POSSIBLE WORLDS.

Imagine some place where the living is very comfortable and easy but where people are unpleasant to each other all the time? Let’s call this place Yintopia. The material standard of living is very high. Temperatures are regulated for comfort and things are fresh and clean and technological devices take the drudgery out of your life. But in Yintopia everybody is rude and unpleasant to each other. They talk in an angry tone all the time and are constantly bickering. They do not get on. They don’t hold doors open for each other and argue about every tiny little thing and talk to each other in an angry and aggressive way like they’re really het up about something. And they do things such as promise they’ll be somewhere at such and such a time and then just fail show up with no explanation. And then they lie about why they weren’t there. And they lie about other things too. In other words they are generally faithless and mendacious. There are no true human relations between people.

The question is: would the material comforts in Yintopia compensate for the aggravation caused by this latter lack of good human relations? Would a preferable place be Yangtopia. Here the people are nicer to each other but the standard of living is not so good. It’s hard work living here. You have to work hard digging in the fields. And making things with your hands. Every day you have to think hard about things that need doing. And still the resulting standard of living is lower than it is in Yintopia.

But it’s not unbearable. People aren’t starving or anything like that but it is hard. So Yintopians do still have leisure time during which they do things like recite poetry and dance and sing. Things that don’t cost much to do! But there’s no movies or TV or internet or smartphones.

In Yangtopia if you look at someone while you are out walking they smile and say “hi”. In Yintopia they say “what do you think you’re looking at”.

And the two issues might not be unrelated. The two issues being standard of material living and quality of interpersonal relationships. In Yintopia they might boast of the technological sophistication of their door locks. They will laugh at the cheap and nasty door locks that the folks of Yangtopia have. And the people in Yangtopia will respond: “But the only reason you need those clever locks is because you don’t trust each other not to steal things! Here in Yangtopia we can leave our doors unlocked and don’t have to worry at all!”.

In Yintopia they have television and other similar forms of entertainment. But maybe they only need these so much there because they persistently fail to (or have lost the ability to) get their happiness from a less technologically intensive friendly association with their fellow citizens.

The Yintopians might say that their material prosperity is actually because of their rudeness to each other. In the sense that people only do things if you get annoyed with them, if you ask nicely they will just ignore you. They might even have laws forbidding people to be nice to each other. Being nice to people is the sort of moral weakness which can lead to the downfall of society!

The term ‘civilisation’ can refer to either of the above. Some adventurer who has been tracking in the jungle will come back to a city and say they have “returned to civilisation” by which they mean somewhere where there are modern conveniences like clean housing and running water. But also if someone is behaving in a loutish fashion shouting and swearing at people we will say the they “are not behaving in a very civilised way”.

There has clearly been a vast improvement in the material condition of people’s lives over the (let’s say) last one thousand years. But has there been any corresponding improvement in the way we behave towards each other? There certainly has been an improvement for example in the way men treat women. But I often think that, in other regards, there hasn’t been much change. And that, when it comes to their own advantage, people will cruelly exploit others as much as they ever used to.

In my mind the two senses of civilisation are related but I’m not sure how. Maybe as if one caused the other. Most likely that material progress causes moral progress. Or just allows it to happen. So kitchen machinery has resulted in men treating women less as servant drudges.

Aside. There was a joke in the old Soviet Union. One official says to another: “in the future, comrade, everyone in the city will have their own aeroplane”. The other says: “why would they need that comrade?”. The first responds: “because when there are no potatoes in the shops they can fly out into the country and get their own.”

[9 April 2017]