Message-ID: <360D89F5.6FA4692D@direct.ca> Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1998 17:42:29 -0700 From: cbelshaw <mailto:cbelshaw@DIRECT.CA> Subject: Where is Utopia? To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
I want to let people know that I have a book published on line with the title "Where is Utopia? - The Control of Societal Evolution, or Choosing the Future"The thesis is that we have available now pretty well all the knowledge and skills required to bring about the state of the world that we desire, given the next century of effort to do so. So Where is our Utopia in fact?
I assert that the first step is to create a major discussion of the nature of the world we want by the end of the 21st century. To that end I make a wide range of suggestions, from personal living to global government, with the various sectors in between. I believe they hold together somewhat systemically.
I then challenge those who disagree with my goals - which is likely to be almost all of you - to propose your own -- but in doing so to work out the implications of their disagreement for the whole global socio-cultural system, thus providing an alternative model.
My own ideas are of course personal, derived from my agedness, thoughts and observations during a lifetime spent in many countries, contact with scholars almost everywhere and in many disciplines, friends of all ages and in many circumstances, and not least from my ideas about what anthropology means. Because of the untraceability of many sources now, and unbalanced selection were I to try, the text is not encumbered with footnotes or scholarship. But it does draw on ideas presented in my anthropological writing, and attempts to be reasonably well founded in contemporary thinking.
It is also I hope an antidote to pessimism. We all need some faith in the future to function. Politicians and policies give us few grounds for that. We need a different, positive, way of linking short term decisions to long-term goals, with optimism and belief in success.
The book is published by Oak Tree Publishers and is one of those on line at http:mailto:/www.publisher@previewbooks.com
The preview in the title means that on this site you can access the first four chapters or so free of charge. If you wish to go further, you purchase the book for I believe $9.50 U.S. and then download it to your disk and/or print it out.
If you wish to rebut or comment upon my argument or propose alternatives you can do so by accessing another site. This is attached to my web magazine with the URL http://www.webzines-vancouver.bc.ca/issues/discus (note-only one 's') - you then choose Utopia to write your material into a form for posting on the site.
It would be great if this exercise were to interest you.
Cyril Belshaw