Wednesday, June 29, 2005

The Utopia Project

Take our 100 best people, not idealized and enlightened people but me, you, our picks for the best hearts and minds we have. Now, we a’re still us, just as we are today. But everything else is gone, gone in a hypothetical flash. We a’re a mid-Western farming community. No one else, no one in the world. No threats, man-made or other, no threats on the horizon. Now. We also have 50 kids. Newborns.
So: how far could we go? Could we create the citizens of a new utopia? Or are human genetics incompatible with the utopias we can imagine? Or, do we carry too much of the system ensconced within us, such that we'd replicate much of it without trying? I tend to be on the optimistic side. But I think there are real unknowns in both those big questions, the genes and our fallen status. And even if you think we could do it, well it wouldn'’t be a simple matter. We'’d have to really decide how. There would be questions, deep and hard questions, like competition and love and property and intelligence and skill and punishment and sex and on and on.

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