CHAPTER 1
THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION
Introduction
The overwhelming problems of the world have brought us
to the verge of species' extinction. To overcome such
extreme problems in human and environmental welfare requires
radical changes in our life-styles, family relationships,
world ethics, and general way of thinking about life. We
must move in a direction opposite to the destructive force
of world capitalism. In _The Nation_, Kirkpatrick Sale
writes,
What would it take to accomplish the serious,
wrenching, full-scale readjustments that in fact are
necessary to save the earth, including reduced
standards of living, consumption and growth; severe
population reduction; and a new, modest, regardful
relationship with the earth and its species? Who is
going to carry this literally vital message to the
American people? And when? For the time, as every new
crisis lets us know, is later than we think (595).
It is the task of the educator to direct us to a more
evolved state of consciousness where we can begin to plan a
solar-powered feminist civilization, or what I call,
Neutopia, where the ancient ills of racism, sexism,
classism, and the like have been eliminated. What are the
educational tools and who are the educators who can bring an
awakening of this worldwide magnitude? The German
philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, in his work _On the Arts_ states,
Poetry's chief task, it has been said, is to bring
to consciousness the powers of our spiritual existence:
all the to and fro in human passion and emotion or that
runs tranquilly through our thoughts--the full range of
human ideas, behavior, productivity, and all else that
pertains to the world's destiny or divine governance.
In this respect, poetry has been and is still mankind's
[sic] primary and most universal teacher. To teach and
learn means to know and experience for one's self what
is (144).
The poetic mission of education, to know thyself, has
been corrupted by the greed and short-term gains of the
military/industrial complex, so much so that "civilization"
is in a state of chaos. People have lost sense of the
meaning of life. War, crime, and oppression dominate the 24
hour news reports. An oligarchy, i.e., government by the
dominate clique of wealthy and politically powerful
families, channels the capitalistic ideology through
education and the mass media.
As the current situation continues to deteriorate, the
question is: are the wisest, most noble people with the
best judgment, abilities, and sense of global ethics in
charge of education and the media? Certainly, the answer
must be negative, since educators and the media have not
revolutionized our world into a just social order, but are
being used to stupefy the public in order to maintain the
destructive consumer behaviors of the status quo.
Now, it seems as though we live in a kakistocracy, a
government by the worst people who, lacking long-term vision
or social imagination, suppress enlightened visionaries, the
artistic and scientific mythmakers. Mechanistic
Neo-Darwinism and its technologies have become a brutal
enemies of the arts, humanities, and organic sciences. The
mystical, biospiritual parts of humankind's nature are being
swept out the doors of our institutes of higher learning.
In universities, for example, many interdisciplinary
programs and other academic efforts outside the mainstream
of traditional education are being eliminated in the name of
economics and budget restrictions. I suggest that the
reason may go deeper, for it is in these kinds of programs
that alternative visions are frequently born and seriously
considered--visions that can heal our sick world by
challenging the power relationships and restoring the
mission of the university to its idealistic purpose, to
produce creative happy individuals who will take
responsibility for solving the problems of the world. And
it is precisely these visions that a dying patriarchal
social order fears the most.
Seekers of wisdom today find it extremely difficult to
make it through higher education and then achieve positions
of authority. People who are attempting to revolutionize
the social fiction of the culture by using poetic approaches
to research are being crushed by the wheels of the
military/industrial mind-set who assert that in valid
scientific methodology the observer is separated from the
observed. This is in direct opposition to the Gaian
approach to science, which believes that the two are
inseparable. Microbiologist Lynn Margulis writes, "In the
autopoietic framework, everything is observed by an embedded
observer; in the mechanical world, the observer is objective
and stands apart from the observed" (Margulis 1991, 227).
The microcosm is within us. To understand science, we must
explore the self. By thinking intuitively and following the
wisdom of the ancient Delphic oracle--to know thyself--we
find the universal answers to our global problems.
The role of epic poetry is to reveal the inner depths
of our being so that we can understand our natural
surroundings. Poetic knowledge allows us to reason why
humanity has not been living in harmony with nature and what
we must do to correct our unjust behaviors. Recreating a
story based on harmony between the two sexes can put an end
to the war between the sexes and the environmental holocaust
caused by our lack of self-knowledge. The poetic
imagination exemplifies the art of love which is why Hegel
called the poet "the universal teacher." However, we must
go back to Plato's _Symposium_ to understand the real cause
of our lack of knowledge about the power of love and why the
poet has not become the universal teacher or the
philosopher-king.
Socrates claimed that the only thing he was
knowledgeable about was love; otherwise he was ignorant.
Even his knowledge of love was not first-hand, but mediated
through Diotima, an old woman of Mantinea. Carrin Dunne, in
her book, _Behold Woman: A Jungian Approach to Feminist
Theology_, asks what this tells us about the nature of love.
She writes,
First, that an understanding of Eros is not like
ordinary understanding since it is compatible with a
consciousness of ignorance; second, that there is a
feminine form of wisdom which goes beyond what can be
achieved through rational dialectic. What Socrates has
received from Diotima is both not his own in that he
did not/could not figure it out for himself, and most
profoundly his own since it emerges autonomously from
his innermost, feminine soul" (59).
One can argue that it is the female side of love which
makes men conscious of their ignorance and enlightens them
to reach for wisdom and truth. This could explain the
reason why the ancient goddess religions which created
peaceful cultures for thousands of years were founded not my
men, but by women. These women probably ruled through
religious symbolism.
In _Women of the Celts_, Jean Markale holds the same
opinion as Carrine Dunne of the role of the female deity in
creating social harmony. The goddess teaches man that "love
is altruistic and makes a thousand sacrifices." It is she
who makes man's body and soul. He cannot find fulfillment
without her. In turn, she needs him in order to become
conscious of herself, to be assertive, and to find out what
she can do. Markale writes, "The two sexes are inextricably
linked. Man needs woman, woman needs man. Translated into
mythological terms this becomes: man needs a goddess, and
the goddess needs a man" (146). It is, therefore,
impossible for there to be a prophet/philosopher without
union with his feminine counterpart. Consequently, it is
the wisdom of a female poetess/prophetess in union with the
prophet/philosopher--let us call their vital bond the Gaia
Messiah--who are savioress and savior of our species. The
intensity of their relationship generates the charismatic
power to stimulate others who come in contact with their
deeper reality. Their only alternative to the current world
situation is to revolutionize the "society that man built
without her" (146).
The epic poetess' mission and the purpose this study
is to promote Gaian science as a state of mind using myth as
a vehicle. William Irwin Thompson writes in his book _The
Time Falling Bodies Take to Light_, "There is now no way to
relate the evolution of the planet to the evolution of
humans except through myth. The truth is that myth and art
create the preconditions of consciousness out of which
science arises" (47-48). The mythopoetess is a weaver of
the public imagination, creating the moral fabric essential
for evolutionary development. She becomes the midwife to a
new heaven and a new earth, the doctress with the paradise
metaphor necessary to evolve humanity's collective awareness
to greater and more noble depths. Her incantations have the
power to cure our planetary diseases. She is the Great
Sorceress who heals, a philosopher-queen who finds an
alternative pathway for humanity to finally discover the
bliss of world peace.
In _The Fortunes of Epic Poetry_, Donald M. Foester
writes that Matthew Arnold held that science "will hereafter
be completed not by religion and philosophy, but by poetry,
the quality of which can be sensed even in a few lines of
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton" (213). Epic poetry,
the oldest of literary forms, envisions the way to create a
beautiful world. It is the direction science and technology
must ethically take in order to assist in the stupendous
effort to save the biosphere for eukaryotic life. It is the
Gaian matrix where all poetic genres as well as where and
the goddesses and gods originate.
However, the Dorian invasion of Greece destroyed the
peace-loving goddess-worshiping culture of the Minoan-
Mycenaean civilization. Doric poets rewrote the epics so
that the once all-powerful Great Goddess, in the persons of
Athena (Wisdom), Metis (Intelligence), Hera (Courage),
Themis (Justice) became subordinate to Zeus' rule. Metis,
Hera, and Themis were married to Zeus relegating them to
secondary roles. The worshippers of Athena, the virgin and
blessed Goddess would not permit her to be married to Zeus.
So instead the Dorians made her the daughter of Zeus. Zeus
was warned by the Delphic Oracle that if he had a daughter,
she would wrest his power away from him. In fear of loosing
control of the world, he ate Metis who was pregnant with
Athena. She remained there giving Zeus knowledge until
finally Athena burst forth from Zeus' head. So it was not
the mother who gave birth to Athena, but her father. This
unnatural order of birth reflected the change to a
patriarchal social order.
Background to the Study
This historical mythic background takes its
contemporary form in the modernist era of the Enlightenment,
the era of measure--of science and logos. It is my profound
conviction that this era is coming to an end. The basic
dichotomies of Enlightenment reason are no longer viable--
the divisions between rational/irrational, subject/object,
nature/culture, and mythos/logos. Enlightenment thought
favors the later masculine traits over the former, the
feminine. Feminists proclaim this male-centered
epistemology needs to radically change in order to liberate
the Source, the female spirit of truth (Hekman 1990).
Clearly the twentieth century has witnessed several
significant movements which challenge the tyranny of
Enlightenment reason, including education.
In the contemporary world we can then turn to education
to affect change. The re-emergence of the goddess as the
source of inspiration and the new program of Neutopia for
interdisciplinary education, creates a lovolutionary
consciousness and personality needed to develop the means to
rescue us from our dire situation. Unfortunately, education
is currently under the spell of the mechanical world-view of
the Enlightenment which, for example, treats doctoral
candidates as if they were mindless robots within the
bureaucracy. Dissertations are not considered to be works
of art, and therefore are not considered to be works of
wisdom, but in most cases are simply long academic papers
written to fulfill bureaucratic requirements. It seems to me
the reason why so many dissertations are written is not to
advance knowledge and be a source of liberation, but to
launch professional careers within the affluent society. In
_The Report of the President's Commission of Campus Unrest_,
the authors point out that the "American university was
traditionally a status-conferring institution for middle and
upper middle class families" (69). And Carl Roger writes in
his book _A Way of Being_,
The Ph.D. thesis has, in most universities, become a
travesty of its true purpose. To follow one's informed
curiosity into the mysteries of some aspect of human
nature, out of that rigorous, personal, independent
search to come up with a significant contribution to
knowledge--this is the true picture of the Ph.D; but
this is _not_ an accurate description of most doctoral
dissertations today. We have settled for safe
mediocrity, and frowned on creativity. If our concept
of science is to change, our departments must change.
If that change does not come about, psychology will
become more and more irrelevant to the search for the
truth of man [sic] (240).
As the transmitter of culture, the university has been
the way the oligarchy has maintained its control over
democratic values. To be creative and find one's own voice
is not accredited which means, it is almost impossible for
artists, who are often experts in the intuitive and occult
sciences, to receive doctorates for their discoveries.
The establishment allows for little diversity of
individual talents and skills to flourish within its
restrictive borders. One must follow the dictates of the
party line and form, or run the risk of not being awarded an
advanced degree. Some faculty are afraid to support
revolutionary ideas, even though they may sympathize with
them, for fear of losing their jobs. In James Gleick's
book, _Chaos_, about a new scientific theory, he writes,
Then there are revolutions. A new science arises out of
one that has reached a dead end. Often a revolution has
an interdisciplinary character--its central discoveries
often come from people straying outside the normal bounds
of their specialties. The problems that obsess these
theorists are not recognized as legitimate lines of
inquiry. Thesis proposals are turned down or articles are
refused publication (37).
"The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom
and Tenure," agreed upon by the American Association of
University Professors and the Association of American
Colleges and endorsed by numerous professional associations,
states that "institutions of higher education are conducted
for the common good and not to further the interest of
either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.
The common good depends upon the free search for truth and
its free exposition." This suggests that the university is
a neutral site within society, a place open to all ideas
(Academe 1986). However, the statement goes on to say that
teacher must "be careful not to introduce into his [sic]
teaching controversial matter which has no relation to his
[sic] subject." Does this mean that a teacher is not
permitted to be a philosopheress or philosopher of life and
to participate in the critical social issues of the day if
she or he is a teacher of science? Thomas A. Dutton and
Bradford C. Grant write in their essay, "Campus Design and
Critical Pedagogy," "Schools can never be understood as
neutral sites, removed from the conflicts of society. On
the contrary schools are inherently complicated in the
political, social, cultural, and economic relations of
society" (Dutton and Grant 1991).
In the 1960's and early 1970's when students were
demanding teachers to take responsibility for social
injustices all around them, specifically the Vietnam War,
which to a large degree was being perpetuated by the
educated class, many teachers felt it was their duty to move
the counter-culture into the classroom. This went against
the 1940 principles by bringing controversial issues into
the classroom situation. Nevertheless, bringing the
controversy into the classroom served to fulfill the
teacher's greater commitment to the public good as well as
the teacher's duty to be the spokespeople of truth.
The belief that the university is a place of freedom
of expression was challenged by the Free Speech Movement at
the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of
1964. After campus officials suspended students for setting
up tables which advocated political activity off-campus, the
hypocrisy of officials stating that the university was a
neutral site became clear. That Administration did not
tolerate dissenters exposed its own political bias.
Administrators feared student protest might lead to
social anarchy. Certainly, much of the student protest
movement was anarchistic which could account for its
ultimate failure to revolutionize the culture. The weakness
and the demise of the counter-culture was that it did not
have a clear program to follow its revolutionary overthrow.
A new moral philosophy was not available at that time so
that the student rights movement became just a stance
against the academic machine, not a complete change-over to
a deeper sense of truth. The feminist world-view became
grouped with other liberation movements in pluralist America
and so was easily marginalized by the Establishment.
The 1960's idealism was a prelude to what must happen
to university campuses throughout the world to re-establish
human integrity. Yet graduate programs continue to work as
if the female doctoral student does not know what is best
for her. In many cases she must conform to the established
patriarchal ideology. There is little chance for her to
question and challenge the authenticity of the ideology and
its underlying assumptions. Faculty should be there to help
students achieve their goals, give them constructive
criticism, challenge their ideas, and be leaders in the
quest for Truth. Their job should not be to hamper and
stifle one's creativity, or to assign them with busy work
which only wastes their valuable time.
If a student can not find members of the faculty to
support their research projects, there should be a
democratic public forum where students could appeal their
dissertation proposals. Now, there exists no such forum in
American universities, which means that projects which go
beyond the paradigm of Enlightenment reason have difficulty
finding faculty members who are willing to go out on a limb
and challenge the ruling elite. Unfortunately, there are a
few members of the faculty whom I have met who have the
courage to seek non-traditional and alternative ways to
knowledge in finding the cures for our social problems.
The educational system is a reflection of what
is happening to the society as a whole. For the most part,
creative people who have the resources to make our planet a
healthy and beautiful place to live remain unacknowledged
and are forced to find employment in unfulfilling and
meaningless jobs. Since democracy is about the right of the
individual to express her or his liberty in a collective
way, one can conclude that the essence of democracy has been
exiled from campus life. During a tape recorded interview
with Mario Savio during the 1964 sit-in at Sproul Hall at
the University of California at Berkeley, Savio says,
Many students here at the university, many people in
society, are wandering aimlessly about. Strangers in
their own lives, there is no place for them. They are
people who have not learned to compromise, who for
example have come to the university to learn to
question, to grow, to learn--all the standard things
that sound like cliches because no one takes them
seriously. And they find at one point or other that
for them to become part of society, to become lawyers,
ministers, businessmen, people in government, very
often they must compromise those principles which were
most dear to them. They must suppress the most
creative impulses that they have; this is a prior
condition for being part of the system (Draper 1965).
Consequently, the committee system in graduate schools
can be seen as an extension of the Oedipus Complex. The
doctoral committee becomes God the Father who has the
almighty power to grant one a degree which could be
translated as food and shelter. In Rosemarie Tong's book,
_Feminist Thought_, she paraphrases the ideas of Juliet
Mitchell. Tong writes,
In so far as the Oedipus complex is the vehicle of
patriarchy, it represents what must be destroyed if
women are to be liberated. But given that the Oedipus
complex is patriarchy's expression of the individual's
entry into culture, if it is destroyed, nonpatriarchal
society must find a substitute for it or deteriorate
into disordered, unlawed chaos (170).
Feminism challenges not only our particular social
arrangements, "but the very foundations of Western thought
and social structure," that is, male privilege (Hekman 1990,
154). Neutopia gives us a feminist program which breaks
through the Oedipus Complex to build a movement of
world-wide evolutionary change.
One can conclude that many faculty members are
concerned more with the fate of their biological families,
middle-class comforts, and protecting their private
interests, than about working for planetary justice. We are
at a turning point in history where we must realize our
private everyday habits are causing the destruction of the
biosphere. For us to evolve as a species, we must break
through the incest barrier of our domestic and public lives,
and began to connect with a pattern of development which is
in balance with the Cosmos.
The student protest movement and the counter-culture in
the 1960's made an attempt to break the incest barrier by
demanding human rights and decision-making power. Students
were fed up with the adult world determining their
educational experiences which were antiquated and unable to
solve local and global problems. The movement focused on
the social problems and injustices which needed to be
addressed in order to create a just world. It stressed the
need for education to foster individual creativity and
imagination to build the good society while rejecting the
"operational ideals of American society: materialism,
competition, rationalism, technology, consumerism, and
militarism" (President's Commission, 52). Women and
minority students were demanding an equal voice in world
affairs. Not only were the old social values of capitalism
being destroyed by the movement, but an alternative vision
of communalism was being explored threatening to end the
traditional nuclear family arrangement, which is the basic
economic unit within the patriarchal world-view.
Presently, the general tendency seems to be that
students in graduate programs must become "brownnosers" who
serve the committee with complete obedience. The entire
graduate process turns out to be a nasty political game in
which the revolutionary thinker, the juno or genius, is seen
as a threat to the status quo, and is usually forced into
the position of an Outsider. Author Colin Wilson points out
in his book _Religion and the Rebel_,
We can formulate this rule, then: The ideal social
discipline is the one that takes fullest account of the
men of genius. When society no longer has such
discipline, the men of genius become Outsiders: they
feel lost; they no longer seem to fit into the social
body" (131).
Wilson says that there were historical periods when the
Outsiders have fit perfectly within the social discipline.
He says that during the Middle Ages the Church provided the
atmosphere for "everyone in society, from the highest
intellectual types to the meanest artisan" to contribute to
the glory of the Church. He continues, "And this has been
true of every "church" in history--Hindu, Buddhist,
Zarathustrian, Taoist, Mahometan. When these churches were
at the height of their health and strength, there were no
"Outsiders"" (132).
Of course, the Church did not provide all people with
the means to be creative since woman were not allowed
positions of prophecy in the hierarchy of male-dominated
religious thought. And so women, who possess the knowledge
of love, remained the unacknowledged outsiders in a world
which has never understood or accepted this infinite power
of the Cosmos. The majority of men have ignored its charms,
rejected it as impossible, and condemned it as an
abnormality. Wilson asks, "Is the Outsider strong enough to
create his own tradition, his own way of thought, and to
make a whole civilisation think the same way?" But the real
question seems to be, in the case of woman, is, she strong
enough to transform his destructive behaviors in the
positive direction of rebuilding Gaia's temple? Wilson
finally admits,
The moment we begin to consider the great Outsiders, or
the saints and mystics, we are forced to recognize that
man does not know who he is. And our materialistic
civilization, which seems so certain of itself and
its aims, only helps to hide man from himself (149).
Aim of the Study
In light of the foregoing, this dissertation is
essentially a study in understanding. It is less an effort
to amass empirical data, quantify it, and draw conclusions
than to engage in a theoretical and speculative study to
comprehend our present dilemma as it suggests alternative
directions for building a new and better society--Neutopia.
This is a futurist approach to studies in global problems;
our species is in extreme crisis requiring extreme
solutions.
To many people these radical solutions may seem far out
and outrageous. More than one faculty member has advised me
to compromise my ideas in order to get the degree. They say
I must choose my battles and wait until after I graduate to
fight the system which I know to be against human nature and
the organic structure of the biosphere. Being a doctoral
candidate in education, I cannot separate myself from my
present situation and simply ignore the moral corruption
within the institution. If I prostitute my ideas in order
to receive a degree, what will my degree mean if I have lost
my autopoietic integrity? My research will then lose its
power to create change and therefore defeat the reason for
this painstaking effort.
From Plato's _Republic_ to Thomas More's _Utopia_, to
Francis Bacon's _The New Atlantis_, Western literature is
replete with utopian ideas. Yet these ideal societies never
came to fruition. In this study I will not attempt a
utopia, but attempt a synthesis of the best ideas of utopian
literature in order to create a blue-print, however vague,
for building a humanistic global civilization.
In this sense, my dissertation symbolizes the move from
logos to mythos, giving educators a new/old foundation to
understand the Cosmos. Philosopheress Susan K. Langer
writes in _Philosophy in a New Key_, "It is a peculiar fact
that every major advance in thinking, every epoch-making new
insight, springs from a new type of symbolic transformation.
A higher level of thought is primarily a new activity; its
course is opened up by a new departure in semantic" (200).
Epic poetry can provide us with the new semantic.
In Gisela Labouvie-Vief's essay, "Wisdom as integrated
thought: historical and developmental perspectives," he
points out the difference between mythos and logos. Mythos
means "speech, narrative, plot, or dialogue." Mythos is a
holistic approach to knowledge where the thought and thinker
are one indivisible unit. Labouvie-Vief writes, "The object
of thought is not articulated separately from the
motivational and organismic states of the thinker; rather
the thinker's whole organism partakes in the articulation of
the object and animates it with its own motives and
intentions" (Sternberg 1990, 56). From the bond between the
knower and the known derives the meaning of the experience.
This existential point of view regards the individual as one
who is involved in the universe, not just a mere spectator.
Guiding Questions
In understanding the movement from logos to mythos it
is necessary to explore the function of epic poetry and its
role in providing a new foundation for global education.
This will entail extensive interdisciplinary research into
the study of the future. I will attempt to weave together
different fields of study into a holistic pattern to create
Neutopian thought.
A series of questions will focus the discussion for
each field of study:
1. Central to an attempt of this sort is the idea of
creating world peace. What is the nature of philosophic
love (the desire for knowledge) in creating a peaceful
world? What is the nature of erotic love (the desire for
human community)? What is the relation of these kinds of
love and how do they relate to change? How does love create
a new meaning between the sexes? What kind of environment
fosters love to grow between the people of the world?
2. Equally important are politics and the related
studies of ecology, history and sociology in understanding
the planetary conflicts. What are the lessons to be learned
from our environment which is being destroyed by the failed
political systems of the military/industrial complex? What
are the origins of "Western Civilization" which have caused
the environment to deteriorate?
3. Then we shall ask the question: how do children
visualize "home?" Why has the "home" been the place of
women's oppression? To answer this question we will look at
the two basic archetypes in architecture: the aedicule and
the trilithon. Finally, we will discuss the reason for the
failure of modern architecture to cure our ancient social
ills.
4. A new world, a reformed environment must be re-
built from the old and built anew. What are the lessons to
be learned from the failures of science, technology and
ethics since the inception of the Enlightenment? Do we have
the blue prints to create an environment which is
ecologically sound? Paolo Soleri and Buckminster Fuller
figure largely in dealing with these issues. We shall also
look at the Biosphere II experiment as an archetypal change
in architecture.
5. The question of leadership is crucial to the
formation of Neutopia. Much of my research will focus on
the problem of the "creative minority" and their place
within the evolutionary process. What is the role of the
hera and the hero in manifesting Neutopian thought? How can
education promote meritorious excellence while ensuring
democratic egalitarianism? Frequently, the best individuals
withdraw from society into solitude to formulate their
insights into a culture. Through their creative example
they emerge from their solitude with the power to stimulate
the masses to challenge the tyrannical forces. However,
Toynbee warns that if the new leaders of creativity become
relaxed and lazy, or harsh and tyrannical, the revolutionary
activity will break down. Then the creative minority
becomes but another dominant minority who acquire power by
privilege. When this happens the juno or genius once again
becomes the outsider. Is this inevitable?
6. Beauty is a necessary ingredient to any human
project; therefore, artistic considerations will be of
primary importance as I attempt to outline a new philosophy
of art. What does magic and alchemy do in helping to create
a new global civilization? My study will then carry us to
the edge of time as we ponder various forms of divination to
discover the workings of prophetic insight into the poetic
language of the One World Mind. The goal of my
dissertation, as Marx says about the goal of life, is not
"only to interpret the world, but to change it." To change
the world we will see that we must break our maternal ties
with Mother Earth and begin a new relationship with the
Crone Goddess in order to have the wisdom necessary for
planetary management.
Since ancient times religious writings have rendered
the basic teaching within a particular culture giving the
culture moral fiber essential for the growth of a collective
vision. The task of the epic poetess is to be sensitive to
the story of the age and to personalize the story from
within her own life. Consequently, she becomes the
spokeswoman for the collective needs of the people. In _One
World Religion_, Kenneth L. Patton writes, "When we cease
ascribing the religious scriptures to the revelation of the
gods, to whom then do we credit for the bibles of humanity?
There is only one possible answer: we must thank the poets
of the human race" (125).
I feel as though I did not choose the epic, but the
epic chose me, as if I have become driven with divine
madness. The greek root for "mad" is "mei," which means "to
change, go, or move," as seen in such words as "permeate,
permut, transmute, molt, mutate, migrate" (Dunne 1989, 58).
Dunne writes,
The Dionysiac mind is one which moves past human
boundaries, and is perhaps the dissolution of those
boundaries, of the properly human form, which feels
to us like anger if we identify with the human form, or
like ecstasy if we identify with the mind which moves
past it. It ranges both above and below the human
limits into the unthinkable and the unconditional,
the unbearable and the inexhaustible, the immoral and
the immortal, the outrageous and the outstanding (Dunne
1989, 58).
The Dioysiac mind is irrational or superrational. It
is the mind of the Muses of poetry, prophecy, and the arts,
a state of mind beyond human control, understanding, or
explanation, even though it is not beyond apprehension and
exploration. Dunne writes, "It is the deeper and larger
mind which gives birth to, sustains and supports, and
finally tears apart, chews up, and swallows into
semi-oblivion a rational thought process (a philosophy, a
scientific theory, a political system, a psychology), only
to spit forth another fresher one instead" (Dunne 1989, 58).
Abraham H. Maslow believes the goal of education is to
help one find one's bliss. Certainly, this epic helped me
to find my bliss. The new story, which must be told, is one
which brings the alienated souls of human beings back in
touch with the divine microbial Superorganism, the one inner
truth of existence, so that we will have a common
understanding in which to be able to communicate between
ourselves and build a planetary culture of love and peace.
CHAPTER 2
A NEUTOPIAN ALTERNATIVE:
TRANSFORMING THE GLOBAL SHOPPING MALL
Introduction
There is an urgent message in much of the material I am
exposed to as a futurist through books, magazines,
television documentaries, lectures, seminars, conferences,
and personal intuition. It all seems to reach a similar
conclusion, that is, we must attempt to change the values in
nearly every field of human endeavor to come together to
form a new planetary urban design for our cities, or witness
the destruction of human life on earth. This chapter will
serve as a review of futurist literature as it pertains to a
new social vision. Futurist Willis W. Harman, in responding
to the issue of what it will take to prevent nuclear war
writes,
The answer: a total change of mind-set around the
globe. Nothing less. Nuclear arms control and
non-proliferation efforts won't do it. Peace research
and teaching non-violence won't do it. Surely more
annihilative weapons on both (or all) sides won't do
it. Essentially: a total change of mind-set (Farren
1983, 55).
Of course a total change in mind-set means a totally
new way of living and such a new way of life brings us to
the focus of this chapter: the urgent need for a
revolutionary philosophy to enact a world neutopian city
design. Murry Bookchin writes, "The goal of revolution,
today, must be the liberation of daily life. Any revolution
that fails to achieve this goal is counter-revolutionary"
(Kostelanetz 1971, xxxii). For the first time through city
design we can build highly sophisticated space-age cities
which liberate us from the toil of our daily lives, cities
where our creativity is nourished, not obliterated, cities
where creativity is the basis of the prestige system, and
not a source of alienation as they are now. As well, the
space we occupy sets the conditions of the way of life.
Hence our perspective, the background to underlying
existence is determined by where we live. It is up to
futurists to revolutionize the way of dreaming about the
future: thinking, playing, and working so that we can begin
building cities which are founded on new, truly humanistic
values.
The Need for a Long-term Vision
In order to build a new city design we must evolve
beyond the short-term economic and cultural goals which do
not provide long-term survival. Kenneth E. F. Watt writes,
in his essay "Planning--So There Will Be a Future," that
contemporary society is based on an instant culture which
means that we are unwilling to "sacrifice short-term
pleasures for long term benefits" (Fadimen & White 1971,
110). He illustrates his point by informing the reader that
the three large pyramids of ancient Egypt took about twenty
years each to construct. The average life span of people at
that time was about 35 years. Thus the ancient Egyptians
were willing to begin a project that would take over
half-a-lifetime to complete. Another example of long-term
projects are the cathedrals of the 11th, 12th, and 13th
centuries which took several generations to complete. In
modern America, the race to the moon, the most ambitious
project we have undertaken, took 12 years to complete, about
one-sixth the average life span of a person.
Redesigning the world so that everyone will have a
decent and creative future requires people to evolve beyond
short-term pleasures for long-term visions of the future.
Without working towards long-term visions, the instant
culture remains oblivious to long-term problems and needs,
as for example, the problem of hunger and where food will be
grown in the future when the soils of prime farmlands are
completely depleted of nutrients or converted into tract
housing. Professor Daniel Hillel gave an excellent example
of this in his recent lecture entitled, "Soil, Water, and
Civilization," at the University of Massachusetts. He
said that the modern-day Egyptians use bricks to build their
houses. However, the bricks cannot be made out of the sand
of the desert, so farmers of the Nile delta are selling
their soil to make bricks for their houses.
Such instant culture is unfulfilling; furthermore it is
dangerous. Manufactures make artifacts not for long-lasting
benefits and recyclability, but for short-term use for big
turnovers and profits. Artifacts should be made to be
long-lasting, bringing worker's pride back into the craft or
product. A sense of making materials to the best of one's
ability is essential to the de-alienation of labor.
The results of our instant culture have lead us on two
destructive paths: 1) the prospect and preparation for
nuclear war and 2) the dramatic climatic changes due to the
burning of fossil fuels and the cutting down of the world's
forests on a massive scale which started during
industrialism. Even if war was to be abolished, the
environmental holocaust would still be haunting us as we
continue to develop the land in impractical, short-term
ways. In _The Nature of Cities_, Kenneth R. Schneider
writes,
I suspect that Western philosophy, which laid superb
foundations for science, did not provide society with
ways to avoid the environmental debacle we now face.
No minds set forth a vision of a liberal environmental
or urban order comparable to the contributions of Locke
and Hume to the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. Consequently, we are in a society that
wildly exploits the natural environment and blithely
builds destructive urban environments (253).
The Good City
The ancient Greeks realized that the good life meant
the good city. It was said the heart of civilization is the
city. In the Greek city-state the civic center was also the
home of the city's deities: the acropolis. The acropolis
was the place of intellectual debate and conversation.
However, the acropolis was eventually superseded by the
agora, the market-place. Alas, post-modern cities are still
a product of the market-place. Buildings are randomly built
without a concept of the whole city. There are no adequate
public places in our cities where artists and intellectuals
come together to discuss solutions for the problems we face.
Schneider affirms, "Up to now, the city has attracted broad
imagination or inspiration only in its fragments, not in its
wholeness. The whole city deserves attention as one of the
most liberating integrators of human wisdom, sensibility
and, inevitably, power" (Schneider 1979, 20).
The human race has failed to envision an evolved image
of the city. Modern cities are divided so that urban
parcels are isolated. Together the urban parcels make up a
fragmented city. In the United States the largest sector of
the built environment is made up of the "suburban sprawl."
This sprawl consists of class-segregated, single-family
homes served by shopping malls and commercial strips
connected by freeways.
Slavery to the House
The nuclear family home is expected to be a
self-sufficient society. This situation is structurally
anti-feminist since private kitchens, laundry rooms, and
home childcare re-enforce the image of the women's place in
the home. Polly Wynn Allen's book, _Building Domestic
Liberty_, describes the vision of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1869-1935). Allen explains that Gilman felt it was unfair
to expect married women to become experts in cooking,
childcare, cleaning, home management, and nursing: in
effect, to become house-servants. Allen writes, "the home
was preventing children from learning the meaning of social
justice" (73). Children were raised to depend on the social
injustice, not to question it. Gilman felt it was futile to
seek social change outside the home which when it was the
home was the source of the injustice.
A key to our liberation and survival is creating a
partnership society, a society were women have the same
accesses to achieving empowerment and social responsibility
as men. In _The Chalice and the Blade_, Riane Eisler
writes, "the direction of cultural evolution--including
whether a social system is warlike or peaceful--depends on
whether we have a partnership or a domination social
structure" (28). Nature, women, and children have been
dominated and repressed by the androcracy (government by the
male sex) which has imposed its "man-made environment." In
the late twentieth century we have begun to realize that a
woman's place is not in the home; however, we continue to
live as if this was so. City growth has not evolved to meet
the needs of the liberated mother. Earlier in the century,
Trotsky realized that the Russian revolution had failed
because it didn't bring about a change in family relations.
In order to change family relations a new holistic
architectural plan of the city is essential.
One reason why women's liberation and a redefinition of
the home is a key to our planetary survival is that it has
been proven that when women have satisfying, creative, and
socially responsible roles other than wives and motherhood,
the population rate declines even more than when birth
control methods and family planning education are available.
In order to control the population rate, women need cities
which support and encourage their public and creative
aspirations. The nuclear family house discourages women
from pursuing meaningful life-long work since the
maintenance and mortgage of the house and other family
pressures make it extremely difficult for women to pursue
creative dreams. The fabricated consumerist's dreamhouse
becomes the slave house as both parents work at unfulfilling
jobs to pay the rent. During the "Symposium on Politics and
Architecture" at the University of Pennsylvania, Hans Harms
said that "individual houses, whether done by Nazis or by
suburban builders here, prescribe a certain life style.
They isolate people and help to sell consumer products to
separate nuclear families. They also tend to reinforce
existing hierarchies and sexist separations" (Collins
and Placzek 1980, 168). Since the nuclear family is an
exclusive group, the "isolated family tries to have several
children in order to create a mini-community" (Ruether 1975,
208).
Rosemary Ruether states that in order to control the
population we must move into communal, child-rearing
residential groups. She believes that
In a communal family, children would grow up with a
sense of a large group of "brothers and sisters." A
bonding of children of a group of families would
develop, extending the child's own peer group and also
gaining relations with a large group of other adults
who are personally concerned with her or him. The
personal child-parent relationship would not be
destroyed, but it would be supplemented by a larger
group of siblings, mothers and fathers, and older
brothers and sisters, much as is the case today where
the family is still rooted in clan and tribe. Adults
who do not have their own children would also have an
opportunity to nurture and develop the lives of
children. Children would have a sense of a variety
of other adults, older children and peers to whom then
could turn for resources that might not exist in their
immediate families. Fifty adults might have between
them about twenty or twenty-five children which would
still afford a bountiful community of children, but
rapidly return the population to a level which the
earth would be better able to support" (208-209).
Ruether insists that a new communalized architecture is
needed to achieve these family arrangements, an architecture
which "balances private and corporate dimensions of life"
(208). She places this necessary change in context to a
"new urban planning to integrate living with work" (208).
A New Communal Architecture
Plans to create a new communal architecture are seen as
threatening to the very foundation of American family life
since communalism subverts the whole idea of private
property. John P. Dean writes in _Home Ownership: Is it
Sound?_, that communalism "is probably the most radical
solution to the need for shelter, both in the sense of its
romantic recall of simple, primitive society and in its
disavowal of property-ownership and family ties" (242).
Certainly this fear of communalism, by builders and
realtors, was witnessed when PWA public housing in the
United States provided better shelter and more social
services than private housing. In 1934, Charles Ascher
wrote that low-cost housing could not only provide cheap
shelter, but could be a prototype for a new way of living
with "community laundries, organized adult education and
recreation, forums, libraries, pre-school child rearing and
care, [and] consumers' cooperatives" (Friedman 1968).
Realtors and builders claimed that the attractiveness
of public housing was discouraging people from moving into
home ownership (Wright 1981, 227). And so, public housing
was reduced to having no public services and located in
undesirable locations. Lawrence M. Friedman writes in
_Government and Slum Housing_, the "Urban renewal program,
as it exists, was not designed as a plan to solve the
housing problems of the poor, nor has it acted as such.
Without radical change, it never will." He quotes James W.
Rouse who says that slum clearance and public housing is an
exercise in futility since it is the whole city which had to
be revolutionized in order to create "self-contained
neighborhoods which have a soul, a spirit and a healthy
pride--neighborhoods which people will vigorously defend
against the forces of decay" (140).
Planet Metropolis
Our failure to envision an evolved world/city has
brought some people to the conclusion that humanity has not
reached a civilized state yet. Bruce Gross writes, "We find
no other animal species that has been as savagely
destructive as humankind. In moral terms, civilization is
something that has not yet existed...might humankind perhaps
build the first civilized human society?" (Schneider 1979,
288).
Today it is difficult to determine where the city
begins and the rural area starts. The market-place city has
become a malignance on the surface of the earth. The desire
for the isolated home which fragments the city is one of the
major, if not the major, cause for _the_ destruction of the
earth's ecology.
Our society makes people cruel, criminal, sick, and
ugly by trapping us into the filthy air of urban decay or
imprisoning us in the isolation of suburbia. Soil, air, and
water is carcinogenic; housing is alienating. The planet
is quickly becoming, according to Robert Jungk, a "planet
metropolis." Our cities are growing into one another,
cutting out wilderness areas, and causing the extinction of
thousands of plants and animals. For instance the eastern
coastline is becoming completely suburbanized from Boston to
Washington, called "Boswash," with a population of 80
million people. "Chipitz" extends from the Great Lakes,
Chicago to Pittsburgh where 40 million people live. Another
example of the same situation developing outside of the
United States is the area from Tokyo to Osaka extending over
600 miles. We are slowly becoming one universal city which
is basically as anti-ecological and anti-human as it is
technological. They could only have been made possible by
the automobile.
Scheider asserts that the city has been destroyed by
the private automobile. In the United States, two and three
car garages are filled with upwards of more than 100 million
privately owned cars. In developing nations these garages
would be adequate housing by themselves. The United States
is 13th in world population, but use 41% of the passenger
cars to support its American life-style. Edward Cornish, in
his book _The Study of the Future_, points out that "neither
the American people nor their representatives in Congress
ever voted to accept the automobile, for which they pay such
a terrible price" (7). The automobile was never
intelligently discussed as to its effects on human life, but
was introduced and institutionalized by the market-place.
As the suburban sprawl continues to grow our
civilization is, in the Greek sense, losing its heart: its
cities. Scheider continues,
Cities are a multicause, multieffect failure of our
society. The failure of science and technology,
economics and bureaucracy, politics and democracy,
tradition and philosophy. Although each of these
spheres of endeavor has achieved success
separately--spectacularly in some cases--together
they have failed to create an efficient, congenial, and
sociable environment for people in cities (Scheider
1979, 35).
Lust for Isolation
The first Americanized word in the English language was
created on the Mayflower in the Plymouth Harbor. The men on
board drew "lots" to decide which parcels of land they would
own in the new world. "Lots" is the first Americanized
English word, establishing the American dream of
privately-owned home ownership. The dream of home ownership
needs rewriting, since we must look beyond it to dream of a
new vision where everyone lives in peace with food, shelter,
education, a clean environment, material equality, and a
good government. For only a new world dream can build new
communal, hightech, solar-powered cities which are free from
the automobile and the pollution of fossil fuels.
In order to evolve beyond the post-modernist nightmare,
we must re-define the concept of property and the American
dream. Scheider spells out the problem of "the classic
American house,"
the one-family dwelling on a one-family lot, is
designed to achieve isolation and separation almost to
the extent of one's means. The more affluent an
individual becomes, the more that person's status and
resources impel him or her into social exclusion and
defensive isolation. Common spaces, common facilities,
mutual interest organizations, and interpersonal bonds
are lacking, almost forbidden, in the channels of
social action (Scheider 1979, 186).
A case of this lust for isolation was witnessed in 1989
in the Massachusetts courts. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
bought one of the last pieces of Wampanoag Indian land on
Gay Head which sits in the middle of her 370-acre estate.
The beach front area in dispute was 1.5 acre. By
consolidating her holdings Mrs. Onassis felt her summer home
and guest house would be more private, secluded, and secure.
One will never be a free person by escaping to a
luxurious estate. It is in the city designed for the
harmonious interaction between people where freedom lies.
Schneider writes, "Reduced to its essence, the human
significance of all theory and design of the city is
freedom" (Schneider 1979, 300). The good city is a place
where "sharing land and exchanging skills, wealth,
resources, creativity, and human warmth enormously en-
larges the skills, resources, and humanity of everyone"
(98). Through building a sharing city we will find our
humanity and the beginning of a worldwide renaissance. The
individual needs the city in order to self-actualize for
without a sense of community the personality is paralyzed:
this is because the interpersonal nexus is the most
important part of human existence. Schneider writes, "The
city is society's most positive and complete human creation,
at once shaping the human dream and manifesting our progress
towards that dream" (177). The dream of a new city design,
designed to provide adequate private and communal space
allowing everyone equal access to the pursuit of happiness,
is an essential evolutionary. An architectural blueprint of
a holistic city design allows the individual to see the
collective plan.
The Alienation of the Built Environment
Schneider believes that the real threat to human
freedom is not repressive governments but "building a
chaotic and profoundly restrictive set of environments which
then multiply the social and organizational forces of
alienation" (209). Hegel is the philosopher who coined the
word "alienation." He defined it as "a separation of
existence from essence." Or as Schneider phrases
it, "a separation of life from experience" (215). The
technology of television has especially entrenched our
culture in alienation. We rarely come together to dance or
play music now that we can watch it on T.V. We have
separated ourselves from ourselves, building structures
which reinforce our anti-social behavior. Schneider also
points out that we have tried to cure alienation through the
professions of "psychiatry, group therapy, counseling,
probation, social work, police, attorneys, and judges"
(215). Schneider writes, "By focusing on the alienated
person rather than on the sources of alienation throughout
urban society, such professions help perpetuate what they
were created to cure" (215).
In the right environmental setting, encouraged and
assisted, Schneider says "people love to sing, perform,
play, dance, demonstrate, parade, draw, paint, design, form,
build, fashion, read, study, theorize, write, search,
compose, experiment, teach, recreate. They perform these
activities best when individuals and groups can associate,
interact, cooperate, and compete freely and creatively"
(24). The marketplace city does not promote these
vibrant creative experiences; rather we experience inhumane
environments. Schneider asks us to think about how human an
environment it is to walk down a traffic island at rush
hour.
An Ecological Revolution
The editors of _Global Ecology_, John P. Holdren and
Paul R. Ehrlich write,
There are no panaceas for the mess we are in. Neither
green revolutions, nor population control, nor all the
technology man can muster will alone salvage the
future. What is required is no less that a revolution
in human behavior, one which embodies fundamental
reforms in our economic and political institutions,
coupled with the wisest technological enterprises, the
necessary ingredient of population control, and a new
perception of man's [sic] place in nature. Since such
a revolution must embrace all the relationships which
bind man to his fellows [sic] and to the living and
nonliving environment, it is appropriate to call it "an
ecological revolution" (1).
An ecological revolution requires a change in urban
design creating a new consciousness which can foster a new
form of governance. One experiment in such a new urban
design is the arcology, a word coined by Paolo Soleri by
combining the words architecture and ecology to describe his
design for a new urban environment for the 21st Century.
Acologies function as centers of education: every part of
the city is part of the university where people of all ages
have access to information, instruction, and places to
follow their intuitions and interests. Presently, a
bureaucracy governs the university system in the United
States; in an arcology, the university/city system is
governed by a meritocracy of an open body elite of
educators, a system where the scholars, artists, and
scientists are involved in creating and educating the masses
to a common world vision. In _What Will It Take to Prevent
Nuclear War?_, Norie Huddle declares, "We need to image a
shared positive vision of the future, one so inspiring we
can all basically agree that it would constitute a better
way" (Farren 1983, 55).
For the first time in history we now have the ability
to create "leisure cities," automated megastructures which
allow every individual the time and means to self-actualize.
In these arcologies no juno or genius would go undiscovered
or wasted. Justus Dahinden states, "leisure activities
involve participation, a change from the working routine,
and a recreational occupation free from group rivalry and
egotism. It has a genuinely recuperative effect and is only
possible within a rehumanized urban environment" (Dahinden
1972, 93). The meaning of leisure in Greek is "learning,"
therefore, leisure cities are places where learning, the
creative life-force, guides society on a progressive future
path. In the cities, citizens will seek to do work that
they love, and through this love they will find out what
they do best and hence find their role in society. Work and
leisure will fuse together allowing the individual the
freedom to pursue her or his innate knowledge.
How can one even imagine the kind and quality of a
society which is working on such a large and long-term plan?
In the 1960's we were on the verge of such a revolutionary
consciousness, however, as Hannah Arendt wrote in _Crisis of
the Republic_,
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The
revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying
in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed
uprising by itself has never yet led to a revolution.
Nevertheless, what could pave the way for a revolution,
in the sense of preparing the revolutionaries, is a
real analysis of the existing situation such as use to
be made in earlier times. To be sure, even then these
analyses were mostly very inadequate, but the fact
remains that they were made. In this respect I see
absolutely no one, near or far, in a position to do
this. The theoretical sterility and analytical dullness
of this movement are just as striking and depressing as
its joy in action is welcome" (206).
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions, but are able
to direct revolutionary times in positive directions. This
takes leadership with imagination to see a new vision with
which people can identify and collectively work towards.
The revolutionary time we are living through is the
impending ecological collapse and world bankruptcy, and so
what is needed now is lovolutionary thought. When the
modern system finally collapses, the power will again be in
the streets. Our prayer now is that the collapse happens
before the planetary damage is irreversible. In _Man in the
New World_, K. G. Saiyidain writes,
many distinguished thinkers of the East and West are of
the view that the central problem of the modern age is
to bring about the right relationship between Power and
Vision--Power, which makes it possible for man [sic] to
adopt effective means to achieve his ends and Vision
which is the source of love, sympathy and the intuitive
feeling of oneness of all mankind [sic] (69).
Saiyidain notes that power without vision, which has
been ruling the modernist world, "is destructive, leads to
external and internal conflicts and deprives life of its
moral foundations" (Saiyidain 1964, 69).
The Neutopian Vision
Visions of truly better ways of social organization are
what our politicians definitely lack. U.S. president,
George Bush, in his 1989 inaugural address asked us not to
contemplate life under an alternative form of government. He
spoke, "For the first time in this century--for the first
time in perhaps all history--man does not have to invent a
system by which to live. We don't have to talk late into
the night about which form of government is better." Does
President Bush really think that the liberal tradition's
goals of home ownership, private property, and capitalist
"democracy" are the best that humanity has to offer? What
about our ecological problems, and the problems with the
justice system?
In the book _Environment and Utopia_, the authors Moos
and Brownstein point out the need for utopian and
environmentalist to come together. Both perspectives know
that in order to save life on earth we need radical change.
According to microbiologist Lynn Margulis, in an article
entitled "Bacteria to the Future" in _Contact Magazine_,
It's estimated that 99.9 percent of all species that
have ever existed are now extinct. The idea that
evolution has got to man and therefore it's going to
stay with man because man is at the summit of evolution
is totally inconsistent with all we know about other
species. We'll either evolve into something else or
we'll go extinct (Smith 1989 12).
Environmental science works through the scientific
method. It concentrates on objective phenomena, the
ecology. Utopian thought arises from the imagination, the
human ecology. It focuses on the social organization,
values, and images of the future. Moos and Brownstein
comment that the utopian "mission is to tempt mankind [sic]
to test limits and to attempt new creative works" (Moos
1977, 268). The world's great prophets like Moses, Jesus,
and Mohammed made such demands on us. Their spiritual
mission was to create entirely new social structures, but
thus far they, too, have failed which I think is due to the
lack of a feminist perspective within their religious
worldviews.
The environmentalist can point out how and why our
civilization is ecologically collapsing, but it is the
utopian who is able to envision the way out of the world
mess. They further observe that "the analytical tools of
environmental science, or of any science, are ill-equipped
to re-shape a civilization. A deeper awareness and
understanding of human values, social processes, hopes, and
desires are needed, and these are, of course, the stock in
trade of the utopian" (Moos 1977, 268). Kenneth R.
Schneider also subscribes to a utopian notion of the merging
of scientist and humanist,
Ecology is inherently a sphere of integrative
knowledge. So is humanism. Both represent revolutions
in thought precisely because they demand a new
perception of knowledge itself. And it is the city,
more than any other environment, institution,
philosophy, or methodology, that can unite the eco-
logical and humanistic foundation of civilization
(Schneider 1979, 20).
Utopia was originally spelled _eutopia_, meaning a good
place. Utopians are the political magicians whose goal it
is to create a "political ecological utopia." However, a
new word is needed to express utopia. I use a word taken
from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, neutopia, meaning a new good
place. In _Man in the City of the Future_, edited by
Richard Eells and Clarence Walton, it is stated that, "The
dream of building a greater and nobler city is an essential
element of all utopian schemes. Lewis Mumford noted the
fact that all utopias, from Plato to Bellamy, have been
expressed largely in terms of the city." Mumford said, "the
first Utopia was a city itself" (271).
A Holistic World View
However, creating the good city has not become a
serious topic for discussion and has been ignored by the
economic, educational, and political powers running our
fragmented, alienated world. In _The Elusive City_,
Jonathan Barnett professes,
The complexities of this subject are often lost in the
divisions among scholarly disciplines or fall between
the boundaries of different professions. Art
historians tend to look at the work of individual
artists or specific historical periods, and more often
discuss buildings as isolated artifacts than as parts
of cities. Urban historians give far less attention to
the physical fabric of cities than they do to political
events and social and economic patterns. Practitioners
of architecture and other design professions have often
looked to history only for the justification of a
specific polemic or as a prelude to descriptions of
their own work. City planning, as a relatively new
profession, has sought to distance itself from
architecture and landscape architecture, both to create
a separate identity and for fear of appearing frivolous
in the eyes of city officials by being overly concerned
with aesthetic matters (1-2).
Schneider concurs with Barnett that planners plan
without a conception of an ideal city. Planning is accepted
precisely because it fails to raise the critical, radical
issues we are faced with today. Planners are not concerned
with creating cities which are ecologically sound and
socially creative. They are under the spell of maintaining
the status quo which makes them impotent in solving the
problem of modernity, the balance between vision and power.
Max Weber saw that planning had become an arm of bureau-
cracy, therefore he suggested we must look elsewhere for the
leadership to manifest creative, ecological cities.
Schneider writes, "Planning has not even approached a
renaissance. It has inherited without essential questioning
the dominant technological and economic traditions" (259).
Where are the Social Healers?
Imaging an ecological, humanistic city is central to
finding solutions to world problems and inspiring us to
greater aspirations. Schneider understands that the city is
the highest creative work of humanity. Now, all art forms
are slaves to the post-modernist city. With the reality of
impending human extinction, art has become dehumanized as it
becomes a mere commodity in the market-place city. The
visionary artists are removed from their positions as vision
givers and social healers. They too are trapped in the
architectural madness. When our cities are chaotic growths
of economic fragmentation, it is difficult to find the
personal meaning needed in order to create an independent
artistic voice. The economy forces one to conform to the
status quo.
Art which fails to address the issue of the great
possibility of our race's extinction is dangerously
deceptive lacking the truth of the art which either
criticizes our dystopian situation or envisions a neutopian
reality. Art is dying as the metropolis is slowly devouring
the planet. It is time for the artists to not only create a
new revolutionary symbolic language, but to theoretically
adopt such character into their personalities. _In Modern
Movements in Architecture_, Charles Jencks writes about what
an architect who has seen through the false foundation
governing our architecture should do,
In that situation all the architect can do is clarify
the situation theoretically, design dissenting
buildings for the system, provide alternative models
and wait for the propitious moment. Le Corbusier ended
his polemic with the alternative "Architecture or
Revolution. Revolution can be avoided." But today if
we are to have a credible architecture, it must be
supported by a popular revolution that ends in a
creditable public realm, the council system.
_Architecture and Revolution_ (380).
We already have the blueprints to create a solar
Jerusalem, however, we should return to the first paragraph
of this paper quoting Willis Harman: we need to change our
value system, our way of thinking. The great architect of
megastructural designs, Paolo Soleri, said to me in Amherst
that what is needed is a genius who can create a political
formula which can liberate the world from the destructive
development while steering us in a new direction towards the
miniaturization of the city, which is exactly what his
megastructural designs propose. Of course, these
megastructured cities will take a considerable amount of
time to engineer, but what is important now is to move
humankind into the synergetic direction away from the
market-place city towards the city of love. Constantinas A.
Doxiadis writes, "To implement the plan we do not need to
implement it today; what we need today is a decision to
implement it, but it will take years, decades, maybe
centuries to implement the whole plan" (Eells 1968, 187).
Neutopia vs. the Global Corporations
To implement such a Neutopian plan calls for a global
movement. In _The Quest for Utopia_, Glenn Negley writes,
"With the necessity in the present day for the utopist to
speculate in terms of nothing less than world organization,
it seems likely that the future history of utopian thought
will manifest a new pattern, with emphasis on the political
as the principle upon which utopia is to be organized"
(577). In other words, a Neutopian plan must be a world
plan based on a new form of management radically different
from the management plans of the social architects of today,
the global corporations. For the global corporations are the
ones planning the world's future with the image of the
"global shopping mall" as their plan of development.
Worldwide profit maximization is their primary goal.
Through mass media and advertising they have
globalized their market-place ideology: global corporations
have the key to happiness, in the form of consumer products.
In _Global Reach: the Power of the Multinational
Corporations_, authors Richard J. Barnett and Ronald E.
Muller ask, "Is the global corporation mankind's [sic] best
hope for producing and distributing the riches of the earth,
as the World Managers contend--or, as their critics argue,
is their vaunted rational integrated world economy a recipe
for a new stage in authoritarian politics, an international
class war of huge proportions, and ultimately, ecological
suicide?" (25)
Here we have it. We live in a world dominated by the
old imperialist wealth which has finally reached its ancient
ambition of world conquest, gaining its world empire not
through the military might of the nation-states, but through
the transnational market-place and consumer culture. The
movie industry now no longer targets national or ethnic
audiences for their films, but makes films which appeal to
the pop global market. It is difficult to think of a popular
movement strong enough to stop the world totalitarianism we
face as the corporations continue to plunder the planet.
Time for Millenarian Activity
As the 21st Century approaches, one possibility for
radical social change calls for worldwide millenarian
activity. It is a movement in which humankind culturally
evolves into a new species by living with nature and
technology in humanistic ways to produce a culture where the
prestige/power system is based on individual genius, talent,
and skill. The prophetic task is to create an economy where
we live to express our gifts which benefit humanity, rather
than make money as a means to material ends. It is a system
where creativity, images of the future, and powers of the
mind are the measures of worth and respect. It is a solar
civilization where the arts, sciences, and humanities work
in harmonious ways for the betterment of life in beautiful
arcologies. It is a world/city designed without the
automobile and designed with communal kitchens which finally
liberate us from private domestic servitude of the
individual house. It is an educational movement which
exposes the falsehoods and miseries of the American dream of
private property and home ownership by evolving our image of
home to extend to the planet as seen from Outer Space. Our
home is the planet; our creatrix is the universe. It is a
movement where art is no longer a commodity of the
market-place city, but is recognized as the spiritual-in-the
material, as symbolic of our cosmic roots. It is an
architectural plan which inspires us to seek the knowledge
within ourselves. It is a world where animals reclaim the
wilderness areas they need in order to survive. It is a
movement which acknowledges and manages for the first time
in history, a truly creative global culture based on our
common humanity and common cosmology: the earth, water,
air, and fire. It is the "politics of planet" where the
Gaian consciousness is born. It is a planet where our
leaders find themselves by tapping into the cosmic energy
which generates the wisdom to fulfill our universal destiny.
It is a place where our obligations lie not only with our
biological families, but with our entire species. It is a
planet where merit, not inheritance, is the determinant of
power. It is a world/city where the ministers of the future
are the Neutopian thinkers, guiding us to long-term peace
projects and the extraterrestrial frontier.
Some aspects of the New Age--natural foods, world
peace, world federalists, intentional community, Gaian,
ecology/green movements--have characteristics of millenarian
activities. They can see we need to redirect military money
into social programs which would cause a radical change in
the world economy. They are holistic in that they see that
we are on board Spaceship Earth and need to manage our
resources fairly. Some see the need for creating a world
government and a new educational system which allows for
individual expression. However, these movements have failed
to change our daily habits and lifestyles.
The New Agers ironically, are some of the ones who are
building expensive passive solar, greenhouse housing in the
woodlands. The New Age movement has not focused on the role
of the city in global transformation. Schneider writes,
"The creation of the city is possibly the most revolutionary
of all human revolutions." Schneider thinks that the back
to the earth movement is the worst ecology of all. He
writes,
As a model for any large population, however, the
back-to-earth movement can do little more than create
vast belts of Appalachia with hard-rock poverty and
acute human deprivation. The American population has
grown by nearly one hundred million persons since our
rural population hit its peak on 6.5 million farms in
1935. It is difficult to imagine any worthy
enlightenment or "prosperity" occurring with a high
rural population density. A very small population
might perhaps live comfortably on the fringes of
wealthy society. A large population decidedly cannot
(293).
Another serious problem with the New Age movement is a
lack of responding to leadership. In many cases leadership
is discouraged and not given power to effectively lead. The
rule in many of these groups is that decisions must be made
by consensus, rather than by personal revelations, even
though creative visions come through the individual, not the
group. Of course, the individual ideas are enhanced and
greatly enriched by group involvement and brainstorming, but
primarily the group is composed of individuals. New Age
groups that I have experienced are skeptical of visionary
leadership.
Millenarian activities are concerned with the ordering
and re-ordering of power. They are not only political
movements but spiritual in nature, a new religion in the
making. These activities will break down the barriers of
class and status and create a new value system resulting in
a just political-economic framework. These activities
represent a new synthesis, creating political power through
a new vision. This in turn has a revolutionary effect on the
economical structure. Millenarian activities create new
unities and social obligations. These movements envision "a
new earth in which heaven is more brightly mirrored"
(Burridge 1969, 165).
Millenarian movements are holistic. They are a "psycho-
logical reaction to cultural inadequacy." They oppose the
household, bureaucracy, tradition, rational management, and
routines of the workaday life (Burridge 1969, 165).
Millenarians want to change everything creating an evolved
human being. Kenelm Burridge states that millenarian
activities
occur as historical events over a relatively short
time; they involve changes in social relations, they
tend to predicate changes in social organization as
well as in what some think of as social structure.
Beyond their intrinsic human interest, that is,
millenarian activities constitute an acute theoretical
challenge. They invite a statement through which
particular actions and rationalizations may be given a
more general validity" (2).
The Role of the Prophetess/Prophet
Millenarian movements may be led by a charismatic
prophetess, prophet, leader, hera, hero, intellectual, a
group or band of people. Charismatic leaders in the past
have been founders of world religions, prophets, military
and political heroes. According to Max Weber charismatic
leaders are self-appointed, leading people in times of
"crisis in which the basic values, institutions, and
legitimacy of society are in question" (29). Charismatic
leaders organize and articulate new assumptions and renew
meaning for existence.
Even though charisma is direct and interpersonal, the
leader is not the important factor, the new assumptions and
ideas are, for it is the message rather than the leader
which creates charismatic qualities. Charisma is social,
"contingent upon a _shared belief_ on the part of both
leader and followers in the genuineness of the leaders's
charismatic possession" (Glassman 1986, 134). In other
words, people follow charismatic vision because of their
faith in extraordinary qualities. In Joseph Bensman and
Michael Givant essay's "Charisma and Modernity," they quote
Max Weber, "Charismatic belief revolutionizes men [sic]
"from within" and shapes material and social conditions
according to its revolutionary will" (Glassman 1986, 134).
In an article entitled, "Scientific Revolution and the
Evolution of Consciousness," Robert Artigiani writes,
"Evolutionary social analysis, can, therefore, respect
individual creative arts" (Laszol 1988, 242). He continues,
Successive iterations lead the society to a bifurcation
point where it must either remap its world with new
symbols programming new behaviors or perish. At that
moment, a society has ceased to be an autopoetic
system. It is acquiring new information about an
environment beyond its original boundaries. But, in the
absence of a suitable cognitive map, that information
cannot be processed. It appears to describe a
world of random chaos. Evolution occurs when, amidst
the chaos of incomprehensible experience, some new set
of symbols is environmentally amplified. In this way,
order emerges out of chaos, the "noise" of creative
individual mappings of new experiences becoming the
eventual source of societal order. Creative acts
produce symbols able to alter collective cognitive maps
and nucleate new social structures (250).
Artigiani says that "the news of the shift is announced
by "nucleations," in human terms, by charismatic leaders who
crystallize new ideas." Prophetesses and prophets are spoken
through, that is, they do not act alone, but act in
accordance to the revelations they receive from the divine,
or supernatural powers, a power beyond the control of
people. Weber believed that true charismatic leaders do not
worry about their image, for they know who they are and
their power comes from beyond themselves. They _are_ the
natural leaders, the Gaian wizards who have a clear
direction on which vision is cosmic and true to love.
These extraordinary individuals work like funnels to the
next millenarian, prophetesses and prophets to the New Age
who gain public recognition to promote the new wave of ideas
and values, whose work and life become treasured, canonized,
immortalized, institutionalized, and adopted not in the form
as dogma but as examples of cosmic individualists.
It is in times of extreme crisis when leadership can
flourish out of a millenarian movement. William H. Swatos,
Jr., writes, "the extraordinary nature of the _times_ calls
forth a charismatic _authority structure_" (Glassman 1986,
134). He quotes S. N. Eisenstadt in defining charisma as
the gift of grace, i.e., "the specifically creative
revolutionary force of history," (134) and, as this paper
has already discussed, the charismatic authority that
humanity needs to successfully survive into the 21th Century
is the utopian genius and juno, leaders of human conduct, as
well as the creatresses and creators of new symbols. They
symbolize the new person by inaugurating a new
power/prestige system based on how people will be measured,
how integrity will be earned, and how redemption is gained.
Therefore, charisma generates a new moral order by creating
the social myth that guides the revolution. In an essay
entitled "The Role of the Intellectual in Revolutionary
Institutions," William C. Martin points out that the
"intellectual constructs the world-view of the new
society,...undermines the legitimacy of the old
society, prepares the strategy of revolutionary change, and
participates in the mobilization of the revolutionary
forces" (Mohan 1987, 73).
Martin goes on to say that in the industrial
core-states within the world economy it will be increasingly
difficult for intellectuals to achieve an autonomous,
critical, and independent voice, and so, they will have to
function as part of organizational entities. The
organizations will provide a comfortable niche for
the intellectual. In turn, the intellectual will produce
ideologies and symbols legitimatizing the powerful
organizations. Martin writes, "Knowledge will be generated,
maintained, transmitted, and extinguished by the large and
powerful organizations" (72). The intellectual then becomes
the servant of the existing corporate world-system which
neutralizes her/his revolutionary personality.
Martin notes that there are two direct consequences of
this development. The first being that, in complex
organizational societies, revolution will cease to exist
since radical social movements cannot develop inside or
outside these organizations. The second consequence is that
the intellectual will feel increasingly alienated from not
having a meaningful connection with the powerful
organizations.
The revolutionary seems to be in a "Catch 22," trapped
in the chaos of the megalopolis with no way out as it
continues to expand its ugly roads everywhere, even into
Outer Space. Science has still not discovered all the
mysteries of the universe, and maybe it will be this rare
phenomenon of charisma which will save the planet from its
shadow. It seems like an impossible dream to think that the
global corporations and the megalopolis can be transformed
into a Neutopian world city design; nevertheless,
inventiveness is breaking through impossibilities.
Summary
In this chapter we have discussed the urgent need for a
new alternative way of thinking and architectural design to
stop the present omnicide of the planet which has resulted
from the rationalist thinking of global capitalism. We have
seen how the market-place has promoted the single-family
private house as the place to live the happy life which
feminists have clearly proven not to be the case. Trapped
in the chaos of the modern megalopolis and the suburban
sprawl, intellectuals must become the leaders of a
millennium movement in order to change the value-system of
the global culture back to nourishing the forces of
creativity and love. In the Neutopian world view, love is
as real as wheat. In the next chapter, we shall further
explore the divisions of the spacial environment so that we
can begin to find the way to break through to a new social
reality.