Practical Utopia by Michael Albert

Author:Michael Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2017-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion

“Will the people in the cheap seats clap? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.”

—John Lennon

In talking about a vision for a future society, one could go into far more detail than we have provided. Indeed, we have been minimalist in addressing only a few institutions in each sphere, and, even regarding those few, we have only addressed broad attributes.

There are four reasons why we restrain ourselves.

To delve much further into visionary details is to risk the idiocy of arrogant excess. The future is not an open book but will be a complex product of choices and conditions no one can fully know in advance.

There are few if any singularly right details to know. A future society will opt for many different choices regarding its detailed features. Saying what those choices will be now not only ignores that what they will be will depend on lessons learned in the future but also ignores the way that in different places and different communities there will be different choices, not only due to lessons we haven’t learned but also due to different tastes.

We wish to avoid a slippery slope that leads beyond arrogant excess to stultifying rigidity. The more visionary details one offers—even if such details could be confidently known, which they can’t, and even if such details wouldn’t vary from place to place and time to time, which they will—the more one is likely to see a vision as some fixed, finished, final, and complete result, and thus the less likely one is to be flexible about assessing, improving, adapting, and refining it. To get overly detailed is a fool’s errand, not only because it will yield gross errors, and not only because there are no universal details to foresee, but because it risks corrupting the whole process by rigidifying attitudes.

The details of vision are not our concern. The task we face is to provide future generations with a society whose institutions facilitate their making their own decisions. Our task is to provide a societal setting consistent with human well-being and development for all, without specifying the shapes people opt for within that freedom. The actual choice of policies and details in future settings is, in other words, for future people to decide. For us to act like those choices are our province would violate self-management (for them) and is a slippery slope toward us dictating for others how they will live.

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