We can never reach Utopia – the name means ‘no place’ – but it’s a fine ideal to keep in sight. Life perhaps should be seen as one long pilgrimage with perfection – ‘Utopia’ – as its goal. Progress towards Utopia ought to be what ‘progress’ really means.
But although all governments talk of progress, Utopia seems to recede. Wealth is increasing and technologies grow smarter but the wealth and the know-how seem largely or mainly to reinforce the status quo, with the rich growing richer while the poor grow poorer and the Earth as a whole runs down. We need, wholesale, to change our ways – what we do, how we organise our affairs, what we think, our preconceptions, and our attitudes (for attitude in the end is all, or at least is the sine qua non). We need in short a transformation; metamorphosis; nothing less than a Renaissance.
This sounds like a very tall order and so it is. But the agenda, the things we need most urgently to think about and act upon, can be summarised in a simple diagram.
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