Re: Utopistics and Democratic Global Commonwealth

In a message dated 3/16/2003 6:10:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, kohlerg@3web.net 
writes:

> Utopistics and Democratic Global Commonwealth
> 
> 
> 
> Professor Wagar mentioned the lovely words "utopistics" and "democratic
> global commonwealth" in a recent posting. While some of that is already
> discussed in the oeuvres of Boswell and Chase-Dunn, more utopiarama would be
> a nice pastime, while we are waiting for the bombs to drop. For example, how
> would a democratic global commonwealth bring about a massive transition to
> sustainable development? For example, how would the decision-making take
> place? Canada would be a democratic republic in that global commonwealth,
> and so would be USA, Angola, Iraq, and others. Would the democratic
> grassroots of the world (i.e., we) all do the right thing, guided by our
> reason and without any bosses (the no - archy situation)? Or guided by our
> elected representatives? How would the Angolan and Canadian representatives
> make sure that they have a fair hearing vis-à-vis the Chinese, Indian, and
> U.S.-American brothers and sisters? How could the Canadian representative be
> sure that the chief U.S. representative does not sleep with the chief
> Chinese representative and rule the democratic global commonwealth in a
> missionary or oriental mode of embrace? Any utopists out 
> there?
> 
> 
> 
> Gert

I'm inclined to believe it would be more useful to globally decentralize power, 
so that no community could gather sufficient resources to exploit another 
rather than try to have some sort of global government express some sort of 
popular will (however, this does not mean communities will be entirely 
autonomous a la the 'smalls' in Wagar's history of the future).  I also believe 
utopistics can only be meaningful if exercised on a varieties of scale 
(individual, citywide, national, international, etc) and time frames (present, 
medium range, etc) rather than coming up with some sort of fully worked out 
global blueprint.

Steven Sherman