Preface

Living as we do at the close of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense…
—Julian West, in a speech at Shawmut College, Boston, December 26, 2000


Julian West is a fictional character created by the late American writer, Edward Bellamy, for the preface of his utopian and futurist novel, Looking Backward 1887-2000. The novel, and of course the quote above, are not contemporary but rather were first published in 1888. The story revolves around a man named Julian West who was put into a trance by a “mesmerist,” accidentally sealed in an underground vault in 1887, and discovered in the year 2000 after being in a state of suspended animation for 113 years. Bellamy’s character awakens at the dawn of the 21st century to find a world of technological marvels. Writing seven years before the publication of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, Bellamy predicted the invention of something he quaintly called a “musical telephone,” which could deliver live music and speeches directly into people’s homes. The volume of the broadcasts could even be adjusted with a screw to accommodate individual listeners or a whole room. These musical telephones also had a clock mechanism that could be set in order to awaken someone to the sound of music. In addition to radios and clock radios he also prophesized an “American” credit card that would replace money, and would be used internationally in enormous indoor shopping malls.

Bellamy predicted that the twentieth century would usher in a paradise that would be free of war, poverty, economic downturns, religious conflict, political corruption, social injustice, and inequality of the sexes. He thought the average person in the year 2000 would live to be 85 or 90 and there would be universal health care, maternity leave, and retirement at age 45. Bellamy also envisioned what today seems preposterous, a world without tax collectors, bankers, merchants, lawyers, police, armies, prisons, private wealth or competition. Bellamy’s description of where technology would be in the year 2000 has been realized and far exceeded. However, in regards social and economic issues we have fallen far short of Bellamy’s vision.

In the 19th century, Bellamy’s best-selling book enthralled readers and became a catalyst for social reform. Bellamy himself became a reformer and helped usher in the Progressive movement, thus profoundly changing the way Americans treat each other. (His devoted cousin, Francis Bellamy, a socialist author and Baptist minister introduced the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the National Public School Celebration on Columbus Day, 1892. Until the rise of Nazism and Fascism, the pledge included a Nazi-like salute. The phrase “under God” was added during the McCarthy era.)

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is written from the perspective of a man who has the good fortune of being able to fall asleep and wake up in a perfect world. While we will never achieve perfection in a material world, we can certainly do better than have. If we run the clock forward and look backward, as Bellamy did, we can arrive at solutions to our current problems that also seem at once simple and logical. Thus implemented, these solutions could represent, in Bellamy’s words, a “triumph of common sense.”

Bellamy wrote a postscript to his book answering a critic who thought that he should have put his story of a Golden Age twenty-five centuries into the future. Bellamy’s reply was to give examples from history showing that when the time is right, things can change very quickly.

We now live in a time where technological change is occurring at an unprecedented rate. In astrophysics a singularity is the event horizon in a black hole beyond which gravity is so intense that not even light can escape. Futurist Vernor Vinge uses the term Singularity to describe the point beyond which it becomes impossible to reasonably predict the future. This not only puts pressure on institutions to come up with solutions to modern problems, it makes it difficult to even say for sure what future problems will be. I was in the former Soviet Union in 1978 and it was inconceivable to me at the time that the Cold War would be over and that the Soviet Union would peacefully cease to exist within twelve years. It will also be difficult for many to believe that we could make serious progress on these twelve labors in in the near future. But I believe the time is right for action and that, with a collective effort, a real Golden Age will be upon us.

I first conceived the idea for this book on Earth Day in 1994, as the culmination of my growing crisis of conscience. Since 1969 when the oil-covered Cuyahoga River caught fire for the second time in Cleveland, and the beaches of Santa Barbara were fouled by a huge oil spill, I have periodically asked myself what I was doing to help. The exercise always ended in anger and frustration. Part of my dilemma can be traced to the self-deceptions woven into the fabric of our society. In much the same way the topics of politics and religion are usually avoided in polite company, there is a focus on frivolous or peripheral issues while the volatile ones are ignored. At the same time, in order to soothe the emptiness that comes from the ache of denial, empty gestures and half measures are stuffed into the hole.

There is self-congratulation about recycling some of our garbage while inefficient processing of the world’s resources and runaway consumerism is making a mockery of conservation. Auto and oil companies—as well as the politicians they support—proclaim that gasoline is getting cleaner and car engines are getting more efficient, while the amount of oil equivalent to 59 Exxon Valdez oil spills is released into the environment every year (see Labor V). The U.S. government is still fighting wars over “national interests” and polluting the Earth because we have not weaned ourselves from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, oil prices are subsidized by a bloated military and the costs to the environment, while our ugly cities continue to sprawl. This, in turn, has increased the dependency on oil and helped to create the legions of huge, gas-guzzling trucks and sport utility vehicles that now crowd our roads.

An expensive, harmful drug war is still being waged on a broad range of drugs, some lethal, some not, while it is the legal prescription drugs, tobacco and alcohol that are doing the serious killing. At the same time, handguns—which are well suited for deliberately or accidentally killing children, friends, and family—are not only perfectly legal, but in some ways less regulated than toy guns.

Our religions have been severed from their mystical roots and organized into rigid demands for faith in un-provable and illogical dogmas that are distortions of genuine religious experience, ancient stories, and myths. One result has been that organized religions help cement the status quo by preventing reasonable political and social reform.

Reform is also hindered by a corrupt political system, well oiled by cash, and an undemocratic voting system. Presidential elections are little more than Mr. America pageants run by their corporate sponsors.

Worse of all, efforts to feed the hungry or reverse the destruction of the planet are being utterly overwhelmed by the 200,000 people being added to the world’s population every day.

It became increasingly clear to me that, as a disenfranchised voter, or as a consumer focused on personal or business projects, I was part of the problem. Nevertheless, I labored under the assumption for many years that I should work on myself first before trying to understand the world’s problems. Thus, in 1994, I was working on another book, Holywood, my interminable memoir and philosophical noodle-knocker. Writing when I was not designing or building houses, or planning utopian cities, I had piled up almost two thousand pages, and there was no end in sight. Partly as capitulation to my nagging conscience, I decided that I would take what I thought would be a six-month break and write something less self-indulgent. As a generalist with wide interests, I had already done a fair amount of reading and armchair philosophizing about global issues during my life. Now with a goal in mind, I began what would ultimately become a Herculean project.

During this period, one book or web site maddeningly led to another in endless digressions, and new interests sprouted like weeds. But no matter how far afield I strayed on a single issue, even if it involved chasing some wild tangent, all the other issues circled menacingly on the horizon. At every step of the way, I tried to step back and get a perspective. Most problem-solving strategies showed themselves to be inadequate when the problems were taken in isolation. Thus, as it became obvious that all the problems and solutions are intrinsically intertwined, it became correspondingly more imperative to address all these problems in one forum.

Yet despite the appearance of a coherent web of interconnected issues that gives a teasing hint of clarity, our global society remains a morass of confusion and inefficiency with cultural beliefs, religious or superstitious ideas, corruption, power struggles, and fear obscuring the underlying structures. It seems that the practice of creating a unifying worldview has been avoided because of our tradition of compartmentalizing the different aspects of our complex world. Thus, religion is not consistent with science, politics is not consistent with democratic ideals, economic practices are not consistent with sustainability, and the way we live is not consistent with happiness.

Two years passed while I tried to sort all this out. What had initially seemed like a tidy little book, tossed off while on break from a grander project, became a hydra-headed mess. I must admit that, at times, it was depressing to sink into the dank muddle of the world’s problems. Under the onslaught of multiplying folders and files on a hard drive gone into overdrive, while cowering under the lengthening shadow of a mountain of books, notes and clippings, the project at times seemed hopelessly ambitious. During this time, I often discussed the book with family, friends and anyone else I could corner into talking about it. Many thought that the book was a good idea, while it seemed to awaken in others a certain amount of lost idealism. Some people were downright hostile; especially if they felt that the comfortable niche they had carved for themselves was threatened. I took it as encouragement that almost no one was indifferent. It seems that many of us want to do something about our modern dilemma, but we do not know where to begin, and there is also fear that our efforts might make things worse.

On the better writing days, I imagined myself to be heroic, bringing light like the sun god Hercules. On the darkest days, I saw myself as Sisyphus, who had been sentenced to uselessly and interminably pushing a boulder up a steep hill in the depths of Hades. But most of the time I was symbolically somewhere in between, perhaps something like the ancient Egyptian scarab—the mythical dung beetle that pushed the blazing, solar turd-ball across the sky everyday.

For comfort in the midst of this project, I often drew from the literature of science as well as from the reservoir of my own personal experience. The elegant, replicable experiments of science were reassuring, especially compared to the infinite variables inherent in our psyche, our society, our beliefs, and the interaction with the biosphere in which all of us are imbedded. In science, it was clear that progress was being made to understand the structure of the universe. It was reassuring to read about how everything on our planet and throughout the universe appears to be fundamentally interconnected and consistent. Whether I saw myself as Hercules, Sisyphus or the Dung Beetle, the writing also became a meditation on the dynamic rhythms of nature, where through interacting systems and patterns, the answers to our practical concerns could be discerned as interlocking pieces of a multi-dimensional puzzle.

I traveled around the world gathering interviews and other material for this book and a related documentary. It was instructional to revisit many of the same places that I had visited twenty years earlier, when I had spent two and half years living and traveling around the world. I was able to compare, for example, the modernization that has occurred in China with the deterioration of conditions in India. China’s rising standard of living is to a large degree due to the slowing of runaway population growth. Meanwhile India, only one-third the size of China, has now surged past the one billion mark. In a few decades, India will be the world’s most populous nation. Unfortunately, I was also able to observe how Asia’s modernization is being paid for with rampant ecological destruction. The charm and beauty of old Asia is fast disappearing under the onslaught of cars, freeways and the artless crud of modern development.

Finally, I put my book on hold for two and a half years to create a living laboratory of The Labors of Hercules by rehabilitating a mean little crack slum in DeLand, Florida into a historic, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood. The process of interacting with many severely troubled residents and workers, while also renovating 28 homes, was difficult but instructive. The former slum neighborhood, which I renamed The Garden District, will be presented in these pages as a microcosm of society at large. In fact, each of the Labors will be treated from three points of view: mythical, personal, and general.

After the seemingly endless research, travel, physical toil, and writing, the knots I had tied myself in gradually loosened. Once I could see that there are practical solutions to the world’s problems, and they have been captured on these pages, I began to burn with the faith of the newly converted. By the time I finished writing, I thought it might really be possible to leave behind the boulder or the dung ball, crawl out of Hades, climb to the top of Mt. Olympus, and catch a glimpse of a better and attainable world.

Michael E. Arth
DeLand, Florida
Earth Day 2004