The Folly of Utopian Thinking – John David Ebert on Future Fossils Podcast #65
Channel: Michael Garfield + Future Fossils Podcast
Date: 2018-11-17

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Transcript:

Almost all utopias – intentional cities that are planned by the frontal lobe of the human brain – involve trying to take over the natural powers that authentic cities come out of, which is just this slow drift across the topological space of human beings and their messiness – but they're rooted in the soil and you get cities like Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Vienna – places like this that come organically into being and they last for a very, very long time, precisely because they weren't planned communities.  

"Planned communities" brings in the intellect and it's artificial.  Its constructions are artificial – like Disney, with Epcot City.  He literally wanted to build a city under a glass dome and eliminate crime and eliminate poverty, apparently not thinking about the Greenhouse Effect of the glass dome – but these guys don't think about things like this.  They fall in love with a transcendent idea that implants into their brains a vision, and they follow the vision without thinking about what the consequences might be.  And then of course we've got experiments like Brazilia, and places like this, and also Henry Ford went into the jungles of the Amazon to try and build a place called Fordlandia, where he was exporting automobiles and American pop to the Amazon.  That failed too.  

So I'm always interested to hear these old utopian projects – because after all, we're going to need them.  The fact of the matter is that the civilization that we're in now has already hit its iceberg, and its two-hour time limit – during which it will sink for sure – has already passed.  We're at the point where you can't reverse this, now.  The hole has been torn in the side of the boat.  And as the character in James Cameron's film remarks, "She's made of iron, sir, and I assure you that she WILL sink."  It's going to happen.  The laws of physics already tell you it's going to sink. There's no way to stop the melting of the glaciers at this point!  It's irreversible.  You can maybe put some bandaids on it, slow it down, unscrew some lightbulbs, put up some solar panels – it's all fine, but it's not going to reverse the damage that's already been done.  There's too much C02 now in the atmosphere, and it's been put in too suddenly, to reverse this process.  The glaciers are going to melt.

So the experiment that we've created now – these world cities and their cosmopolitan interiors – are going to sink.  We know that the sea levels are going to rise and flood places like New York and Los Angeles and Miami, Bangladesh, New Orleans, Venice – they're all going to sink.  It's a 100% certainty.  We know this.  So we are going to need alternative ideas for living.  We're going to need ideas for alternative sustainable communities, but those communities are going to need to have to be designed in such a way as to be self-sustaining, but they've got to take into account refugee populations, which are going to rise and rise and rise as these catastrophes along our coastal cities proliferate and shift populations inland – just like New Orleans did.  It shifted refugee populations during Katrina as far West as out here in Phoenix; there were people taking up refuge here in our big coliseum.  So the inland populations are going to have to be designed in such a way that they can take in these refugees and build them in somehow, maybe as Europe has been doing with the Syrian reguees, taking them in.

But I am skeptical of utopian experiments.  I find them very entertaining, and I find utopian literature very entertaining, but it's always got a tragic flaw.  Every time I sit down with one of these books, recounting it, it's always like the beginning of a Greek tragedy.  You know the guy is doomed as soon as Agamemnon pulls up and starts bragging about his deeds, and gets out of his chariot with his inflated ego – you know the guy is in big trouble.  And it's fun to watch.