The Next Era: Utopia — or Bust
I do not know if your politics fit the current Left or Right; but, I do know that you know that we are on a cusp. Either Lake Mead dries up and California can no longer grow almonds and everyone in Phoenix relocates to Duluth and/or Donald Trump spends the rest of his ego days in the D.C. county jail playing golf in the Metaverse or everything goes back to 1955 and America is after all Great Again and our suburbia becomes the world norm in Brazil and Botswana: Great Corporate Dystopia.
Yet, I do know this; actually. The Modern Era of great and greater technology and innovation and human achievement and more and more people all over the place is about to go poof in the night. We all know it! And the politics and power structure in America and worldwide that keeps us on this path and then over the cliff is about as good as late Rome just before the fall or the Mongol Emperor of the Yuan, just before their fall, or Easter Island before they ran out of trees. Oops. And we know it and we pretend either the truth of global warming and species extinction is an illusion or the ignorance of a good portion of the population is just temporary.
To be blunt — sorry: we are bullshitting ourselves. Either we start moving and moving very very quickly or ... the consequences are dire, dying time DIRE.
So, what should be The Next Era, after the end of this Modern Era? When did Rome come back together? Did it? Or did London instead? And the great British Empire which fell, too? At least, the Ming followed the Yuan. And then it fell to the Manchu which fell to the British which fell, too. Did Egypt ever regain empire beauty again? Will New York, the Empire State, come back after The Fall?
Scholars have criticized utopian visions, like Sir Thomas More's, as envisioning and creating in imagination a "static" society. That is, perfect cannot change and innovate and it is left without the ability to adjust and survive problems, which inevitably arise. Of course, we seem to have constructed a non-utopian society that can change and innovate and certainly is imperfect, but in the end, this end, cannot survive its own set of problems because of its own set of misplaced utopian ideals. Make America Great Again? Bring us back a la Biden to a politics where everyone gets along nicely? Think that will solve it all before it all goes poof in the night.
I think the next era should be, instead of the early or late Paleolithic or the Agrarian or the later Agrarian or the early Modern or the later Modern, The Utopian. Change and innovation are fine, but changes and innovations that work instead of pollute the planet and its climate and bomb Ukraine and grossly suppress women in Iran and the U.S.A. The Modern Era is done for.
What I have begun to outline — and it really is only an outline and details and more details, e.g. the new green internal structure of cities, need to be worked out and then accomplished — is the first steps, the first revolutionary steps to that next era, The Utopian Era. A real and workable Utopia.
If we keep playing the same political games over and over again, in Russian and Turkey and China and North Korea and ..... Trumpian America; if we play that authoritarian game over and over again, that politics will lead to world wars and more and more oppression. If we do not deal forthwith and completely with climate change and The Sixth Great Extinction and the depletion of farm and pasture lands, Greta Thunberg will be right; and, superficial and inadequate solutions will lead us to our environmental end.
There are +/- about 8 billion people on the planet. I hate to even think about the amount of suffering that will take place this century as we lose billions to our problems of The Modern Era. Think the same old same old with the same old same old assumptions will fix all this? Right or Left? Bah humbug!
Heading in the right direction I like. There are many of us heading in the right direction. Yet, still and all, it is not enough. We must rethink. We must redo. We must get very radical indeed. The middle is not going to hold; it is not holding now. Nor even if it held would it be adequate. There are times when hysteria is necessary. As the lemmings push toward the cliff, right there at the edge of the cliff, right there and right now, panic and change direction or ...
It really and truly is time to rethink this all. And believe it or not, as you read through these essays, you will see that the best of each of the human eras, of human beings, of homo sapiens, beginning as a species about 250,000 years ago and making our species way out of Africa and around the planet everywhere except Antarctica that we left to the penguins; and then into the agricultural Agrarian Era of early just farming and then later constructing big empires, around 10,000 years in all, and then to The Modern of the last 500 years, we can take the best of each of these human eras instead of just being dazzled by the machines and toys of the latest era and construct a Utopian time of the best of all the societies from the past and a future that works really and truly, stable and lovely, changeable and innovate but never any ways out of harmony and balance to any extreme. In all things societal moderation.
Or we are done for. And there may or may not be some kind of build back. So read on. Read carefully. What is proposed here might seem all too reasonable and even simple. It is but it is also not. You will see what I mean. And, please, add your ideas. Stay up late at night thinking about this. We need you!