Utopian World Championship

Enmar & The Hawk .: Portal to the Future: The Internet and the Development of a Global Utopia

Summary: show/hide
Previous page |  Next page |  Page: 4 of 9 |
Jump to page: 
 

Page 4


It is enough to look at the radical changes of the twentieth century to see how much the global perspective has been altered. There are huge differences between the people that lived just a hundred years ago and our present time. It isn’t just the technology that changed, it is people. The violence in recent history and in our lives, our competitive nature, the freedom and span of choices – all would be breathtaking for a 19th century person.

It is very hard for us to foresee the future, being chained by present perspectives, but we must learn the lesson that history taught us. People change, goals change, new and surprising horizons open. Problems we can point out but find no solution for can be solved by future people. Gaps impossible to bridge will look ridiculous one day. Yet new problems we never imagined will emerge and take centre stage. We can not map the entire path. But that should not prevent us from taking the first step, trusting those who come after us to continue our work.

That the future will not look like any of those monocultural dreams does not mean we have to surrender them or our attempts to make them come true. We can not and should not give up on who we are, or what we dream—for some of those dreams will come true, at least in part. As our current dreams will become the progenitors of the dreams yet to come, so too will those dreams reflect what we now believe, and have evolved and developed from them. But we have to allow the needed space for future generations to progress and to diverge from our way of thinking.

That we can not see the future does not release us from our responsibility to it, nor our stewardship over it. The way we conduct ourselves today determines the paths people will be able to choose from in the future. Every generation can only choose from the options laid by the previous ones. We have to keep the people of the future in mind when we make decisions, and try our best not to stand in their way.

We may not be able to bridge the cultural and religious gaps among us, but we can take the first step in the right direction by acknowledging differing religious and cultural backgrounds not as 'others', but as being very much like ourselves. As with any good intention on a cultural level, declaring what needs to be done is far simpler than implementation. This will demand a change of attitude on personal, media, societal and institutional levels. A global consciousness requires that we look at people not through a single facet, but as the multi-layered characters they are. Just like ourselves, there’s more to their identity than cultural factors.

 

Previous page |  Next page