The Utopian World Championship

Cyril Belshaw: From Youth Maturity to Global Government : The Utopian Tapestry

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Summary

We have the intellectual tools to create a practical Utopia by the end of the 21st Century.. A theory of innovation, and the vast socio-cultural changes of the last quarter-century, provide an anchor. There has been a growth in the power of peoples. What is needed now is for the peoples to influence institutions to take the steps towards a Utopian world.
In the first part I concentrate on changing education by means of Youth Maturity Institutes incorporating schools into wider organisations. They will bring together interests and expertise focussed on the growing maturity of the child as he/she learns to become adult.
It is here that we will have a chance to instil the central value of courtesy and to enable individuals to control the anger and violence that is bedevilling the world. Among a range of other goals will be such themes as creativity, risk-taking, the defeat of boredom: values essential to a balanced adult persona, and the absence of which are at the root of most social ills.
The second section emphasizes the notion of a holistic tapestry. We cannot expect a Utopian solution in one dimension of society to succeed unless it is articulated with the rest. Thus parental influences in the Youth Maturity Institutes will not be fully functional if the relations between men and women are dysfunctional. This essay is not the place to elaborate on all the many dimensions, from control of criminality to zero-based taxation and universal minimum income. Instead there is a summary list of the threads which must be woven to succeed
The third section jumps to the constitution of global government. Now we build on the confidence of the earlier sections to tackle world order.
Global Government emerges from an analysis of the weaknesses in the present system. It will be a true world government deriving its authority from an elected body based on population units. It is organised into functional departments rather than the present independent organisations. It has an elected Cabinet and Ministers and a monopoly of military forces.
We cannot depend on national governments. They still work in a culture of competitive power, and are mostly far behind the wishes of their peoples. We need an alternative source of movement to give power to the people. I suggest that the most likely form to succeed would be a Council of International NGOs, mobilizing opinion to push governments and the UN to take the necessary steps.

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At an intimate level, there is much that can be done. We can judge our own actions in terms of what we know about their effects. This of course is already being done. Husbands and wives ponder the effect of their words and behaviour on their partners. Sincere environmentalists amend their private actions, consciously working if not to improve, at least not to further damage, the environment as they know it. Parents work with theories and ideas about what works best for their children, and in doing so have at least some wider respect for social responsibility. The exercises will be the more effective the more they become spontaneous, as natural results of attitudes towards life. To handle this is of course a prime goal of activities which create maturity in youth.
The vast differences between the rich countries and the poor, not only in commercial wealth but in the opportunities presented to the human spirit, create obvious targets for action. Too often, this takes the form of “Let them be like us”. Put baldly, the gross flaws in such an argument are obvious to all except the proselytizers of U.S. style capitalism. I have claimed elsewhere that the more centralized and detached a political entity, the more humans value small scale associations of great variety (from Churches to carnavals and cultural associations) within which they may find an identity.
Thus what we may call global values (e.g. embodied in international law and policy) both emerge from and impinge upon systems of significant localized values. Adaptation, resistance, judgement, positive excitement and anger are part of the dialectic. No great work can emerge which can take into account all the variations. But principles, such as those of understanding the nature and ramifications of change, the implications of reform, may be applied and respected.
I base my hope and optimism on two features. The first is the broad, continual, discussion of where we want to be in 2100, of values and ways of getting there. What I write now in 2003 is something I believe to be eminently feasible. But the goals I suggest, which I in vanity consider to be appropriate, will, as discussion continues and culture changes, turn out to be naïve, in need of much further refinement, probably as early as 2030.

The Responsibilities of Education

It is my intention here to examine critically the ways in which official policies relate to the maturation of youth, primarily through the educational system, primarily in richer countries. More and more frequently schools are being confronted by manifestations of societal ills – violence, depression et al. They are not equipped to remedy the problems they face, and there are difficulties bringing other community resources to bear on the issues.
Once we identify the tasks and challenges necessary to optimize the ways in which youths mature into responsible citizens, we may then design appropriate institutions to do the job. That design will be the Utopian goal to achieve prior to 2100 – in my view it should be achievable fifty years before that - indeed very soon - in much of the world. Special adjustments will be required to modify the institutions and ensure that they are effective in the poorer countries. In all instances the interaction of these ideas with indigenous values and systems will need careful culture-specific appraisal.

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