Special:Badtitle/NS90:Forum:Literature/George Orwell on utopia/reply (5)

It's not so much a difference between highbrow and lowbrow to me -- it's just I'm not much of a forum-goer in general. I like wikis on the theory that the information gets better through evolution. Doesn't always happen, but in general it does work.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in grad school, the idea of making the academic world into philosopher-kings is quite scary. These dudes can barely decide how to assign lab space, let alone manage a country. Never mind the fact that some scientists hold on to irrational ideas until they die. As always, there is a place for academia, but running the world isn't it.

I'm gonna agree and disagree on the the "teenagers' actions have no real-world consequences" bit. Sure, some are overprotected and ignored. But then we have places like Chicago where the gang violence has a lot of real world consequences. I think the biggest conclusion there is that teens don't completely understand when their actions do and do not have major consequences, which is... yeah. As I said earlier, you can't remove the conflict of Coming of Age, because that's a core part of being human.

I'd say that "avoiding a too-rational world" is more of a fear than a desire. People never object to abstracts like "rationality" or "utopia", they object to change or the lack thereof. And most of this comes from fear of losing one's place in society. Fear is definitely not rational. Fear is the mind-killer.

My graduate studies were in meteorology and climate change. The fact that anthropogenic climate change exists is glaringly obvious if you study it. Corroborating evidence comes from thousands of institutions in hundreds of different fields. People deny it because they fear the change, or fear the idea that man is usurping God, or whatever. It has nothing to do with rationality.

However, it's not like knowing climate change exists helps all that much. There are hard decisions to be made with no clear answers, even for the things that are the most obvious. Sure, let's shut down all the coal plants -- the CO2 release + black carbon on snow + radioactivity + SOx/NOx smog and acid rain + waste water pollution all makes it a no-brainer. But what do we do with the people who mine the coal; could they really be trained to work in a new industry? What about metallurgical coal use? What do we replace it with, and how much are we willing to pay? How fast can we do this and maintain the level of electrical service? That's just a simple version, for a complex version try the debate between using water for farming, fishing, or hydropower in California during a drought.

Society is full of these non-trivial problems. So how would a utopia address issues like this? I simply don't know. I think it would be easy to create a dystopia based on the problems with climate change (Mad Max anyone?), and a corresponding ecotopia sounds just as bad (reproduction limits, industry highly controlled by the state, getting invaded for our unobtanium by less scrupulous aliens).

Governance has to spring from effective conflict resolution. Maybe utopias are just really really good at that? I think some form of conflict in inevitable assuming we're humans -- or any life-forms honestly. A utopia is a government that can effectively balance the many and the few; one that can think in both the short-term and the long-term. And that... is really freaking hard.