
The Strange Paradise of Paul Scheerbart - dnetesn
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/16/strange-paradise-of-paul-scheerbart/
======
reasonattlm
Technological utopianism is a great thing and we should have more of it as a
thread in the great global conversion. It has a very interesting history if
you're prepared to go chase it down, something in every decade from the late
1800s on. Cosmism
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism)),
Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
([https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/ind...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/index.htm)),
and the more recent paradise engineering of the Hedonistic Imperative
([http://hedweb.org/](http://hedweb.org/)) spring to mind among many, many
others.

People like the author of this article have a way of looking at the early
transhumanists and saying "well, then the ugly parts of the 20th century
happened," and somehow then discarding the original point, the goal, the
wonder of the possible. The point still stands, however: that we can in
principle engineer utopia, build technologies to eliminate pain, suffering,
and death, and create wonders of macroscale engineering along the way. As a
species we continue to move in that direction. Despite the intervening mass
upheavals and deaths in the past 100 years, isn't 2015 so very much better to
live in than 1915? And the 160 million people who died due to war in the 20th
century are a small fraction of the ~3 billion (very approximately) who died
in total. War is not a big part of the problem, for all that Serious Thinkers
seem ponder little else.

More people should be for technological utopianism, with eyes open. It
shouldn't be remarkable to sit up and say "we can and should do more to stop
suffering and death, and there is no point in stopping until it is all gone."
Perhaps it would go faster if it wasn't just the science fiction authors,
scientists, and philosophers who gave a little time to appreciate the bounds
of the possible.

