Chomsky:

Comments on this _Atlantic Monthly_ magazine article?

F. Leon

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Analyzing 21st-century utopias

Socialism may have given utopias a bad name, but that hasn't stopped the next
generation of dreamers from conceiving of 21st-century ideal societies of their
own, writes the physicist Steven Weinberg. The 1979 Nobelist, who is now at the
University of Texas at Austin, turns a cautious and critical eye on five utopian
ideals that he envisions may emerge in the new century, and that he predicts will,
like their predecessors, all be doomed. In the Free-Market Utopia, for example,
hands-on government would remove barriers to free enterprise and be relegated to
a policing role. But, cautions Mr. Weinberg, when the mighty dollar gained
irreversible strength, equality and civilization would be wiped out, deemed cost-
inefficient. Another of the five, the Technological Utopia, is a world in which
national borders would blur amid the backdrop of fiber-optic cables that connect
all corners of the world. In such a world, Mr. Weinberg writes, technology would
replace the need for the worker, stripping man of what Freud calls one of his two
greatest needs (the other being love). Mr. Weinberg offers his own alternative --
the Civilized Egalitarian Capitalist Utopia, in which business and culture would be
synthesized through cross-investments, and a democratic government -- itself
checked by independent courts -- would encourage production, competition, and
donations to nonprofit institutions. His own "modest" vision aside, Mr. Weinberg
recognizes that there is "no simple formula that will tell us how to strike a balance
between the dangers from governing elites and those from majority rule or free
markets, or between the opportunities and the hazards of new technology." The
article is available online at:

<http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/current/001weinberg.htm>

From the Atlantic Monthly" magazine.

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