Gas Prices and Utopia (or Not)

I've been thinking a lot about gas prices lately. I guess a lot of people have been. And there's an article in the next NYT Magazine about "peak oil" production and then its decline and the potentially devastating effect on the world economy. Some people believe in dire predictions; others reject the doom-and-gloomers out-of-hand.

But here's my thinking on this. Go back fifty, sixty years. Think first of the utopias constructed by social theorists and novelists. What do they have in common? (1) Some version of world peace, a peaceful world, a world without war; probably with some kind of rational world government. (2) The elimination of the other traditional scourges of mankind: hunger/famine; disease; drought. The conquest of these natural scourges through science is a key utopian thought (at least mid-century). (3) The elimination of scarcity, more generally, and with it scarcity's natural consequence: poverty. And while we're at it, the elimination of ignorance, racism, all forms of irrationality. (4) I know from watching those movies that the world of the future is bright and clean; that the people are well-groomed and well-educated. Frankly, people in the future are just better than you and me.

Now think of the dystopias. They have in common: (1) Some form of government oppression, if not panoptic tyranny. Think of a boot stomping on a human face, forever. (2) Scarcity, rampant disease and warfare. (3) Ignorance, irrational hatred(s), even some cultivated by the State. (3) The future is dirty, dysfunctional--unless it's too clean, too antiseptic, that is. Maybe even a manmade apocalypse, triggering the following: Some versions would through in (4) sedation of the population (soma, THX 1168, and television, even), and, mostly later, (5) overpopulation, crime, hunger, and Soylent Green. And, yes, you know what's next:

It's people! Soylent Green . . . is people!

Now, to a great extent, these visions magnify what their creators saw in the world around them. Some saw progress toward a better world, the seeds of which were visible in the 1920s, 1950s, whenever. Others saw horrifying prospects around them, and imagined a chain of events to make those prospects realities. So some of this reflects on the times. But here I want to reflect on how well utopias and dystopias tend to work as predictions.

The world I live in is not a utopia. Washington, D.C., has plenty of crime, and ignorance--and that's just Congress. Duh-dum-duh. But seriously, the city is part a city of the utopian future, and part a city of the dystopian future, from the past perspective. Parts of the city are clean and bright, with well-groomed, well-educated people. Other parts, though, look like sets of the upcoming Kurt Russell movie, Escape from the District of Columbia (working title). The rest of the world is largely the same story. There's disease, and famine, and ignorance, and war. But then there's science, democratization, and so on.

The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that the future is never as good as the utopias we can currently imagine might be, and never as bad as the nightmare, worst-case dystopias we can imagine, either. What's strange is that some parts of the predictions of both genres come true, at the same time. Or, maybe that's just another way of saying that there's nothing new under the sun. There are reasons to be hopeful for the future, and reasons to be pessimistic.

With that said, I find myself becoming increasingly pessimistic about things like climate change and our dependence on oil. I don't believe worst-case scenarios, but neither do I believe that things are just going to work themselves out. To avoid some particularly bad scenarios, if not worst cases, I think that we need some concerted action, and fast. But with the way things are right now, I don't see that happening any time soon.