It’s the rage these days to wax indignant over the rise of authoritarian figures around the world. From Trump to Putin, Victor Orban, and the right-wing parties of Europe, the fear is that our experiment in post-World War II and then post-Cold War liberalism is at risk of being distorted and abraded by a desire for cultural uniformity. A common refrain is that the visibility of and legal restructuring around LGBTQ+ and ethnic/minority communities, as well as a sprinkling of environmentalism, is moving so quickly that a slight majority of the electorate wants to stand in the path of change “yelling stop,” to paraphrase Bill Buckley. Ripple effects then will break down the slow-built institutions that define contemporary liberal democracies and soon we have concentration camps for dissenters.
In America, there are nostalgic swoons for Ronald Reagan and some idealized middle-class heaven from the economic growth-phase of the 1950s when everyone went to church and the worst swear word was “golly gee!” The uniformity and comfort that people felt about their roles in their communities combined with a bedrock belief in family, faith, and devotion to country that was as reliable as America’s continuous economic growth. It was good to be alive and all the backward peoples of the world would maybe someday catch up if they didn’t all die of famine first.
But I can never quite understand what those who lean authoritarian want for their future world? I call most of the hypothetical visions “tiresome heavens” because they reflect the old joke of how Christian heaven must be a monotonous, uniform place. Just sit around in perfect blissful union with one’s Creator. Nothing really to do, no stressors, no wants, no struggles; it is a transcendent promise that is more geologic than human. So too are all these restructured Americas with white, straight faces ruling over subalterns without dissent or the churn of constructive change. Marxist utopias have the same quality and we know from the breakdown of the Soviet Union that reality is far too intrusive to allow for any proletariat Xanadu to thrive.
I, conversely, think the non-tiresome heaven is already here and it’s all this jangly complexity.
I’ve recently written about the concept of an ethics of emergent systems (forthcoming) that builds on the observed “informational physics” that we see in the universe and especially in living systems. In this ethics, what is good and valuable is a combination of freedom and coordination, exactly the best features of contemporary liberal democracies. But building further on this theme, there is a need for the experimental generation of alternative micro-economic systems and the use of simulation to find non-trivial solutions to complex problems that involve planetary-scale systems and that multilateralize over sovereign states. This model further realigns the individual desire for a totalizing self-identity through politics or faith to a coordinating stance—another interest among many—in the variable heaven that we can create now and moving forward. That is, it replaces the anodyne hope embedded in utopianism with a central virtue that idolizes incremental change with only one dogma: compositional emergence can deliver enhanced lives in coordination with one another and the greater planet.
In this scheme, we arrive at a manifold of non-tiresome heavens always bubbling with ambitious change. And, mercifully, we shift away from the sense of dysfunctional anomie that is hypothesized as driving the urge towards authoritarianism.
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