three visions of the future by R. Crumb; Mr. Plumbean’s house, from The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater; Baba Wagué Diakité and mural

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

DREAMS OF BETTER WORLDS

July 8, 2021

I once asked my friend Howard Thoresen what he thought the future would be like. “Like the present,” he said.

In the drawings above, the artist Robert Crumb gives three versions of the future of the same street corner. In the first, everything is more-or-less dead. The second is a high-tech future, with flying cars. The third is a hippie ecotopian future. One of the things I think Howard was getting at is that all three of these “futures” exist right now. Somewhere there’s a terrible drought and the crops have died. Somewhere there’s a city where tall skyscrapers have skins of mirrored glass. And somewhere someone is riding her bike to the organic vegetable market.

In movies and popular culture dystopian visions abound. Back in the Hippie Days, before the Internet, we had a Bible of Hope known as The Whole Earth Catalog. On the cover, it had a picture of our planet as seen from space.

In the Fifties, in America, World War Two was over and many people dreamed of raising a happy family—like the ones on TV—in their house in the suburbs, with a two-car garage and an automatic washer and dryer. A company advertised: PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT. The idea was that things were better than they had ever been, and they would just keep getting better and better.

Around 1970, we got the Bad News. Ecologists told us that there were too many people on the planet for its “carrying capacity.” Plant and animal species were becoming extinct. Forests were being cut down, topsoil was being exhausted and eroded, fresh water sources were being depleted. Factories were poisoning the air, the soil and the rivers. The climate was changing. The trajectory we were on, they said, was not taking us to a better place, but to a worse one.

This came as quite a shock. All our stories had told us that humanity was ascending from a state where life was “nasty, brutish and short” to a more and more civilized, more and more “modern” one, where all our problems would be abolished by rational problem solving, economic prosperity and technological progress.

One of the thinkers featured in the Whole Earth Catalog was R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, and a “futurist.” He wrote a book called Utopia or Oblivion. These, he said, were our options. He said that he didn’t find the subject of oblivion very interesting, so he spent his life trying to figure out how, together, we could “make the world work.” He said he had done the math, and it was quite possible for everyone on this planet to have enough to eat and a place to live. We could educate all the children and provide health care for everyone.

It makes you wonder: why aren’t we doing that?

When we go camping, we’re supposed to leave the campsite better than we found it. Individually and collectively, we would like to do that with our planet. One problem is that we can never give an adequate answer to the question: “What’s going on here?” There’s always too much going on at every moment. I don’t know what’s happening in my backyard right now. What are all the worms up to? And everything is always growing and changing—within me and around me.

Another difficulty is that people have different ideas about what the most important problems are and about how things could be improved. Each of us has our own utopian dreams.

In The Tempest, while Gonzalo puts forward his ideas of what he would do if he was king of the island, hecklers are busy finding all the flaws in his Big Idea:

GONZALO

Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,–

ANTONIO

He’ld sow’t with nettle-seed.

SEBASTIAN

Or docks, or mallows.

GONZALO

And were the king on’t, what would I do?

SEBASTIAN

‘Scape being drunk for want of wine.

GONZALO

I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries

Execute all things; for no kind of traffic

Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

And use of service, none; contract, succession,

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

No occupation; all men idle, all;

And women too, but innocent and pure;

No sovereignty;–

SEBASTIAN

Yet he would be king on’t.

ANTONIO

The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the

beginning.

GONZALO

All things in common nature should produce

Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,

Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,

Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,

Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,

To feed my innocent people.

SEBASTIAN

No marrying ‘mong his subjects?

ANTONIO

None, man; all idle: whores and knaves.

GONZALO

I would with such perfection govern, sir,

To excel the golden age.

SEBASTIAN

God save his majesty!

ANTONIO

Long live Gonzalo!

*

In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom fantasizes about being an eloquent politician:

BLOOM

I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.

Shakespeare and Joyce are having fun with our proclivity to imagine ourselves in charge of everyone and everything.

The protagonist of Dostoevsky’s short story “Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” is depressed. He wants to find the right day to commit suicide. He falls asleep in his chair and dreams that he travels through space to a planet just like Earth—except that everything there is perfect. Everyone there is happy. They love each other. They love the animals. They talk to the trees. In his dream, the unfortunate narrator corrupts that world. Things get worse and worse, until it resembles our own. When he wakes from the dream, he wants to live! He feels that his mission in life is to convince everyone that we need to love each other. He is certain that if we could do that our world would become a Paradise.

Paradises and utopias come in all shapes and sizes. A perfect moment is Paradise. When we write a poem or paint a picture, we create a perfect little world.

The philosopher Wittgenstein contrasted the idea of “the world” with the idea of “my world.” It’s fun to ponder this distinction. If you wanted to change the world for the better, it would be quite hard to do because it’s so big and there are so many forces in play. But my world—the world as I experience it—changes from day to day. We create a new world from moment to moment. A happy person lives in a friendly world. An angry person lives in a world full of adversaries. We create our own Heaven. Or Hell. We can see the kind of world Marc Chagall lived in by looking at his paintings.

People have imagined that Paradise existed sometime long ago, or will arrive at some time in the distant Future. Maybe after we die—if we’re good. Hesiod spoke of a long-ago Golden Age, when people were happy, lived long, and didn’t have to work. In the Bible, our first parents lived in a Garden until they were kicked out for disobedience. Karl Marx believed that some day a casteless, classless society would be ushered in, and all would be well. Paradise is always elsewhere.

In contrast to this story, Thich Nhat Hanh says: “The present moment is a wonderful moment.” I don’t have to wait for The End of War in the world, in order to abolish the conflict within myself. I could live in Love right now. It’s not against the law.

One of my favorite books is The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater. In it, one day a seagull drops a bucket of orange paint on the roof of Mr. Plumbean’s house. Instead of fixing the problem, Mr. Plumbean painted his house to look like all his dreams. 

It reminds me of the colorful, wildly imaginative architecture of Gaudi and Hundertwasser. 

The Mexican muralists Rivera, Orozco and Siqueros painted walls in Mexico, and inspired thousands of people to do likewise around the world.

Thanks to YouTube, we can tour the barn of the Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV232D962pE

or the home of the clown Slava Polunin in France

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy9DqXzGEAI&t=12s

or accompany Dr. John “Slomo” Kitchin as he skates along the sidewalks of San Diego

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn87-mcnoVc

Maybe Paradise is not far away. Maybe we’re in it right now.