2099: A Eutopia: Prospects for Tomorrow
2099: A Eutopia: Prospects for Tomorrow
Yorick BlumenfeldYorick Blumenfeld is very widely travelled having been a foreign correspondent in over 90 countries. The last two decades he has been writing about the future.
Keywords: Politics, Philosophy
2099: A Eutopia: Prospects for Tomorrow is published by Thames and Hudson, London. ISBN No. 0-500-28157-2 (softback); £6.65; 110 pp; 1999.
The challenge of utopia it seems to me is a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all. Utopia is much more than a dream: it is a valuable resource for the planning of a better future. I have always believed that the best way to convey our dreams and aspirations is through fiction and drama, not through academic studies or scholarly analyses. In portraying a Euro-commune a 100 years hence, I certainly have had to combat the prevailing ethos of our time: utopia is currently dismissed as irrelevancy.
To be sure, the meaning of utopia has shifted rapidly over the past century. Today it refers not only to a literary genre, but also to a philosophical perspective, a political viewpoint, and even to a way of thinking. "Utopian"is all too often dismissed as that which can never be reached or achieved:impractical, crackpot schemes for societal generation. Anything that is absolute, unworkable and smacks of perfectionism is branded as "utopian". I find this most disheartening. The sociologist Anthony Giddens suggests utopianism has a place in current political usage in a phrase of his own coinage: "utopian realism", that is, the pursuit of realistic solutions through utopian bifocals. The pedestrian zone in city centres comes to mind as an example of such "realistic utopianism"!
Utopian ideas and ideals are always experimental and since the days of Plato were regarded by their creators to be inspirational rather than pragmatic. So how did this perception shift in the twentieth century? It would seem that sometime in the 1920s and early 1930s, thanks in good measure to Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, utopia stopped being a word to which people reacted positively. Stalin's vision of world communism and Hitler's Thousand Year Reich were seen as utopian by their creators and as hell by the rest of us. The result of such disillusionment was a series of dystopian works, ranging from Brave New Worldto 1984. By the 1970s it had become impossible for me to find a publisher for my novel, Philia: A Utopian Way of Love. Dystopia had become the flavour of the times; utopia in a title became an instant editorial kiss of death, much as "millennium" is today.
I love utopias, which I define as deliberate and systematically constructed models of the ideal society. Such an imaginary construct offers mankind an alternative and vastly superior organisation to any existing on earth today in which harmony reigns for the community and happiness is realised by most inhabitants. Utopias are particularly challenging because they try to provide key answers to a panoply of questions regarding education, community, family,sexuality, justice, work, health, money, equality, property, ethics and so forth. Everything is up for grabs. No value is safe against its systematic re-evaluation of all values.
In view of the pressing need for alternative social models, the intellectual campaign by academics, writers, journalists and philosophers against the utopian ideal is remarkable. At every possible opportunity they seek to reaffirm the status quo: there can be no viable alternative to the "free-market democratic capitalist" ethos. Cynical writers like Bernard Levin in A World Elsewhere (1994) treat utopians like tricksters with a compulsion towards perfection who want to take an all too gullible electorate on a ride that will take them to hell at the end of a false rainbow.
I have also been fighting against more serious contemporary thinkers like Karl Popper, Roger Scruton and Isaiah Berlin. These have all held that the more fully men could realise any utopia, the greater the misery and the evil which would be unleashed on earth. This seems like the most dreadfully pessimistic condemnation of humanity! For Karl Popper, utopias required that some people(always a minority) impose their belief on others. This would inevitably result in both violence and authoritarianism. Roger Scruton concurs, saying that "The machine which is established for the efficient production of utopia has total license to kill". And the late Isaiah Berlin insisted in The Crooked Timber of Humanity that in utopia "the inner life of man, the moral and spiritual and aesthetic imagination, no longer speaks at all". Berlin's problem was that in denying the positive essence of utopia, he never offered any alternative. He would deny people their dreams because they might also have nightmares. "Ignorant", "pathetic" and "escapist", were his favourite adjectives in dismissing all utopians.
Science fiction has offered another set of negative vistas of tomorrow which I have found to be socially irresponsible and therefore unsuitable for a book like 2099. The SF writers of the past 50 years have tended to cut out the ethical, the intellectual, and artistically creative aspects of the usually nasty and aggressive beings they portray. Almost never does SF describe more peaceful, creative or beautiful worlds. The horrors and misery described are on such a scale that the reader is grateful to be alive on this planet now. The extra-terrestrial, supernatural and prophetic settings never hint at positive social changes. Fred Polak, in his superb The Image of the Future, said SF "made us spiritually ripe for a visionless existence bounded by today".
Americans, usually ready to acknowledge that they are struggling to improve the world, dislike being faced with any alternative ideology which might have universalist aspirations to equal their own. They see capitalist democracy as the role model for the entire world now and forever more. And indeed, in one sense, the pure theory of market capitalism is one of the biggest (and most erroneous) of "utopian dreams" ever promulgated.
When I wrote Towards the Millennium: Optimistic Visions for Change(1997) I had been motivated by the belief that every human being should have access to a rewarding life as the basis of a definition of the good society. I focused on how to formulate a set of ideals, on how to develop our most positive aspects so that we could live in solidarity. I believed we could experience greater social consciousness, love and creative responsibility. In this ambitious, all-encompassing work, I recognised that my readership might feel threatened: would the changes we faced deprive us of much of what we have inherited?
In writing 2099 I set about planning a future which engages and appreciates our human potentials to a far greater degree. All my life I have tried to fill in the details of the eutopian dream. The challenge has always been to create a workable, believable model of a better society, not a perfect one. I was much influenced by the description of Rosabeth Moss Kanter in Commitment and Community (1972):
In the imagined utopia, people work and live together closely and co-operatively, in a social order that is … held together by commitment rather than coercion, for in utopia what people want to do is the same as what they have to do; the interests of the individuals are congruent with the interests of the group; personal growth and freedom entail responsibility for others.
Unlike the earlier proponents of the "perfect" or entirely planned society, I did not assume that human nature could be moulded once and for all time to meet every social, political and economic need. That is why I introduced the highly complex phenomenon of an independently conscious Artificial Intelligence. My characters, unlike those workers of Huxley's Brave New World,are not "so conditioned that they practically can't help as they ought to behave". My heroine has free will, but she also has the ability to immediately consult her AI console for considered and psychologically attuned advice.
Free will in this community is limited to some extent by the law, by chemistry, by AI, and even by genetic engineering. Some readers have found this unpalatable. My reply is that the very struggle for survival in prehistoric times, which included warding off attacks by other species, built a kind of aggression into the chemistry of the human male which is often incompatible with civilised existence. I regard the testosterone rushing through the blood of a 17 year old as an example of infringement on his "free will". He is driven by glandular programming beyond his control. And yet such a phenomenon is acceptable to libertarians where any implant restricting such a natural phenomenon is not. In the eutopia I have described, there are no more prisons. On the other hand, the mentally disturbed (such as those who commit crimes of violence) are "treated" in hospitals, while libertarians seldom object to the currently restrictive practice of incarceration.
Unlike most utopias, both my setting for 2099 and its inhabitants are evolving. There are continuing struggles, challenges and disputes which bring out some of the best in the characters I have created. The heroine, Ivia, is engrossed in her work in the theatre. She accepts criticism and improvement in her community – for hers is not a static world. I wanted to depict a vibrantly alive society in which the arts play a leading role in daily life.
I also felt that it was important to use contrasting mirrors in order to tackle the materialist, ego-driven, competitive capitalist road on which America is pushing the world. But I did not want the negative perspective of this sub-plot to undermine the positive message of the story. Optimism greatly affects the way we humans feel, think, behave and play. In an era when optimism is often disparaged as a sign of human weakness, as a kind of dopamine of the intellect, I believe it enables us to see our actions in a purposeful light.
The eutopia, the better world, I set in East Anglia makes no pretence at being the Kingdom of Heaven. But the realisation of even such an imperfectly better world demands a radical discontinuity with the present. In my short volume the trigger was the breakdown of the global economy and the abandonment of the capitalist system everywhere but North America.
My scenario is in part predicated on the anticipation that at some time in the middle of the twenty-first century, computers will be able to take over the day-to-day operation of the economy. With this would come the end of the economic cycles that have plagued the world since the South Sea Bubble. In the new, computer directed economy, long-term productivity and employment will replace short-term profit and the no-return forms of environmental degradation,joblessness, and human suffering that now exist. Computer controls will severely restrict growth and size. The twentieth century recognised no limits in terms of wastefulness, speed, size, or destructive power as symbolised by our Aswan Dams,gas guzzlers and hydrogen bombs.
Emphasis is placed on economics, money and "property" in 2099because modern capitalism has failed to produce a better or happier world for our children. Its obsession with growth has devastated what was formerly a beautiful and pristine planet. Capitalism has no vision for a better tomorrow– only of "more" of the same. It has created a form of human bondage to money in which the spiritual and social links between people are severed, the society is atomised, and the individual is left alone in an alien and largely uncaring environment. How different life is in 2099!
In writing this book I was also motivated by my desire to offer the younger generation a comprehensive alternative. Alas, "post modernist"intellectuals are brilliant at analysing fragmented micro-units, like architectural utopias, sexual utopias, or environmental utopias. But they seem incapable (or unwilling) of envisioning utopia as a unity or as a whole dream. For example, today's civil servant can understand the limited utopia of health care: it is a realisable goal of giving people the best conceivable end-product. But the prevailing ethos denies the possibility of any utopia with a broader scope.
Yes, my book has recast how a civilisation can view itself. It has little to do with merely extrapolating present tendencies (which is the essence of present futurist studies.) The characters in 2099 blend work with play, joy with responsibility, sexuality with creativity in fulfilling not only their own potential but also in furthering a sense of human mission and meaning which are so fundamental to our continued existence on this planet.
