My "Keeping Things Interesting" Blog Post Trilogy.

Ten years ago, I wrote a trio of blog posts on the importance (as I see it) of keeping society interesting. They can be read, should you wish to do so, here, here, and here.

I'm not saying they're great or anything. What I will say is that I keep coming back to these ideas again and again.

Sometimes, when I'm arguing with liberals (or progressives, or leftists, or whatever you want to call them) I resort to saying: "But imagine if you get exactly what you want. Fifty years down the line, do you think society is going to be better for it, or do you think people might actually miss all the things you want to abolish?" (For instance: gender roles, hierarchy, national boundaries, stereotypes, irrational taboos, everyday aggravations and inconveniences, etc. etc.)

Of course, I don't say it as articulately as that. (People always paint themselves as winning arguments. It's one of my bugbears.)

Like every other argument, this could be reduced to a reductio ab absurdum. Total war would be interesting, wouldn't it? But that's not the sort of thing I mean. I'm not making an argument like that of Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, who said that the suffering of life could only be justified as a spectacle for the gods-- but that this does justify it, and the more of a spectacle we provide the better! (Nietzsche, being an atheist, was obviously speaking figuratively.)

I'm taking for granted that people's basic needs take priority: food, shelter, safety, etc. But I think that people's non-material yearnings kick in a lot sooner than is generally supposed.

The quotation that I always use to illustrate this idea is one from George Orwell, and on which I'll finish:

By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H. G. Wells. Wells's vision of the future is most fully expressed in two books written in the early Twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it or thinks he would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create.