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[ 260 ] 13“To Close the Circle of Our Felicities” In the Best of All Possible Worlds, How Would You Know? Sometimes openly, sometimes in the subtext, this has been a book about attainable utopia, the best of all possible worlds. But it has been therefore an imperfect utopia. In my best of all possible worlds, some people still are poor, some children still grow up badly educated, criminals still commit crimes, and human beings still do foolish and hurtful things to themselves and to other human beings. But upon reflection, this thought should temper our ambitions: That’s what the best of all possible worlds would really be like. Imagine a time centuries hence when some nation, somewhere, has reached the best of all possible political worlds. The laws and institutions of the country have been so arranged that day-to-day life is as good (however you choose to define the word) as possibly can be, so good that the legislature has nearly put itself out of business. Minor modifications to the existing arrangements are made from time to time to adjust to changing external conditions, but these are only refinements to basic laws and structures of government that have produced a situation in which all good things within the control of government are maximized and all bad things within the control of government are minimized. Trying to improve on any one aspect of life by changing the law or starting a new program will create enough problems elsewhere that, on balance, things will be worse than before. What would that world look like to the people living in it at the time? One possibility, of course, is that humans are perfectible, in which case we may imagine a thoroughgoing utopia in which everyone is “to close the circle of our felicities” [ 261 ] prosperous, a good citizen, and happy. But if you are any less optimistic , assuming that humans are and always will be infinitely variegated, then a curious implication follows: If you were living in that best of all possible worlds, you would be unaware of it. Omniscient bystanders observing from outside the system, armed with a social science calculus that can tell them the first derivative for a culture, would know that any attempt to reduce the bad things still further would be futile, only increasing the net amount of bad things. But you, living in the attainable utopia, would have no way of knowing that any additional effort would move you from the-best-that-can-be to some inferior alternative. You would see around you what would look like clear proof of your government’s imperfection. Perhaps everyone would have access to good food—but some would be malnourished nonetheless. Everyone might have it within his power to have decent shelter—but some would live in squalor anyway. In the best of all political worlds, some parents would still abuse their children, for human beings sometimes behave terribly. All of these things would happen, because it is inconceivable that in the best of all possible worlds people will be force-fed, or made to be tidy, or put under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. In the best of all possible worlds, the incidence of such problems would be much smaller than it is now, let us assume. But the incidence would be nontrivially greater than zero, and the existence of such bad things would inevitably raise cries for their alleviation. The smaller the amounts of the bad things, the more vocal the cries (“In a society as rich as ours, it is intolerable that a single person should . . . ,” etc.). And if enough people in the society measured progress by counting the number of abused children and hungry people, they would succeed in their campaign. They would legislate new steps to reduce the observed problems, and thereby move past the best-that-can-be, down the slope on the far side of the peak, and begin to realize it only many years later when it finally became apparent that they had been using the wrong measures of success. We in the United States at this point in history are very far from the best of all possible worlds. But we do have to worry about whether we are making progress toward it, and the generic problem we face is the same as that faced by the people living unknowingly in utopia. The bad-thing-to-be-reduced is malnourished children...

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