{Leave it to Pascal the existential Russian blue cat to get ahold of a peripheral thread and do his best to unravel it: in this case, the thread is a passing reference to “futility” in an article about Clarence Thomas. Pascal has no interest whatsoever in Justice Thomas, but he finds the concept of ‘Futilitarianism’ fascinating.}
“You’re all just pissing in the wind. You don’t know it, but you are.” (Neil Young, “Ambulance Blues”)
Is there really any point in trying to make the world a better place? Do our efforts make any difference at all? 1
Corey Robin (interviewed by Sean Illing for Vox) cited Albert Hirschman’s classic The Rhetoric of Reaction, in which Hirschman explained three arguments used by conservatives to oppose social and political reforms. As Robin puts it:
Hirschman said there were three main kinds of reactionary arguments. One was perversity. And that is, if you try to make things better, you’re gonna make them the opposite. You’re gonna make it worse. So if you try to solve poverty, you’re just going to create more poverty.
A second argument is jeopardy. And that is, you try to do one thing, you may achieve it, but you’re gonna jeopardize something else. So again, you try to solve the problem of poverty, but you end up destroying the Black family.
Those arguments are versions of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a simple definition of which is that “an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.” 2 This explains why centrally planned economies cannot work; a national economy is too complicated, and contains too many variables, for planners to comprehend, much less to control. The same is said to be true of healthcare systems, housing systems, educational systems, etc. Even Friedrich Engels acknowledged the ever-present risk of perversity and jeopardy: "The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended."
Corey Robin further contends, “Hirschman said there’s a third argument. He called it “futility” and he said this is the most dangerous, most toxic, most lethal conservative argument there is. The futility argument says, you can have every revolution you want. You can have every Civil Rights Bill, every Voting Rights Act. You can have every Inflation Reduction Act you want, every Climate Change Act. But in the end, you can’t do a damn thing. It is absolutely futile. It’s hopeless, because politics can neither transform nor ameliorate the human condition.”
Arguments from futility range from the philosophical/anthropological (“You can’t change human nature”) to the pragmatic (“You can’t legislate morality”) to the cynical (“You can’t fight city hall”). Conservatives have even been known to invoke the words of Jesus (“The poor you will always have with you”) as a warning against anti-poverty programs.
According to Robin, “The left has its own version of that argument, which we call structural arguments. A certain kind of Marxist loves to throw this gauntlet down against liberal reformers. ‘You think this bill is blah, blah, blah, but look at the structure of power!’ I mean, I’m being very crude here and deliberately provocative, but the basic argument is that unless you deal with structure, everything is just window dressing, right? That’s the version of the argument on the left.”
Are we merely addressing the symptoms of democratic breakdown rather than the causes? Are we putting bandaids on broken legs? Are we simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? Are we throwing babies out with the bathwater? Can we make any real difference at all?
Futilitarianism is not quite nihilism; it doesn’t deny meaning or agency so much as it minimizes the amount of good we can do in the world. It lowers expectations, and it discourages a search for “answers” to intractable problems or for “one size fits all” global solutions. Think of it as a precautionary principle along the lines of “look before you leap” or “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”
The plain fact is that, try as we might and as much as we have, we do not seem to know how to eliminate poverty, inequality, bigotry, injustice, crime, cruelty, selfishness, violence, war, mental illness, etc. What progress we have made has been largely confined to limiting, alleviating, responding to, and attempting to repair (or to manage) the consequences of those social ills we cannot for the life of us eliminate. Our efforts are not futile, but neither are they ever final; there is always more to be done. One thing we can be sure of: mankind will never run out of problems to "solve".
Futilitarians' worldview is best captured by the image of Sisyphus, straining to push the boulder to the top of the mountain, knowing that it will then roll back down; he will have to begin again, endlessly repeating a process where whatever 'progress' he makes is immediately undone. And yet Albert Camus insisted, after considerable reflection and considerable experience, "We must imagine Sisyphus happy." Perhaps the proverbial Good Samaritan could be introduced to the Happy Futilitarian; it might turn out to be a match made in heaven.
What does Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really believe? - Vox
1 Also, why do good things happen to bad people? Not to mention, who wrote the book of love?
2 This is related to what is called “consequentialist ethics” (or “Consequentialism”), the gist of which is that we should judge an action by its outcome(s), intended or otherwise. An agent’s intentions may be good, but if her judgment is faulty, she will make a situation worse; her actions are therefore, despite her intentions, unethical. This, say conservatives, is why political Liberalism is so pernicious: busybody do-gooders always have the best of intentions. Ronald Reagan: “The nine most dangerous words in the English language: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” The proof is in the pudding, and Liberalism’s pudding (according to conservatives) is rancid.
At the opposite end of the ethics spectrum from Consequentialism would be "Intentionalism"; T. S. Eliot once wrote that "the worst treason [was to do] the right thing for the wrong reason." Consequentialists don't care about your reasons, only about the results. Hitler may have believed he was doing the world a favor by exterminating Europe's Jewish population, but that belief, even if sincere, in no way mitigated the horror of the Holocaust.
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