Sure, Mike. Freely state whatever you think. I am here to learn. And I am eager to read, comment and vote on yours once I have the proper sleep.

Rick

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,

Wilhelmus,

I have read your essay and tend to leave a more extensive comment there, the long and short of which is I have my doubts as to if quantum fields,the nature of consciousness or theories of the multi-verse are as important as more mundane goal setting at least in terms of the near-term future.

Where I think you and I are in solid engagement is that deterministic ideas of the future that follow only one path are not only socially dangerous but scientifically inaccurate as well.

Best of luck on your essay!

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

    Thanks, Joe. I'm a utopian with a lower case u.

    I intend to read and vote on your essay tonight. Please grade my essay if you haven't done so already.

    Best of luck!

    Rick

    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

      Thank you very much for the question, Tejinder.

      I had to cut a good bit of my original text to meet the length requirements, so below I'll paste some of my thoughts from there which I hope will answer your question.

      Please let me know what you think, and if you have not graded my essay already, please do so.

      All the best,

      Rick Searle

      ______________________

      The major problems the world faces over the next century are not hard to identify. How do we support and continue to spread generalized human prosperity in light of their overwhelming pressures on the biosphere? How do we respond to climate change that is already guaranteed to take place over the next few centuries despite what we do today? How do we make our society more equitable and democratic? How do we respond to unprecedented demographic changes? What kind of society can we build around the rise of increasingly intelligent machines? How do we use our increasing powers over the workings of life being granted to us by the biological sciences?

      We need more political, socio-economic and environmental innovation if we are to find ways to confront these problems. Our political institutions are in some cases centuries old, the structures of our socio-economic life not much younger, and the ways we relate to our physical environment legacy practices stretching in some case deep into our history.

      It isn't the case either that we are bereft of possible solutions that range from the statist to the anarchist, the bio-conservative to the transhumanist. Still, the application of these solutions faces the high wall of human inertia, better the devil that you know, as the saying goes. As Laplace knew, public caution when it comes to radical change has a great deal of wisdom in it. We don't what solutions will work and what they will look like in the real world, or if the cure will end up being worse than the disease. Indeed, the very non-deterministic, non-linear nature of human affairs ensures that we cannot know the answers to these questions beforehand.

      What we need is ways to test our ideas and examples of solutions that people can actually see and visit, to move to if they so chose, and best of all, apply what has been shown to work in their own society. Small scale utopian experiments can radically innovate while the larger society can use these innovations to engage in what Popper called "piecemeal social engineering".

      Thus, we need a real research and development budget for innovation beyond the merely technological and scientific. Social innovation as a major solution for the world's problems gets almost no notice because it is vastly overshadowed by much faster technological innovation. Yet, as noted, most of our social problems are at root problems of political and economic organization as much as they are technological in nature.

      BREAK

      In some ways we already have such broad experimentation as a consequence of our fractured political world. American states in its federal system are famously thought of as "laboratories". Mayors are among the most innovative figures in the US at least. (Barber) Countries with similar histories, cultures and ecologies that at some point diverged such as North Korea and South Korea offer running experiments contrasting alternative political and economic systems (Romer). Some cities have been developed precisely so as to be experiments in green technologies (Dubai). Religion and culture can be considered long running experiments in cultural evolution whose very longevity shows they helping human beings to successfully navigate their way in the world. (Wired for Culture)

      All this knowledge, along with sector specific innovation in areas such as policing, public health, education etc needs to be better collected and made available for policy makers and citizens, but we also need more radical experiments. There are many possible examples: small, self-sufficient cities in ecologically extreme habitats such as deserts, or arctic zones, communities with radically different forms of governance, economy, and relationship to technology and the natural world. For those who wish to secure the future of democracy, what is especially needed are ways to bring democratic governance into the hands of citizens. (NAAM) At the moment popular technology is better at helping overthrow governments rather than democratically govern them. (Naam Atlantic).

      Almost all of these experiments will fail. Yet their failure is almost the point. Small scale utopian experiments would give us a place to tap into the energetic idealism of youth and would provide a school of politics and policy better than even the most sophisticated computer simulation. We might create a much wiser generation of politicians if we gave them the opportunity to crash a whole (if very small) society by their mistakes rather than just corrode our much more weighty and resilient society where the consequences of bad judgement and short-sighted corruption are handed off to future administrations and even generations not yet born. Future politicians and policy makers would have be honed by a kind of evolutionary process to in some sense resemble Burke's political classes whose wisdom was shaped by history and party politics. His charge against French revolutionary utopians being that they lacked the sort of political wisdom that only came through experience.

      Even the suggestion that a small effort at social experimentation would be publicly funded in itself seems utopian in the pejorative sense of the word in today's age of austerity when governments have trouble even investing in eminently more practical social goods. I have no answer to this charge than to say that even where something looks utopian it is our responsibility to put our efforts behind it as long as we find it the smart and good thing to do.

      A modest step that might be a necessary prelude to any broad ranging support for any real world Utopian experiments might lie encouraging the use of Utopia as an organizing concept in secondary and postsecondary institutions of learning. In secondary education the concept of Utopia combined with the use of increasingly sophisticated simulation and gaming tools might be used being to revive in the young a sense of the holistic and independent nature of their societies, a commitment to the general good of the community, and above all a sense of the future that can be shaped by human agency, and which we are thus ultimately responsible for.

      At the university level Utopia might also be used as a way to bridge the increasingly specialized nature of our society. All Utopias are to some degree architectonic and aim at being holistic with everything meant to fit together just so. A truly architectonic society is an illusion, but the fact that communication between different segments of society might be said to be weak, and that specialists spend most of their time interacting with specialist in their same field, means that our view of society is more kaleidoscopic than the reality. As just one example, one needs to get education, the economy, mental health, and law enforcement right all at the same time, for all interact with one another and have feedback effects. Utopia as a concept can get these various specialists, or budding specialist in the form of undergraduate and graduate students, in the in the same room preferably not only in interdisciplinary exercises at the university level, but in real communities as well.

      So what we need is a return to the Utopian tradition, but one that is also in many ways new. This reconceptualized utopianism would be supremely conscious of its epistemological limits, and less centered on technological solutions as the cure-all for social ills. A new utopianism aware of itself and its limitations might be a way of breaking free of the unconscious utopianism that surrounds us- ideologies which claim to have uncovered the direction of history and simplify reality in order to subject it to their narrow interpretations of the world. It might show us new ways of living in the world, novel approaches which we will increasingly need in light of looming demographic, technological and economic change.

      That's a great question, George.

      I think you're right on two fronts- science grew out of determinism along time ago, and the public in general is certainly far more cynical of the promises of technology than in the middle of the last century.

      Still, the people I continue to see adhering to a version of determinism are pretty powerful- they own and run some of the richest companies in the world, and/or adhere and promote an ideology that is currently rooted in Silicon Valley.

      Here are some links to just a few of the posts I have written on the subject:

      http://utopiaordystopia.com/2011/12/29/what-humanity-wants/

      http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/05/09/reflections-on-abundance/

      http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/08/13/the-terrifying-banality-of-humanity-2-0/

      http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/09/14/betting-against-the-transhumanist-wager/

      http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/12/14/dont-be-evil/

      http://utopiaordystopia.com/2014/03/02/cracks-in-the-cult-of-radical-transparency/

      I intend to read the Tip of the Spear tonight. Please give me your grade if you haven't done so already.

      Best of luck,

      Rick Searle

      Thanks Mike for your very thought provoking question.

      Length constraints prevented me from fully fleshing the concept out, but I also want the idea to be as opened ended as possible- Utopia as a kind of Swiss Army Knife.

      Here's just one way it might work:

      One of the benefits of Utopia is also one of its greatest weaknesses- it gives you a sort of Tabla Rosa by which you can redesign society at will. This is dangerous in the larger society because you have to level the existing order to start afresh, which is why I think Utopias should be used as a "proof of concept" with which you can tweak the overall society.

      Imagine being able to design an energy system, employment system, justice system

      all from "scratch" without legacy distortions and institutional interests based on the best knowledge we have? People would be given real life examples of what a society would look like if we, just as examples, built modern communities with almost zero carbon footprint, went to a 35 hour work week, replaced most incarceration with community imprisonment and re-conciliatory justice, broke down walls between subjects such as art and science during elementary education.

      We could then argue around these real world examples rather than our respective ideologies- is this the type of world we want.

      That's just one version of how a revived concept of Utopia might work. There are many many others.

      Off to read your essay. Please give me a grade if you have not done so already.

      Best of luck!

      Rick Searle

      Dear Rick,

      Your essay is interesting. I attach below this paragraph my reply to your comment on my blog page. I generally wait a bit before scoring many essays to see how they fit in with each other. I tend to copy the cover page and enter potential scores before doing the actual entry.

      The intellectual attraction of utopias is pretty low these days. Utopia = no place, is a sort of fiction meant to advance an ideology or agenda. Recent history has sort of rubbished up the attraction of utopias.

      The irony of these things is the reason they fail is that once they are applied the application of them changes human behavior in ways not predicted by the system. This is what happens with economy theories, the application of the economic theory changes behavior in ways not predicted by theory.

      We humans have been very good at exploiting our environment. Our ability to figure out problems, learn, and communicate this information has permitted us exploit our world in new and more complete ways. As a result we have increasingly taken our selves off the fitness landscape. It probably began when Homo erectus took themselves off the menu by throwing rocks at leopards and using fire at night to keep them away. This has lead to the current age where there are over 7 billion humans and we exploit our world in ways no other animal ever has, such as petroleum, uranium, metal ores, and ... . With a population of 7 billion and total mass of around 400 million tons no animal with comparable size and dietary requirements in the natural history of this planet has come even close.

      In the environmental debate it is interesting to ponder the idea that the conservatives are in a certain perspective right. The continual expansion of human power, our increased use of resources and the wasteful damage done to the environment has been the human program from almost the start of our species. They are right in the sense that we have always managed to press on this way. For most of our natural and recorded history the exploitation and demolition of the world has been very slow and comparatively small. Now of course the problem is that as this trend is exponential it appears there is a prospect that this will lead to finis Homo sapiens. To rein in our growth and exploitation of the world is out of character with our species. On the other hand failure to do so means we will inevitably reach certain limits. If nothing else our world is becoming bewilderingly complex and we may at some point be no longer to manage this growth in scale and complexity.

      Largely political leaders do not exist to solve problems. We sometimes call political leaders "problem solvers," and this is really only true from a certain perspective. Political leaders largely serve to protect or expand the wealth and power of those in the most elite positions. If you are in that exclusive class then in one sense political leaders are "problem solvers" if they permit you to keep business as usual or to increase your share of the pie. The idea that power structures of any sort, whether government/political, or business/corporate and we might as well include military and religious, exist to actually solve problems in the world is a bit of a delusion. We tend to focus on the rather exceptional occasions where there is leadership that does actually solve problems, where the normalcy is really a banal form of management that greases various palms.

      So the future will doubtless prove to be interesting if nothing else. The odds frankly do not look in our favor, and between dystopia and utopia I would tend to say the former looks more likely. It really should not be looked upon as something that horrible. In 50 million years the Earth will be doing just fine, but we wont be there. The world will no more cry for the loss of our species than it does now over the loss of Tyrannosaurus rex.

      LC

      Lawrence,

      "Largely political leaders do not exist to solve problems. We sometimes call political leaders "problem solvers," and this is really only true from a certain perspective."

      Well, yes and no. It it very often the case that solving one problem leads to another down the road, sometimes even bigger. But politics certainly does solve problems- think of the US after the Clean Air Act than before or before child labor laws, regulation on food production the list goes on and on.

      I suppose one could think this was futile, but it is futile in the same way cleaning your house is futile. That it just gets a mess again is just part of reality- but it's better than living in filth.

      "It really should not be looked upon as something that horrible. In 50 million years the Earth will be doing just fine, but we wont be there. The world will no more cry for the loss of our species than it does now over the loss of Tyrannosaurus rex."

      I agree that other life on earth- in the short term- would be better off without us and do not agree with other essayists in this contest who seem to think humanity has some cosmic role to play. Yet, for any human being the end of our species should be seen as a tragedy whether we will personally experience it or not.

      As for Utopia, it has indeed be rubbished by history, but I think we have thrown something valuable into the garbage pile which I am trying to pull out, clean off, and fix its broken parts.

      All the best,

      Rick Searle

      Dean,

      Would love to know what your physicist's eye makes of the essay "The future is the past" by Roger Schlafly. It's like the anti-Time Reborn.

      Rick

      Rick, wonderful indeed. I read it three times in three different occasions to understand your ideas more fully. We definitely share the idea that we need to define our common destiny clearly, so that most mankind would agree and work together to realize this common dream. As you wrote: "We need something like the idea of Utopia for this shaping. We need it as both a prototype and moral template where many of the problems we currently face are resolved." I also agree and believe that we do not have a privilege to exist than any other living beings that has ever swam, walked and flown on Earth. So far perhaps, only 1% might survive since our ancestor single cell evolved here. More likely than not as our ancestor evolved from the single cell to multicellular and to ape kind and then to mankind, and then to a new kind more likely than not our own creation that we would interbreed, infuse our DNA and biological parts and of course our memory so that we can live longer and even would have a shot to be immortal physically here and now. Likewise we are different from our own immediate predecessor ape-kinds, we will evolve into many species and sub-species. Whatever that would be, without an agreed roadmap of the future, we shall certainly lost into infinite possibilities and potential, most of them are bad for us. That is why I am working on Xuan Yuan Anti-entropic Operating System 2.0 that leads us safely to the brave common future of Xuan Yuan's Da Tong in which we joyfully share together by joining in the hip so to speak our common prosperity and well being. From each to each according to his/her dreams and aspirations and each has free-education, free health care and free minimum material wealth like a small house and $1 million or more in his/her bank account.

      KQID's Giving first taking later principle demands me to give your outstanding essay its highest score possible in this contest. I will also post this comment in my blog. Good luck and congratulation for your important essay.

      Regards,

      Leo KoGuan

      Rick

      As promised I'd like to share some thoughts on you nice nostalgic essay.

      I like Utopia and we need Utopia. Utopia shall be crazy and propose some vague values like Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité from the french revolution that we still don't understand what they mean. Seen from today the french revolution was far away from realizing these values. Utopia shall serve us telescope to see our present and as compass to give us the direction where to navigate.

      This was a far I could understand it Adornos critic to Poppers "piecemeal social engineering" in the positivist dispute. Using the language and logic of the present Poppers telescope could not see very far. The Utopian telescope in contrast might see the present much clearer and the future much nearer.

      Contrary to what I say in my essay I like to think, that the past is not "stubbornly outside of our control" as you state it. This might be so as far as we only talk about things that have a clear physical meaning. Our past and our future is only about the events that happened and will happen. It is also also about its meaning we give. This hopefully will change when we will have reached Utopia.

      Although over a hundred years ago quantum mechanics introduced indeterminism in to our physical world I think you are right insisting to call the physical world view deterministic, although that might not be accurate. Quantum mechanics makes it possible to build atomic bombs and to control them (technically, not socially). As I state in my essay physics is the most general language that can make prediction from the given knowledge. No wonder all other sciences (especially economics) wants to emulate it.

      Last but not least I want to cite Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker who says that it is a moral necessity not know exactly the future otherwise we would not make any effort to reach Utopia.

      Hope you liked my comment

      Luca

        Luca,

        If I understand this, I love it, and is one angle my essay lacked:

        "Our past and our future is only about the events that happened and will happen. It is also also about its meaning we give. "

        In some ways, the meaning of the past is constantly changing in light of the outcomes expressed in the present. Reaching for a utopian outcome is,in a way,

        an attempt to bring the stream of the past to its best possible outcome, though, we never quite get there and it is always outside our reach- there is more future in front of us.

        Rick

        Rick,

        A "not" has been lost in the passage. Actually I should have writen: "Our past and our future is not only about the events that happened and will happen. It is also also about its meaning we give."

        It was very late at night.

        Luca

        Rick,

        Because I am huge fan of Karl Popper, I'd like to first suggest that what he left out of The Open Society and its Enemies you might find rehabilitated in The Povery of Historicism.

        Popper's view of science is unwavering in its dedication to the correspondence theory of truth (Tarski), so you might find that your idea of reconstructing the past, with the advantage of new knowledge in the present, quite compatible with Popper's criteria for a scientifically sound and falsifiable theory. Though the correspondence is not causal, as in Marxist dialectical materialism, it is entirely objective, i.e., metaphysically real.

        That being said, though I have sought to be true to critical rationalism (Popper's name for his philosophy), I am much more the rational idealist, which puts me closer to your philosophy than his, even in spite of myself. In fact, I am pleasantly suprised to see a number of idealistic proposals in this year's essay contest (Bee Hossenfelder comes quickly to mind), because academics in general tend to eschew idealism, as you noted.

        There's so much worthwhile in your piece that it may well be the most important essay this year.

        Best,

        Tom