Politics and Utopianism

My political science textbook* has a great definition of Utopianism: utopianism is a disdain for specifically political processes. Utopianism goes all the way back to to Plato's Republic. While it's probably true that Plato didn't intend for the Republic to be a blueprint for an actual society, none of the institutions he describes as being part of an ideal** society are political. The rulers his society privileges — the "philosopher-kings" — are privileged because they embody the search for truth; there is no actual political process even within the philosopher class.

*Thomas M. Magstadt, Understanding Politics, ninth edition
**I mean "ideal" here in the sense of abstract, ignoring complicating factors.

But what do I mean specifically by a political process? I think the key is that a political process is fundamentally a process of negotiation and compromise; it is not (except in a peripheral sense) fundamentally a truth-finding process. In contrast, while we can gain some information by counting noses, and scientists do engage in negotiation and compromise, scientific investigation really is fundamentally a truth-finding process; the political aspects are peripheral. Scientific theories are accepted as true fundamentally because of evidence, not because they are the theories that scientists like best.

The distinction between a negotiation and a truth-finding process is subtle and not entirely easy to discern. As noted, scientists do engage in negotiation and compromise regarding the conduct of science, and scientists make a lot of decisions — such as the decision of what hypotheses to investigate — purely subjectively. If you look closely, and you filter out all of the politics, something substantial remains in scientific investigation: a methodology that relies on evidence and the search for truth, truth that's independent of what the individual scientists like or want to be true.

Is there such an objective (or objective-seeming) methodology in capital-P Politics, i.e. the construction and maintenance of social institutions that guide our social and economic behavior? If there is, then Utopianism would be relatively benign (at least if we found an effective methodology). We could then consider the essential Utopian "disdain" for politics as just a filter to focus on the objective, truth-finding core.

But there isn't an objective methodology, or at least we haven't found one. Furthermore, we do know if there were an objective methodology, it must necessarily be essentially distinct from the scientific method. The scientific method works by noting that we do not in fact ever observe a violation of a true scientific principle; in other words, a true scientific principle is precisely some principle for which we never actually observe exceptions. Politics, however, is all about choices, and for some proposition to be an intuitively meaningful matter of choice, we must be able to actually observe exceptions. A law against murder, for example, is meaningful and relevant only to the extent that some people actually do choose to murder others.

One of the interesting themes prevalent in Utopian literature is not just the filtering out of politics (i.e. structure processes of negotiation and compromise), but the extirpation of politics. Plato's philosopher-kings do not negotiate, even amongst each other: they rationally search for the objective truth, truth that is independent of their particular personal preferences and interests. Indeed in most Utopian literature, society is simply assumed to be free of substantive conflicts of preferences and interest. Negotiation and compromise are, of course, tools for resolving substantive conflicts; without those conflicts the tools are irrelevant. Where no conflict exists, we observe no exceptions, and "correct" behavior at least seems a matter of objective truth.

So the key to identifying some element of literature is to look at how the author views politics, i.e. negotiation and compromise (as well as propaganda, the resolution of substantive conflicts by trying to directly alter others' preferences). If the author has a disdain for politics, if he or she "magically" waves away conflicts or posits that what appear as conflicts of preference and interest in reality are mistakes of fact and truth, then the work is Utopian.

It's important, I think, to distinguish between the disdain for politics from the promise of benefits. All Utopian authors will, of course, "sell" their Utopia with a set of promised benefits; no author will say their society is "right" even if it delivered no benefit at all. But the converse does not follow: a political theorist who promises benefits is not necessarily Utopian. Should we, for example, have at the beginning of the 18th century called capitalism a Utopian theory had we been prescient enough to see that capitalist democratic republics would have in reality created orders of magnitude more material wealth, for not just a few but for a billion; afforded the ability (by virtue of using that material wealth to support not just a privileged few but a veritable army of scientists and scientific technicians) to cure diseases that had for millennia caused untold suffering and death, to not only put a man on the moon but show that momentous occasion live to millions of people? I'm not saying that capitalism (and its political superstructure) has solved all of humanity's problems — far from it! — but the benefits it has actually delivered in just three short centuries would have seemed to the most intelligent, perspicacious thinker of 1701 to be so wildly implausible as to be worthy of the most severe "Utopian" derision.

We should always, I think, be extremely suspicious and skeptical of arguments from "human nature". If there is any truth about our meta-nature, it is that our actual nature in incredibly plastic. Human beings really can believe almost anything, sincerely, deeply and without a trace of irony.

But I think too there really are deep truths about human nature. One of those deep truths is that we really do have individual preferences and interests*, and there is no objective truth — statements that are true independently of our individual preferences and interests — about how we ought to live. We can figure out how to actually live only by the arduous and complicated process of continuous negotiation, compromise, propaganda, and the occasional (but hopefully minimal) bouts of coercion and outright violence.

*It is, of course, possible that we will give rise to a successor without individual preferences. But I think most people would have a deep intuition that such a successor would not be fully human in an important sense. Whether or not such a successor arises, their problems will be their own. We have the problems of today to solve, problems that should embrace our present deep nature as individuals with individual preferences and interests.

The disdain and desire to extirpate politics is not just a description, it is a deep condemnation of Utopianism. A society without politics is simply not a society of human beings; if real human beings are there — human as we conceive ourselves today to be fully human — the politics will be there, somewhere, and the author is simply ignoring politics, not extirpating politics.

Arizona SB 1070

[I'm actually going to college after all these years. In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, I'll be posting some of my class assignments here, as well as posting supplementary material inspired by class discussions.]

Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (Wikipedia) implements a number of measures against illegal immigration, including making it a state misdemeanor crime for an alien in Arizona to fail to carry the required documentation, and obliges the police to attempt to determine the immigration status of a person during a "lawful stop, detention or arrest" if there is "reasonable suspicion" that a person is an alien unlawfully present in the United States.

There are a number of larger issues relating to illegal immigration. That illegal immigration is significant social problem seem uncontroversial, but there is considerable disagreement about what component of illegal immigration is the fundamental problem. Are there simply too many foreign nationals in the United States? Are there too many of the wrong sort of foreign nationals, and if so, who precisely constitutes that "wrong sort"? Or is the problem simply that immigration law is is so complicated and unnecessarily exclusive that people whom we might otherwise accept as temporary or permanent residents find it impossible or unacceptably difficult to comply with the law and thus circumvent it, creating subsequent problems? These larger questions are outside the scope of this essay, however; I want to focus instead on the specific problems posed by imposing the obligation on police to determine the immigration status of those they reasonably suspect to be aliens unlawfully present in the United States.

One must charitably assume that if the Arizona legislature is sincere in their stated intentions, they believe that there are too many foreign nationals in the United States, or too many of the "wrong sort", and that federal immigration law, if vigorously enforced, would adequately restrict immigration to the correct numbers and types of people. The question then becomes: does this provision constitute vigorous enforcement of federal law? More importantly, does it constitute only enforcement of federal law? If either answer is negative, then there is ground to doubt both the appropriateness of the provision as well as the motivation of the legislature.

The overall sincerity of the legislature is somewhat supported by other statutes. The legislature has recognized the economic incentive underlying illegal immigration in Arizona with House Bill 2745, the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which mandates that employers verify their employees' immigration status. However, "law-enforcement officials have said that the law includes little budget support for these new obligations" [citation], and the statute does not include criminal penalties for employers hiring illegal immigrants; enforcement is limited to suspension or revocation of offending business's licenses. A law that is not adequately enforced is no law at all.

The provision for reasonable suspicion, however, does not appear to enable vigorous enforcement of immigration law. If this provision were strictly followed, police would discover illegal immigrants in only very narrow circumstances. To be discovered, an illegal immigrant would have to display evidence of other unlawful behavior to justify a "lawful stop, detention or arrest." More importantly, an immigrant would have to display this evidence in a context where documentary evidence relating to his or her immigration status was required by law. In practice, these elements would be present only if an illegal immigrant was operating a motor vehicle in an unlawful manner and did not possess a driver's license. It is as well already at least a violation, and a class 1 misdemeanor if an illegal immigrant were held to be ineligible for a drivers license); if an illegal immigrant were eligible for a drivers license, then failure to possess one while driving would not constitute reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation. This provision therefore adds little additional actual enforcement of immigration law.

The provision for reasonable suspicion also does not appear to constitute only enforcement of immigration laws. Our legal requirements regarding police procedure are typically enforced not by civil or criminal sanctions against individual police officers, but rather by exclusion of evidence during criminal proceedings. Furthermore, exclusion of evidence has "teeth" only when the case a criminal or civil defendant would otherwise be found guilty at trial. While this method of enforcing police procedure might seem counter-intuitive and actively perverse, it has good theoretical and empirical justification.

However, when the adverse effects of a police procedure are never relevant to the introduction of evidence at trial, this method of enforcement becomes entirely inoperative. We cannot merely tell police officers to follow some procedure, we must establish consequences when they fail to do so. When police fail to adhere to correct procedure in ordinary criminal matters, the state might fail to convict someone who would otherwise be convicted; this sanction strikes directly to the motive and purpose of the entire criminal justice process, and gives the police an important incentive to adhere to correct procedure. But what are the sanctions under this provision? Suppose a police officer does not actually have reasonable suspicion that someone might be an illegal immigrant? If the detainee is actually a citizen or legal resident, the officer will not face any individual sanctions. If the person is not a legal resident, they will still be deported. Lacking any way to sanction violations of reasonable suspicion, this provision becomes indistinguishable from the arbitrary decision of the officer.

Worse yet, the provision undermines adherence to standards governing a lawful stop, detention or arrest. If an officer unlawfully detains a person and finds evidence of a crime as a result of that unlawful detention, it is possible and perhaps likely for the detainee to escape the consequences of that crime even though he or she might otherwise have been convicted on the basis of lawfully obtained evidence. However, the reasonable suspicion provision of SB 1070 creates a positive incentive to detain a person — to check their immigration status — while failing to implement a corresponding negative incentive to restrict the officer from unlawfully detaining a person. There is no sanction at all if an officer simply "fails to notice" any evidence of a crime during an otherwise unlawful detention in which the officer only checks the immigration status of the detainee.

We must (at least if we accept the necessity or desirability of the police) give honest and well-intentioned police officers the tools and social permission to do their jobs. But we must also recognize that there are officers who are not entirely honest and well-intentioned. We must take as much or more care to ensure that the latter officers follow correct procedures despite their personal inclinations. The reasonable suspicion provision appears to not only fail to give the well-intentioned officer substantial new tools to enforce the law but also gives bad-intentioned officers the ability to act contrary to correct procedures.

Not only must we reject the specific "reasonable suspicion" provision, we have grounds to call into question the motivation or competence of the Arizona legislature. Even if the legislature is sincerely and legitimately concerned with illegal immigration, this sincere concern might be mixed with illegitimate concerns, especially racial prejudice. We cannot of course definitely conclude that the legislature is motivated by racism — legislative constitutional incompetence is hardly remarkable — but a measure appears to do nothing but give police the ability to harass brown people without fear of sanction raises reasonable suspicions.