Saturday, April 4, 2009

More Futurism

So one thing i have been thinking about is how no science fiction stories imagine a pleasant future. Well, I have really been giving that much thought, since the reason for that is obvious—pleasant futures don't really lend themselves well to conflict—as to what such a pleasant future might entail. What would be a conceivable future world that we could look forward to living in? That wouldn't just be a sci-fi setting, but that could be an accurate projection of the future, to some degree? Assuming the world will actually get better, which I kind of do, and that there is an actual direction to history, what kind of future society are we looking at? What would be a conceivable endpoint, or at least goal, in terms of a future society.

I don't mean far future either. One of my feelings is that any possible future that could be arrived at, that is, any society, would have encoded in it mechanism to ensure scientific and artistic advancement. We will not get an End of History scenario, where we settle down to one, stable, form of society, and then we never budge from that, ever again. (It's funny, how when you think about it, how conservative Marx's vision really is.) However, it seems to me that there is a certain trajectory in terms of terms of economic and societal reforms, that something like the the "Liberal Agenda" will come about in the end, it's just that the Liberal Agenda keeps mutating, so it's hard to keep track of what it actually might be. Of course, any possible future, in order to be realistic along these lines, would need to be believably based upon a foreseeable trajectory from the present (otherwise you are dealing in Fantasy).

I mean, let's start out with some simple things shall we? I assume that eventually we are just going to have to have some kind single payer healthcare. Medical cost will just be so expensive, that some attempt will be made to eliminate the cost, and cutting out the profit margin seems a good way to do that. And of course, there will be increased, nearly universal unionization, leading to higher wages for all (at least in America). This, in turn, will cut into the profit margin. (God, I wish I knew more about economics.) Kind of hard to figure out what the step it after that.

Then there is social issues. The problem I have is that I feel like you can always fail to take something into account. Part of me thinks that We have almost reached the endpoint in terms of civil rights causes. Just where is there to go from here? But I bet the Romans thought the same thing, right. But if there is still some social just causes unturned, which ones? Who is there really left out there being oppressed? What additional dimensions of human experience have not been noticed? There's race, gender, religion, and sexual proclivities, right? Race, or nationalism, will probably be a continuing source of discord until everyone is brown, but I think in many countries it will soon fade to non-importance in day to day interaction. The President of the United States is a black guy. Talking about post-racialism is bullshit, but that doesn't mean our conception of our relationship with the concept of race isn't going to go under an overhaul over the next 4-8 years. Religion, who fucking cares. sexual proclivities? I just doubt that furies are going to be the next GLBT. Fetishes in general be become kind of humdrum and not important. Lot of taboos and peoples' interest in caring about or stigmatizing certain taboos will just go away. Once gay relationships are normalized, that shit will open like floodgates, and no one will care about fetishes, whether we're talking Furries or S&M. It will be like caring about a person's favorite ice cream flavor (mine is vanilla, natch). By 2050, no one gives a fuck what you do in bed. Probably the only sexual habits I see keeping a stigmatization are things like pedophilia, bestiality, and polygamy. Basically anything that could be read as an imposition onasnother conciousness that is unable to give valid consent. Though I wonder how long such things could hold on, especially if concepts such as gender start to fall apart and sex comes to be less loaded with meaning or value. Bestiality will always be a somewhat nasty violation of animals, but polgamy? Just a way to ratify polyamorous relationships, the way we are now ratifying same-sex ones. Pedophilia is a bit more fucked up, but, the ancient Greeks did it, right? Could we concievably return to a state so sexually lax that it became acceptable. Is NAMBLA the next gay rights movement? Allen Ginsburg seemed to think so. On the other hand, that might actually be a moral aberration that has actually been corrected for by Western Individual Liberty, not something harmless that has been supressed by intolerant mores. Still, if Socrates fucked Plato... (did he? could people confirm that, or am I just imagining that shit from stuff I read and heard? Man the Greeks sure were odd.)

More later.

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