Edwin Bendyk - Desire Called Utopia

Let's try to analyse more specific picture of one country, like Poland. Once again, according to the latest studies, we can say that it has never been so good in Poland. The wealth of Poles is growing, we are becoming happier, better educated and more satisfied with life and with situation in our country. 

Than our Alien arrives to the meeting like ours, gathering intellectuals and analysts of different fields of social life. And the Alien, I am sure, will have cognitive dissonance. We are talking about horrors and the end of the world seems to be quite close. Spectre of crisis is wandering over the world, would conclude the Alien asking a question: So, what is the real situation? Is it bad, as we picture them or is it good, as statistics show? 

Perhaps both pictures are valid, and we can conclude that the body of humanity is healthy but simply its soul is sick. As critics of the contemporary society from the left to the right say, our society has generally lost the sense of direction. Yes, we are better off, but „everything what solid is melting in the air”, to recall famous sentence from “Communist Manifesto”. The idea of family has collapsed, social ties are weaker and changing fast, institutions of the modern society have weakened too, so we can talk about the crisis of the university, crisis of the school, crisis of the media and public sphere generally. Welcome to the world of liquid modernity, as prof. Bauman call it. 

Another eminent scholar, professor Krzysztof Pomian, scientific director of the Museum of Europe in Brussels wrote in 1980, that humanity was facing the crisis of future. We do not believe in progress as an inevitable process described so beautifully by Condorcet. We do not believe, that future can only be better than present, we are afraid our children will live worse lives we are living now. On the other hand we need the more or less clear and positive picture of the future, as the whole contemporary life, especially its economic aspects, is being build against loans we have taken to pay back them within next decades: personal and national debts, ecology, natural resources. We are borrowing from future assuming that hell doesn't exist. But at the same moment we are losing our faith in future. As a result we are destroying basements of our future prosperity. 

What is the answer? One of them is return to the religion. Institutions of religion, like the Catholic Church are traditionally well prepared to deal with future. They have a quite clear message and quite sophisticated visions. It is enough to stick to the message of faith, follow the rules of the institution to spare not only one’s personal soul, but as a result to spare humanity as well. 

Yes, in times of liquidity a return to religion and its institutions to spare future we need to keep the world going on seems to be a rather obvious choice. But I am afraid it’s not the best of the solutions. Why? Talking about the possibility of intercultural dialogue and peaceful coexistence of different peoples and societies we have to use a global perspective. I agree, that most real conflicts are exploding on local levels, between communities of different cultures leaving in one place, like modern city in Europe, US or Brazil. But the real risk of Armageddon comes from the global level, just to mention the current debate about climate change and needs of cooperation on the global level, what means demand for universal codes and practices of communication. Obviously, religion doesn't provide us with such universal codes.

It’s quite a radical change in comparison to the age of the first globalisation. In the beginning of the modern age and so called first globalisation of the 15th century, religion (I mean Christianity) belonged to the official ideology of conquest and was a part of universal message. The first global Empire of Charles V was a Christian empire. At that time we believed that universal message of Christian faith would prevail and give the universal code we are in need of. 

But in the globalisation of the 21st century religion like Christianity doesn't bring universal message to the world, but as one of particular messages have to compete not only with the messages of other religions, but even more with the messages of other, really universal powers. 

There are three of them, which shape the contemporary world and are in the heart of global processes. The first, is free market and forces of liberal economy. Statistics I quoted in the beginning of my presentation prove, that market forces are the best answers to the problems of material development of humanity. But we have to agree, that bringing prosperity these forces can also create other problems and be a source of humiliation described by prof. Bauman. They are good for the body, not for our soul and we know that at least since the time of “Communist Manifesto”. 

The second universal power is science and technological results of its deployment. And we should remember, that even if we lose our faith in future and progress, the pace of development of new technologies in areas like telecommunications, computer science, microelectronics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, neuroscience, neuroeconomy, reproductive techniques, pharmacology is as fast as it has never been. According to some analyst of the development of science and technology, future is quite bright and clear. Ray Kurzweils, one of the leading American futurologists, the man of vision and also of big technological achievements claims he knows future and it is quite simple. 

First of all, we have to realize, that our civilisation is ruled by the law of exponential acceleration of the pace of growth. Technology is developing faster and faster, in a non-linear way. It is extremely difficult to comprehend that pace, but it means that within the next ten years we will face so many new important inventions as we were introduced in the last hundred years. In other words it means, that in year 2020 a computer you will buy for one thousand dollars will have a computing power of a human brain, and similarly priced computer in year 2030 will have a computing power of the whole human kind. 

What is the conclusion? That by this time scientists will be able to reverse engineer human brain and its function and reconstruct them in silico. Welcome to the age of conscious machines. Kurzweil is sure, that as a result of the growing speed of scientific and technological development we are running to the point of Singularity, when technology will merge with biology and a new age of post-humanity will begin. Kurzweil goes even further in his claims as he is sure, that one of the consequences of post-humanity will be real immortality. Kurzweil is 60 years old now and he believes that he will live long enough to become immortal. 

We can call these visions crazy, insane and so on. We can dislike them, but I am afraid we cannot stop people like Kurzweil. He is not alone, there is plenty of them in places like Sillicon Valley in the US with huge coffers of money to pursue their goals. It is enough to mention Craig Venter, a genius biologist who as an independent private scientist was able to compete with the internationally supported project of decoding of the human genome. Venter is now working out the issue of artificial life and he has just been granted a patent from the US Patent Office for a living organism made from scratch in a test tube. In other words, technologies which will bring the Singularity are being developed in many laboratories now. Most of them will fail, but who knows – perhaps some of them will be successful. 

Is religion an answer to the universal power of modern technology, especially modern antropotechnology? Pope John Paul II tried to give an active and positive answer, listening carefully to the voices of scientists and searching for reconciliation between science and religion. He did a lot but also predicted, that development of science and technology, especially in areas like cognitivism and sciences dealing with problems of evolution and emergence of complexity would bring a crisis similar to the crisis we faced in Europe in the age of Galileo. I am afraid that Benedict XVI tries to prove that predictions of JPII were correct. I mean his position toward theory of evolution. We could also read in today's newspapers that Catholic University of Louvain, one of the most important places of meeting of science and religion is on a way of losing the support of the Catholic Church and couldn't be called longer “catholic” because of research on fertilisation in vitro which is conducted inside this university. 

If religion is not able to give another answer than conservative resistance to the change, perhaps we should refer to the third universal power. It's the popular culture. I am not thinking about mass culture of the industrial age, based on TV and other culture industries targeting passive consumers through the mediation of market. Contemporary popular culture is much more complicated. The advent of that new popular culture we can place somewhere in 1977, a year when George Lucas showed “Star Wars” and Steve Jobs introduced the first commercially available personal computer. Just a few years later Ithiel de Sola Pool, a scholar from MIT identified new trends emerging in culture. First of all, he realized that personal computers linked together in communication networks would be, as he called them “technologies of freedom”, with a huge potential for recreation of public sphere. The second point, he also noticed that the new culture began to emerge, culture of active participation, also called convergence culture. 

One of the most important analysts of convergence culture, Henry Jenkins of MIT shows an interesting new phenomenon spreading among participants of that culture. Consumers are more demanding and want to participate actively not only in consumption, but they also want to be co-creators of the form of culture. But new forms of popular culture, especially these based on the Internet and network computer games demand cooperation, often on the global scale. Jenkins calls this phenomenon of creation of global communities –mediated by popular culture pop-cosmopolitanism. And it is worth noticing, that this new popular culture is not restricted only to the 20 % of the global population. 

It's not the place to analyse popular culture in more detail, it’s a very fresh phenomenon and need to be studied carefully. Why? The language of popular culture, its codes and practises are becoming to dominate the public sphere. Especially in the generation of so-called Digital Natives, majority of young people, the language of popular culture is also used in other than cultural fields of activities. Examples of South Korea, France and United States, but also Philippines, China, Brazil show, that participants of modern popular culture know how to use new skills not only to play computer, but also political games. More importantly the pop-cosmopolitan popular culture creates a universal environment, in which new forms of social life are being invented, tested and discussed. 

This is the environment, in which technological progress is mediated and put into different contexts. One of the responses of popular culture is the new enchantment of world through cultural forms like computer games (but also literature) based on fantasy topics. New myths appear and old are revitalised. 

I wouldn't like to say, that modern culture is superseding religion. But I'd like to show, that modern religions have to accept existence of these universal powers and use the communication platform of popular culture to get out from the closure of particularity. I am afraid I am saying nothing new – I am just repeating conclusions drawn by Marshall McLuhan, devout catholic and one of the most influential analysts of contemporary modern culture. 

But still, we have not solved the problem of future, as we could see, that religions and their concepts of future are only a part of the solutions. So, what are we missing? What we need more to deal with future. Undoubtedly we need a fresh utopia, secular story about future which could shape our thinking about what is coming but is not yet conscious. Utopia, which, as defined by Ernst Bloch, is a result of daydreaming about the better world. Daydreaming based on reason and insight. The question is why we have so many dystopias and it is so difficult to find compelling utopia. An interesting explanation to this question we can find in the last book on utopias by Fredrick Jameson. 

Utopia is strictly linked to the state of development of infrastructure. The most interesting utopias appear around turning points of development of civilisation. Thomas More's “Utopia” was written in the beginning of the modern age, when nobody could predict the coming of industrial society but new forms of creation of the capital through the means of private ownership of means of production and market forces were present and man of deep insight was able to dream about possible future. 

Let's follow this suggestion and look for a new utopia in the place, where new forms of production are being tested. So we should move to places like Silicon Valley. And what do we find there? Once again we should refer to the utopia of post-humanism expressed by Kurzweil's and countless other prophets of cyber future. Just to let you know – the official name of professional position of Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and now, vice-president of Google company is Chief Internet Evangelist. 

And what about Al Gore? As a vice-president of the USA he used to be one of the prophets of cyber utopia in the 90s, but now he has expanded his mission to promoting an ecoutopia: the vision of world in danger because of a climate change caused by human activity. But the whole vision is a positive one: we can save the world, what we need is more technology and global, collective action. How to trigger it? You know the answer: using universal forces of market, science and popular culture. The pace of spread of the so-called New Greens movement around the world, and especially in the USA shows, that the strategy works quite well. 

So we need fresh utopias not to substitute religions, but to have a richer spectrum of dreams about future, we need to push collective actions to pursue common good, beyond particular differences closed in frames of particular cultures and religions. As long as utopias like the utopia of technologies of freedom inspire people like Muhammad Yunus, banker of the poor, who won Peace Nobel Price last year or politicians like Al Gore who want to save the world, the situation is not so bad. And it is the problem of religions and religious institutions to find their place. They will never be obsolete, but very easy, in spite of the current wave of religionisation, can be set on the margins of development.