Utopianism Come of Age:
From Post-Modernism to Neo-Modernism
By Tsvi Bisk
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SUMMARY: Utopianism arose at
the same time as Modernism, suffering
the same critical attacks through the ages. Now, as we move from
Post-Modernism to Neo-Modernism, we need a new, practical Neo-Utopianism
for the future.
Part I
Modern Utopianism and the development of utopian thought were coeval with the advent
of "Modernism" and the "Idea of Progress" itself. Thomas More's
Utopia
(literally in Greek "no where" was a reaction to
the discovery of America and the very possibility of creating new societies--religious or
secular. This has been a project which has characterized American culture since its
inception and which is reflected in that vague concept called the "American
Dream." Frances Bacon's New Atlantis was a response to the possibilities of
the development of rational, organized, intentional scientific method of which Bacon was a
pioneer. Bacon was one of the first to realize that this development gave human beings the
power to alter their physical environment for their own benefit. Indeed, unlike the
"knowledge for its own sake" approach, which had characterized Greek inquiry, he
was a radical advocate for investigating nature solely to gain knowledge and techniques
that would benefit humankind. His technocratic utopianism has affected literature and
politics ever since. Much of Science Fiction as well as Fabian Socialism, and the literary
optimism this movement spawned in the persons of Wells and Shaw are genetic descendents of
Bacon's basic sense of life and the possibilities of human life in a technological age.
The physical sciences of the "Scientific
Revolution" gave birth to the "Enlightenment" and what came to be called
the "Science of Man" (which later, in a typical act of academic desiccation
evolved into the Social Sciences). Enlightenment thinkers, such as Locke and Adam Smith in
England and Voltaire and the rest of the Encyclopediests in France, perceived that just as
reason and scientific method could be applied to nature "to wrest her secrets from
her" they could also be applied to human society to make it better and more just.
This was when the "Idea of Progress" and the
belief in the possibility of progress, as a consequence of the directed and focused
actions of rational human beings, became the gestalt of western thinkers. The assumption
that material progress and the rational organization of society would make better human
beings, that there is a complete identity between material progress and moral progress
became that ideology which we now call "Modernism." The realization that
material progress does not automatically lead to moral progress, that rational and just
social institutions do not resolve the problem of human evil has given birth to that
anti-ideology which we call "Post-Modernism."
This belief in human progress was the gestalt of the
founding fathers of the United States, the first polity in history to be rationally
conceived and designed for the sole benefit of its human constituents: "We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that…men…are endowed…with certain unalienable
Rights, that…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." In
other words there is no purpose to organized (governed) society other than to benefit the
human beings that compose it. We have become so used to these words that we have forgotten
how truly revolutionary they were at the time and how the United States exploded onto the
stage of history forever changing the course of human events. The United States is the
quintessential Enlightenment project and might be called practical, applied Utopianism.
For Americans (until recently) the "American Dream" was never a dream, it was
their reality. Karl Marx's "Scientific" Socialism reflected the same
Enlightenment gestalt and optimism about the possibilities of creating
rational and
just societies.
Modernity and "Modernism" are not synonyms.
Modernity refers to the advent of our technical civilization dedicated to the comfort and
convenience of human beings. Modernism is an "ism," an ideology that reflects
the Enlightenment belief that moral and ethical progress would follow scientific and
technical progress and the rational organization of society around scientific principles
(thus the Social Sciences). "Progress" for the advocates of
"Modernism" was an all-encompassing Unicom predicated on the assumption that
all
technical progress is beneficial for human society. "Modernism" and
Americanism are almost the same thing. What could be more American than the saying
"you can't stop progress." Not only couldn't you stop it, why would you want to?
But right at the beginning this concept of progress
ran into trouble. Nay Sayers such as Blake and Rousseau (whom we might classify, in
hindsight, as proto-Post-Modernists) excoriated the spiritual impoverishment of a humanity
governed by technical reason alone. Ernest Becker, in The Structure of Evil,
brilliantly describes the ideological debate that raged in the Enlightenment. Thinkers as
diverse as Hume, Diderot and St. Pierre (anticipating the future obscenity of a
de-humanized "Scientism") protested against "a science divorced from human
affairs" and "a science which would take the universe and not man as the
center" (pg.10) which they felt would follow the organization of society according to
a scientific approach that celebrated "valuelessness" as the way to avoid value
laden prejudice (literally pre-judgment) and to achieve "objectivity."
But as science and industry (the very heart of the
modernist belief) progressed they themselves laid the groundwork for the eventual
"Post Modernist" critique of "Modernism" which harkened back to the
healthy instincts of these early Enlightenment skeptics.
Science did become "Scientism," not a tool of
human inquiry into areas suitable to scientific methods but an almost totalitarian belief
system, which denigrated and even negated concepts not amenable to quantitative,
measurable, scientific methodology. Rather than saying we have discovered magnificent
methods for inquiring into phenomena amenable to quantitative measurement, intellectuals
who had become advocates of "Scientism" said that phenomena not amenable to
quantitative measurement were not worthy of being addressed or, later on, did not even
exist.
"Scientism" achieved its grotesque extreme in the
philosophy of Behavioral Psychology of Watson and Skinner. They denied the very existence
of volitional human consciousness because it could not be seen, smelt or measured. Mind
for them was a meaningless word because it could not be scientifically described. Behavior
on the other hand could be observed, described and statistically measured. Science, the
first humanity (science being the basis of Enlightenment Humanism) was now transformed
into "Scientism," which denied the very humanity of humanity (that is if we
accept that what separates the human from the animal is the volitional reasoning mind).
This became grist for the mill of post-modernists who denied that reason was an universal
objective human characteristic but was rather an ideological construct of western culture;
who denied that reason had any intrinsic objective value and who affirmed that
non-rational, irrational and even anti-rational ways of relating to reality should be
treated with equal respect. Post-modernism retreated back into pre-modernism and put the
metaphysical on the same plane as the physical. Multi-culturalism was born; medicine men
became equal to medical men. Pretensions to hierarchy of values became politically
incorrect if they were coeval with cultural origin. Objective rational discourse based
upon a universally accepted language of meaning became almost impossible in the Social
Sciences and the Humanities. New Age affirmations went unchallenged because there was no
way one could challenge them other than by applying one's critical reasoning mind--an
effort pre-empted by the prejudices of Post-Modernism. If one attempted to apply critical
reason one became open to accusations of cultural jingoism. Anything went. Analytical and
critical questioning became a sign of poor taste and cultural intolerance. The human mind
was turned into an uncritical dysfunctional "filter" which enabled all kinds of
meaningless mush to enter. This was ideal for advertisers and politicians but disastrous
for our civilization. Reason created science, science created Scientism, Scientism created
anti-reason.
Science had to destroy teleology--the philosophy of
purposefulness. In order to do its business, science had to assume that existence has no
purpose. Existence just "Is." The proper question for a scientist to ask is not
why
(a value laden question) but how (a valueless question). There can be no scientific
answer to the question why but there can be many scientific answers to the question
how. Richard Feynman in The Character of Physical Law relates that when
Newton was asked about his theory--"But it doesn't mean anything--it doesn't tell us
anything," Newton responded: "it tells you how it moves. That should be
enough. I have told you how it moves, not why." (pg.37) It was just
this type of cold mechanistic approach that the early Enlightenment skeptics were afraid
of.
When science became "Scientism" and conquered
philosophy and academia (and even art) it became a sign of déclassé philistinism to even
ask the question why (or in the case of modern art, what). This approach
created the existential dilemma of modern times. If existence has no purpose then human
existence has no purpose. Thus was laid the spiritual groundwork for twentieth century
Nihilism. The Social Sciences like a male dog with its nose up the behind of the in heat
female dog of Physical Sciences quickly followed suit, cutting itself off from its
historical roots of a value laden "Science of Man." "Scientism"
desiccated the radical humanism of the Enlightenment. Utopianism could not and cannot
survive in such a barren spiritual environment.
In addition to "Scientism" the course of
straightforward nineteenth century science also contributed to the decline of the heroic
humanism of early "Modernism." The Enlightenment had inherited a God-Like image
of man from the Renaissance and Enlightenment men were usually still believers in God
(although often contemptuous of organized religion) and accepted that men were made
"in the image of God" by God himself. Newton and Locke were devoutly religious
men. Along comes Darwin and demonstrates that man is not created by God but has descended
from the monkey.
Enlightenment thinkers believed that man was a rational
being amenable to self-improvement as a consequence of rational social and political
policy. Along comes Freud and blasts away this naïve psychology and demonstrates the dark
complexity of the human psyche. Both these developments dealt a severe blow to traditional
human self-esteem and hence to the self-confidence which lay at the base of the modernist
ideology.
But it was the historical misuse of industry and technology
that set the stage for twentieth century "Post-Modernism." The naïve belief
that rational technical progress would create a more just and enlightened society and as a
consequence the moral level of humanity would also rise (the foundational assumption of
the "Idea of Progress" and the backbone of Modernism) was soon destroyed by
events. Men did not become better; they became better at killing one another.
The American Civil War was humanity's first industrial war.
Tens of thousands of men were slaughtered in single battles fought with industrial means.
Europe stood appalled and judgmental at this American barbarism, not realizing that the
Civil War was but a prologue for the barbarism of World War I during which hundreds of
thousands of men were slaughtered in single battles. WWI spelt the end of Victorian
optimism and blind belief in the goodness of man and the inevitability of progress. The
problem of evil was reborn and nihilistic, pessimistic existentialism dominated the
European spirit after World War I.
But the coup de grace for naïve optimism in the idea of
progress as a Unicom occurred in World War II. Here the most developed nation in the
history of the planet (industrially, scientifically, philosophically and culturally)
committed the most heinous crime in human annals and could not have committed the crime
if they had not been so developed. If the Civil War represented the first case
of industrial warfare then the Nazi Holocaust represented the first case of industrial
murder. Auschwitz and the other camps were giant factories dedicated to the production of
death. This is the uniqueness of the Holocaust when compared to other mass murders in
history (such as that of the Armenians in World War I or the Tutsis today). The Holocaust
could not have been perpetrated by a pre-technological (i.e. pre-modern) society.
That it was perpetrated by such a developed society is one
of the reasons it is so horrific; not only did it kill millions (nothing unusual in that)
it destroyed our most sacred beliefs about ourselves as modern human beings.
The eventual failure of and consequent intellectual
disappointment with the various Marxist Leninist experiments may be seen as an epilogue to
the "Death of Modernism"--Marxism being the quintessential modernist ideology.
All told, it has been estimated that governments and
societies holding the modernist creed as their foundational societal axiom have killed
over 160 million people in the twentieth century. World War I, World Wwar II, the
Holocaust, The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, Indian Independence and other
"modern" phenomena have piled up bodies in numbers inconceivable to Genghis
Khan, Attila the Hun and Ivan the Terrible.
The dismal record of the twentieth century made Utopianism
unfashionable. It seemed silly and infantile. You were not a serious social scientist if
you engaged in such frivolity. Ice cold, valueless, statistical social science became de
rigueur. Some interesting exceptions like C. Wright Mills and Ernest Becker were around
but always on the margins of "serious" social science. If you wanted to get
ahead in Academia you talked statistics not values. Statistics are useful analytical tools
but they are not fertile soil for nurturing utopian thought or anything approaching a
"Science of Man."
The concrete examples of various twentieth century utopian
pretensions, such as collectivization in the Soviet Union and China, the pathetic
self-indulgent communes of the sixties and seventies dropouts, or bizarre religious
communes such as Jonestown and Branch Davidians have done little to improve the reputation
of utopian speculations and experiments.
The failure of the Kibbutz movement in Israel has been the
final nail in the coffin. This had been the one twentieth century utopian experiment given
sanction by "serious" social science. Indeed, the Kibbutzniks themselves were
fond of joking that more books had been written about the Kibbutz (by anthropologists,
sociologists, psychologists and educators) than there were Kibbutzniks. This is no longer
the case. Out of 270 Kibbutzim only about 20 are still prospering, of the rest half are
hanging on by their fingernails and half are economic and social basket cases. Indeed, the
Kibbutz Movement has only survived the last decade because of a 6 billion-Shekel bailout
by the government. This has caused tremendous resentment amongst Israeli taxpayers and for
the first time in their history the general population has come to view Kibbutzniks as
being part of the problem and not part of the solution. The self-esteem of individual
Kibbutzniks, used to seeing themselves as the archetypal Israelis, plummeted; social
disintegration followed and a reverse Darwinist process took place. Instead of the best
and the brightest coming to the Kibbutz (the historical precedent), the best and brightest
began leaving the Kibbutz.
The 2nd and 3rd generation
Kibbutzniks themselves had already radically changed the internal structure of the
Kibbutz. Those raised in communal children's houses (an experiment celebrated in scores of
social science books as an alternative to the traditional family) had painful memories of
their experience and refused to raise their own children in the same way and simply
brought them home. Recently a spate of anecdotal articles and research has burst the
bubble of the halcyon myth of the "Children's House" revealing physical, sexual
and psychological abuse which today would be prosecuted. One young former Kibbutznik is
even suing his Kibbutz for performing a social experiment on him that he claims has left
him an emotional cripple. The demise of the "Children's House" did not reflect a
diminishing of collective values; it reflected the concern of loving parents not willing
to make their children suffer what they had suffered in the name of a poorly thought out
ideological abstraction.
The demise of the "Children's House" and the
consequent necessity to expand family dwellings resulted in tremendous expense, which was
a major contributor to the financial problems of the Kibbutz. Idealistic and axiomatic
wishful thinking based upon grand sounding slogans (and little else) can produce
anti-ethical social structures which result in irrational economic organization, which
eventually cause economic difficulties, which result in social disintegration and the loss
of individual self esteem for members of the community. This has been the greatest failure
of Utopianism; to understand the connection between economics and ideals: that no matter
how lofty the ideal, if it does not rest upon a bedrock of practical, efficient, rational
economic behavior it is doomed to fail. The history of the Soviet Union and Chinese
collectivization are other much more extreme examples of this truism. If there is to be a
"Neo-Utopianism" it must base itself on this self-evident historical lesson.
Part 2
On the Rehabilitation of Utopian Thought: From Post-Modernism to Neo-Modernism
So why pre-occupy ourselves with Utopianism at all, given this sad record? Because,
quite simply, we require concrete visions of our possible future in order to live as human
beings on this earth. As the early Enlightenment Modernists so rightly understood, what
separates the human from the animal is the rational mind. The rational, volitional mind is
the chief survival tool of the human species. When we use it we prosper, when we fail to
use it we endanger our own survival. War and the human suffering it causes are irrational;
peace and the human fulfillment it makes possible are rational. A polluted environment is
irrational; a clean environment is rational.
Can we even have a rational social science that is not
based on a social philosophy possessed of a coherent vision of the innate possibilities of
the human being? How can we have a rational Social Science (a true "Science of
Man") without social values? Just as the physical sciences must be valueless in order
to be scientific so must the social sciences be value laden in order to be scientific.
Science is a rational, volitional, intentional activity that must say yes or no to data it
gathers. The physical sciences make the decision based upon the quantitative coherence of
the data itself after experiment and translation into mathematical language. If the Social
Sciences are to be relevant to the survival of humanity (i.e. rational) they must base
their yes or no on non-quantifiable values. Values cannot be perceived by way of
statistics; they can be perceived by way of pictures or visions or scenarios. Indeed
scenarios are kinds of mini-utopias. Futurist methodologies will probably be a basic
functional tool by which we might construct a Neo-Utopianism.
Human society cannot conduct itself rationally without a
clear idea of where it wants to go. Clear ideas would be a better term
because "Neo-Utopianism" should be pluralistic in order to avoid the
totalitarian know-it-all temptation that has doomed utopian experiments in the past. The
horrific consequences of a single-minded (as opposed to an open-minded) utopian instinct
are well documented in Yaacov Talmons classic work Totalitarian Democracy. Whatever
the case, we must have a vision of the kind of future we want in order to make rational
decisions on a daily basis.
Having a vision and being a realistic visionary are
absolute necessities for functioning as a rational human being. This is contrary to
popular prejudice, which equates visionary with unrealistic fantasy, but it is nonetheless
self-evidently true. Human beings make practical judgments and value judgments every day
of their lives. We must do this in order to survive, as the primary human survival tool is
not instinct but the reasoning mind evaluating the human environment. Human beings better
at this usually have much more successful lives. Societies and cultures that encourage
this kind of thinking are usually much more developed.
The question is on the basis of what do we make our
judgments? If we do not have a clear vision, or several alternative visions then how do we
make rational decisions? If we do not know where we want to go, if we do not have a future
ideal of the kind of life we want, how can we judge the practicality or the value of any
judgment we must make in the course of our daily lives?
A plurality of visions might be necessary for practical
reasons in such a rapidly changing world and not only to avoid the totalitarian
temptation. Utopianism must avoid becoming a finalistic one-dimensional picture. It must
reflect a "new view of the cosmos (and) be progressively evolutionary, infinite in
its capacity and comprehensible, both qualitatively and quantitatively" as Eric J.
Lerner writes in his brilliantly original book The Big Bang Never Happened
(p.327).
Or as Stephen Jay Gould, commenting on the ramifications of the human genome project in
the New York Times, writes, "…only humility (and a plurality of strategies for
explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?" Gould goes on to hint at the infinite human
potentialities offered by a post-reductionist view of human life.
Perhaps we can find support for a New Utopianism based upon
a New Science of Man that would be based upon new developments and insights in the
biological and cosmological sciences. Just as the Social Sciences, dominated by a
reductionist mechanical science, destroyed the value laden "Science of Man, so might
a New value laden Science of Man find its justification in philosophical insights drawn
from new developments in Evolutionary Theory (physical and biological) based upon Plasma
Physics and genetic research and ever increasing knowledge about life itself. Edward O.
Wilson has made a heroic (Neo-Modernist?) attempt at a synthesis which re-introduces
objectivity and meaning into the discussion in his book Consilience. Wilson also
defends reductionism as the proper methodology for science while, by implication,
recognizing that it is an improper worldview. This, I believe, is the proper
distinction: a reductionist methodology within a holistic worldview.
There is a socio-psychological price to be paid for the
death of Utopianism. Observe the number of people in the modern world who seem to float
through life rudderless without a clear view of their own value as human beings. They are
so confused about the complexities of modern life that they have shut off their cognitive
rational faculties trying to fill the subsequent spiritual vacuum by going shopping,
taking drugs, getting involved in cults, getting religiously "saved," getting
"into" New Age fads etc. The inability to construct rational, realistic
alternative future visions leads people to create fantastic ones (benevolent aliens will
come in their space ships to take us away to eternal bliss and in preparation we must
first castrate ourselves and then commit collective suicide).
Human beings are the only species that can conceive of the
future, the only species truly cognizant of its own mortality. The resultant angst leads
us into the future conceiving business. Religions had a monopoly on this business for the
longest time (the end of days, the coming of the Messiah, eternal life, eventual human
salvation, life after death, reincarnation etc). Science began to replace religion in
areas amenable to quantitative measurement. The profession of Futurism has attempted to
make this process more comprehensive and as rational and as realistic (i.e. connected to
reality) as possible.
Utopianism was one of the foundational building blocks upon
which Futurism was built. Now Futurism must serve as one of the foundational building
blocks of a Neo-Utopianism. Modern Utopianism coincided with the secularizing process of
the Renaissance. People were beginning to shed the surety about the future provided by
Religion. This unsurety was reflected in the plays of Shakespeare, the first truly modern
writer who anticipated the angst of modern man. "To be or not to be, that
is
the question!" Utopian speculations, in all likelihood responding to this incipient
angst, offered secularized versions of a possible end of days as it pertained to human
society on this earth.
One of the positive aims of the Post-Modernist project was
to attack human certitude (moral, scientific or political) as insufferable hubris. While
this project has performed a valuable service in critiquing modernist ideology it is
essentially nihilistic. It offers no coherent alternative to Modernism. Indeed it would
view the very search for coherence as a modernist pretension. But if humanity is to
survive and have a meaningful existence then the intellectual project of the twenty-first
century must be to move from Post-Modernism to Neo-Modernism. We must reinstate the
Enlightenment ambition to create a "Science of Man." We must become
Neo-Utopians.
Secular Humanism, an outgrowth of the Renaissance,
Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, has been one of the foundation blocks of
modernist ideology. But its growing spiritual inadequacies (based in part on the
uncertainties of the New Physics) has led to the radical moral relativism of New Age
Post-Modernism on the one hand and a return to the bedrock certainties of religious
fundamentalism on the other hand. Both these extremes feed off of one another and both,
together and separately, are very dangerous for the future of human society. Only a
Neo-Utopianism can offset this double trend and re-invigorate Secular Humanism that is the
necessary meta-ideological underpinning of constitutional Democracy.
"Modernism" was simplistically optimistic about
the possible planned perfectibility of human society. The "Post-Modernist"
critique identified the simplistic hubris of "Modernism" and showed how this
hubris resulted in catastrophe in ecology, politics, economy etc. Post-Modernism gave us
wisdom about the limitations of power.
But today we have graduated to an even higher wisdom--that
criticism of simplistic visions is not enough; that human society absolutely requires
visions of where it wants to go, that without such visions it is impossible
to
conduct society in a rational way. These visions might be vague but exist they must if a
culture is to be vigorous and healthy.
Is the United States better off because academic research
has "proven" that the "American Dream" was a manipulated myth? Is
Israel better off because intellectuals have "proven" that the "Zionist
Idea" was flawed at its very inception? Is Europe better off because the
Enlightenment dream of a more rational and just society has become unfashionable, replaced
by dubious theories of false consciousness and the inherent alienation of the human being?
Are any of us better off because radical Greens have "demonstrated" that human
beings are basically pests infecting Mother Nature?
Neither individuals nor societies can function efficiently
and flourish in an atmosphere of declining self-esteem. Human beings are not just economic
beings or cultural beings or social beings, they are first of all heroic beings who
require an heroic image of their own future in order to stimulate and sustain the energy
capable of bringing out the best of their human being.
This is the task of Utopianism; not a blueprint but a
vision of what things could be like and should be like. Let us define this mood as
neo-Romanticism. A Neo-Utopianism would want to change the tense of Romanticism. It would
want us to be romantic about the future not about the past. I use the term Romanticism in
its most precise sense (not in its popularized perversion). Romanticism is that literary
genre which sees the human being as a heroic creation and deals with human life as it
ought to be, in light of heroic human nature, and not as it is. It is appositive to
Naturalism, which deals with life as it is and even celebrates life as it is. Futurism is
in a way a realistic Romanticism. It does not deal in fantasy or wishful thinking but in
the rational organization of empirical fact in order to assist us in constructing positive
alternative visions of our future. Just as Utopianism served as a building block for
Futurism so may Futurism serve as a building block for a Neo-Utopianism. Rather than an
idealized nostalgic attachment to the past, let us cultivate a Romantic attachment to the
possibilities of the future. We live in the future and not in the past therefore the
future is more important than the past and if we are to love our own lives we must learn
to fall in love with the future.
Let me be clear and precise. The call for vague visions and
Romantic attachment in no way justifies mushy and impractical thinking. The challenge must
be clearly and precisely formulated and must reflect reality and not wishful thinking. It
must deal primarily with the "objective" life of the human being as a
social
animal and not with the "subjective" life of a so-called alienated
individual whose "false consciousness" malevolent forces are manipulating. The
challenge must be long term but not so long term as to be inconceivable. Any vision that
transcends 100 years in the future usually turns into the fantasy genre of Science
Fiction--interesting but essentially useless.
I will formulate a possible Neo-Utopian challenge as a
question, hoping by doing so to avoid the totalitarian tendency of positivist Utopianism.
The question is: "How can we create, by the year 2100, a planetary human society
composed of 12 billion people with an American standard of living with one tenth the
negative environmental impact present human society has on nature?"
What research and development policies, international trade
policies, tax policies, space exploration policies must we pursue in order to achieve such
a vision? This is a practical question given to rational treatment that will
engender numerous alternative possible answers. The debate, therefore, will be
utopian but pluralistic and non-totalitarian.
By clearly defining the challenge we will have avoided the
imprecise, wishful thinking of New Age Post Modernism reflected, for example, in calls to
lower the world's population from 6 billion to 2 billion within the next century and to
"educate" the remaining 2 billion to adopt the way of life of a European village
before Charlemagne. This is neither clear nor moral thinking, its immorality being a
direct consequence of its lack of clarity. To attain such a goal we would have to
exterminate a few billion, forcibly sterilize a few billion and "re-educate" the
remainder in the Rosseau/Robespierre tradition of "forcing people to be free," a
chilling oxymoron that began with the guillotine and ended with the gulag.
Most people want a clean environment; not so much because
of theories about human induced global warming but because of much more banal and egoistic
reasons. People do not require a grand theory of global warming to be for a clean
environment, they are for a clean environment because they do not want to breath, drink or
eat befouled air, water or food. Whether the theory of human induced global warming is
correct or not is beyond the point; any future vision of society that envisions a clean
environment must argue its case on the basis of the interests of real human beings living
real lives in a sophisticated technological society.
Most human beings have no intention of giving up their
technological life style and billions more aspire to a technological life style. Frantic
self-righteous calls by neurotic dropouts to give up soap and hot water and live in
teepees are not likely to have wide appeal. A practical Utopianism would not present a
vision of the future that would require people to give up modern dentistry in order to
save the environment. Indeed modern dentistry might be the greatest justification for the
inherent human morality of the Industrial Revolution. When you go to a dentist you are
giving sanction to the metallurgy industry, the chemical industry, the electronics
industry and the pharmaceutical industry as well as to industrial civilization in general
which has provided both the technical means and the surplus wealth to train the dentist.
The Modernists were right; the Industrial Revolution was
the greatest event in the history of humanity. In 1750 in France 70% of children died
before the age of 5, the life span was less then 40, most women were toothless by their
late teens and only a minority of the population could read and write. How many sane
people would want to return to such an era? Yet it is this very gloomy
"utopianism" that we are being offered in some anti-modernist quarters.
A practical Utopianism, based upon a
"Neo-Modernism" that accepts the "Post Modern" critique of the hubris
of "Modernism" but rejects "Post-Modernism's" radical relativism and
lack of coherent vision, and relying on new developments in evolutionary theory, would
have a good chance at being relevant and offering positive direction for human
civilization. It would enable us to once again instill human society with purpose,
rejuvenating human culture around a coherent, yet pluralistic, framework of ideals and
values. This would be Utopianism Come of Age!
Part 3
How Should Utopianism Be Taught?
I believe that Utopianism should be taught historically and that the syllabus should
include the following elements.
1. The history of utopian thought.
2. The history of the utopian experience
3. The historical circumstances to which the thought and the experience responded.
4. Critical analyses of both the thought and the experience. This would deal with logical,
psychological and practical weaknesses. The method should be Popperian, striving to
falsify the validity of the Utopian Idea and practice.
5. The Popperian method should then be stood on its head and used to try to falsify the
Post or Anti-Utopian approach vis-à-vis the real needs of human society.
6. Futurist methodologies should be used as the most responsible way to try to create
rational and practical Neo-Utopian conceptions and structures.
The futurist technique or methodology I would use is one of
my own invention. I call it "Futures Thinking." It is a technique that relates
to the essential epistemological difficulties of relating to the future and is predicated
on the assumption that, as Edward Cornish points out in his outstanding source book
The
Study of the Future, the future does not exist and therefore, by definition, cannot be
predicted. The proper task of futurism, therefore, is to help people develop futurist
habits of thought, not to deal with arrogant pretensions of "what will be" but
to try to conceive of what could be or (to refer back to my Romanticism of the Future)
what should be--i.e. futurism as a value-laden enterprise and not as a scientific
enterprise. Utopianism becomes, therefore, an indispensable tool for any one dealing
seriously with the future and not a past time for starry-eyed idealists.
This is a technique that says the following about the past.
1. We should study the past
2. We should learn from the past
3. We should learn how to draw analogies from the past, as they pertain to our present and
near future situations
4. We should celebrate the past. Many the holidays of many cultures (especially my own)
are a celebration of past events. As I write these lines world Jewry is preparing for the
Passover holiday, which celebrates "events" that occurred over 3,000 years ago.
5. We should not
idolize the past. The past is a spiritual, cultural and
psychological raw material that modern human beings can draw from in order to help create
the future their autonomous volitional consciousnesses have decided is desirable. We must
not
be dictated to by the past. Accepting the diktat of the past has contributed to the
Northern Ireland problem, the Israeli-Arab (Palestinian) problem and the Kosovo problem.
I teach history part time. I love history almost as much as
I love breathing and I am appalled at the primitive ignorance so many people have of their
own cultures. Moreover, I am absolutely dismayed at the ignorance so many professionals
have of their own professions: economists and businessmen who do not know economic history
or the history of economic ideas; engineers who do not know the history of technology;
doctors who do not know the history of medicine or medical paradigms; teachers who do not
know the history of education or educational ideas; politicians who do not know the
history of politics or political ideas; scientists who do not know the history of science
and scientific paradigms etc.
This lack of historical perspective and ability to
critically analyze ones own professional self, in the context of ones own historical
period, often results in an astounding hubris.
The professionals who are running our civilization see
themselves as the alpha and the omega, produced by a kind of professional virgin birth. As
such they often become incapable of conceptualizing "alternative possible
futures" (to steal a phrase) that might lie outside the professional paradigm they
are functioning in.
Ironically, because they have not really studied the past
they are incapable of historical perspective and thus become intellectual slaves to the
immediate
past. The immediate past becomes their intellectual filter preventing them from breaking
through inherited historical paradigms.
Those who are capable of breaking through--capable of
envisioning alternative futures--become our most innovative and celebrated citizens.
Imagine the creativity and innovation we could stimulate if we introduced Utopian/Futures
Thinking into our educational systems? The critical study of history must be an integral
part of any utopian/futurist curriculum. Indeed, I believe history should be studied from
a futurist perspective.
The Paradox of Knowledge--the Pedagogical Dilemma of Our
Time
1. We only know what we know.
2. Everything we know we know from the past: we were taught, we learned, we experienced.
3. This "knowledge" limits our ability to envision "alternative possible
futures." Knowledge becomes an enslaving factor rather than the liberating factor
dreamt about by the founding fathers of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.
We have difficulties breaking through our inherited paradigms. The past dictates to us by
default.
We can either try to create a future on the basis of what
we know (a recipe for certain disaster) or on the basis of breaking holes in the walls of
our enslaving knowledge enabling us to envision (Utopias?) of alternative possible
futures.
If I were teaching a class on Futurism/Utopianism I would
require the class to do an exercise based on this paradox. I would require them to list
what past assumptions, experiences, knowledge are keeping them enslaved within their own
knowledge filter and how they might break holes (or windows) in the walls of this
enslaving knowledge filter, creating new space within which they might be able to think
new ideas. I would call this exercise "Escaping the Past and Creating the
Future."
I would continue this exercise with the following:
1. What we know
2. What we know that we don't know
3. What we don't know that we don't know
This would demonstrate the paradoxical fact that the more
we know the more we know what we don't know; in other words, our ignorance and our
knowledge of our ignorance grows exponentially in comparison to our growth of knowledge.
This realization would cultivate the wisdom of humility thus neutralizing the adolescent
surety of classical Modernism. It would reinforce the Post-Modernist critique of Modernist
mythology that posits the possibility of eventually knowing everything about everything,
an ambition stretching from Newton to Hawking.
This part of the exercise would have several aspects:
personal and historical. In the personal the students would list what they knew and what
they did not know five years previously and what they know and what they don't know now. I
would allow the students to free associate in speculating about the scale of what they
don't even know what they don't know.
In the historical part they would have to compare the last
decade of the nineteenth century and the last decade of the twentieth century in terms of
what was known and what was known about what we did not know. This exercise would be most
useful for achieving success in their future professions and would require them to learn
the history of their prospective professions.
Teaching Utopianism would compel us to develop curricula
of, what I would call, a neo-classical nature. We would have to return to the ideal of the
Renaissance or the pre-WWII Middle European Gymnasia. We would have to see as our ideal
the development of citizens of the future; we would have to strive to create individuals
of deep culture and wide horizons; we would have to conduct a revolt against the cult of
specialization; we would have to create real Human Beings.
Footnote: One may speculate if that
well-known American cliché "in the middle of no where" is not a pejorative but
rather a deep yearning for some indefinable vision.
Bibliography should include: Ernest Becker's The
Structure of Evil; Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point; Edward Wilson's
Consilience;
Eric Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened; Jacob Talmon's The Origins of
Totalitarian Democracy; John Bury's The Idea of Progress; Carl Popper's
The
Poverty of Historicism and Edward Cornish's The Study of the Future.
About the Author
Tsvi Bisk is an independent Israeli educator, social researcher and writer.
He is founder and CEO of the adult education Web site
www.adultdegree.com and the "Strategic Educational Planning (ST.E.P.)
Institute." He is presently co-authoring a book for Praeger/Greenwood Press entitled
Futurizing
the Jews. He can be reached at bisk@adultdegree.com.
