Embracing the Future: Utopia

14. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Utopia

             Utopia disquiets. Inmates in old age homes inhabit utopias of sorts, places where they wait to die. Few relish prospects of old age homes. We think conflict spices life and spend our lives competing. We worry about what to do with our days. We want employment, not only in the sense of making a living, but in the sense of having mattered. We want meaning. We want recognition. We want our children to say prayers for the dead.
            Eternity terrifies and habit keeps us in old routines. I tout benevolent societies, but play racquetball. The game would be less without winners and losers. Utopians may decide they are better off when no one goes one on one, but I lose at games without remorse. I think the species suffers if we do not strain against each other. My introduction to the spirit of Antioch College was a basketball game in which we did not keep score. After ten minutes we gave up, it was that boring. We say we need pain to appreciate pleasure. If we are right, painless societies lose appeal because without pleasure, life is diminished. That we enjoy emotional extremes may be why we fight wars. War departs from daily routine, touches the child in us, and gives the insecure a license to kill.
            I served in the army, but have never gone to war, a loss I do not regret. A basic training instructor, a regular army infantryman from North Carolina, was more accurate with his M-1 from the hip than I was prone. He fought World War II and recounted Pacific exploits. He may have invented some stories, but combat thrilled him. The war was the high point of his life, and he is not alone. Wars keep capitalism going. Rebuilding afterwards provides the jobs through which we earn our keep. The process is insane, but so is most collective activity when measured by individual behavior standards. We accept economic booms and busts, thinking them an inescapable aspect of economic systems. We call down cycles "depressions", a word describing individual abnormality. Were we to call booms "mania", economic cycles become manic-depression, pathological swings when they occur in individuals.
            Societies based on warmer perceptions imply living in a more natural state, respecting the planet and its non-human occupants. We come together because we no longer tolerate the waste and destruction of living apart. Suburban streets and houses destroy oxygen replenishing vegetation. Perhaps the number of forests we can convert to parking lots is finite, but we reject limitation. We make some lives so difficult that madness stalks the land. Mothers who leave children unattended take a chance, and not only children are at risk. Entering Manhattan from Connecticut via the Tri-boro Bridge someone sprayed the message "Fuck everybody" on a girder. That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of hierarchy.
            My crystal ball is no clearer than any, but optimism, even in our extreme situation, is not unjustified. Wild imaginings come true. When Jules Verne described submarines and space ships, readers marveled at his imagination, but few believed the dream. Today's science fiction takes us further into space, but perhaps even Startrek fans doubt it can happen. I have wanted utopia since reading Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy more than thirty-five years ago. Recollection dims, but I remember enough to marvel at Bellamy's prescience. The narrator, who lives in the year 2000, describes his utopian society. He reports that capitalism collapsed in the late 1980's, following overextension of credit and a corporate merger mania. If best selling economists are right, a giant crash lurks. Bellamy's narrator described utopian life. Children are educated until twenty-one. Upon graduating college, they work ten years. After that, they need do nothing else. A utopian life style is reasonable and attainable. For details, read the book.
            I prefer Bellamy's optimism to pessimistic predictions, but he may be wrong and others, Nostradamus or the Book of Revelations, right. Utopia implies enormous social change, the end of nuclear families, lineage, inheritance, and other accouterments of hierarchy. Individual housekeeping chores become collective, but efficiency and convenience may not persuade us to relinquish bloodlines. Demoting individualism to aberration seems authoritarian and unpleasant, but collectivization need not imply enormous cafeterias in grim, Orwellian settings. Small, intimate bistros can be part of the utopian dining scene, but utopia will provide fewer choices because the urge to establish difference will disappear.
            Societies in which everyone wears black pajamas seem austere to western minds, but individuality needs no adornments if individuals think, say, and do what they please especially when the demise of something like haute couture releases seamstresses from mindless labor and salespeople from serving needs other than their own. Utopians who want different clothing must make it themselves. Housing will change as classless societies put us in efficient apartments, electronic and more beautiful than anything the wealthy know today. Paulo Niermi builds Arcosanti in the Arizona desert and his conception feels like the future, huge horizontal and vertical spaces housing millions of humans. Escalators, elevators and moving sidewalks rather than automobiles provide safe environments where unsupervised children roam freely. Enormous, vertical cities lessen human impact on the planet, allowing millions of acres now used for roads and suburban development to revert to a natural state. Waterless toilets and biodegradable products end contamination of the planet's water supply. With luck, we unlock the atom and obtain abundant electricity without radioactive waste.
            Electronics will not solve every human problem, but if we accept democratic notions, we can create a democracy of billions of individuals. We have no guarantee human aggressiveness is not innate, but any prediction is an act of faith. With old faiths exhausted, faith in ourselves may save us. Ignorance is vast but the search for knowledge will continue. An attempt to harness fusion reactions may spin out of control and do us in. It is the nature of ignorance that essential knowledge remains hidden. Luck plays a greater role in human affairs than we care to admit, but we are not compelled to wage war, pollute, or derive satisfaction from hierarchical position. To that extent at least, the future is up to us.

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Book chapters

1. Chapter - Theory Overview
2. Chapter - Self Image Psychology
3. Chapter - Collective Image Psychology
4. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Religion
5. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Sex
6. Chapter - Sources of Collective Inferiority: Parents
7. Chapter - Pollution and Other Terrors of our Times
8. Chapter - More Problems: Representative Democracy
9. Chapter - More Problems: William Toste
10. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Television
11. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Computers
12. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Floating
13. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Scenarios
14. Chapter - Embracing the Future: Utopia