The Great Paradox 1: The Ideology of Optimism vs. Utopian Pessimism
Let's do a quick recap of what all of my recent blathering really adds up to:
- Very soon, the organization of American Life will totter and possibly topple. Specifically, the one-person/one-job and one-family/one-dwelling social form will not be able to bear the weight of a collapsing housing market, skyrocketing commodity costs (think oil and food), and ecological meltdown.
- From one perspective, what we'll call the Ideology of Optimism, this fading of the American Dream is an utter disaster. This Ideology of Optimism is just an intellectual description of this phenomenon, but it also happens to be the dominant mindset of our time.
- From another perspective, what we can call a Utopian Pessimism, this crisis in our current arrangements is a blessing in disguise. Why? Because our current way of life is profoundly unsustainable, and terminally dangerous if it is embraced in full by the population juggernauts of China and India
- There are many noble proposals floating around as solutions to our predicament: a Green New Deal, a Grassroots political revival, a green energy equivalent to putting a man on the moon, a profound localization of our economies, etc. And while many of these things will likely be an important part of our future, there is virtually no mainstream attention paid to the one-person/one-job, one-family/one-dwelling social form as the fundamental Achilles Heel of the whole thing. After all, it is this social form that drives everything else: overconsumption, misuse of space, an overly circular and self-referential service economy, extreme wasting of resources, species extinction, etc.
- The real Silver Bullet for the whole situation (and I am a staunch believer in Silver Bullets, because social change can come rather quickly, on occasion) is a recasting of the basic American social form into a community arrangement. Adults living in groups of 50 to 150 can tackle virtually every social, economic, and ecological problem at the same time, through their way of life itself. No super-pious altruism or "social activism" is needed when the power of scale is leveraged through group living.
- Community living will reap personal benefits on many levels: reduced depression, increased physical activity, robust social intercourse, and a position of strength vis-a-vis the job market. But even more importantly, a new American Community social form would provide a crucial model for other rapidly-industrializing countries. I'm not saying that countries like China and India will fall all over themselves to emulate the great American system. Those days are over, and many emerging economies are powerful enough in their own right, with enough resources to create their own versions of capitalism and modernity. All I'm saying is that if billions of people go down the hyper-individualist, uber-consumer road that America has already ridden into disaster, then the whole planet will go down for the count. But if we can create some kind of new model, we still have enough cultural cache with the world to make things interesting. People could look at an America reorganizing on community lines and say, "hey, maybe that's the cool new way of the future." In other words, our own sociocultural bankruptcy could prove to be our last great gift to civilization, but only if we can actually emerge out of it to something better.
- So how can we make this community change happen? If people really wanted to live in groups, wouldn't they already be doing it? And didn't we try the whole dirty hippie free-love thing already, and it didn't work? Didn't all those teenage boomers already give up their yurts and join honest society a long time ago? Well, yes and no. Most communes did come and go decades ago. But a vital and now growing group of individuals has been driving what's loosely called the Intentional Community movement for many years now. And they have proven to be consistently on the cutting edge of social and ecological issues. Solar energy? Bio-diesel? Local food production? You name a chic green issue today, and I'll bet you that Intentional Community members have been doing it for years. To see the great work of these communities, and how fast they are expanding, see www.ic.org
- So what is preventing us from giving a new community social form a try? In the first two posts of this blog (The Conservative Story and The Liberal Story), we reviewed the intellectual emptiness of our two main political parties. Conservatives and Liberals are so busy blaming each other for the decline of America, squeezing their bulbous, old, fat half-truths into the girdles of faulty narratives, that we cannot rely on them at all for leadership in the real world of facts. Unfortunately, we will actually need our major parties to step up to the plate for certain things, because as much as we like to think that social change comes from the bottom up, top-down reforms are also crucial. We will cover what the national political parties need to do in a later post.
- But in addition to our political vacuum, a major inhibitor to meaningful social change is what we can call the Ideology of Optimism. In the original Marxian sense, "ideology" is not a synonym for "ideas." Ideology is actually the accumulated weight of our social forms, all of the social, economic, and intellectual institutions and structures that undergird the status quo. In a sense, the sociological meaning of "ideology" is almost equivalent to society and culture combined. Ideology has awesome density and staying power. And when we talk about an Ideology of Optimism, we're actually going to see that the current structures lauding Progress and Economic Growth are actually retarding our efforts to find a new way forward. We are paradoxically crippled by our own optimism.
- What is actually needed is a new Utopian Pessimism. While this sounds ridiculous on its face, we'll see next time that it makes perfect sense. Following (crudely, I'm sure) some groundbreaking work by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, we'll see that a Utopian position is paradoxically the best and really only place from which to critique the status quo. As such, the ability to envision a profoundly different future is actually a highly pessimistic endeavor, as it relates to the current arrangements. A Utopian stance, especially of a communal stripe, is really a kind of hopeful pessimism. And it is absolutely needed to break through the dead-end debates of the current landscape.
Next time -- more on the bleakness of the Ideology of Optimism, and the hopefulness of Utopian Pessimism.
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