How to manage imagination and reason turning it a “good utopia”: Is such a thing possible (and desirable)?
Adriana Salinas, Academia da Forca Aerea
Oswaldo Melo Souza Filho, Academia da Forca Aerea
Mirivaldo Rosim, Academia da Forca Aerea
The society that is not able to yield a utopia for the world and sacrifice itself for it is threatened by sclerosis and ruin. E. M. Cioran
Considero a lo que llamo utopismo una teoría atrayente; pero también la considero peligrosa y perniciosa. Creo que es autofrustrante y que conduce a la violencia. K. R. Popper
And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; (…) And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. Isaiah (11:1,2,12)
From the end of the 1960’s until the beginning of the 1970’s when the youth movement, mostly in developed capitalist countries, challenged the truthful values of the industrial society and the American way of life, ecological concern roused by the young rebels was just viewed by the elders as an exotic bias of a regressive Utopia or a petit-bourgeois prejudice. The scientific work of the Club of Rome had not reached at that time the conscience of the ordinary citizen yet. Hippies, anarchists of all kinds, and democratic socialists that rejected both the totalitarian way of the Soviet Union and the capitalist rule of the USA and Europe aiming a fraternal society did not envisage their ideal of living from a state of misery, injustice and hunger. On the contrary, they were the privileged children of a bourgeoisie that enriched after the Second World War. Messianic movements back from the Jews in biblical times to the social insurrection of the Nineteenth century passing through the eschatological aspirations of the Middle Ages heresies are all instigated by a very miserable condition, a devastating crisis or a collapse of all the society. Hope was the fuel of these ancient movements. Hope is for the future. The young rebels just want a better life based on a more democratic way to organize all activities in society. They had no hope. They acted as to the here and now.
Now, after the fall of Berlin Wall that finished Cold War, and the revolution of the information technologies that created a network society we are facing a real menace: from global warming, political terrorism, religious fanaticism, overpopulation, scarcity of drinkable water, more and more limited supply of petroleum, up to criminal organizations getting global and stronger etc. How can we deal with this approaching catastrophe? What paradigm is there to change? Should we build a new Utopia? A new individualism has to be born? How do the organizations have to be settled?
Popper in the essay Utopia and Violence proposes a rational approach that discredited Utopias arguing that it is a product of a misleading rationalism that conditioned the action to a fixed objective which necessarily leads to dogmatism and violence. Messianic movements bring hope to a set of fixed objectives that not rarely is also structured in stimulating imagination. Hope is a very deep value of Christian tradition. How can we deal with hope without a framework projected in the future? Shall we renounce hope and lose imagination that motivates to action? Or shall we renounce rationalism and be in danger to fall in fanaticism and violence?