I
keep finding myself reading yet another hefty book on the history of utopias.
Its title would be more accurate if it claimed to be the history of ideas, but
perhaps that, too, carries a message: could it be that every idea is, in some
sense, a utopia?
As a (by now very old) contemporary
observer, I am struck—vividly, and not pleasantly—by the book’s long, bitter
epilogue. Yesterday it set off in me a dizzying chain of thoughts. I went
searching for an explanation of why we—human beings—can remain hopeful even
after the end of history, or more precisely, after the apparent end of utopias
and grand ideas.
Ray Bradbury’s immortal words keep
echoing in my mind: “The wonderful thing about man is that he never loses his
courage and his spirit; he begins again and again, because he knows it is
important and worthwhile to begin again.”
Here lies the great question: how
does a human being know this? Or at least, how is it that there are always some
people—fewer or more—who think this way, and act accordingly?
One could say this is a trivial
question, and the answer even more trivial.
But the trivial question-and-answer
will not do for me.
Truth is always simple, but never trivial.
And then I sensed
something—something in the aura of civilization.
For a long time I searched for a
name for this something.
At first I thought it might simply be the human spirit itself, but something
pushed me to reject that monolithic image. What I see instead is a multitude
within the aura of civilization. What should I call the figures gathered there?
The “superhuman human” seemed too mystical. “Logic” sounded promising—but we
may as well call them intelligences.
The picture taking shape is this:
across the millennia, the thinking, brooding, communicating of billions of
people—fused with oceans of emotions and a jungle of mechanisms—has brought
into being spiritual entities that assume real and distinct forms. Among them
there are gods, yes, but also secular logics and a thousand other
intelligences, and among these now appear the artificial—or more precisely, the
informatic—intelligences.
The best part is that among these
gods, angels, logics, and intelligences, the anthropomorphic and anthropophilic
logics are especially important and effective, for they are the natural
superstructure of humanity itself. And it is precisely these that guarantee
that there will always be human beings ready to receive the message—and to
carry it forward.
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