Even if these ideologues, bucking the natural order, could realize their utopian dream, such an artificially-contrived society would still be unsustainable. Modern physics may shed some light in this regard. While there’s a predisposed drive in Nature to produce evolutionary change and to express novelty—in a word, to create life—there’s also another countervailing urge that strives toward stasis and death. Physicists refer to this cosmic impulse as entropy.

The idea is that there is an ineluctable tug toward an entropic state where energy becomes increasingly dissipated and more and more useless to effect change. The amount of energy in a system is constant and cannot be destroyed; but the state of that energy changes over time, becoming more and more spatially uniform and, lacking a differential, increasingly unable to perform work. Entropy can be resisted or slowed down—but it requires the expenditure of work. (Your bedroom, normally neat and well-organized, will in time become a chaotic mess if left unattended, if not for your daily effort to tidy things up. Without work on your part, the highly organized pattern of your room becomes one big undifferentiated clump of cluttered sameness.)

Physicists theorize that our universe may eventually experience what’s known as heat death. Over the course of eons, entropy would ultimately reduce everything—every single particle of matter—to a constant temperature of Absolute Zero. There would no longer be a heat gradient, no more exchange of energy, and there would, therefore, no longer be any movement possible. No possibilities whatsoever. It would be an utterly static and perfectly uniform world devoid of the slightest hint of vitality, an inactive wasteland frozen forever. (At least all the little molecules would be “happy” molecules because—at last—everything would be fair and perfectly equal.)

I submit that the Marxist utopian society would eventually suffer a fate similar to heat death. At first, the process would be gradual, with the “poor” being increasingly disinclined to work, knowing their needs would be met by the efforts of others. The more productive members of society would gradually lose their motivation to produce, knowing that the fruits of their creativity and hard work would be taken from them and disbursed among the “less fortunate”. Eventually this leveling process would result in a “classless society”. But it would be an impoverished, drab and languid one. In a mundane sense, people would still have to work and move about—people still have to eat—but the vitality and truly creative energies of such a “utopia” would gradually dissipate into dullness and eventually cease to exist. (Examine any Marxist regime of the twentieth century and you’ll see glimmers of this negative dynamic.)

As life plays out, there inevitably will be “winners” and “losers”, the gifted and the handicapped, laborers and deadbeats. There will always be the “rich” and “poor”—relative and ill-defined terms, at best. (Consider that most of America’s “poor” have a car, a cell phone, a computer and, in some cases, a plasma TV.) It is what it is. In a fallen world, there will inevitably be injustices; and these must be rectified. But creating “heaven on earth” by fiat, by technocrats mandating the equality of all outcomes, is specious and unattainable. Jesus certainly recognized and sympathized with the plight of the disenfranchised; but he also acknowledged the nature of this world when he stated, “the poor you will always have with you”. Paul confirmed this same reality when he issued his edict to the early church: “he who doesn’t work doesn’t eat”. Again, it takes work to sustain civilization and to stall the relentless and destructive advance of entropy.

The answer is ordinary people helping people, not enlightened elitists erecting a cumbersome, fabricated social structure that is doomed to fail because it stubbornly refuses to recognize the nature of reality. God has mandated that His church minister to the needs of the poor and the genuinely unfortunate. This is accomplished through charitable enterprise at the community level as God’s love is expressed by and through individuals. The notion that sovereign Man, with his central planning and bloated bureaucracies and by the imposition of a contrived collective, can do better is tragically absurd.