Janet Sealy: THE UTOPIAN VORTICAL WEB - LIVING ON A BORDERLESS PLANET WITH A DIMINISHING NATURAL WORLD.
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In his winning entry for the Internet competition Utopian Championship 01, TROY beautifully describes his vision of a journey toward a better world, providing the reader with links and doorways to this world through many grassroots and organisational websites. These gifts we will use in my Utopian Conversation. Chillingly though, he sets his entry against a backdrop of “The Great Fall of Capitalism”. As he tells it, “The very market of hyper-capitalism got a global aneurysm and it imploded. When the international economic collapse came in 2007, national governments, bureaucratic armies and state institutions were ill prepared for the chaos that ensued. Their authority suddenly vanished.” And he says, “…is not capitalism itself, with the American Dream as its ultimate promise, also a utopian myth of sorts? For we are told, in a grand quixotic challenge to basic mathematics, that all people have a chance of becoming part of the wealthy minority.”[3] Today, as minority and majority worlds together move out of the certainty, linearity and predictability of the Newtonian scientific paradigm, insights from the science of complexity are slowly shaping our culture, based on a deeper study of the Natural World. The devastation of the economic imperative, the tunnelvision of specialization, the reductionism of Cartesian thought and the certainty of matter are being slowly superceded - by enchantingly beautiful, yet scientifically proved concepts of butterfly effects, bifurcations, emergence, fractality, feedback, fuzzy logic, non-linearity, selforganized criticality, sensitivity to initial conditions and Vorticity. The principles of all these concepts are fully founded on Nature’s elemental magic. It seems almost certain that not Darwinian competition but Margulis’ cooperation, not genetic mutation but symbiosis, not individuality but structural coupling, not selection but feedback, have been the basis for our earliest primeval survival as “a new kind of cell” some 2.2 million years ago. Utopia must take note of this our earliest fight for survival.
In a 21st century effort to survive, can Utopia exist concurrent with modern mayhem, made achievable in different ways, in an age of deeply interconnected social chaos? I believe it can. The elements are already with us when we hear of The Cordoba Initiative in New York, a multi-faith effort to increase communication and tolerance between Islam and ‘America’; when we read of The Natural Step, which is a sustainability partnership between business and environmental educators in Stockholm; when we hear that the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams are “playing for peace” in celebration of border porosity and when we hear of the vast network of action being performed under the auspices of the United Nations. Children too, are capable of Utopian learning by learning how to debate, discuss and dialogue with great skill – this is visible in schools in Sydney, in Australia and around the world, where intricate topics covering ‘free trade agreements’, genetically modified foods, the relevance of the UN and the urgency of Environment are debated. Unfortunately, the exposure, publicity and visibility for intelligent debate and the issues it explicates are often lost to sport and the market. Even within the spheres of intelligent debate, while the issues that matter are many and relate among other urgent topics, to growing global refugees numbers and to decreasing ecosystems, the reality is that many in society simply grow fat in courts, debating and interpreting the letter of the law. In closely related schemes for making money under the convoluted and protected aegis of global financial law, dealing rooms of the stockmarket are ‘dynamic and fluid spaces’, in the words of a share dealer, full of opportunity to make and launder easy money; and yet our most creative and unique Universities and their academics struggle to survive and to be heard, without having their intellectual freedom compromised. This too is not unchangeable, though the link between education and the economy is slowly becoming more symbiotic and accepted. While these sick situations are not incurable, it requires a fundamental alteration in attitude to change our current attractors [4] of power, money, identity and arrogance to enable islands of hope to turn into continents of consciousness.
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