Page 41 - Ruminations

39. The uphill road

Utopian scenarios often depict a world in which ethnic conflict,
ideological mythologies, overpopulation, environmental degradation
and apocalyptic weaponry would not exist. To the extent these
conditions require themselves as prerequisite, such theorizing is
useless. The accumulating dead weight of the past is overwhelming.
Any line drawn to a utopian, relatively homeostatic future must
pass through the present, itself a chaos of entropic and anti-entropic
trends: the odds of change toward a specific outcome are in
proportion to its dependence on anti-entropic expenditures of energy.
As caution and corollary, the less specific and closer to the present is
the prediction, the greater the chance of occurrence; thus the further
into the future utopia is placed (in order to differentiate it from the
present), the lower its probability. The prognosticator hoping for a
stable situation must decide which trends would have to overcome
others, and could reasonably be expected to do so. And that means
estimating the relative strength of such opposing forces, based
objectively on past developments as well as anticipating changes in
their energy (or power); and also extrapolating increases in entropy
already at work against them.
This could lead to the conclusion that it is already too late to start a
desired utopia, as well as too late to stop any feared dystopia, simply
because the positive anti-entropic forces would have to have been
greater in the past and the negative entropic forces lesser. Any
engineering of utopia should avoid starting with a snapshot of present
conditions, then adding imminent technological breakthroughs; the
former are not in a historical vacuum, and the latter are likely to
manifest unintended consequences. But that is the hallmark of utopian
thinking: whatever needs fixing will be fixed by something not in turn
requiring an even greater fix, and the cause of breakage will somehow
cease its destructiveness.
It should go without saying that human nature, in its biologically-
rooted sociopolitical aspects, cannot be omitted from any utopian
plan. And that problem of homeostasis has never been solved in any
human aggregation larger than a tribe or small village. The idea of
starting small as proof of concept, then expanding into ever-greater
communities while retaining the cohesion of consensus flies in the
face of history: again, the road to utopia must start deeply in the past
even to cross the stringent borders of the present.