In Favour of Indentured Servitude

Utopia, Scepticism, and Camping in Kent

“Often, it is necessary to deny the lived experience of minority groups, no matter how real and valid said experience might be, if we are to get anywhere at all,” was something my father was fond of saying when we were struggling to get out the door for a camping trip to Kent.

My brother, an extremely sensitive boy with a multitude of supposed health problems, would complain endlessly that the Bermuda grass surrounding our habitual camping spot provoked his hay fever. While it would have been easy for my father to choose another camping spot, he refused to do so, saying that if we were to kowtow to every discomfort we ever felt, we would never get to Kent. The Bermuda grass, in truth, was never identified as an allergen for my brother. Nor was it ever established that he suffered from any sort of pollen-based allergy. But this was only because my father refused to entertain the idea by taking him to a doctor. He believed that, far from diagnosing diseases, doctors were in the business of bestowing them and that, were a disease never pronounced by a medical man’s lips, it would never be allowed to come into existence.

To underline his point, he would cite the phenomenon of cancer patients’ conditions rapidly worsening after becoming aware of their diagnosis, and the common (and, in his opinion, wise) custom of the Chinese to keep family members in the dark about their terminal illnesses, even going so far as to deny them treatment to avoid giving the game away. He applied this strategy to his own mother, hiding from her for years the fact that she had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

This is not to say that my father truly denied the existence of my brother’s suffering, only that he refused to acknowledge it. On the contrary, my father was an extreme sceptic, believing that the potential number of problems that could impede us from getting to Kent was infinite. For this very reason, he chose to ignore them. If one were to recognize even a single problem, there was no reason not to recognize the other fifteen million that followed. But if one were to seriously contemplate them, one would fall into an absolute paralysis of will. In short, if he bent even an inch for my brother, my mother would start “banging on” about her leg cramping up in the car.

Intellectually, my father recognized these to be valid complaints, but he also recognized—perhaps even before Strauss—that one needn’t necessarily live in outward accordance with one’s inner philosophical principles. In fact, he claimed, having one set of philosophical principles in mind allowed one to act more accurately against them. And so, recognizing in himself the potential for absolute moral catatonia, he held his scepticism at arm’s length and used its momentum to accelerate in the opposite direction—towards Kent. This curious intellectual maneuver made my father an anti-anti-utopianist when it came to issues of national and global importance. Utopia, understood as a society where the needs of all members are met, was, in his mind, an impossibility (and a product of secularized Christian eschatology besides). But such a society was possible if one simply ignored or denied the suffering of that minority.

One of his most ingenious applications of this idea concerned his theory for the elimination of work and the creation of a permanent leisure class. The typical vision, proposed most often by leftist utopianists, is the automation of work via a series of unspecified “technological advancements” that would eliminate the suffering of the entire population. In contrast, my father recognized that the twin problems of prison overpopulation and undignified labour could solve each other. He believed that, instead of serving a prison sentence in which they produced no value to anyone, at a considerable cost to the taxpayer, incarcerated individuals could work in fast-food restaurants, massage parlors, and other places of undignified labour, thus permitting the law-abiding portion of the population to undertake reduced, meaningful labour and enjoy increased leisure time.

Over time, criminal individuals could be inserted into positions of slightly greater importance than that of a McDonald’s cashier—such as a human resource officer or geography teacher—all while receiving little more than two daily meals and an enclosed space to sleep in, with the capital generated financing the lives of an increasingly docile and law-abiding class. Eventually, one could expand the criminal class of workers to positions of greater and greater importance until the entire workforce was composed of criminals, essentially automating all labour.

There are potential moral objections to this arrangement. The beauty of anti-anti-utopianism is its ability to simultaneously acknowledge this while recognizing that to formally acknowledge the potential problems or internal contradictions is to impede the realization of the project. To this end, it makes the strategic choice to ignore them.

This principle is universally applicable and, indeed, indispensable for anyone with a naturally sceptical mind. How many past actions, were we to analyze them thoroughly, would appear to be marred by too many problems to have any chance of realization? How many present decisions, were we to ponder their possible outcomes and obstacles, would, with their infinite bifurcations, render us paralytic? How can one even get out of one’s chair without being held stiff in place by the complete contraction of one’s body?

How, like this, will we ever get to Kent?