We have described desirable key defining institutions for four key spheres of social life, and two overarching contexts. This is not a finished, complete, and final vision. It is instead a flexible core vision people can share, refine, adapt, and hopefully use as part of a conceptual toolbox to undertake social change. Some parts of the whole vision are more developed than others. Some parts may need more improvements, others less. But taken together, the preceding chapters provide, we hope, sufficient institutional clarity to fuel hope, inspire struggle, help inform understandings of the present, and, particularly, as we will try to do in the third volume of Fanfare, aid in creating and implementing strategy and program. To conclude this volume, however, we would like to very briefly discuss some matters of overall attitude to vision and our uses and potential abuses of it.
We Are Minimalist
In talking about vision for a future society or for any part of a future society, one could go into far more detail than we have provided. Indeed, we have been minimalist in addressing only a few institutions in each sphere, and even regarding those few, we have avoided discussing details, but only addressed broad attributes.
In presenting the vision from this book, publicly, in talks, audiences often ask many different exploratory questions. What will sex life look like? What will people consume? How long will the work day be? How will Catholicism or Islam change? What will happen to population sizes? How long will the school day be? How old will people retire? How big will workplaces be? What job will I personally have? Will everyone be vegetarian? What legislation will pass? Is our imagination lacking, or is there a positive reason we neglect such matters?
There are actually four reasons why we restrain ourselves.
First, to delve into visionary details is to risk the idiocy of arrogant excess. That is, we can’t in fact know visionary details. The future is not an open book but a complex product of choices and conditions no one can fully know in advance. Nor, for that matter, are there any singularly right details to know. A future society will opt for many different choices regarding its detailed features. Saying what those choices will be now not only ignores that what they will be will depend on lessons learned, which we do not now know, but also ignores that in different places, and different communities, not only due to lessons we haven’t learned, but due to different tastes, there will be different choices. There aren’t singularly correct future choices.
A third reason is we wish to avoid a slippery slope that leads even beyond arrogant excess to stultifying rigidity. The more visionary details one offers, even if such details could be confidently known – which they can’t – and even if such details wouldn’t vary from place to place and time to time – which they would – the more one is likely to see vision as some fixed, finished, final result and thus the less likely one is to be flexible about assessing, improving, adapting, and refining it. To get overly detailed is a fools errand not only because it will yield gross errors and not only because in fact there are no universal details to foresee, but because it risks corrupting the whole process by rigidifying attitudes.
Finally, there is a fourth reason, even more fundamental than the above three to avoid excessive detail. The details of vision are not our concern. The task we face is to provide future generations with a society whose institutions facilitate their making their own decisions. Our task is to provide institutions which do not dictate, bias, or even constrain outcomes away from human well being and development. Our task is to provide a societal setting consistent with human well being and development for all, but not specifying the shapes people opt for within that freedom. The actual choice of policies and details in future settings is, in other words, for future people to decide. For us to act like those choices are our province would violate self management (for them) and is again a slippery slope toward us dictating for others how they will live.
So we have been and we need to remain minimalist. Of course all sides of life interest us. Of course there are times when discussing in more detail some matter, hypothetically, maybe answering a question or developing an edifying example, can be useful for showing the general benefits and implications of our institutional commitments. But to actually think we can know, or that there is even something to know – one choice regarding details – or that it is in any case our right to make such choices or even urge them before future citizens have means to decide for themselves, would violate the self managing, diverse, and flexible values and processes we favor. So, instead, we propose just a minimal list of institutional features for a new society.
We Are Maximalist
Our minimalism regarding institutional proposals does not mean we don’t aim high. To deliver a society that is truly without oppressive class, race, gender, and power hierarchies, and in which just outcomes, diversity, solidarity, and self management are literally produced by society’s institutions even as those institutions also facilitate people fulfilling and developing themselves and others as the highest priority, in a world of peace and ecological stewardship, is no small goal.
The relatively few institutions we choose to describe and advocate are not randomly chosen. They are a minimal list, yes, that can, however, accomplish the maximal goal of carrying out society’s core defining functions in a manner that allows future citizens to self manage their own choices in a solidaritous, diverse, and just setting.
So we are not only minimalist in trying not to overstep what is our rightful task and province and what we can sensibly know. We are also maximalist in trying not to under specify vision in a way that would leave the possibility that a basic defining feature we unself consciously adopted would subvert the goals we aspire to, a matter that will crop up often, in volume three, addressing how we attain a participatory society.
Minimalist Maximalism
Last volume of Fanfare, we were minimalist maximalist about theory. We wanted the most succinct list of concepts we could assemble in our conceptual toolbox, sufficient, however, to understand society and history in ways sufficient to guiding our work to change them.
This volume, we are minimal maximalist about vision. We sought to specify enough future aims to inform our thought about the present, to inspire our desire for a new society, and to guide our practice to attain it, without, however, overextending beyond what we can reasonably know or even can be known, and beyond what is our province on behalf of our future selves and future citizens.
Finally, next volume, we will be minimal maximalist about strategy… respecting limits of knowledge and province, but providing sufficient conceptual tools and insights to facilitate efficient thought about program and struggle in the years to come – all flexibly, so that our insights mature and develop with each new lesson we learn.
Perhaps we should also add what is obvious, but nonetheless important. Offering new ideas of any sort, particularly bearing on how society ought to be arranged, is unlikely to be initially popular. It isn’t only critics and revolutionaries who can become sectarian about their views, and hostile to what challenges them, nor is confined to overt ideology and religion. One doesn’t have to have succumbed to an explicit coherent brand of fundamentalism to be quite fundamentalist – one can display such behavior even in daily life. As the philosopher William James warned, quite rightly, “By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.” Amassing sufficient support for new vision to enact it is not merely a matter of insightful argument calmly and rationally and rapidly winning over open eager minds, which is why we need another volume to address how to win change, not merely envision it.
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