Practical Utopia
Our constraints are: We have to use building blocks that exist today or that have existed in the past. We can’t just invent non-existent magic wands. No one size fits all: a house that might be good in the artic wouldn’t work in a tropical rainforest.
We’ll devote ourselves to the material world first.
- What sort of dwelling might we live in?
- What might we wear?
- What could we eat?
- Where will our fresh water come from?
- How about energy?
- And transport?
- How about waste disposal?
- Once we’ve built our material worlds, we’ll turn to social worlds:
- Health care, education, wealth distribution, gender roles and relations, and forms of governance – who says who does what?
- Will we have a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy of some sort? Totalitarianism? A benign dictator?
- How will we make decisions and enforce them? Lots of models have been tried – what will ours be?
I have a few first impressions about imagined Utopias from Margaret's project:
- For some reason, there is a preference for round buildings. Extremely impractical except for single-room dwellings. Let's not go without our bathrooms and private spaces;
- Many dwellings seem to have been erected by magic without the heavy machinery that is needed, even for the foundation of a tiny house. Heavy industry needs to exist somewhere with energy sources comparable to what we use today, presumably with far less or zero carbon. The only alternative would be to revert to animal labor, effectively regressing to 1850 or earlier.
- There is a strong preference for community gardens. People who love this have never worked in a garden large enough to put a dent in nutritional needs. Without machinery, it is back-breaking, dawn-to-dusk labor involving everyone able to do it, from children to seniors;
- The examples I see rely on "renewables" with a kind of hand-waving. Plop a windmill in the picture, and done. Do the examples actually provide enough energy for the project? It is hard to imagine how computers could exist or find the power to work. The "cloud" is one of society's most energy-intensive components. We have all forgotten how useless stand-alone computers are.
- Waste disposal is another hand-waving exercise. In the real world, even with maximum efforts at recycling, we are constantly in search of landfill. Only in fantasy land can you recycle everything.
- Recycling human waste is a popular idea. Presumably, this takes the place of nasty synthetic fertilizer. That's a 60% drop in crop productivity, or, you might say, more than double the amount of back-breaking human labor.
- Universal health care is a given, but how to provide this is ignored. Do we build MRI machines out of leaves and twigs? I am 76. My quality of life would have gone off a cliff around 55 if it weren't for a heart operation, hearing aids, and a cataract operation. These are all products of industrialized health care.
- The models usually posit some kind of counsel to replace modern elections. Not a problem except for the decisions the council is supposed to make. These often lead to an assumed command economy replacing nasty capitalism and the profit motive. This setup doesn't scale or endure, as our experience with Kibbuzes shows. "Economics" is about allocating scarce resources. Models tend to assume a "fair" distribution of resources, which will be very scarce in these models. UBI is assumed in almost all models. Price signals and economic incentives are what work in the real world. No, wait, that's capitalism ...
- Enforcement is usually the weak link in Utopian visions. What about people who reject the whole idea or rebel against the council?
I first think we need to start with Bill Gates' vision for 2050 but allow another century for it. In other words, a soft landing on a hot planet with the economy adjusting to the shifting realities of decarbonization. UBI, free health care, free education could fit into this vision but we need to picture a drastic reduction in personal wealth (GDP per person) due to the Keya Identity. Any realistic utopia must assume a drastic reduction in population along with the amount of energy available to produce the goods and services our utopias want to distribute "fairly." For example, "almost free" international transport of everything from cars to toothbrushes will be a thing of the past. That would mean, for example, that almost everything in a typical hardware store or "big box" appliance store will vanish.
The Keya Identity does help in one way. Utopias tend to suffer by failing to offer a plausible path from where we are to Utopia. The Keya Identity, plus a little math with available resources, shows us the path will be catastrophic, including the disappearance of billions of people who can't be fed. The population that can be fed will depend on many factors, including climate. A corresponding collapse of our world of cheap, abundant energy will put us on a different planet for all intents and purposes.
Then we can start to "build back better."
Comments
Post a Comment