.”
“(In 1868, John Stuart Mill proposed ‘dystopian’ to describe the kind of person who planned utopia’s opposite.)”
“At one level, they were engaged in a common project: each attacked what he regarded as the misplaced optimism of his contemporaries.”
“Utopianism and Malthusianism are not just synonyms for optimism and pessimism. They stand for divergent views of whether the obstacle to increasing human happiness is human nature, or rather the rest of nature.”
“More thought that humans were the problem. Malthus acknowledged the problem of humans, but concluded that material nature itself presented a greater impediment.”
“The Tudor humanist More and the Regency clergyman Malthus, of all people, can help us. They are experts on our moment. Together, their key works turn a spotlight on the much disparaged, pre-neoliberal 1970s, when things could have gone differently.”
“‘Moral philosophy’ sounds like a mirthless business but, conceived (correctly) as the branch of human knowledge specialising in happiness, it has greater appeal. More and Malthus were moral philosophers, two of the specialists in ethics who ponder the criteria for human happiness.”
“What is it? Who has it? What are its true manifestations versus its false appearances? How much of it is there and how far may it be spread? Which versions are unjust to some if desirable for others? What materials are necessary to make and maintain it?”
“More approached these questions from traditions of religious exegesis and humanism. Malthus operated within the newer dictates of political economy, originally a branch of moral philosophy because it proposed that economic activities could make people happy.”
“Like us, More and Malthus lived through crises of accelerated societal debate and change. Such historical crises are occasions to stress-test old definitions of happiness and propose new ones.”
“Malthus was wary about Mother Nature. He aimed his Essay on the Principle of Population against his generation’s utopians (in the unsatirical sense), the partisans of revolutionary upheaval in France.”
“Malthus thought that their plans for total societal overhaul suffered from a fatal flaw: ignorance of natural limits.”
“He claimed a twinned law of nature. Human increase proceeds geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8 …) while agricultural resources can increase only at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3, 4 …). Therefore, the population will always tend to exceed the food supply, and thereafter people will suffer famine and disease.”
“Basically, More and Malthus present two big ethical claims: greed is not good, and nature is not boundless.”
“one critical economic element – More’s concern over inequality of wealth – runs steadily and convincingly through his work. He deplores the new English practice of ‘enclosing’ the countryside, fencing it off to breed sheep for the profitable foreign wool market. The sheep ‘swallow up people’ because they graze land that once fed humans. And significantly, More thinks poverty results from human greed, not natural limits. English people starve in famines while food is hidden away in ‘the storehouses of the rich’.”
“Meanwhile, in Utopia, people know that ‘Nature … like an indulgent mother, has placed all wholesome things, like air, water and earth itself, within our reach’”
“Their two claims challenge the classical liberal political economy and politics that emerged after More’s lifetime and during Malthus’s.”
“They afford alternatives to the better-known Marxian critique of liberal capitalism. Crafted in the 16th and the 18th centuries, the utopian and Malthusian proposals are distant mirrors in which modern people of the global West have seen themselves, sometimes more clearly in one, sometimes in the other: utopian, Malthusian, utopian, Malthusian. To see ourselves in both is the biggest challenge.”
“Hard as it is, such power of sight is what we need – and it’s what we’re trying to achieve, though not always consistently and coherently.”
“If there are die-hard utopians among us, they tend to be of a kind More and Malthus disregarded: architects and engineers, people who think very concretely about physical stuff that might make life better for everyone. They are even more utopian than the Utopians, who didn’t seem to build much, and they are definitely less Malthusian than Malthus, whose views of agriculture were implicitly skeptical of the possibilities of human craft.”
“Engineers are perhaps the greatest utopians. It’s not a designation always bestowed on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. But their efforts to put electric cars on highways, to make drones expand internet service, to get people to Mars (and back?), claim to be works on humanity’s behalf. Musk and Zuckerberg defy More’s warning about accumulating wealth. But they and other engineers have invented utopian options, even unintentionally.”
“Whatever the lures of greed, engineers set out to build better worlds while working for government and universities, not just themselves.”
“Mirrors from the 1500s and 1700s rarely survive intact, but they still reflect back on the world. Fragments of utopianism and Malthusianism have been reassembled into the equivalents of disco-era glitter balls. As they torque overhead, they spray hopeful light, if only in tiny bits.”
“The good news is that the upcoming arguments – indeed they have already begun – about what to do next can do more than repeat the nearly parodistic Adam Smith-Karl Marx confrontation that has dominated for at least a generation. Multiple ideas are available to us.”
“The religious traditionalist More warned that happiness could never be founded on private accumulation, but also that sailing straight away from that goal might land us on a tiny island of cumulative weirdnesses; the early political economist Malthus warned that happiness would fail whenever material abundance failed.”
“am not exactly happy that either of these moral philosophers turns out to be right, let alone that both of them are. But I take heart that there exists a big stock of ethical reflections – even beyond More and Malthus – that can help us plan better in future.”