Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1973"

Utopia or Dystopia in an Age of Confusion

Abstract: The language of the apocalypse sharpens as we approach the year 2000. The millennium is, after all, less than 30 years away and chiliastic hopes have begun to mount. Given our present condition, it is also natural, however unpleasant, that we hear the language of despair and melancholy; view the art of distortion, psychedelism, and \"abstract expressionism\"; experience the feelings of alienation and apathy. Utopian thought has been replaced by dystopian nightmares. Every age sees its own as one of crisis and the past as the Golden Age. The events between 1930 and 1950 gave many, particularly intellectuals, ample cause for despair. The rise of fascism and racial imperialism in Germany and Japan; global economic depression; worldwide war at a level of destructiveness never imagined; the savage inhumanity of the mass murder of millions in concentration camps and death chambers—all spelled the end of chiliastic hopes, to millenarianism, and to apocalyptic thought [I]. Utopian thought no longer appealed to intellectuals: the possibilities for engineering social harmony were exhausted. The 1960s gave little cause for renewed hope as the world teetered on the brink of disaster. The hopeless exhaustion of the intellectuals was termed \"the end of ideology.\" The great ideas which fueled the engines of Western development seemed to be in serious jeopardy—to the extent that many intellectuals claimed that ideology was dead. Daniel Bell notes that the intellectual is to ideology what the priest is to religion. Ideology provides the engine for social movements and change. Social movements gather force among the people when three conditions exist: (1) ideas are simply conceptualized, easily understood, and fit the needs of the times; (2) a valid claim to truth is established; and (3) fusion of the simple idea and truth leads to sustained action. Ideology provides