Utopia Lost; W. Manoogian

thus. The latter's calcul~tions were generally wrong, but his number-re lated suspicion of human imperfec tibility points in the right direction. Human numbers increase or de crease. In the strictest logic, every live birth is a tiny step toward the smothering of the world's farmlands in people, just as a lack of births points toward the extinction of the species. Pending the realization of these comparably undesirable ex tremes, we are left with given soci eties or nations within which every social phenomenon relates in some way to the ((moreness" or ((lessness" of its number. Wars, just or unjust, popular or despised, won or lost, al ways connote some lessening of hu man numbers; peace implies a cer tain steady, cautious growth in human numbers which has always been the routine precondition of civ ilization: more manpower, expanded 275 276 THE FREEMAN May economies, more refined division of labor and leisure, and so on.

But growth is no unmixed bless ing any more than is depopulation. The deceptively simple truth of the matter is that when a group decides to increase its numbers it collec tively moves away from the advan tages and disadvantages of demo graphic sparsity and toward the blessings and curses of growth. From the beginning of time we have stood in crowded cities and yearned for the peace of the countryside, then fretted on lonely farms in nostalgia for the human beehive of the city. But a specifically mathematical truth stands behind this casual ob servation: We simultaneously desire two demographic conditions, con traction and dilation, which cannot simultaneously occur. Whether it is increasing or decreasing in number, every human society is moving to ward one set of desiderata and away from another. The human group can dilate or contract toward one and only one set of universal human goals at a single given time. Man is de mographico-mathematically imper fect and imperfectible.

A second, more informal way to consider human imperfectibility is the best preparation for a direct and definitive refutation of history's most revered utopians, Plato and Marx. It concerns the impossibility of a just deployment of wealth upon the death of a creator of wealth. At that time, two parties have claims to the wealth: the person's heirs, meaning almost always his (;hildren, whose very existence an nounces population growth; and his government, whose very existence is justified by the prevention or mini malization of crises which diminish human numbers (wars, climatic ca tastrophes, and the like). Neither claim is perfectly just, since neither the heirs nor the government's tax collectors have made the same in novations, taken the same risks or performed the same labor which cre ated the wealth. But neither claim is completely refutable, either. A Dilemma The growth claimant, the heir, is correct to point out that he is genet ically and geographically closer to the decedent, and the latter does al most always prefer his own sons and daughters as beneficiaries; but the non-growth claimant, the govern ment, is also cortect·in pointing out that its power provided the creator of wealth, with the physical security indispensable to the orderly crea tion of prosperity and innovation.

Certainly, if society were perfect ible, a perfect method of doing some thing so simple as assigning wealth upon the death of its creator would be possible or at least conceivable. It is not. The hereditary conveyance of wealth has frustrated utopian 1981 UTOPIA LOST 277 thinkers for thousands of years, and for goodreason: even a ((perfect"state, has to begin somewhere, and begin. equally for everyone, but every where the utopian turns he sees that inheritances ((aggravate" the inequalities of wealth and' position. which make utopia seem so unat-, tainable. It is no wonder that almost all believers in human perfectibility call for an end.to the bequeathing of wealth to heirs. Plato and Marx are not exceptions. In all of political theory it is diffi cult to find two more dissimilar po litical thinkers than the most fa- , mous ancient and the most famous modern utopians. What eould the patrician Athenian visionary, steeped in literature, music and ath letics, have in common with the sar castic German journalist, arch-ma terialist and agitator? The simple!

answer is a common call for the end. of individual inheritances. Toward the end of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels present ten points toward the communiza-· tion of society. Point three reads succinctly enough: ((Abolition of all right of inheritance."! Plato seems wiser and therefore! far less optimistic about sweeping: away the very essence of the human family by mere fiat. He knows that to eliminate or, more realistically, to minimize the effects of the hered·· itary conveyance, one must hack at its deepest roots without fear or fa·· vor. The fifth book of the Republic does just that, and the lives of the elite guardians of the Platonic state are regulated not only before their birth, but before their conception: ((The number of weddings is a mat ter which must be left to' the discre tion of the rulers, whose aim will be to preserve the average of popula tion."2 The future guardians, ((off spring of the good parents," will never know these parents. Anony mous nurses ((will provide for their nurture, and will bring the mothers to the fold when they are full of milk, taking the greatest possible care that no mother recognize her own child."3 The hereditary convey ance of wealth within a family of guardians will be abolished because the guardians will know no family at all.

Declining Population It is of course beyond the scope of this article to refute Plato or Marx line by line, volume by volume. The point· is that this is unnecessary to our logic, since neither system has passed the first and most important test of any social blueprint, prag matic or utopian: is the proposed government one under whiCh hu man beings will consistently con tinue to increase their numbers (Le., have three or more children) or at least maintain them (by having two)? In logical sequence, no other issue is reached if the answer to this ques278 THE FREEMAN May tion is negative. Even utopia needs people, and even the slightest and most well-intentioned interference with the hereditary conveyance of wealth can induce catastrophic de mographic declines, as shall be seen below. If no one in a state works for the long-range enrichment of any one but the state, human reproduc tion becomes a form of tribute to the state and to its majority politicians, and human numbers eventually shrink in retaliation.

Perhaps most importantly, nei ther Plato nor Marx in all their vo luminous works ever bothers to ad dress the ultimate question: how do you make the state everyone's heir without giving its politicians an om inous vested interest in the death of their most productive and wealthy citizens? A private heir is virtually always forbidden by the state from killing his future benefactor to hurry his inheritance, but who will forbid the forbidder? Stalin's murder of millions of relatively wealthy Rus sian peasants has been denounced even in the communist world, but it is an inescapable result of Marx's and Engels' explicit and absolute hostility to the hereditary convey ance, their implicit rejection of the only conditions under which human populations seem to consent to maintain themselves. But what historical evidence can be cited to support the thesis that the freedom to bequeath wealth to one's children is the necessary pre condition of demographic growth and national survival? Utopias, by defi nition, can never be wholly refuted by history because they can never be totally placed in the arena of his torical reality. But certain policies based on utopian assumptions al ways seem to manage to creep into the histories of the most innovative nations, provoking anti-utopian re actions, like the depopulation of France under its inheri tance law, which confirm our demographic logic.

Trouble in France Almost consistently from the days of Caesar to the late nineteenth cen tury, France was the most populous nation in western Europe and there fore the society most likely to risk social experiment within the secu rity which only superior numbers can provide. Then, relatively sud denly, its population growth stalled and virtually ceased. Aggravated, of course, by the First World War, deaths in France exceeded births during the 1930s. The country which had been almost five times as popu lous as Spain in the latter's golden age and over twice as peopled as Victorian Britain in the nineteenth century fell behind the Italians, the British and above all the Germans in population, virtually assuring German domination of Europe until 1945. Even today, under many gov ernment programs to increase French 1981 UTOP][A LOST 279 population, France has twice the territory of West Germany and is in many ways richer, but cannot match German economic performances.

What had happened? In 1793, the French revolutionary legislature, the Convention, abol ished primogeniture, the feudal law which directed the estates of persons toward their first-born child. This abolition of a restriction on the he reditary conveyance was consistent with demographic growth and therefore correct, but the Conven tion did not proclaim the right of all persons to bequeath what they want to whom they want. It replaced the feudal directive with a far more ex tensive one by mandating that all property must be willed in equal shares to all legitimate and ac knowledged illegitimate children. Napoleon incorporated this princi ple into his Code Civil, and it re mained the law throughout the tur bulent nineteenth century, blissfully untouched by cCliberal"and cCconser vative" governments alike. The Germans and British had. no such law, and generally allowed the free dom to bequeath. A popular histo rian sums it up concisely: This legislation had important results, moral and economic: reluctant to con demn their heirs to poverty by periodic divisions of the patrimony among many children, the French cultivated the old arts of family limitation. The peasants remained prosperous, but the population of France grew slowly during the nine teenth century-from 28 million in 1800 to 39 million in 1914, while that of Ger many rose from 21 to 67 million. Pros pering on the land, French peasants were slow to move into towns and factories; so France remained predominantly agricul tural, while England and Germany developed industry and technology, ex celled in war, and dominated Europe. 5 In 1911, a great French demogra pher cried out against France's de population and inheritance laws: Few know it! Hardly anyone thinks of it!

The French see their country's suicide without attempting a thing to prevent it. The death of France, which will be one of the major events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, astonishes foreign ers and leaves us indifferent!6 We have seen that in all the major countries of the world, legislation is de signed to reconcile man's two most nat ural ambitions: the desire to survive himself in his wealth and work, and the desire to survive himself in his children. In France, the law prevents the concilia tion of these two ambitions; it forces a man to choose, and experience proves that he makes the choice most harmful to his country: he sacrifices the conser vation of his nation to the preservation of his family wealth. 7 If even this subtle restriction on the hereditary conveyance-French revolutionary legislators might have almost been justified in calling it. a theoretical extension of it to younger siblings--could result in the demo graphic eclipse of the most peopled 280 THE FREEMAN May and powerful state in Western Eu rope, what would an outright aboli tion of the conveyance do to an oth erwise ((perfect" state? The younger children which the French law was designed to protect were never born and never lent their economic pro ductivity or their military man power to the task of holding back the prolific, prosperous Germans. The statist, utopian assumption in all this is that people are so perfectly sub servient to the state that they will have many children and create much wealth for their government regard less of its attitude toward the phys ical and economic continuity of fam ily life. People are not and they do not.

Depopulating the Soviet Union Revolutionary France has not been the only demographic colossus com mitted to utopianly naive restric tions on the freedom to bequeath. Marxist orthodoxy, as we have seen, envisions not merely a restriction on, but a total abolition of private inheritances. Accordingly, Marx and Engels are depopulating (and de Europeanizing) the Soviet Union just as French revolutionary naivete pe nalized France. The Great Russian ethnic majority which stabilized the identity of tsarist Russia has disap peared under the communists; Sta lin's genocides and wars have left catastrophic deficits of males; and infant mortality is skyrocketing to such an extent that China can seri ously relish the possibility of an end to Soviet population growth. Two American demographers, basing their study only on figures put out by the Soviets themselves, have concluded that the average So viet woman has from six to eight abortions in her lifetime. 8 Soviet feminists claim that the figure is closer to ten,9 with the inevitable probability of uterine damage. In fant mortality is up to the levels of underdeveloped countries and So viet life expectancy, having risen impressively in the 1950s, is edging down.lo Western experts on Soviet affairs are astounded at this ((health crisis" and cite alcoholism and health expenditure cutbacks, but these fac tors could be more of an effect than a prime cause of··sagging familial morale in the U.S.S.R.

Breaking Family Ties The overall problem is that a still theoretically utopian Soviet state, despite tacit concessions to the real ity of minor family possessions stay ing within a family, remains faith ful to Marx's and Engels' suppression of the essence of familial continuity, the hereditary conveyance. The Kremlin is reputed to be coldly re alistic, but what more urgently real duty do the Soviets face than the peopling of that immensely rich Sib eria which faces a billion hostile Chinese, and how can this crucial 1981 UTOPIA LOST 281 goal be achieved with the average~ Soviet woman undergoing at least half a dozen governmentally per-· formed abortions during her child-· bearing years? The U.S.S.R. has aI·· ready become predominantly Asian in population: how can it best resist the Asian nation par excellence, a China with Marxist pretensions of its own? ((The Sixties and Seventies have proved devastating to Soviet soci-· ety," writes demographer Nick Eberstadt. l1 And indeed they have, but did not the Soviets enjoy a cer·· tain demographico-economic growth up until that time? The growth-in-.

different communist state could spur its people to grow when its patrio·· tism could point to Japanese or Ger· man militarism or to the fact that only the United States had the power of nuclear attack. But those days are gone forever, and when did they leavE~ for good? At the dawn of the devas tating sixties and seventies. Soviet citizens are now free to see~ that the most dangerously self-de·· luded opponent of their familial con·· tinuity is not Hitler, but commu·· nism itself, as freely expressed in the 1848 Manifesto. Once the Sovi.. ets became a nuclear superpower, their leadership lost its most pre·· cious or perhaps its only tool for per suading the Soviet family to grow: Russian nationalism and military vulnerabili ty. Soviet women will bear children to defend the ((motherland of socialism" but not to prove the utopian theses of two nineteenth century German pseudo-scientists.

So it is that most utopias may be generally defined as the fruits of an intolerance for the hereditary trans mission of wealth, an intolerance which, once international circum stances calm down long enough for families to take stock of it, provokes the disastrous retaliation of depop ulation. The Soviets must repudiate Point Three of the Communist Man ifesto or continue to face a demo graphic decline of incalculable con sequences for the ~hole world. If the demographic decline of France op posite Germany was the most omi nous event of the nineteenth cen tury, the de-Europeanization and slow population growth of Soviet Russia is among the most discon certing phenomena of the twentieth. Beneficiaries of Great Wealth Often Oppose Such Transfers Along with this new definition of utopianism as an assault on heredi tary transmissions of wealth should come some theory of who the serious opponents of family wealth are. They could be anyone, but the deliciously paradoxical fact of the matter is that some of the most famous ones were the direct beneficiaries of great, un earned family wealth. At the very beginning of Plato's Republic, Soc rates asks Cephalus whether the latter's wealth is self-acquired or in282 THE FREEMAN May herited, and rejoices upon learning that it is inherited: ... the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men. And hence they are very bad company, for they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth. 12 This passage fits in well with evi dence indicating that Plato was of a patrician family and his leisurely, rambling dialogues the fruit of more leisure than any ordinary person could afford in his day. As to Mane and Engels we are far better in formed. They shared not only friendship and a belief in CCscientific"

human perfectibility, but a common source of income, the Engels family fortune: To support both himself and Marx, [En gels] accepted a subordinate position in the offices of Ermen & Engels [senior] in Manchester, eventually becoming a full fledged partner in the concern. He again functioned successfully as a business man, never allowing his communist principles and criticism of capitalist ways to interfere with the profitable· opera tions of his firm. Hence he was able to send money to Marx constantly, often in the form of five pound notes but later in far higher figures. When Engels sold his partnership in the bUSiness in 1869, he received enough for it to live comfortably until his death in 1895 and to provide Marx [who died in 1883] with an annual grant of 350 pounds, with a promise of more to cover all contingencies. 13 Birthrights Rejected The point is not, certainly, that a social thinker has to inherit great wealth in order to mount a utopian attack on the very conveyance which enriched him, but it could hardly be a coincidence that the two most fa mous and revered assaults on family wealth have come from among the heirs most gorged on its benefits.

Dynastically wealthy persons con stitute less than one per cent of all the humans who have ever lived, yet they have produced most, perhaps almost all of the utopian social blue prints which have distracted man kind from the real task of improv ing, not ((perfecting" society. Nor is it being said here that major heirs are absent from the ranks of liber tarian, individualistic thinkers: the task is not to predict the future po litical behavior of the dynastically wealthy, but to classify and analyze their past thoughts and attitudes as well as the nature of the political majorities which have accepted them as leaders. Finally, it should always be re membered that dynastic wealth is virtually never a political factor outside of the world's wealthiest na tions because only the latter produce politically significant amounts of it. It is in the Germany and Britain of 1981 UTOPIA LOST 283 Marx and Engels, the America of Franklin Roosevelt, or the France of Jean-Paul Sartre that the partisan functions of family wealth must be sought. Did not Sartre, France's most eminent twentieth century·Marxist, admit that his mother once paid about $24,000 in taxes for him?14 The material poverty of a Lenin or a Mao Tse-tung disproves none of all this: penniless terrorists have al ways sought justification with the economically illiterate rich,who, like them, are too small a group to im pose utopia and tyrannize the masses alone. The inescapable conclusion is that the most popular enemies of free market economies are those who never had to enter those economies on their own in the first place.

A Theoryof Marxist"Progress" From this principle a very logical theory of Marxist ttprogress" can be induced. It derives not from any so cialist logic, but from the successes of free market economies: as more wealth is created by productive peo ple like Engels' father and his work ers' more direct and indirect heirs like Marx and Engels are free to de nounce the market logic which en riched their fathers and themselves. This is inevitably most evident in the recent history of the nation which has produced more anesthetizing dynastic wealth than any other in history, the United States, whose floundering welfare state is of course the creation of its most politically successful heir to great wealth, Franklin Roosevelt. But the American experiment is beyond the scope of this indictment of human perfectibility, and right fully so, for the heartbeat of our con stitutional government, the separa tion of powers, is specifically anti utopian: if the framers of the Consti tution had been naive enough to think a single individual (philoso pher king) or group (the urban pro letariat) perfectible, they would not have perpetually separated the pow ers of demographico-economic growth, which are legislative in na ture, from the executive power whose legitimate functions derive from and should be limited to the real or im minent emergencies which lessen human numbers. This institution alized mistrust between legislators and the executive can minimize hu man greed and arrogance because it concedes that they exist. All govern mental schemes which reject the separation of powers are doomed to be devoured by the selfishness and imperfectibility they deny.

So it is that our demographically based logic does not refute nscien tific" utopia and leave nothing in its place. American history, before the 1930s at least, is the most real refu tation of utopia, but also the proof that man has a choice between pur suit of an impossible perfection and the cynicism which would deny nim_ 284 THE FREEMAN provability." The United States, ap parently bent on returning to the CCgrowthist" ideals which made it great, and the self-depopulating So viet Union respectively illustrate the Greek pun through which the jest ing Thomas More gave utopia its name: the cCgood place" (eutopos) op posed to the cCnoplace"(outopos) of utopian pseudo-science. i -FOOTNOTESl UThe Communist Manifesto," in Capital and Other Writings, Modem Library Edition, page 342. 2TheRepublic, translated by B. Jowett; Mod em Library Edition, page 183. 3Ibid. 4Premier Edouard Daladier, ttRapport au President de la Republique," 1939, quoted in Edmund A. Opitz Politics and Society in Contemporary France, edited by Eric Cahm, 1970; pages 484-485.

5Will Durant, The Age of Napoleon, page 125. 6Jacques Bertillon, La Depopulation de la France; Paris, 1911, page one. 7Ibid., page 150. 8Christopher Davis, Murray Feschback, URising Infant Mortality in the USSR," Bu reau of the C~nsus, Series P-95, No. 74, page 13. 9Ibid. lOIbid.,page one. uIn reviewing ttRising Infant Mortality in the USSR", New York Review of Books, Feb ruary 19, 1981,page 23. 12The Republic, translated by B. Jowett; Modem Library Edition, page 7. 130scarJ. Hammen, uFriedrich Engels," En cyclopedia Britannica, 1980, Volume 6, pages 859-860. 14Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, X: politique et autobiographie;Gallimard, Paris, 1976; page 203. IDEAS ON LIBERTY SOCIALISM, as mood, theory, and practice, is a result of the material abundance made possible by the industrial revolution. Millions of peo ple had toiled close to the soil for millennia, only to be rewarded by a bare subsistence, at best; at worst by plague and famine. Until the modern era, poverty was hardly more attributed to human arrange ments than to cosmic setting; one seemed about as fixed as the other.