If the goal of life were to be happy, no one would have children.
That's if life had a goal.
When I first saw As You Like It, I was rapt by the first scene in the Forest of Arden. A random gathering of refugees of uncertain future, with diverse talents, backgrounds, personalities and dispositions, including at least one of no apparent talent, all making the best of their lot in the now, together. One, of course, has a lute -- someone always has a guitar -- and sings resonant songs, one is a philosopher enthusiastically espousing deep thoughts, another a young impulsive romantic and a bit stupid, and one, talentless and apparently opinionless who sits on a big chair at the center presiding over their little make-shift society, the refugee Duke, of whom nothing is asked and who asks nothing of his pretend-subjects.
It reminded me of my very first job. It was in a retail store in Times Square, 1971, all the night-shift employees randomly thrown together with various talents and dispositions, the lively yet gentle, delicate and beautiful Cecilia and her handsome and dashing boyfriend, his comical and trangressively vulgar brother; and there was a young out-of-towner trying to make it in the Big City, impressed with all the craziness of New Yorkers including the local streetwalker who'd regularly traipsed by to entertain us and just before leaving, pull off her t-shirt to shock the patrons with her bare b**bs then run out the door; and the night manager, a wry, gay composer who wrote musicals for Andy Warhol's transvestite Superstars -- all facing an uncertain future, but facing it in the now together. As the youngest -- sixteen, they were mostly in their mid twenties -- I was treated as the mascot. Despite our limited paycheck means, we spent Saturday evenings after work very late at dinner together in a local bar & grill.
If I had to spend eternity somehow, I'd choose that job. The day-to-day concerns and not knowing what life would hold were enough to engage all of us, and we all cared about each other, not in any programmatic or moral way, but the way kids who hang out together know and care about each other.
I had the same reaction to the old black and white 1937 movie Stage Door and the 1960's L-shaped Room, both about boarding house life in which the characters are thrown together randomly and live their uncertain lives together.
That's my heaven, but it's not happy. The option of perpetual happiness sounds to me in no way different from drug addiction. Is that what people want? Once hooked, maybe, and AI threatens to hook us all into indolence incrementally like frogs in a heating pot, but who would choose that hook aforehand?
I'm sure you all can think of examples of such motivating needs and wants that lead to engagement, absorption and fulfillment. A big part of what makes hunter-gatherer culture -- the culture that homo sapiens were naturally selected for through at least two million years of human evolution -- so idyllic (egalitarian, gender-equal, cooperative, no disciplining of children) is the engagement required to obtain their basic survival needs. And what is most dysfunctional in our society is excess supplying of needs (too much sugar, for example, or convenient transport instead of a healthy walk or climb up the stairs) and the property that follows from the surplus. "To each according to his [sic] needs" has failed us. We have to struggle against our desires now instead of struggling to fulfill them.
Karl Popper proposed an alternative to utopianism: a procedural model rather than the usual policy or top-down planned model. The ideal society, for Popper, is one which is a) highly sensitive to informational feedback of its policies, whatever policies are chosen; has b) the flexibility to learn from its mistakes and the agility to fix them quickly; c) responds to the needs and interests of its constituents. He thought liberal democracy was such a procedural ideal.
Recognizing that the technologies of the future cannot be predicted and since technology is a socio-economic game changer, staunch ideologies and top-down autocracies should have no place in government. Holding onto ideologies will obstruct the responsiveness required of policy-makers.
In this he may have been wrong -- the CCP seems to be more flexible, informationally sensitive and responsive than the US, an ostensibly liberal democracy, is. And the periodic, and apparently global, fashion for fascism and the polarization of the political realm tells us that the members of the society are neither informed nor rational in their understanding of the world. In an autocracy there's little point in holding strong political views so there's less social polarization, and besides, everyone more or less agrees on whether the autocrat is succeeding or not. Egyptians all recognize that their state is ruled by a military dictatorship. This does not produce polarization or rebellion. It produces general agreement, not with the gov't, but with the people who have to get by with their uncertain future, together.
So utopia is a stupid idea. Even an anti-ideological, bottom-up program like Popper's won't work. It's time to accept that the future depends on technology we cannot anticipate and that technology of the future will be a morality and personality and values game-changer. And above all, let's not sacrifice now for a future we can't understand much less predict. Take things as they come. The craziness of now suffices for the day.
It's hard to accept that the future is a foreign country. Doctors seem to have trouble understanding that their knowledge of today will be all wrong tomorrow. Can you blame them? What a sorry profession, dedicated helping and never doing harm, yet doomed to doing harm. It's no wonder that deal has to be sweetened with so much money.
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