The Global Brain as a New Utopia

Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire” liberalism that has replaced them is coming under more and more criticism. Instead, the intellectual climate has turned to either gloom and doom, or an “anything goes” postmodernist relativism. This general pessimism and apathy is fed by an increasing amount of bad news about wars, terrorism, ecological catastrophes, global warming, rising xenophobia and inequalities. Yet, objective statistics show that humanity is doing rather well on a global scale: life expectancy, wealth, education level, democracy, safety, and even average IQ have been consistently rising for the world as a whole, and this for at least the past century [Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000a; Simon, 1995]. Still, it cannot be denied that accelerating changes in all segments of science, technology and society and growing complexity produce a lot of stress and uncertainty. While, on average, developments seem to be for the better, overall social evolution has become much more unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable [Heylighen, submitted], raising the risks of major catastrophes. The anxiety, distrust and hopelessnes that this engenders is made worse by the lack of a shared world view [Apostel et al. 1994, Heylighen & Bernheim, 2000b]. Such an encompassing philosophy would provide clear goals and values, and a positive vision of the future, motivating people to work towards a common project, and giving a meaning to their life. The role of a utopia is to create such a vision. Past utopias have been discredited mainly because their views were unrealistic: they failed to take into account the complexity of social systems and the tensions and contradictions inherent in human nature. As a result, their application to real societies have all too often produced spectacular failures. Yet, recent developments such as evolutionary psychology and the theory of complex adaptive systems [Heylighen, 2002], are providing fundamental insights in these complexities, opening up the perspective of a utopia that takes them duely into account. While a realistic model of a future society will necessarily be complex, abstract and with many shades of grey, a utopia must in the first place provide a simple and appealing picture, that people can easily visualize. These two