The Cartography of the Future: Recovering Utopia for the 21st Century by Rick Searle

Rick,

The theme of utopia is hopeful and honest, especially basing it on such prospects of the past. As you suggest, it is alien in our current world. Even the social measures of technology you mention like longevity, child mortality and income are more measures of success and affluence compared to other countries than they are technological progress.We can all agree that someone must shape it to fit values of survival and common good. That is my perception as well. The imagination of Utopia is certainly an inspiration for achieving a better world which includes a viable survival.

Jim

Hi Rick,

I find some similarities between our positions, and you've convinced me (together with Sabine Hossenfelder) that I should take a look a Smolin's new book - I was avoiding it because I think he misunderstands what the block versus flow of time pictures imply vis-a-vis free will and fatalism. However, your concluding statement is very close to various themes in my essay:

"The future is neither completely ours to shape nor something we are subject to without room for maneuver. For, continuing to think that our world cannot be made to better conform to our ideals is one of the surest ways to insure that what lies in our future is the farthest thing from Utopia. And so, if I were to answer the question that inspired this essay "how should humanity steer the future" directly, I would say that the question has no definitive and final answer but begins with the rediscovery that it is us with our hands behind the wheel."

I concur.

Best,

Dean

Hi Rick,

I think that steering the future is as difficult as steering the past, there are so many coincidences that influence the future (see my essay : "STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS") that it is even impossible to predict our second generation. It is not only the influence of for now unknown (unborn) individuals, that blur the future but also the difference of view of our participating individuals here and now.

So "Utopia" can only be a subjective ideal, that is why so many religions are existing all with their own interpretation of a future "kingdom of heaven" , the subjective ideas are coupled and became rules to be lived in.

It is in my opinion the overall "mentality" that has to change from egoistic short term profit ideas to a long term non-profit sharing our potentiality mentality. The average age of a human being is just 80 yers and that also influences his actions when they are influencing his wellnes during this time, if we would age longer then we would perhaps have more attention for a future that is longer away as those 80 years...

I hope that you will find some time to read and leave a comment on my thread (link is above) and eventually give it a rating that is in acoordance with your personal valuation.

Good luck and best regards

Wilhelmus

Ihre Nieve sind gefährlich und - dangrus

Rick,

It is an observant and well thought out perspective, but I think the issues which need to be dealt with are more a matter of process, than objectives. We first really need to figure out what we are doing, before considering where we might be going.

One point I keep making in various conversations on the FQXI forums, as well as prior contests is that we experience time as a sequence of events and so think of it as the present moving along a vector from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration, but the underlaying reality is of the changing configuration that turns future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns, not that there is some extradimensional flow from yesterday to tomorrow. So while the past has certainly been determined, the future remains probabilistic, because the input into any particular event only coalesces with its occurrence. We affect our world as it affects us. It is just the opportunities for greatest change are in times of maximum chaos. The punctuations of the equilibrium.

A more specific problem with the concept of utopia goes to the heart of our current philosophic and religious assumptions, in that the universal state of the absolute is basis, not apex. It is the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. The nature of complex systems is that the more complex they are, the more inherently unstable they are. Just look at the periodic table. So as we build out these social systems, they exhibit a wave pattern of compounding and then collapsing complexity. Nature incorporates this by having individuals be born and die, which the DNA slowing evolving as the stable state.

In my own entry I focus on our treatment of money as a form of commodity, rather than the contract it is, as the most resolvable source of our inability to exist in a stable form of society. A currency is a promise by a community to its members and its value is entirely dependent on the health of that community, not how many such notes are in circulation, so when we sacrifice inter-communal relations and other resources in order to create and collect these notes, it is counter-productive.

Regards,

John Merryman

Hello Rick, May I offer a short appraisal of your essay, a little on the critical side? I would ask you to reciprocate. - Mike

Rick --

Excellent essay, and I'm much in tune with your way of thinking. The last sections of my own essay on communications technology develop the same thought, that as "technology is moving intimately closer to our humanity... we really do have choices regarding how this particular phase of technological evolution will unfold, in a way we have not before."

Your argument about technological determinism makes sense, though of course it's one aspect of a bigger picture. Part of the reason utopian thinking died out is that by setting up a vision of how things should be in contrast with how they actually are, it implies that we can just switch over from the wrong way of doing things to the right one. That seemed sensible in the 18th century, but didn't fit as well with the 19th-century realization that our history goes back a long, long way, and passed through many evolutionary stages. That also gave us the longer-term, progressive view of our future that made utopianism seem shallow and naive.

Yet you're completely right about the importance of a "cartography of the future" in the utopian spirit. We badly need to develop new pictures of what it looks like when we've got it right. This is something I didn't attempt in my essay -- under present conditions I find it hard to envision hopeful scenarios. But some of the contest entries, including yours, are making me want to try.

I'll have to check out some of your footnotes. It's very encouraging to think that "many are asking fundamental questions not so much about what it means to be human as what we want being human to mean..."

Thanks -- Conrad

Rick,

The only reason I take issue is that utopia is a social idealization and I find there is a dangerous tendency to conflate ideals with absolutes. If we can first understand that what gives rise to form is context, so when we start distilling away and generally sterilizing the messy aspects, we don't want loose sight of the reasons for the forms in the first place. Otherwise there becomes that overpowering pull to the center, as the elementary fabric is weakened.

So yes, we very much need our goals, desires and standards, but also a sense of proportion and balance have to be part of the mix as well.

Looking at the way the world is going today, that sense of proportionality and equilibrium seems to be lost, as the various factions express their deep desires and apply standards they themselves might not uphold.

Regards,

Dear Mr. Searle,

A nice change of pace. I found your essay a joy to read, and not as outrageously oversimplified as one would tend to think.

Regards,

Joe Fisher

Rick -

Great essay, thanks. In my essay, The Tip of the Spear, I only make an oblique reference to the way technology has shaped our human imagination for the worse (by promoting determinism, commercialism) - you have tackled this issue head-on. Bravo.

However, are we not looking in the rear view mirror? Determinism as a world view was promoted by Newtonian science and 19th/20th century technological enthusiasm. But the convergence of scientific theory and technological advance is now split. For the past century, fundamental science has grappled with an increasingly opaque and obscure landscape - relativity, quantum mechanics, complexity, and arcane specialization. These are existentially unsettling and seem to have led to an erosion of confidence and optimism in the scientific enterprise - just look at the climate change debates, or the new creationism for that matter.

I would also say (Kurzweil to the contrary notwithstanding) that most humans are not particularly comfortable with all that the digital etc. world has brought with it. While technology, productivity and standard of living may have climbed, so has the sense of alienation and stress. That incessant beeping!

I worry that we have yet to see the full impact of 20th century science and 21st century technology on the human imagination. It is playing out as we write. I hope that out of the ashes of 20th century determinism and progressivism we will see a new, positive, shared moral framework arise, rather than greater discord.

Best - George

Thanks Rick, when you have time.

At the end of your essay, you imply that you haven't so much answered the question as agreed with its premise; as though to say, "Yes indeed, let us steer the future." But I disagree. I've long thought that utopianism could be (and has been) employed as an actual means of steering; so that any general description of utopian thought, including an historical one such as yours, is indeed a description of "how to steer". I came to this conclusion while reading Howard P. Segal's (1985) Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Segal looks at the present value, the "contemporary usefulness" of utopian thought, particularly of a category he labels "serious utopian visions", those which "play a vital role as vehicles of social criticism and, sometimes, of actual social change." (p. 155) Such a vision "functions properly not as a literal blueprint for the future but as a take-off point for reconsidering and possibly altering existing society." This surprisingly practical (almost mechanical) view implies the possibility of deliberately grabbing hold of utopian literature, etc., and continually, consciously manipulating it for the steering mechanism it "properly" is. It's an image that's stuck with me ever since.

So I think your essay is completely on topic insofar as I'm concerned, and definitely interesting, too. My main complaint is that I wanted to learn more about the specific device you suggest at the end (p. 8), based on small-scale experimentation in utopian communities. How would the steering effect of that be conveyed "piecemeal" from the successful community to the larger society? What aspects of the society (and the future) could be steered in this way? Has this been attempted before?

Mike

Dear Rick,

It was a pleasure reading your scholarly essay. If I understood you right, you advocate moving away from technological determinism, and towards a new exploration for a Utopia. I am very interested in knowing what practical steps you have in mind with regard to moving in this new direction.

My best regards,

Tejinder