(xi) Preface

"I am by nature skeptical—if not cynical—about visions and visionaries that claim moral and perhaps intellectual superiority over everything and everyone else. I cannot imagine being seduced by any utopian dream or prophet. Yet I remain fascinated by those who have been so seduced and by the manifestations of their seductions."(xi)

[Dat is een vreemde al te relativerende uitspraak. Ik vind het fascinerend, maar het doet me verder niets? ]

"Their refusal to accept existing values, customs, institutions, and policies is often admirable if not courageous. True, this book is not a formal moral assessment as such, but it does attempt to treat utopias and utopians—and their critics—with fairness and respect."(xii)

[Of: Ik vind het fascinerend, maar ik heb er verder geen moreel oordeel over? Hier zijn 100 opvattingen, maar ik heb geen voorkeur? Postmodern relativisme.]

(1) Introduction

"I also extend the analysis of utopias from an exclusively Western enterprise to a worldwide one—a; facet of utopianism ordinarily neglected."(1)

"We are by now past the hostility that greeted most utopian proposals throughout much of the twentieth century, when utopias were commonly equated with the nightmarish and pseudo-utopian totalitarian regimes that shaped most of that century, whether right-wing or left-wing, fascist or communist."(1)

[Het kapitalisme weer even vergeten. ]

(5) Chapter 1 - The Nature of Utopias

"“Utopia” means the allegedly perfect society."(5)

[Daar gaan we weer, hoor. ]

"Nevertheless, we can define “genuine” utopias by comparing them with “false” utopias in three ways."(5)

[Maar wat dan echte utopia's zijn blijft onduidelijk. ]

"Second, not only their precise contents but also their comprehensiveness further characterize genuine utopias, which seek changes in most, if not all, areas of society. By contrast, false utopias seek changes in only one or two components, such as schools, prisons, diet, or dress. This is because the proponents of utopias are generally more dissatisfied with the basic structure and direction of their own, non-utopian, society than are the proponents of milder changes." [mijn nadruk] (6)

[Zelfs dat is niet zonder meer zo duidelijk. Stel dat je de exclusieve relatie uit de wereld zou helpen, dan zou dat een enorme invloed hebben op alle mogelijke maatschappelijke organisaties.]

"Depending on human beings rather than on God to transform the world distinguishes utopias from millenarian movements." [mijn nadruk] (8)

"Utopias differ from science fiction in their basic concern for changing rather than abandoning or ignoring non-utopian communities and societies. Science fiction, on the other hand, consists primarily of escapist fantasies about exploration to distant lands, to depths below the earth, or to outer space.(...) However imaginative they may be, any impact upon the society left behind is quite secondary."(8)

[Met die twee karakteriseringen ben ik wel eens.]

"most secular utopias that achieve some longevity still have a spiritual dimension. This might be a faith in science and/or technology as panaceas, often as saviors—a focal point of this book—but it does provide a non-material dimension that cannot be ignored.(...) Overall, religion-based communities have lasted longer than those based on secular beliefs such as socialism."(10)

[Zo kun je alles wel spiritueel noemen. Een 'geloof' in wetenschap heeft niets met religieus geloof te maken, is simpelweg gebaseerd op andere waarden en normen. Het heeft weinig zin om een 'non-material dimension' spiritueel te noemen. Maar het is wel duidelijk dat de auteur zelf religieus gelovig is, als je dat gemakkelijke oordeel op het eind ziet. ]

"More broadly, the general notion of America as utopia has gradually become part of America’s so-called civil religion, whereby a supposedly secular nation repeatedly invokes God at public ceremonies and in the formulation of public policy. The United States became, in these terms, a de facto utopia, unique among the world’s nations and yet a model for them all. Americans, including many policy-makers, have argued both that the country’s uniqueness makes it morally superior to all other countries and that the United States could somehow still lift up all other, inferior nations to attempt to approach its high standards."(10-11)

[Dat je zoiets zelfs maar serieus kunt opschrijven zonder het meteen belachelijk te maken gaat boven mijn pet. Chauvinisme natuurlijk. ]

"It is crucial to keep in mind that not all utopias are intended to be established in the first place. The classic example of such a utopia as an intellectual construct is Plato’s Republic (360 BCE)."(13)

[Dat zegt dus niks. Mensen na Plato zouden die gedachten uit De Staat wie weet wel willen realiseren, wat Plato er zelf ook van vond. En ik geloof er ook niets van dat Plato alleen een intellectueel beeld neerzette en niet wilde dat dat beeld ook zou bestaan.]

(16) Chapter 2 - The Variety of Utopias - Geographical Scope and Genres

"It is now evident that there have been significant written utopias and some actual movements to try to achieve utopia in China, Japan, Latin America, and India (those from India will be discussed later, in Chapter 6, as part of the ongoing “post-colonial” critique of Western imperialism, not least Western science and technology). In addition, Israel’s many kibbutzim implicitly constitute utopian communities (see Chapter 7)."

China

De chinese utopia's kijken vooral achteruit, volgens Segal.

[Dat blijkt een zinloze constatering en dat ligt voor de hand. Je kunt een ideaal verleden beschrijven om werk aan de toekomst te inspireren.]

"Developing the concept of a past that might inspire a different present and in turn a different future, Confucian scholars gradually revised these two concepts to accommodate notions of evolution and progress. But not until European and North American civilizations and cultures began to influence China in the nineteenth century did Western utopian thought, epitomized by Khang Yu-Wei’s Ta Thung Shu (Book of the Great Togetherness), start to emerge."(18)

"His [van Khang Yu-Wei] was an avowedly modern vision of a democratic world state governed by a world parliament, extending equal rights to women and men, abolishing private property, developing a universal language, and powered both by atomic energy and by a love of science and technology. Institutions would be cooperative and international in scope, the means of production would be publicly owned, goods and services would be provided for all, obsession with money would thereby cease, education would be vocational in orientation, military institutions would be greatly diminished, and the numerous other scientific and technological advances would also be highly practical. Accepting the view that people are innately good, Khang concluded that history could be a story of unceasing progress leading toward utopia rather than the familiar tale of cycles of rising and falling; this constituted an extraordinary leap of faith in his time and culture."(18-19)

[Kortom Khang wil alles wat een intelligent normatief rationeel mens zou willen. Alleen jammer dat die er zo ontzettend weinig zijn. ]

Japan

Korte bespreking van Ishida Baigan (1685–1744), Ogyu Sorai (1666–1727), Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856).

"The Yuaikai was heavily influenced by Fabianism, a type of utopian socialism originating in Britain that emphasized social planning. Following World War I, and particularly after the Communist penetration of the labor movement by 1924, utopian socialist ideals gradually declined. After the catastrophic Tokyo earthquake of 1923, Christian messianic utopian movements became especially influential, as did eschatological Buddhist traditions. In the 1930s, the increasingly Fascist political regime persecuted all utopian movements, socialist and religious alike, as they threatened both the imperial colonialist and the anti-socialist monopoly capitalist ideals of the new regime."(20-21)

Latijns-Amerika

Vooral Europese invloeden.

"Suffice it to say that discontent with the status quo in these societies over the centuries, as revealed by the more “aggressive” utopian visions, may well have trickled down to the proverbial masses and may reflect pervasive discontent among them. Direct links between those visions and actual events cannot, however, be established."(23)

[Dit overzicht van Aziatisch en Zuid-Amerikaans gedachtengoed is te kort om zinvol te kunnen zijn. "would go beyond the scope of this book" is dan wel een erg gemakkelijke opmerking, als je eerst aangekondigd hebt dat je aandacht wil schenken aan het feit dat utopisch denken wereldwijd voorkomt. Ik vind dat nogal een afgang.]

"With rare exceptions, neither form of utopian expression— communities or writings—had many followers or much influence. But the exceptions, which include a handful of communities such as the American Shakers and a handful of writings such as Bellamy’s Looking Backward, do deserve our attention."(24)

[Erg eenzijdig lijkt me. Weer helemaal gericht op de VS. Het hele verhaal lijdt bovendien onder een vaagheid van wat "utopisch" zou zijn. De opbouw laat ook te wensen over want hierna gaat het ineens over utopische gemeenschappen, in de VS met name, en over Bellamy. Waarom?]

"Until Robert Fogarty’s All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914 appeared in 1990, most students of American utopian communities assumed that they had flourished only in the first half of the nineteenth century and had virtually died out until their revival in the 1960s “counterculture.”"(25)

"The one other prominent technologically oriented utopian community of the period, Oneida, in upstate New York, produced animal traps, chairs, brooms, dishwashers, hats, garden furniture, leather travel bags, and, of course, the silverware that eventually made them famous. It was established in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes. Far from insisting on celibacy, Oneida insisted on what might today be called “open marriage.” Highlights included “complex marriage,” whereby every man and every woman were married to one another and so could have sexual relations but not be strictly bound to one another as in conventional marriages; “male continence,” a form of birth control precluding ejaculation during and after intercourse; and “ascending fellowship,” whereby virgins who were about fourteen years old were put under the guidance of older persons and brought into the practice of complex marriage." [mijn nadruk] (27)

"Noyes successfully involved himself in every major aspect of both the original and the branch communities. But in 1879, threatened with legal action for immoral behavior, Noyes fled to Canada to escape arrest and trial. Before leaving, he got the community to accept the abolition of complex marriage, reducing outside scrutiny and condemnation. Within two years, though, the community had broken up. Oneida then became the joint- stock corporation Oneida Limited, which concentrated on silverware." [mijn nadruk] (28)

"The failure of the Shaker, Oneida, and other experiments to transform the United States is the reason why Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) concluded that complex times demanded utopian writings rather than the continued creation of communities."(29)

"Without question, Bellamy’s envisioned twenty-first-century United States is an avowed technological utopia, an allegedly ideal society not simply dependent upon machines but outright modeled after them, its citizens quite willing cogs in a “great industrial machine.” Bellamy grasped technology’s potential to create a reformed social and civic order out of what, to many of his fellow Americans, was material and moral chaos. Not surprisingly, the Nationalist movement his book inspired sought to reform America’s political system, not to overthrow it.
Still, unlike numerous other technological utopians of his day whose writings were commercial failures, Bellamy was not a rigid technocrat demanding complete conformity. Instead, he was exceptionally sensitive to technology’s potential for satisfying citizens’ varying needs and desires. In this he recalls the insights of Marx and Engels. Occupation, residence, and leisure would be matters of choice; only those seeking top positions in the industrial army would work after age forty-five. Marriage would be for love, never wealth, because everyone would live comfortably. Crime would barely exist because poverty would no longer exist. In these ways, Looking Backward is a more complex and more humane work than William Morris in his News From Nowhere (1890)—discussed in the next chapter—would ever acknowledge." [mijn nadruk] (32)

"Looking Backward’s enormous popularity inspired a political movement, the Nationalist crusade, but its influence, as indicated, was modest. Moreover, in general, utopian writings were no more successful than utopian communities in general in providing either practical or popular solutions to the problems of American society at any juncture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." [mijn nadruk] (32)

"World’s fairs constituted yet another expression of American utopianism beyond communities and writings."(33)

[Van die Varieties of Utopia's waarover het hoofdstuk zou gaan is bedroevend weinig over. Ineens gaat het de hele tijd alleen over de Amerikaanse samenleving. Van de hak op de tak, die man. ]

"The popularity of earlier fairs spurred much of this increase. So, too, however, did a growing faith, especially in the United States, in the ability to shape the future through science and technology.(...) manifested the idealism that a veritable utopia would come about in America in the very near future"(34)

[Is de man chauvinistisch? Hij lijkt de VS steeds op te hemelen. Op het eind van het hoofdstuk ook die steken onder water richting China en zijn Expo. Ja, want Amerikanen houden zich aan alle mensenrechten?]

"But there was nothing of the social and economic equality or the cultural riches that, like many other technological visionaries, Geddes and his associates assumed would follow automatically in the wake of the scientific and technological advances. For that matter, the very dream of world peace through international gatherings such as fairs, a traditional belief that permeated the 1939 fair season, was shattered by World War II, a scientific and technological nightmare, well before the 1940 season." [mijn nadruk] (46)

[Waaraan je kunt zien hoe naïef dat soort mensen zijn. Het is een dom reductionisme. Alsof alles wat mensen belangrijk vinden door technologie geraakt wordt. Ik denk bijvoorbeeld niet dat de religies er door afgeschaft werden.]

"Missing from recent world’s fairs and theme parks alike is any genuine moral critique of the present, any serious effort to alter society in the manner of earlier world’s fairs. This is not to deny the widely accepted historical interpretation of these prior fairs as socially and culturally conservative, given their origins and funding as promotions of business, industry, and corporate-oriented government." [mijn nadruk] (36)

[Precies. Dus hoe utopisch zijn die wereldtentoonstellingen uiteindelijk? Ze willen zogezegd alleen maar meer Industriële Revolutie.]

(47) Chapter 3 - The European Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics - From Thomas More to Karl Marx

"The principal themes of these earlier visions were either a golden age of some kind set in the distant past or a more contemporary earthly paradise akin to the Garden of Eden. Endless speculation about worlds beyond Europe and, in time, actual voyages of discovery to those lands, generated many of these oral and written visions alike."(47)

[En meteen daarna gaat hij al over naar More. ]

"Previously, as in Plato’s Republic, there was no expectation of genuine improvement. Instead, the insurmountable gap between the real and ideal worlds was lamented. “Platonic forms” such as the Republic reflected that avowedly human condition. More, however, was the first to offer the prospect, albeit dim, of actually establishing a perfect society and thereby altering human nature. Recall that the term utopia, which More coined from Greek roots, means “nowhere” as well as “good place,” and bear in mind that More considered human nature depraved." [mijn nadruk] (48)

[Ik vraag me werkelijk af of die weergave van Plato juist is. Maar ook van die van More.]

"The evidence for More’s qualified optimism is threefold. First, he locates utopia in contemporary semi-feudal society rather than in either an agrarian paradise of long ago or a far-off tomorrow.(...) Second, like the pre-Millennialists, More expects people, not God, to establish utopia.(...) Third, More provides a detailed description of utopia, not merely a set of abstract principles, and his description reflects a close evaluation of his own society, not unanchored speculation. Here More foreshadows the systematic social planning of later full-fledged technological utopians such as the Pansophists (discussed below)."(48)

"Yet More provides his utopians with only three scientific and technological improvements, none of them decisive: the hatching of eggs by artificial heat in incubators, the charting of planetary movements by means of various instruments, and the invention of unspecified “clever . . . war machines.” To achieve economic subsistence, his utopians rely on the efficient use of established agrarian techniques and craft devices. To achieve improvements in human nature, they rely on the introduction of novel social and cultural arrangements—above all, the abolition of money and private property, rather than a new prosperity wrought by technological means. Like the later full-fledged scientific and technological utopians, More’s utopians are hungry for new scientific and technical knowledge of the world, but their purpose is as much to serve God as to improve society." [mijn nadruk] (49-50)

"As visions that might actually come about rather than as mere thought experiments, utopianism is rooted in two European developments. First, starting in the sixteenth century, faith in the power of reason to achieve steady human improvement grew. (In the eighteenth century this would become the Enlightenment.) A logical outcome of this perspective was unprecedented belief in the prospects for utopia. Second, beginning in England’s textile industry in the mid-eighteenth century, rapid technological advances led to the English Industrial Revolution, which, in time, spread to most of the rest of the world. We know this as the revolution of “rising expectations.” These developments are intertwined. Only when technology advanced sufficiently to offer the prospect of general affluence did utopian schemes begin to appear at all realistic. Such schemes presupposed the availability of adequate food, clothing, and shelter, and only in modern times could their availability be taken for granted. Technology was crucially linked to the rise of utopian thought."(50-51)

[More zat vóór de Industriële Revolutie. En juist die Industriële Revolutie leidde tot dromen van een andere samenleving vanwege alle ellende die die Revolutie met zich meebracht. En ondanks wat Segal eerder schreef zit hier toch weer een overdreven vertrouwen in technologie. Alsof die er in de moderne tijd toegeleid heeft dat alle mensen kunnen rekenen op de aanwezigheid van voedsel, kleding en een dak boven hun hoofd. Ook in de VS is dat niet het geval. Technologie heeft eigenaren. En alsof die technologie niet ook gebruikt wordt om hele steden plat te bombarderen. ]

"Various European utopians forged the first real connections between utopianism and fulfillment through science and technology. They included the Pansophists, a small number of late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century visionaries. The most prominent Pansophists were Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), an Italian Dominican friar; Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1650), a German Lutheran minister and teacher; and Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a scientist, philosopher, man of letters, and, like More, Lord Chancellor of England. Other European utopians who connected science and technology were the Enlightenment philosopher Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794); the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the former’s one-time protégé; the British industrialist and communitarian Robert Owen (1771–1858); the French communitarian Charles Fourier (1772–1837); and the communists Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Yet, for all of their commitment to the power of science and technology, none of these men endorsed unadulterated scientific and technological advance. That is, they did not see science and technology as the royal road to utopia. All insisted no less on a mixture of what each deemed appropriate values for varied kinds of ideal societies. For example, Fourier insisted that there could be no utopia unless individuals could fulfill their varying sexual and other pleasure-providing desires. Meanwhile, Marx and Engels insisted upon a variety of work and leisure activities to avoid exhaustion and boredom in the highly mechanized future they envisioned." [mijn nadruk] (52-53)

[En dat is helemaal terecht.]

"The aim was to achieve progress in non-scientific and non-technological areas at roughly the same rate as in science and technology."(53)

"In their greater optimism, the Pansophists stood closer than does More to scientific and technological utopianism. Their religious orientation, however, sharply differentiated them from secularminded scientific and technological utopianism, for they sought a civilization, called Pansophia, that would harmoniously join Christianity, science, and technology. Their ideas were articulated in three works that appeared over a period of eight years: Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623), and Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627)." [mijn nadruk] (53)

"To say that their scientific and technological advances are what make these utopias utopian would be too bold. Clearly, these advances improve life. They make it pleasanter, easier, healthier, and safer—in short, happier. Nevertheless, scientific and technological progress in these utopias is only a means to an end and not, as in full-fledged scientific and technological utopianism, an end in itself. As with More’s utopia, the ultimate goal of Pansophism is the service of God. Although their utopias are based on confidence in the possibility of improving human nature, Campanella, Andreae, and Bacon all remain sufficiently wary of mankind that they propose establishing limits within utopia in order to keep human nature in check. Each of them envisions a fixed, unchanging society; each seeks surcease from toil not simply to enjoy leisure but, more importantly, to contemplate and worship God. Release from ceaseless labor, provided by science and technology, is for them a means and not an end." [mijn nadruk] (54-55)

"Two works by Condorcet, a leading Enlightenment philosopher, broke radically with the notion of utopia as a means of contemplating and worshipping God and with many other characteristics of previous utopias. Condorcet’s two utopian writings were both published posthumously in 1795.(...) Condorcet departs fundamentally from previous utopias by envisioning endless progress rather than endless tranquility and by denigrating rather than embracing organized religion." [mijn nadruk] (56)

"He evinces an unprecedented optimism about the prospects for realizing utopia, and he grants science and technology unprecedented roles in establishing it. Yet he is no scientific or technological utopian himself, for he credits mankind’s advances not to science and technology but rather to the increase of secularization (the view that public policy should be conducted without reference to religion), the spread of education, and the growth of the ideal of equality." [mijn nadruk] (56)

[Een wijs man. ]

Saint-Simon bleef wel geloven in religie.

"Moreover, near the end of his life he backed away from his exclusively scientific and technological vision, urging a religious as well as a scientific and technological panacea. He came to feel that people had spiritual as well as material needs."(57)

"Comte became Saint-Simon’s disciple in 1817 and remained with him until the year before the latter’s death, when he broke with his master over both personal and intellectual matters. Of importance here, however, is their persistent agreement, despite their parting, on six fundamental aspects: (1) the need for a new social order in Europe, and perhaps elsewhere, in the wake of the disorder brought about by the English Industrial Revolution and the political revolution in France; (2) the need for science and technology to solve major social as well as technical problems; (3) the need for technical experts to run society; (4) the need to control the unenlightened masses in order to effect these changes; (5) the need to establish a new European hierarchy based not on social origins but on natural talent and society’s requirements; and (6) the need to abandon mass democracy and politics." [mijn nadruk] (57-58)

"Comte was a more systematic thinker than Saint-Simon. Not content with Saint-Simon’s comparatively modest philosophical formulations, he created a full-fledged philosophical system that aimed to encompass every aspect of human existence. Sometimes called the “New Social System,” but now more often called “Positivism,” it provided an intellectual foundation for the modern discipline of sociology that grew out of it. Its principal expressions were Comte’s multi-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and his Systeme de politique positive (1851–1854). Yet Comte eventually followed Saint-Simon in expanding his vision to accommodate spirituality. Both men were reluctant to embrace a purely scientific and technological utopian vision." [mijn nadruk] (58)

"In short, all of the European prophets of scientific and technological progress—from More to the Pansophists to Condorcet to Saint-Simon and Comte—either refrained or retreated from endorsing unadulterated scientific and technological advance. Their reasons differed, but none was a scientific and technological utopian in the final analysis."(58)

[Nou, Condorcet wees religie toch af? ]

Vervolgens gaat het over mensen die niet zo geloofden in wetenschappelijke en technologische vooruitgang: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris. Alleen Morris wordt besproken.

"Morris was a designer and craftsman whose furniture, wallpaper, stained glass, designs of books printed at his famous Kelmscott press, and designs in other media led to the Arts and Crafts movement in England. A major influence on Victorian taste, his design and craft work has shaped design culture up to the present day. Morris was a socialist who went further than Carlyle and Ruskin in developing his utopian ideas. His prolific writings include News From Nowhere (1890), about a utopian communist society that was heavily influenced by both Ruskin and Marx. The narrator falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakens to find himself in a future society wholly different from his own Victorian London. Based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, this utopia lacks money, classes, governmental structures, congestion, poverty, crime, and industrial pollution. Like Ruskin, Morris envisions a prevalence of medieval buildings, clothing, and musical instruments. In News From Nowhere, all large towns have been downsized to increase the extent of the countryside; huge industrial cities such as Manchester have disappeared; and large-scale factories have given way to small workshops scattered throughout the land and catering to the exercise of craftsmanship and art. Agriculture is again popular. Even smoke has been eliminated, thanks to a new power called “force.” Yet Morris was hardly opposed to technology: work that would be painful to do by hand is done by machines vastly superior to those in medieval times or the nineteenth century. Moreover, products are made both because society needs them and because citizens enjoy making them—not for the purpose of making a few people rich and powerful. Creativity, freedom, and happiness prevail." [mijn nadruk] (59)

"Worries concerning the mechanization and specialization of work and leisure, the decline of communal institutions such as the family and church, the unprecedented growth of materialism and utilitarianism, and the breakdown of social and political order thus gave radical and conservative social critics alike some grounds for agreement about restricting scientific and technological development."(60)

Weer andere auteurs:

"Owen, Fourier, and Marx and Engels were among the handful of critics who offered serious schemes for making beneficial use of various scientific and technological achievements without letting scientific and technological advance—or, for that matter, the threat of scientific and technological advance—become virtually ends in themselves. More than other “radical” European visionaries, and more than the “conservative” critics of industrialization such as Morris and Ruskin, they proposed specific means of regulating and accommodating—as opposed to merely stopping or severely limiting—scientific and technological advance." [mijn nadruk] (60)

"Gradually he [Robert Owen] became aware of the drawbacks of industrialization, which he hoped might be alleviated. He did not advocate wholesale retreat from technological change but rather restrictions on its development; moreover, and no less importantly, he showed as much concern for improving the social, cultural, and moral lot of industrial workers and their families as for improving machinery." [mijn nadruk] (62)

"Fourier persistently preached that his version of utopia could come about only in small communities whose inhabitants actually knew one another, not in big cities filled with anonymous masses. He asserted the economic and moral superiority of agriculture over manufacturing. Yet Fourier recognized that communal living in itself was no panacea. For true happiness, the passions must be released completely. He insisted, as had Owen, that new societies must replace old ones. Like Owen’s communities, Fourier’s “phalansteries,” as he called them, would be models for the reconstruction of his own society and, eventually, of all Western civilization." [mijn nadruk] (64)

"Long before twentieth-century critics of depersonalized working and living conditions, Fourier recognized the problems that ensued from treating people as mere cogs in machines. Equally importantly, he rejected the idea that the proliferation of technology was necessary for the achievement of utopia."(66)

"Marx and Engels were more sensitive than those “utopian” socialists to the liberating as well as enslaving potential of modern science and technology. They repeatedly hinted at a society radically superior to the existing capitalist order, a society that would utilize modern, especially automated, technology as a principal means of freeing the proletariat—that is, the class dependent for its very existence on daily employment. The proletariat would be liberated from their longstanding alienation from their work and freed for more varied and fulfilling activities." [mijn nadruk] (66)

"Contrary to what is often said about them, Marx and Engels were not crude technological determinists; they did not believe that the form taken by technology determines the social conditions under which humans live." [mijn nadruk] (67)

[Zie noot 5 op p. 69 met bronnen over de Industriële Revolutie.]

(74) Chapter 4 - The American Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics

"What made America a potential utopia was its status as a blank slate on which a new society could be written and its possession of enough natural resources to provide material plenty for all. Nevertheless, the potentiality rather than reality of America as a utopia must be emphasized.(...)
To most new arrivals and their offspring, the threat of permanent scarcity loomed far larger than the promise of eventual abundance. Until at least the mid-nineteenth century, most people conceived of America’s natural resources as finite, not infinite."(76)

"“System” was the touchstone of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America and influenced virtually every aspect of American life. It manifested itself primarily in ever larger and more complex transportation and communications systems. Those systems were frequently the backbone of utopian visions, however else those visions might differ. All Americans agreed that establishing a “true” hierarchy based on objective methods and criteria was critical for operating a system at optimum efficiency. In the roughly fifty years after 1870, Americans, in effect, remade their nation." [mijn nadruk] (78)

"until at least the late 1960s, most Americans were quite positive about scientific and technological advances, which they equated with social and moral progress. Technological and scientific advances resulted in the reconceptualization of America as an open system. It is hardly accidental that the first American technological utopian writings— those of John Adolphus Etzler (b. 1791), Thomas Ewbank (1792–1870), and Mary Griffith (1800?–1877)—appeared just as those advances were starting to become evident, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century."(78)

"Thoreau faulted Etzler’s Paradise for excessive optimism, materialism, and authoritarianism."(79)

"Despite these counter-narratives and the protests accompanying them, the eventual triumph of the nation’s major transportation and communications systems brought into being two related concepts that became part of most Americans’ basic beliefs long before they were formally categorized by scholars: “technological determinism,” or the conviction that technology shapes society and culture; and the “technological imperative,” or the conviction that technological advances must be pursued and implemented simply because they can be pursued and implemented, regardless of the consequences for society." [mijn nadruk] (82)

[Niet direct utopisch op het vlak van intermenselijke relaties dus. Integendeel. ]

"Not surprisingly, the unprecedented abundance brought about by technological advances hardly benefited everyone. Not only was the distribution of raw materials, finished products, and the wealth accruing from them grossly unequal, but concerns arose about the impact of wealth on its very recipients, the newly rich or at least newly comfortable middle class. Puritan concerns that abundance might produce moral corruption resurfaced, rendered more acute by unparalleled abundance and by the absence of the kind of rigorous ethical restraints that the Puritans had imposed on themselves." [mijn nadruk] (82)

"No less importantly, many Americans throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries debated whether industrialization in the United States would entail the kind of urban blight then plaguing England and whether “dark satanic mills” (a phrase commonly attributed to the British poet William Blake) would consume the American countryside and decimate farms and villages, as had already happened in much of England. This concern was also voiced by many European visitors to the United States. For some foreign and native critics alike, the prospect of America as a potential utopia had become the prospect of a potential dystopia—with results just the opposite from what were sought." [mijn nadruk] (83)

"During the Great Depression of the 1930s, for the first time in American history the public held inventors, engineers, and scien- tists responsible for economic bad times as greedy industrialists"(83)

(89) Chapter 5 - Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia in the United States and Europe

"If no prominent Europeans were genuine technological utopians, this was not true of Americans—though there were hardly as many as one might think. For all the rhetoric in American history about the uniqueness of the nation’s natural and man-made wealth, about an American “exceptionalism” that favored scientific and technological progress, and that equated human progress with scientific and technological progress, surprisingly few Americans have provided actual blueprints for a better society." [mijn nadruk] (89)

[Tja, als je al denkt dat je in een ideale wereld leeft... ]

"However, between the appearance of Macnie’s The Diothas in 1883 and Harold Loeb’s Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like in 1933, twenty-five individuals published fundamentally similar visions of the United States as a technological (and, to a lesser extent, scientific) utopia. Most of these twenty-five were obscure as visionaries, though some were prominent in their respective professions, businesses, or other pursuits."(89)

"Still, the only technological utopian made famous by his writings was Bellamy, whose remarkable success with Looking Backward was wholly unexpected."(90)

"Obtaining information on some of these twenty-five technological utopians is extremely difficult. (...) these visionaries were not marginal, alienated, disaffected figures but, on the contrary, successful, well-integrated Americans. This indicates that technological utopianism was not a movement of revolt but rather a movement seeking to alter the speed instead of the direction in which American society was moving."(90)

[Kun je dan nog over utopisch spreken, zo vraag ik mij af. Alleen de middelen en niet de doelen? Dat betekent dat waarden en normen niet centraal staan.]

"All of the twenty-five technological utopians were male. The absence of women is disappointing but hardly surprising. Their absence here is certainly not for my lack of trying to find them."(90)

"Significantly, exceptions to this generalization commonly took the form of fiction about Amazons, physically strong and usually beautiful women who dominated men but who, notably, lacked “social graces,” much less formal education. This was the case in works by both men and women. As Krishan Kumar noted in 1981, a focus on pre-industrial “primitivism” in feminist visions of a perfect or at least radically better future could be found in Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), and Mary Staton’s From the Legend of Biel (1975). Unbeknown to most scholars when Kumar wrote was Mizora: A Prophecy, written by one Mary E. Bradley Lane"(92)

"The Mizorans’ scientific and technological elevation finds expression in the development not only of a highly industrialized and automated state but also of a means of procreation without reliance on men. Only Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s far better known utopian novel Herland (1915) has a similar scheme."(92)

"At least in part, these technological utopians were responding to widely perceived late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century problems. Like countless other Americans, they were obsessed about seemingly unprecedented social disorder, including crowding, competition, aggression, selfishness, and rudeness. They feared the ever-present threat of disease...the growing secularism and declining belief in God and an afterlife; and the pervasive sense that individuals had lost control over self, family, and community. And, again like countless other Americans, these technological utopians feared that, a century or more after the Declaration of Independence and ratification of the Constitution, the United States had lost the quality of extraordinary leadership, integrity, and vision that had made it a unique beacon of democracy and opportunity."(93-94)

[Dat zijn dus gewoon conservatieve opvattingen. ]

"What these prophets of technological utopia envisioned was not a mass of soot-belching smokestacks, clanging machines, and teeming streets. Instead, the dirt, noise, and chaos that invariably accompanied industrialization in the real world would have given way to perfect cleanliness, efficiency, quiet, and harmony. With the taming of technology would come the taming of nature. Wind, water, and other natural resources would be subdued and harnessed in the form of clean, quiet, powerful electricity." [mijn nadruk] (96)

"They took to extremes the vision and values of mainstream Americans who were seeking changes strictly within their society."(96)

[Niets revolutionairs dus.]

"Of all the reform crusades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout the world, the American Technocracy movement of the 1930s and 1940s most closely approximated scientific and technological utopianism."(96)

[Hij blijft het maar utopisch noemen. Wat is er utopisch aan? ]

"Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely because of its preoccupation with science and technology that Technocracy cannot be considered the equivalent of technological utopianism. In seeking to increase efficiency and production, the overwhelming majority of Technocrats ignored the social ramifications of scientific and technological advance. Only a few were concerned with government, education, religion, culture, recreation, and social relations. The most prominent of these was none other than Harold Loeb, who was an authentic utopian. But Howard Scott, the leader of the Technocrats, had no such concerns and eventually competed with Loeb for leadership." [mijn nadruk] (97)

[Nou dan! ]

"The origins of Technocracy are shrouded in controversy, but most of its future leaders were apparently inspired by their association between 1919 and 1921 with the social critic Thorstein Veblen, then teaching at New York City’s New School for Social Research. Veblen offered a strategy, spelled out in The Engineers and the Price System (1921), for ridding American society of the waste and extravagance that he and other reformers had long condemned. Under Scott’s leadership, the Technocracy movement used some of Veblen’s analysis, but they ignored his social criticism, his passionate desire to do more than operate a more efficient America. Veblen finally gave up on the prospect of engineers, scientists, and other technical experts changing the basic structure of American society." [mijn nadruk] (97-98)

Over de invloed van Vannevar Bush die (natuur)wetenschap voor de overheid op de agenda zette, wat leidde tot de oprichting van de NSF. Maar:

"Bush thereby perpetuated in a monumental way the modern hierarchy that places science above technology; that treats engineers and other technical experts as handmaidens to scientists; that deems technology merely applied science; and that thereby misses the unique intellectual qualities of technology itself. The modern hierarchy that Bush embraced was based on a false foundation. If, however, “applied science” did not in Bush’s and other powerbrokers’ views warrant anywhere as much federal support as “pure science,” what claims on federal largesse could the social sciences possibly make? And how could the social sciences ever justify their own intellectual stature?"(100-101)

"By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, things had turned around for the social sciences and, consequently, for their use in science and technology policy."(101)

"During this same period, in foreign policy, the social sciences also played a crucial role directly related to science and technology. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists provided models for the maturation of countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their expertise would help to turn “underdeveloped” areas into more industrialized and more democratized nations emulating the United States." [mijn nadruk] (102)

[Het nieuwe kolonialisme... ]

"Both groups believed that the exportation of American science and technology, such as agricultural chemicals and equipment, to the aforementioned “backward” lands would turn the tide within them from communism to capitalism or undermine any efforts to remain ideologically neutral. These politicians and social scientists used a very traditional notion of “technological determinism” and ignored historical contexts that might have tempered their utopian expectations." [mijn nadruk] (102)

"For that matter, repeated examples of American intervention from the late nineteenth century through the Cold War in the internal affairs of other countries were conveniently ignored, as were persistent American leanings toward business, military, and political forces in those countries often hostile to genuine grass-roots democracy. Remarkably shallow and frankly unscientific premises were papered over with elaborate, self-consciously “scientific” models replete with graphs, statistics, public opinion surveys, and other seemingly objective paraphernalia. Like their conventional scientific counterparts, these social scientific experiments were designed to be repeated. But the laboratories for “modernization” theory were entire countries. More often than not, however, the experiments failed."(103)

[Vele voorbeelden volgen, waaronder de Vietnamoorlog. En je ziet dan steeds hoe zwak betrokken machtsfiguren zijn op het vlak van waarden en normen, zelfreflectie, en zo meer. Het is pure arrogantie, het is dom chauvinisme. ]

"Alas, the line of false prophets of technocracy, of arrogant “number-crunchers” from Howard Scott through McNamara, Bundy, and Rostow has obscured the largely forgotten intellectual tradition that viewed technocracy not as an opponent of progress and democracy but as a friend. This tradition includes any number of Progressive and New Deal intellectuals and reformers as well as science fiction writers. As Lewis Mumford, perhaps the leading figure in that tradition, put it so well in a 1921 review of economist and social critic Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, “What matters it if industrial society is run efficiently, if it is run only further into the same blind alley in which humanity finds itself today.” Ironically, the first chapter of Life in a Technocracy is entitled “Blind Alley.” The 1960s saw yet more interesting cases: political scientists Robert Dahl and Robert Lane and nuclear engineer Alvin Weinberg." [mijn nadruk] (106)

"Still, the fundamental assumption of post-war social scientists like Dahl, Lane, Galbraith, and Bell, and of socially minded engineers like Weinberg, was that public policy both at home and abroad could be managed by the right combination of experts in various fields. This assumption was taken to an extreme by Simon Ramo, who codified it into Systems Analysis or, more accurately, Systems Engineering."(110)

"Both the modest Social Engineering at the federal level pioneered by President Hoover and the grander schemes envisioned by Weinberg were dwarfed by the de facto utopian vision of Ramo and his fellow true believers."(110)

"Like the Technocrats of the 1930s, Ramo and his fellow systems engineers had come to see their world as desperately needing the kind of order only they could provide: efficient, honest, non-ideological.(...) More precisely, by focusing on output and by assuming that output is an agreed-upon commodity, systems engineers such as Ramo more often distorted than resolved problems. As historian and social critic Theodore Roszak observed, “the good systems team does not include poets, painters, holy men, or social revolutionaries, who, presumably, have nothing to contribute to ‘real life solutions.’”" [mijn nadruk] (111)

"Other critics have complained that Systems Engineering not only is elitist, self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and narrowly con- ceived but also, and most ironically, inefficient, inadequate, and unscientific."(112)

"Beginning in 1959, with the publication of Englishman C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, those conversations were influenced by the notion of a Western academic world bitterly divided into two camps: the sciences and the humanities."(114)

"In 1956, William H. Whyte, Jr., published The Organization Man. Whyte, assistant managing editor of Fortune, criticized unthinking, uncritical worship of corporate organizations and pilloried the gospel of scientism, the notion that expert determinations were always non-partisan and not subject to error or debate." [mijn nadruk] (115)

"In the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Administrations, however, socially useful research was redefined as research making high-tech America more competitive vis-à-vis other major powers, Japan above all." [mijn nadruk] (116)

"The historic bedrock American faith in scientific and technological progress, and in such progress as leading directly to social progress, has clearly diminished. If it is premature to proclaim the end of the “Enlightenment Project,” let alone the “end of science,”the evident growth of scientific and technological pessimism has made the optimism of the late 1950s and early 1960s seem hopelessly naïve and utterly passè." [mijn nadruk] (116)

"On the “hot-button” issues of evolution and climate change, shocking percentages of Americans reject evolution and/or global warming altogether as scientifically proved facts of life. And, where roughly fifty percent of respondents in a 1999 poll believed that scientific advances were among the nation’s most important achievements, a decade later only 40 twenty-seven percent agreed with that proposition." [mijn nadruk] (117)

"If anything, science and technology policy are today more political and more ideological in nature than ever before in American history."(118)

Volgt een verhaal over kritiek op utopisch denken.

"Beyond the obvious question of whether specific utopian schemes could ever be implemented has come the traditional concern over forcing individuals, groups, and entire societies to adopt values, institutions, and ways of life that many might otherwise reject— that is, if offered a choice, given the equally persistent association of utopianism with a lack of choice.
However, for roughly a century now, there have been two main objections. First, insofar as the realization of utopia presumes human perfectibility, it is impractical. The scientifically and technologically assisted horrors of the years since World War I (the world wars, the genocides, the nuclear bombs, the environmental disasters) have rendered forlorn any hope of radical improvement in human behavior. Second, and more perversely, any scientific and technological progress has made utopia as undesirable as it has become possible. Given the human propensity toward selfish and exploitative behavior, achievement of the kind of planning and control required by utopia would inevitably result in “dystopia,” or anti-utopia. The visions of Eugene Zamyatin’s We (1920) and of the more popular Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 have transformed utopia from something to be yearned for to something to be dreaded." [mijn nadruk] (123-124)

[Een erg oppervlakkig standpunt. Net als het idee dat de mens verbeterd kan worden door genetic engineering of via robotica en AI. Meteen wordt de hele samenleving even vergeten.]

(139) Chapter 6 - Utopia Reconsidered

"Nothing is more indicative of the fading of scientific and technological utopian fantasies from the sensibilities of ordinary Americans (and most other people) than the relatively muted response on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first moon landing of 1969.(...) By 1994 it had become painfully clear to most people that, contrary to centuries of utopian dreams, the moon landing had not changed the world. Like utopian communities, utopian writings, and world’s fairs, moon landings could not bring about lasting peace on an international or merely national scale."(139)

[Je moet ook wel erg dom of naïef zijn als je dat zou verwachten van een technologisch kunststukje. Je kunt je afvragen of wetenschappelijke en technologische utopieën hoe dan ook kunnen bestaan. Het lijkt me meestal een overschatting van de middelen zonder zelfs maar stil te staan bij de doelen waarvoor die middelen zouden moeten dienen.]

"The same skepticism, of course, applies to other megaprojects such as the so-called “Star Wars” anti-missile defense system and the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, though it should be said that the latter project has been abandoned while the missile defense project lives on despite having cost more than one hundred billion dollars."(141)

"The history of Maine’s only nuclear power plant, Maine Yankee, is a superb case study of the rise and fall and possible renewal of the nuclear power industry in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century."(142)

"In these respects, Maine Yankee and its sister plants were widely viewed as veritable scientific and technological utopias, especially in their early years, when nuclear power was widely touted throughout the world as a safe, efficient, and inexpensive alternative to conventional energy sources such as coal and oil. In those days, there were still echoes of the kinds of genuinely utopian visions held out for nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s, as outlined in Stephen Del Sesto’s now classic 1986 article, “Wasn’t the Future of Nuclear Engineering Wonderful?”" [mijn nadruk] (146)

[Hoezo utopia's? Wat veranderde er sociaal dan afgezien van de toegenomen rijkdom in dat stadje? Dit is meer een geschiedenis van de techniek dan van utopia's. En kritiekloos ook nog, want de samenhang van alles wat er gebeurde met het kapitalisme — bijvoorbeeld reactoren die commercieel uitgebaat worden — wordt niet geanalyseerd.]

"The growing retreat from such megaprojects as nuclear power plants extends to a declining belief in inventors, engineers, and scientists as heroes; in experts as wholly objective; and, most broadly, in science and technology in general as social panaceas." [mijn nadruk] (157)

[Allemaal het gevolg van naïef gedweep en weinig reflectie over waarden en normen en kennis.]

"Once, forecasting was the province of people who, regardless of their particular strategies, had a genuine hope of improving the world, or at least a small part of it. Now it has become an almost purely commercial enterprise intended only to make money.(...) Traditional utopians (and anti-utopians) who cared about the future, no matter how they might have foreseen it, have been replaced by another sort: men and women who care primarily about getting rich by playing off anxieties over the future. This represents a profound and troubling change." [mijn nadruk] (161)

"Not surprisingly, old-fashioned and simple-minded technological determinism pervades such books as Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), Gates’ The Road Ahead (1995), and Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995). Fuller was hardly a professional historian, but he did understand that his was not the first technological utopian vision in all history (though, in his own mind, it was surely the best).
It is so seductive, if so simplistic, to assume that high tech transforms everything in its path and that the twenty-first century will therefore reflect the globalization of culture as well as technology. Yet historians and other scholars of technology know otherwise." [mijn nadruk] (163)

"Other case studies of this growing ambivalence about contemporary technology can be found in Edward Tenner’s Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (1996). A healthy skepticism about unadulterated technological advance might actually represent another form of progress." [mijn nadruk] (167)

"A complementary critique of the utopian assumptions of Western science and technology derives from the growing “post-colonial studies” field that has emerged in recent decades. It is increasingly common for historians and other scholars to argue that Western science and technology, the commonly deployed measures of “progress” possibly leading to utopia, were utilized by European colonial powers to dominate their empires not only materially and financially (rather familiar themes) but also culturally and psychologically. The traditional condescension toward non-Western science and technology invariably reflects ignorance of the achievements in Arab lands and in China, among many other places, in the centuries before colonial empires began." [mijn nadruk] (169)

[Ik vraag me steeds meer af wat je met een woord als 'utopisch' nu eigenlijk zegt. Wat zijn 'utopian assumptions', wat betekent 'deployed measures of “progress” possibly leading to utopia'? Hetzelfde hieronder. Misschien is het juist utopisch om de natuur te respecteren en met rust te laten? Misschien hadden ze interessante relatievormen en mooie ideeën over naaktheid en seks? Utopisch als 'techische superioriteit' zegt me weinig.]

"The most profound measure of Western superiority became its growing control over nature and its mastery of nature’s secrets.(...) There was no prospect, in the eyes of Westerners, for anything remotely utopian within their overseas colonies."(169-170)

(186) Chapter 7 - The Resurgence of Utopianism - The Future is Now

"Consequently, few if any of the high-tech zealots of our own day have ever considered the possibility that, far from being original, their crusades fit squarely within a rich Western tradition of scientific and technological utopianism. It is not likely that very many of them realize how old-fashioned they really are when celebrating science and technology’s prospects for transforming the United States and, in due course, the world."(188-189)

[Waarom nog een hoofdstuk over dezelfde kwesties? Het heeft geen enkele zin om elk technisch middel te bespreken als je de principiële kwestie verder laat zitten door het niet over doelen / waarden en normen te hebben. Het hoofdstuk dus alleen gescand.]

(234) Chapter 8 - The Future of Utopias and Utopianism

"The “scientific and technological plateau” noted at several earlier points is a possible successor to scientific and technological utopianism: a redefinition of progress as being as much social and environmental as scientific and technological, with lessened commitment to those sciences and technologies that offer few if any widespread social benefits. Countless examples abound: reduction of nuclear weapons and efforts to minimize their possible use; safer, more fuel efficient cars; elimination of unneeded dams and other structures to restore natural settings; regulation of noise levels of various machines; “limits to growth” campaigns at local, state, and national levels; and “small is beautiful” crusades in both highly industrialized and less industrialized countries."(234)

[Op zich goed, maar nog steeds georiënteerd op techniek en zonder kritiek op het economisch systeem. Weer een hoofdstuk vol met zinloze uitweidingen die voorbijgaan aan de essentie.]

"Yet it is increasingly clear that the ongoing computerization and digitalization of the world and the extraordinary growth of instantaneous communications and of unprecedented access to information have generated a renewed stage of utopian expectations despite, as already detailed, a legitimate and mature skepticism about especially scientific and technological “advances.”"(249)

[Idem. ]