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Sources of inspiration
To think about the future has for me become a way to understand the present.
Many phenomena that otherwise would remain vague and indistinct become clear
and less ambiguous when they are projected into the future. In utopian visions,
as they are presented in for instance popular culture, we may discern if the
political means we today undertake are in the "right" direction or if they
instead take us further away from the long term ends that we find desirable.
Analogous, by reading dystopian works as Brave New World we may increase our
understanding of what future it is that we do not want to attain - something
I find almost equally important.
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It is not an exaggeration to say that much of my own thinking about
the future of our civilisation began with the Finish philosopher
Georg Henrik von Wright. Already during my late teens I read his
Att förstå sin samtid (To understand the present). In much
that book marked my intellectual awakening and opened my mind for
so different thinkers as Oswald Spengler and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The civilisation critical approach that von Wright expresses in
the book gave intellectual substance to my own reflections about
the shallowness of concept like "economic growth".
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Here there is no need to get trapped in any entangled chronological account.
Instead we easily can move forward a few years in time to my literary meeting
with Stephen Toulmin. With his Cosmopolis he gave me a learned account
of the philosophical discourse of modernity and pointed out the unfortunate
in any attempt to reduce the enlightenment to the exact sciences.
Instead Toulmin puts forth a humanistic ideal which he sees as a necessary
component if we should be able to craft a broadminded and tolerant society.
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The thinking of Toulmin interested me as it pointed towards the future and opened
for alternative historical patterns. Otherwise my feeling was that the more I learned
about the human prospect and the problems facing mankind the less realistic did the
survival strategies of the environmental movement seem. For even if I fully
agreed to their description of the unsustainable nature of the late modern
consumption society I nevertheless found the "solutions" they suggested to be naïve and
even dangerous. Slowly I became more and more convinced that any attempt to
reverse modernity and thus to return to a pre-modern agrarian society was nothing
more than a romanticized dream. A humanity that once has tasted the fruits of
modernity, as dramatically increased life expectancy, modern sanitary conditions and
the freedom to travel over the continents, will most certainly not voluntarily return
to the dark pre-modern realms where it once came from. This made me dejected as
it would mean that mankind was more or less doomed to undermine its own
existence.
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Searching for alternative ways to view
the threats and opportunities of modernity I came to think
about an entertaining strategy game for computes, Alpha Centauri.
In the game a grand perspective on humanity is applied
and the player may through political, ecological and
scientific decisions in a simulation test different
modes of action.
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There, in difference to the established academic discourse, I found a strong
belief in that it indeed can be possible to tame modernity and overcome
its negative sides. The most interesting thing was that I in
Alpha Centauri found a continuation of Toulmin's thoughts
but combined with a vision of what the natural science - if no longer
restricted by short term economical consideration - could be able to achieve.
It was an encouraging picture which I felt was important to communicate.
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Therefore I decided that one of the visions in my bachelor dissertation
Democracy in four far-future
scenarios should be constructed around similar ideas. I called my
mix of Toulmin's thinking and the visionary energy of Alpha Centauri
for Eudaimonia. This positive scenario marked out a truly bright contrast
to the other scenarios in the dissertation.
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Finally, I would like to present some of the internet
resources that have inspired my work with the master
disseration:
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http://www.huxley.net/
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Transhumanists on Huxley's Brave New World. My essay can be
regarded as a kind of polemic against their movement.
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Matrix
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The movie Matrix points out the importance
of applying ethical, aesthetical and eventually religious
aspects on what technology we want to develop. This homepage
has an interesting philosophical section.
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http://www.wfs.org
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A mine of information for everyone interested in the future of mankind.
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