A blog about Marinwood-Lucas Valley and the Marin Housing Element, politics, economics and social policy. The MOST DANGEROUS BLOG in Marinwood-Lucas Valley.
What are the biggest obstacles to continued progress and to maintaining an open and free society?
One of the biggest obstacles is, broadly speaking, utopianism. Progress is neither guaranteed nor irreversible. The institutions and values that helped bring about the progress humanity has achieved are increasingly under attack by extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. Many nationalist populists on the right and self-proclaimed socialists on the left reject the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and open discourse, as well as free enterprise.
A realistic picture of the human condition should compare the imperfect present with a much more imperfect past rather than with an imagined utopia in the future, as well as acknowledge the truly incredible progress that humanity has already made. Unfortunately, instead of viewing the present as a vast improvement on the past, many people see the present as failing to live up to some sort of ideal world and deny the progress that has been achieved.
It is important to remember that living conditions remained remarkably constant throughout 99.9 percent of homo sapiens’ existence: poverty was ubiquitous. Then economic growth started to accelerate in Great Britain and the Netherlands, the rest of Western Europe and North America, and then the rest of the world. Markets globalized and the Industrial Revolution took productivity to new heights, causing the acceleration in economic growth and ultimately leading to widespread prosperity.
Modern society based on the rule of law, global exchange, and social tolerance, is an extremely recent phenomenon. It may also be more fragile than it seems.
The greatest travesties of the 20th century were carried out in the name of the utopian ideologies of communism and fascism. There is always the danger that new utopian demagogues will emerge.
Utopia will always be out of reach and the world will never be a perfect place. But by building on and learning from past successes it is possible to strive to make each day better than the last. Mankind has proven again and again that it is capable of rising to great challenges and solving problems that once seemed insurmountable. As my colleague Marian Tupy once wrote, “The danger lies in turning our backs on the means by which problems can be solved – reason, science, open discourse, thirst for knowledge, etc. The values of the Enlightenment are under assault from the far Left and the far Right. Both extremes believe that our world has been corrupted beyond repair. They want to blow it up and start anew. ‘What,’ they ask us, ‘do you have to lose?’ A lot, actually, should be our response.”
'Definitive document of pre-World War II futuristic utopian thinking, as envisioned by General Motors. Documents the "Futurama" exhibit in GM's "Highways and Horizons" pavilion at the World's Fair, which looks ahead to the "wonder world of 1960."'
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Futurama was an exhibit/ride at the 1939 New York World's Fair designed by Norman Bel Geddes that tried to show the world 20 years into the future (1959--1960). Sponsored by the General Motors Corporation, the installation was characterized by its automated highways and vast suburbs. Compared to other "visions of the future," Bel Geddes' was rather achievable—the most advanced technology posited was the automated highway system, of which General Motors built a working prototype by 1960.
Futurama is widely held to have first introduced the general American public to the concept of a network of expressways connecting the nation. It provided a direct connection between the streamlined style which was popular in America between 1928 and 1938, and the concept of steady-flow which appeared in street and highway design in the same period. Bel Geddes expounds upon his design in his book Magic Motorways, stating, "Futurama is a large-scale model representing almost every type of terrain in America and illustrating how a motorway system may be laid down over the entire country -- across mountains, over rivers and lakes, through cities and past towns -- never deviating from a direct course and always adhering to the four basic principles of highway design: safety, comfort, speed and economy." He had acknowledged this in the belief that "A free-flowing movement of people and goods across our nation is a requirement of modern living and prosperity."
The modeled highway construction emphasized hope for the future as it served as a proposed solution to traffic congestion of the day, and demonstrated the probable development of traffic in proportion to the automotive growth of the next twenty years. Bel Geddes assumed that the automobile would be the same type of carrier and still the most common means of transportation in 1960, albeit with increased vehicle use and traffic lanes also capable of much htigher speeds.
To meet these assumptions, four general ideas for improvement were incorporated into the exhibition showcase. First, that each section of road be designed to receive greater capacity of traffic. Second, that traffic moving in one direction could be in complete isolation to traffic moving in any other. Third, segregating traffic by subdividing towns and cities into certain units that restrict traffic and allow pedestrians to predominate. And fourth, consequent traffic control for predetermined maximum and minimum speeds. Through this, the exhibition was designed to inspire greater public enthusiasm and support for the constructive work and planning by engineers and public officials who had contributed so much toward improvement of streets and highways.
The popularity of the Futurama exhibit fit closely with the fair's overall theme "The World Of Tomorrow" not just in its emphasis on the future, but also in its redesign of the American landscape. The highway system was supported within a one-acre animated model of a projected America containing more than five hundred thousand individually designed buildings, a million trees of thirteen different species, and approximately fifty thousand motorcars, ten thousand of which traveled along a fourteen-lane multi speed interstate highway...
Bel Gedde's 'future' was synonymous with technological process, no less in its simulated low-flying airplane journey through the exhibit. The aerial journey was simulated by an eighteen-minute ride on a conveyor system, carrying 552 seated spectators at a time, covering a winding path a third of a mile long through the model. Along with light, sound and colour effects the ride moved at a rate of approximately 120 feet per minute, allowing spectators to look down through a continuous curved pane of glass towards the model. The virtue of this elevated position allowed spectators to see multiple scales simultaneously, viewing city blocks in proportion to a highway system as well as artificially controlled trees in glass domes. This scale was modelled off 408 topographical sections based on aerial photographs of different regions of the US provided by the pioneering company Fairchild Aerial Surveys...
