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
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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.
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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.