![]() ![]() We convince ourselves that things cannot change, and that if they do, they will change for the worse. We begin to feel our present reality as static and inflexible. When we lose sight of the past, we also lose sight of the idea that there were other pathways forward, other roads not taken. But, according to the anthropologist Wade Davis, “the world into which you were born does not exist in an absolute sense but is just one model of reality-the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and adaptive choices that your own ancestors made, however successfully, many generations ago.” As individuals going about our daily lives, it is often hard to step out of the flow of history and consider how things might have been different if our ancestors had made an alternative set of “intellectual and adaptive choices” and to imagine what those choices might look like in practice. Many people today fear these types of changes, looking to the stability of the traditional family as a bulwark against the vicissitudes of demographic, economic, or climatic upheavals. ![]() As we face an ever-growing number of disruptive technological advances, it is essential to explore how past utopian thinkers believed that changes in our intimate lives could help us forge stronger and more harmonious societies.Īnd yet resistance to new ways of thinking may be most extreme when it concerns how we structure our private lives. A wide variety of philosophers, theologians, and social theorists like Pythagoras, Plato, Thomas More, Tomaso Campanella, Charles Fourier, Flora Tristan, and Alexandra Kollontai once argued that political reforms or revolutions will fail unless they also rethink of how we create and sustain our families and communities. Since political and economic systems accrue and distribute power and wealth among people, those people are essential inputs to those systems. How can you challenge or change political and economic systems when both are directly dependent on the primary institution in society responsible for the production and care of the next generation? But where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment. Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives. And in “ Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” British author Aaron Bastani argues that technologies like cheap solar energy, asteroid mining, and CRISPR gene-editing will lead us into a world of post-scarcity universal health and leisure.įor me, one of the most interesting aspects of this popular neo-utopianism lies in its primary focus on the public sphere. In his book “ Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think,” Greek-American engineer Peter Diamandis (founder of XPRIZE, which rewards inventors for technological developments that benefit humanity) and science journalist Steven Kotler look to the wonders of artificial intelligence and advances in robotics to propose solutions to problems like food scarcity, aging populations, and climate change. ![]() The Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman has promoted several utopian visions “for realists,” including open borders and a 15-hour workweek. The French economist Thomas Piketty has called for a progressive global wealth tax to combat income inequality. They suggest political and economic changes that might seem far-fetched but are increasingly debated as real possibilities. The pace of this technological change has inspired a growing number of future-positive books. products have turned the world upside-down, and we may be only decades away from universal solar power, asteroid mining, and something close to human immortality. In the last months, ChatGPT and other generative A.I. The following is an excerpt from “ Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life” by Kristen Ghodsee, professor and chair of Russian and East European studies in the School of Arts & Sciences. ![]()
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