The current political and ideological climate does not encourage launching and discussing of truly long-range goals for societies (in this paper “long-range” means “a century or two”). Such topics are discouraged for several reasons:
1. The dramatic and complete collapse of attempts at socialist societies.
2. Related disillusionment also because of revealed theoretical and ideological weaknesses of socialism and communism.
3. The increasing “postmodernist” belief in many academic and intellectual circles that (even) such until now uncontroversial “programs” as enlightenment and progress are “simply not possible”.
This paper holds that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. If utopias – grand visions for qualitatively better societies – do not play a part in public debate, this has detrimental effects on political choices made today, also and even when the visions in themselves are maybe infeasible and can never be completely realised. In this context the metaphor of an asymptote may be useful. An asymptote in mathematics means a straight line that a given graph approaches with an always dimishing gap, but which it will never reach completely. The utopian society to be presented is feasible in an asymptotic sense.
Another important concept for this paper is the self-fulfilling prophecy: Political processes, as opposed to natural or “physical” processes, are subject to this mechanism. If some new view or proposal for big change is disseminated only by some individuals or fringe groups, and only mentioned occasionally in the media, it may easily be disparaged as “crackpot”. But attitudes and ideas that are repeatedly disseminated and talked about, will after a while seem feasible and “realistic” even if they were initially met with skepticism – what was controversial becomes conventional wisdom by repetition. An example of the latter is how public opinion of of what constitutes a “realistically” achievable level of employment has (been) changed since the early seventies, and how this change in opinion has made possible political reforms to the unemployeds’ disadvantage. But the mechanism of the self-fulfilling prophecy should also give grounds for optimism, since it can work the opposite way: It indicates that unconventional or “grand” ideas should not necessarily be considered crackpot because they are initially derided.
In the above spirit, with the (somewhat pretentious) notion of contributing to self-fulfilling prophecy processes, this paper will present both a utopia and a dystopia. The first one should be strived for, the second one avoided (the author brashly assumes that most readers will agree on the attractive, respective repulsive, characters of the two scenarios to be presented).
Both future visions have something in common: They presuppose that science and technology progress in a relentless manner, and is not something that may or will be hindered or retarded significantly by human interference. (Thus the possibility of a grand collapse of modern civilisation into barbarism for some reason is not considered.)
With the assumption of progress in science and technology (I should note the term “progress” is used in a strictly descriptive way – not implying any positive value per se), it follows that employment in all types of work that can be automated, will contract: in the dystopia, to increase profits without a second thought to those that lose their jobs, in the utopia as a deliberate tool to liberate labour for meaningful “service” jobs – creating, interacting, teaching, entertaining or caring for other people.
Friday 23 October 2009
Two feasible Future Scenarios: A high-tech Utopia – and a high-tech Dystopia ☀
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