👾 About Me and My Interests

>I often argue with my friend Sam about what has become of the dream of Utopia. He believes it has faded with the end of communist and universalist fantasies; I believe it has evolved into more viable, modest versions. A certain kind of twentieth-century utopian idealism had died, the kind that believed we could and should erase everything and start over: new language, new society, new ways of organizing power, work, even family home, and more. Projects for abandoning the past wholesale and inventing a whole new human being seem, like the idea of a one-size-fits-all universalism, more ominous than utopian to us now. It may be becasue we now includes people who forcibly lost their language, whether it was Yiddish in Poland or Cree in Canada, that as we lose the past, we cherish it more and look at the devouring mouth of the future with more apprehension. But we have also learned that you can reinvent the government but not the human nature in one fell stroke, and the process of reinventing human nature is a much more subtle, personal, incremental process. Mostly nowadays we draw our hopes from fragments and traditions from a richly varied past rather than an imagined future. But disaster throws us into the temporary utopia of a transformed human nature and society, one that is bolder, freer, less attached and divided than in ordinary times, not blank, but not tied down.
- A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit