Forgetting how to quarrel

A utopian tale on the death of homo economicus

Part 6 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

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Utopian tales usually hum with certain qualities. They are dreamlike and visionary. They seem distantly yonder in time and space and experience. They are epics that realise, in the imagination, some grand harmonious social and political accord. They are futuristic fantasies about the possibilities of progress and innovation. They ache with a kind of tenacious longing; they are dreams connected to the real world by precarious threads of pining desire.

Here is a very different kind:

Two hermits lived together for many years without a quarrel. One said to the other, ‘let's have a quarrel with each other, as is the way of men.’

The other replied, ‘I don't know how a quarrel happens.’ The first said, ‘Look here, I put a brick between us, and I say, That's mine. Then you say, No, it's mine. That is how you begin a quarrel.’

So they put a brick between them, and one of them said, ‘That's mine.’ The other said, ‘No; it’s mine.’ He answered, ‘Yes, it's yours. Take it away.’ They were unable to argue with each other.

Utopia is a dry comedy, set in some impoverished past between two adults who are too dull to even maintain an argument. But of course it is a utopian tale: see, here is a world without private property or ownership of any kind. Here is a world without violent conflict or disagreement of any kind. Here is a world without any cause for policing of any kind, or indeed any law or any state to enforce any law. Here is a world without sovereigns, kings and Caesars.

You may be fond of some of these things. They may hold a special place in your own utopian imagination, which is fine. The point here is that we have a tiny window into a tiny world where these things are superfluous, insofar as they exist to manage conflict and violence. It is a disturbing truth, that has been accordingly theologised aside, that the earliest visions of the messianic age saw law abolished and authorities brought to an end.

The comedy of this utopian tale is that the poor wretches have forgotten how even the most trivial conflict might happen in the first place. They couldn't do it, even when they tried. Life has become so peaceable they are actually bored.

This an oddity among utopian tales, partly because it seeks its unspectacular paradise, not by racing ahead of the world, but by falling back from it; not by rising above the world but by sinking beneath it. The Enlightenment’s characterisation of the human being as homo economicus was centred on the belief that a bent toward the accumulation of property and wealth was the unmistakably rational human preoccupation. The two nameless hermits above make no arguments against this or anything else. They would seem to be masters of the art of not caring about things that don't concern them. But their tale is a sort of joke about the assumption that accumulation is the only rational business. Perhaps if one values relational peace above all else, then having nothing to lose or fight over might itself become a rational thing to do.

A crucial ingredient to the comedy is the two hermits' lack of desire to argue over anything. A peculiarity of the time of the desert fathers and mothers would be the absence of any overarching rule of life. This is to say that there was no authority that legislated against private property. If there were, the tale would collapse. If it were really the case that they both desired ownership of the brick, but were forbidden to try and acquire it by some religious policing, then the magical and hilarious indifference of the tale would be gone. They would be at war with themselves against the rule, at war with the enforcer of the rule, and at war with one another, knowing that they also desire the brick that both are forbidden. But on the contrary, it is entirely by their own self direction—by their own ascetic exorcism of homo economicus from their own bodies—that they have completely forgotten why they would wish to possess the brick in the first place.

The charming spark of hope in this comedic farce of a utopia, is that there are two of them now. Homo Economicus has been exorcised, not only from the ascetic individual, but from a relationship between two individuals. Therein lies the small utopian possibility of another kind of community.

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