Robert Nozick (somewhat ironically out of context—he’s differentiating between “design” and “filter” devices of construction —but I love the thought):
It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”
James C. Scott (emphasis added):
[T]he legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build. …
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.
I have said that Auden was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, but he gradually came to understand that there were some valuable things, necessary things, that Kierkegaard didn’t understand. Late in his life, Auden would write of Kierkegaard that, “like all heretics, conscious or unconscious, he is a monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament — in his case, the theme of suffering and self-sacrifice — but is deaf to its rich polyphony…. The Passion of Christ was to Kierkegaard’s taste, the Nativity and Epiphany were not.” Auden contends that, while Kierkegaard’s consciously held beliefs were scrupulously orthodox, he was “in his sensibility” a Manichee, who felt strongly the evil and degradation of matter, of our bodies. Indeed, Auden wrote in another essay, with pardonable exaggeration, “A planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.” And to have bodies of flesh and blood is to live in the world of nature’s necessity as well as in the world of history, of existential choice.
We are therefore, Auden came more and more to reflect, compound beings: subject always to natural laws and yet called upon to “assume responsibility for time” by making decisions — decisions whose inevitable consequences are yet another form of necessity. For Auden, this peculiar situation is above all comic: there is something intrinsically funny about our mixed identity, as we try to exercise Divine powers of decision and yet always find our bodies getting in the way. “A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws.” And this sense of humor about one’s condition is for Auden absolutely necessary to spiritual health: he may have dreamed in his youth of redeeming the world through his poetic power, or being destroyed in the effort, but as an older man he found himself, as he often remarked, just a “martyr to corns,” which afflicted his feet and made him comfortable only in carpet slippers.