Abstract
Utopia is the committed desire to attain seemingly impossible goals.
It is generally regarded, by the technocratic, matter-of-fact society, as a domain for idealistic musing and for questionable exercises in intellectual speculation. Nevertheless it is a fact that all the great enterprises, achievements and conquests of mankind were deemed to be impossible when they were first envisioned or conceived. Though it may be curt to conclude that progress is an undeniable outcome of utopia, it is also very difficult to state that it is not so.
Quoting some of the most well known 'utopian' accomplishments in history the paper proposes a 'structure' of the utopian project: i.e. the features that commonly characterize them. Some consideration is then given to the apparent lack of utopian vision in our present time and reference is made to the provocative thought of Karl Mannheim in his Ideology and Utopia (1929).
The closing assessment is that modern utopian thinking is pervasive and diffuse according to patterns which are not easy to detect. The paper finally infers that information, the mindless and most powerful master of this age, not by intelligence, but by mere accidental probability, may interact with some of the features of utopia to set the course for the ultimate project: the reversal of the slow environmental catastrophe of the planet. A final comment is proposed as to how and why Australia, its culture, its ways of thinking and doing may play a significant role in this planetary drama. Advance Australia fair.
Utopia
Utopia is the committed desire to attain seemingly impossible goals.
It is generally regarded, by the technocratic, matter-of-fact society, as a domain for idealistic musing and for questionable exercises in intellectual speculation. Nevertheless it is a fact that all the great enterprises, achievements and conquests of mankind were deemed to be impossible when they were first envisioned or conceived. Though it may be curt to conclude that progress is an undeniable outcome of utopia, it is also very difficult to state that it is not so.
The slow catastrophe
It is reasonable to assume that the human settlement on this planet will face dire problems in the coming 30 years. Environmental balance appears to be very close to breaking point, the limits of its physical capacity are challenged, if not already extensively breached. Further infringement could result in vast, irreversible catastrophe . In fact, according to some researchers, we already are in the midst of a slow, catastrophic phase. No natural course of action to check the fast artificial growth seems to be at hand. It has been suggested that only technology can solve this problem: clearly not the same technology that got us here, nor used in the same way.
The quality, time span, and scale of the technological action required are such that any doubt about its real feasibility is legitimate. Furthermore, the conceptual, ideal and political power needed to implement any consistent project seems to be beyond the scope of either any modern democracy or any totalitarian government. Since the changes now perceived and measured in the planetary systems (atmosphere, oceans, biosphere) are minimal, due to the time scale of the phenomena, many challenge this assumption of an impending catastrophe and more than a few in the scientific community consider catastrophism with some disdain, not to say with open contempt. Global warming may be regarded as a phenomenon well within the limits of statistically normal cycles; climate change may be a re-current phase of the geo-physical system. These positions may be difficult to deny, but some of the circumstances contingent with these changes are indeed disturbing. The scorn poured on catastrophism, today, is more fashionable than serious, but I do not want to fall prey to that spell anyway.
This is why my way of looking at the planetary catastrophe is cool-headed and serene. In fact there is time for a few more generations on the planet and one can live happily through slow catastrophic events, make love, make money, win lotto, go fishing and sailing. I also share some skepticism towards the moralistic suggestion that we have to change our life-style to prevent a 0.5 'C temperature increase of the planet in the year 2020 ! So, why bother? Serenity notwithstanding, there are nevertheless reasons to worry, not about the catastrophe, not about the unsustainability of present trends nor about the ungovernable changes, but about their implications and subliminal effects on present social and ethical behavioural patterns. These reasons are both of higher, and more pressing priority. They deal with the right of future generations to the same freedom that we enjoy today. Jeopardizing that right is deeply unjust and it is in the nature of human kind to react in a negative way to injustice. This is, in my perception, the real motivation of many conflicts between generations.
I think that this generation would be happier if we felt that all possible respect was given to ensure the freedom of future generations. And I am talking of present, everyday, personal and social happiness with all its related consequences. There is no happiness when you know, or even suspect, that your children will be slaves, and you are doing nothing to avoid it. To put it bluntly: environmental commitment and consistent action is a condition for our own present well-being and happiness, one which is worth paying for. Maybe a mere tribute to virtue.
When something is worth paying for, the market will find ways to respond and react accordingly. Then, environmental concern and commitment will not be a matter for utopian musing any more: it will be good business and consistent investment will be mandatory. Any discussion and speculative iffing will be absolutely irrelevant. If the 'reasonable assumption' of the slow catastrophic or unsustainable trend is accepted, on one or more counts , the rest will follow: when survival of a species is felt to be in danger current patterns of conduct are subverted. This could very well mean that we are now living conditions that could lead to an exceptional planetary event.
Dennis Meadows (author of Limits to Growth, 1964) describes this event as a great environmental revolution carried out and supported by each individual under the dire pressure for survival. If such an event should ever take place, the vision that sets it off will certainly rank as a great, utopian endeavour: the era of consistent technology will begin, the future will be returned to the domain of design, planning and intelligence, the present generation will again have a clear goal and human kind will resume its ... pursuit of happiness. For this reason I deem it to be of great importance to study how such enterprises are conceived, are born, grow, fail or, sometimes, succeed, in the startling domain of Utopia.
If sustainability is not governable we shall be blown into the catastrophe dreaming about a beautiful world and fighting to make the dream come true. Can anyone suggest a better way?
The banal feature of exceptional achievements
It is not true that a great idea demands at its origin an unusually brilliant brain or a great, legendary character.
Great ideas stem from straightforward simplicity, banality. Great ideas are often the surprising outcome of bare simplification. The paradox of simplicity. Nothing simpler than connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic Ocean by cutting through the narrow strip of Panama: you only need to look at a World map to see that. The same applies to Alpine tunnels and to the more recent Chunnel (idiom for the Tunnel under the Channel). The Eiffel Tower is the simple, even if extreme, application of metal strut carpentry. Another source of exceptional enterprises is the search for things which are beyond evidence (to borrow an Italian word ulteriorita'). To go beyond a given limit is the simple consequence of going forward: the motivation behind any exploration. Once you have reached a certain limit nothing is more simple than to go beyond it. Once a principle is acquired, nothing is more natural than testing it to its furthermost consequences. Once you reach a geographic boundary it is natural to go beyond it. This seems to be within the very nature of man: hence the pressure and anxiety to go always beyond our limits in sports as well in any other achievement, the need to compete with ourselves and with others, to challenge nature and the elements, to seek the most and to reach the top. Be it good or evil. Once the idea is conceived, it has to be communicated, understood and supported by the decision makers, political or financial sponsors, and by the people. This is not so simple.
Utopian proposals can be easy to explain and to understand if their advantages are clear and in the immediate term, but that is not their usual feature. The rewards may come after decades or centuries, they may privilege other peoples and nations, other generations, other countries. Sometimes the reward may come in the form of knowledge. Space exploration programs in the seventies had no other scope than the completion of the projects: no emblems, buildings, or signs were to remain other than a few footprints on the dust of the Moon's surface. The return in knowledge of this achievement is still unaccounted for: knowledge is qualitative , a difficult item to evaluate and to put into bookkeeping records. The monument was the process itself and the things learned by going through this process. The great explorers of the eighteenth century were also seeking knowledge, even though their sponsors wanted gold, new land and slaves. The reconstruction of the DNA structure is at present a great scientific challenge: knowledge to some, but a powerful control tool to others.
So here we are with the great banal idea of the year 2000: the Planet is a mess, let's clean it up.
It may be useful to underline that the utopian project ends when it is accepted: revolutionary utopia ends, when the guillotine starts slashing necks; the information age is no longer a utopian vision once MCI, Sprint, ITT, IBM, Microsoft are investing billions in cable networks, electronic circuitry, EDP hardware and software. Utopia flies in everybody else's darkness.
The structure of utopia
If we study the great utopian accomplishments of the past we may be able to detect their common features, in an attempt to define a possible structure of the utopian project. These features, as I see them, are:
- need and survival
- vision of the future
- imagination
- myth of eternity
- religion
- demonstration of power
- scientific strategy
- profit
- intellectual amusement
- craziness
Need and survival
Need is a highly convincing motivational force. Since the beginning of time it has been the prime mover in any human enterprise and in the construction of great civil engineering works as well: roads, bridges, tunnels, canals, aqueducts, dams. Need can have roots in the social, economic, political and physical environment, or it may stem from constraints for biological survival. The evaluation of priorities is subject to specific individual awareness and conflicting differences are often hard to negotiate. The connection, by a bridge, of the two capes that enclose the Bay of San Francisco was a necessity for those who, in the year 1920, had in mind the development of the city and the economic fall-out created by connecting San Francisco, Marin County, Sausalito, the Sacramento Valley and Northern California. A town planning strategy limited to the Bay Area however, would have viewed the construction of the Bridge as a useless waste of money. Necessity may be but a vague issue for the public, when the vision of a certain civil work is already sharp and clear to the few: the consequences and the returns usually cannot be precisely stated with available data. Information to the public must be based on assumptions. For every good reason to do something at the planning stage, it is equally easy to find ten comparatively good reasons not to do it.
The disturbing fact about decisions is that they usually have to be made on 52 to 48 wagers: stakes of 20 to 80 do not require an expert nor a responsible decision maker.
The vision of the future
Human beings have always been fascinated by the future: the tools and the ability to predict events yet to come and the consequences of present actions have always been sought and dearly paid for. Humans want to know the future because they crave for certainty: insurance companies make money selling certainty in this world, religions draw their power by granting certainty in the next. It is also true that the present is better controlled if you have some vision of the future. Since ancient oracles and fortune-tellers the art has made some progress with models and scenarios based on probabilities and their mathematical processing. Not much progress if we consider the continuous, stunning surprises that we are confronted with on a daily basis. The future is a deceiving genius: it is always and repeatedly the most logical and banal development of the present situation, but the logic appears clearly only after the events have actually taken place. It is probably true that even if we were given a precise sequence of future events by some divine entity or by an incredibly powerful computer, our perception of the future would not be any better than the perception we have now. In fact the perception we have of the future is dominated by the present and by personal contingencies, it is related to culture, to social conduct and individual behavioural patterns. Thus our behaviour will always be guided by the vision of the future that we can comprehend and by the reaction to it that our brain is capable of. Our reaction capability is our effective ability to make consistent decisions and to act in order to control events and guide them within the scope of our vision. Models and scenarios help our assessment of the vision, but they are not sufficient. Our ability to plan and make decisions is limited to the future that we are able to perceive, thus the reaction to events placed in a future beyond that range of perception is fuzzy. In some instances the reactive capability of our brain is limited by our direct participation in an event and we remove from our mind events that imply our destruction. What is true for individual behavioural patterns seems to be also true for collective patterns of conduct: hence the difficulty in setting up a responsible course of action to check the ongoing environmental catastrophe or to control the demographic time-bomb. The system protects itself, with suicidal consequences, by completely dismissing the issue. Qualitative and temporal categories define our system of priorities, the weight of these two parameters being governed by complex, social and psychological interactions, with time generally dominating. Information may also change behavioural patterns: our vision of the future and social cultural awareness are influenced by information in a whimsical manner. Hence the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in our perception. Vision of the future and ways of reacting to perceived future events may be very different for individuals and for groups and they may also vary with time, yielding different values, misunderstandings, conflicts and confrontations. The problem is to promote both the vision of the future and the conditions for a cultural awareness of it.
A vision of the future without consistent social awareness is like a painting in a place where there are no eyes to see it.
Fiction
Fiction is different from a vision of the future: vision is an inductive process based on perception, on cultural contingencies, personal will, background and information; fiction is an intuitive poetic description of non existing things and events. Fiction may be informed by knowledge: the more consistent with objective elements the closer it is to reality, the less consistent, the closer it is to legend or fable. Of specific interest is the association of science and fiction which often has in fact described situations that, later, were to come true. (See. Jules Verne, Asimow, etc.). The ability to describe fictitious but plausible futures is a feature of design.
Religion and the myth of eternity
The myth of eternity has always promoted great enterprises: the Pyramids were the tool by which the Pharaohs were to achieve eternal life, gothic cathedrals were the seal of the eternal faith of their builders, the Crusades to free Jerusalem from the Infidel set the foundation for a new European geography. Pitting finite resources against infinity, mankind set forth to meet the greatest of all challenges. The construction of exceptional 'magna opera' yields the knowledge and the tools that promote progress in everyday life: as Hegel says, the course is always more rewarding than the deed.
Ä Scientific strategy
By scientific strategy I mean the authoritative positioning of a utopian target with the general scope of setting out all the means for its achievement. A good example is the Apollo Project that led to the Moon landing some 26 years ago. This was the result of several billion dollars invested, the coordination of hundreds of research centres and institutions, thousands of researchers, the commitment of hundreds of industrial enterprises. The list of technological fall-outs is impressive: industrial processes and methods, organization patterns, computer software, new materials, breakthroughs in electronic hardware, textiles, pharmaceuticals, new molecules. The fall-out from the Apollo space program is still active today. The closing of the program resulted in the forced migration of thousands of engineers and experts from NASA to the most diverse manufacturing activities where they brought, in a matter of a few months, their knowledge and their hi-tech skill base. Never before had such a huge technology transfer been implemented in such a short time. All of this was set in motion by the utopian vision of president Kennedy, and by the political goal to show the world the power of the United States, and by the urge to counter the success of the USSR Sputnik. A set of conditions, not all of them positive, that yielded clearly positive results in the end.
Ä Profit
Economic speculation and the desire to accumulate large amounts of money can stir the utopian project. Only wild speculative projects usually fit the utopian scope. Investments based on carefully checked conditions, short term, safe and secure returns, minimum risk, if any at all, do not fit. The unforeseen success of wild, far out, eventually wrong, projects is much more interesting. Sometimes the unforeseen failure of very sound projects is a fascinating utopian challenge.
Ä Intellectual amusement
This is always part of the categories that we have analyzed above, but can also stand alone as a prime mover when associated to consistent economic and political power. Consistent utopian content can be found in the deeds of men such as Pericles of Athens, Alexander the Great,Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Napoleon, Rockefeller, Howard Hughes, today Bill Gates. People who have been placed in an exceptional position by the events of life and have to live up to the dimension of their image.
Ä Craziness
Craziness (more or less understood according to Erasmus famous eulogy) is often one of the prime movers of utopian projects. Technological utopians cannot be 'normal' people: in fact the great majority of them can be classified as 'paranoid subjects'. Clear, brilliant craziness, properly distilled and managed, excites imagination, and yields a strong and convincing communication energy. Two other features absolutely necessary for the completion of utopian projects are related to craziness: tenacity and perseverance. Craziness allows one to distance himself from conformity and everyday contingencies, and buffers the mind from the insults and offences of the 'normal' public: a vital rigging to sail the rough waters of the utopian project.
An important question
Reviewing ancient and recent utopian projects raises an important question: what is happening now? Karl Mannheim's conclusion may well be worth recalling here:
... The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. We would be faced then with the greatest paradox imaginable, namely, that man, who has achieved the highest degree of rational mastery of existence, left without any ideals, becomes a mere creature of impulses. Thus, after a long tortuous, but heroic development, just at the highest state of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate, and is becoming more and more man's own creation, with the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it.
Karl Mannheim (Ideology and Utopia)
Everyday events, as reported by the media, supply little or no suggestion of present utopian challenges. Individuals, social groups, the great multinational consortia seem to be muddling through the daily contingencies with no vision of the future, no tension of desire nor common goal to seek. Petty rivalries and greedy competition kill any project, the fight of a thousand small identities smothers any bright flame. Any common effort for progress is frustrated by the ambiguity of the very concept of progress that hardly ever draws any consensus. Any strategy or project not devoted to short term benefit is viewed as absurd and obscure. Narrow-minded and limited vision prevails over long-term, idealistic goals. The thrust of high-flying utopian proposals is dampened in all fields of endeavour: commercial rapacity, the triumph of conformity, or retreat to the private domain, seem to prevail. The few exceptions shine out in this general darkness. Utopian thinking (and action) has also suffered, more than anything else, from the ideological overdose of 'complexity' that has tormented the last thirty or more years. Any simple and obvious proposal has been immediately silenced with the snobbish qualifiers of 'illuministic' 'late positivistic', 'simplistic platitude' by the overwhelming fans of the 'ratio negativa' and by the Marxist remainders of the history as science paradigm. Long, contrived presentations have had to be pasted up in order to put forward the most simple item. Fear to be branded with the deadly seal of being simplistic discouraged common sense and the more straightforward approach has been humiliated.
Once branded as illuministic and simple nothing short of tanks have been able survive. Whereas utopia is generated by simplicity: by the simplicity which is both beyond and underlies complexity.
A different perspective
A different perspective can be sketched, on the same depressing background, when one tries a wider interpretation, not tainted by short term pressure. The features of the utopian project that we have briefly considered: need, survival, vision, fiction, imagination, eternity, religion, power, scientific strategy, profit, amusement, attraction to risk, craziness and ambition, may be referred to an individual subject, but they may also be features of a collective subject, a scientific, religious or cultural community or group. A family, a nation or a generation may be the referring party as well. The utopian project does not require unity of space and time: it may connect subjects who are historically, geographically and politically afar. The social or collective utopian project may be conceived as a shared way of thinking, pervasive of the social and cultural structures were its basic features are stimulated by another element: a growing rejection of present conditions or state of affairs. This rejection, and the pressure of present contingencies conceal the perception of history from our daily experience: when we read books of recent history we often wonder if we have actually been living through it. Social, pervasive utopia comes out at times when the world is experiencing critical situations. It appears in different cultural and political contexts, and the medley of its signs makes it difficult to acknowledge them and to relate them to any specific issue. All interpretations are possible. The despairing position of Karl Mannheim can be shared, but another, totally different vision may be purported: utopia is alive and will always be directing the thrust of history, it is pervasive and present in everyday life, at times breaking out in contradictory and often conflicting modes.
Compared to hundreds of years ago social utopia is challenged today by a new element: intensive and diffused information, by which current opinion is shaped or deformed. A positive outcome of this interaction may be the sudden flash of the pervasive social utopian signal that may reach the critical intensity needed to move the dwellers of the Planet towards a new set of organic scopes: adequacy, sustainability, environmental consistency.
This could happen not as a consequence of intelligence, a feature that the chaotic paradigm of information hardly deserves, but by the association of the dominant information signals with the contingent reactive capability of the general public. Such an effective alliance could induce new patterns of conduct in the mass of consumers which would stir a consistent demand mode. The market may eventually respond, radically changing present attitudes and inducing related environmental trends.
Current, tragic conflicts throughout the world have a common feature: they are the outcome of identity struggles - a paradigm that can be clearly perceived, atrocity notwithstanding. After specific identities have been restored, the utopian system of values could resume its course for the solution of the great impending problems of survival: the first of these being the problem of the environment. For some areas in the world it may be too late, but for other areas there could still be a fair chance of success.
The above is a brief outline of a possible deployment of the 'great environmental utopian revolution'.
To study, research, inquire and design the future is mandatory : to pull out from Mannheim's involution; to justify our existence; to positively compare our projects with other people's projects, i.e. to engage in living. This assumption will open the field to a set of technological researches and design projects, that in the present cultural and political conditions cannot even be mentioned.
When the social perception of the problems that have to be faced and solved will be assisted by the willingness to conceive tools of consistent magnitude and deploy them for the necessary length of time, the alternative social and economic lifestyles which are today ridiculed as absurd and unacceptable, the proposals that generate the distrust and skepticism of technocratic conformists, such as the solar city, the urban forest, the cleanup of the oceans, the restoration of the planetary environment, will become an urgent necessity, an indisputable demand of public opinion, and the market economy will have to comply.
Some of these proposals today lack detailed and mature engineering tools (although not entirely) because the dominating culture has cast them off in the last three decades, segregating the whole lot to a 'utopian space' often sarcastically labelled as absurd.
Very often technical or bookkeeping considerations which have the overwhelming power of conformity are called upon to oppose utopian proposals. On the other hand it is also true that a considerable number of silly vagaries are often smuggled through as alternative possibilities. A full perception and understanding of technological utopia requires attention and enlightened pragmatism: the efficacy of the straightforward approach. The environmental utopian project goes from the everyday menial action to the multi-generational planetary program: a pervasive, diffused continuum that makes appreciation and understanding even more difficult.
Utopia, the desire to attain impossible goals, such as the recovery of the planet, must become a standard mode of current behaviour to counter conformity and the slimy acceptance of current models. Every action can host a small fragment of this great utopia and each instance has to be carefully deployed.
Australia
Australia is facing a slow environmental showdown like many other countries in the World. The environmental problem is peculiar to time and place, so there are differences which relate to the Australian geo-physical situation and to the Australian cultural situation as well. A few words on the physical peculiarity of Australia: a very old island continent, Australia is ahead of the rest of the World as far as entropy development is concerned - which means that the physical structure is more simple and thus more fragile. Environmental fragility can be regarded as an advantage, and as a dangerous asset at the same time. It is an advantage because a fragile environmental system is more responsive to corrective input, it is dangerous because it may be easily overrun by inadvertent, wrong or accidental input. New biological (animal or vegetal) inputs may rapidly and easily integrate the environmental system making it more resilient by filling ecological gaps, or controlling unwanted trends, but if not carefully checked in advance and monitored, just as easily, they may set forth the conditions for fast and irreversible disasters (remember the rabbits!). The most important difference, though, is brought by the present Australian cultural situation: what follows is the feeling of an outsider who has just come to this country after some experience in Europe, the US and Asia. It may surprise you in a positive or negative way, it may be felt as too sharply influenced by a first, enthusiastic impression. This is the inherent limit of looking at situations from an outsider's standpoint: you do not perceive local disturbances and noises, you may forfeit some of the hindsight, but you get the whole picture.
My perception of Australia is that of a very civilized society, well- informed and quite sensitive to external signals. A place where democracy, the less efficient, most unnerving, but the only acceptable system of government, is working at one of the best standards, or less disappointing if you prefer, now experienced the World over. The basic values of what we call the western culture : freedom, equal opportunities, social fairness, respect of individuals and of institutions are alive and naturally practiced in Australia more than elsewhere. Australia has not enjoyed, but neither has suffered, the 'complexity overdose' of the seventies.
The 'straightforward approach' is effective, the memory of the dire settlement phase is still a structure of social behaviour and part of the educational pattern of your schools. You can still have dreams in Australia, and, which is even more important, they can still come true. And this is my sincere wish to you, to us. Advance Australia fair!
Lorenzo Matteoli
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