Didactic utopias are easy to mock and criticise, which is probably why dystopia has become a more popular genre. I have trouble thinking more than twenty years ahead without the ugly sceptre of pessimism cantering my brain and its for that reason i found green’s utopia got me thinking about what might be possible and desirable amidst the flotsam of possible chaos.
About a half century from now, the former U.S. has splintered into several countries, most of which are desperate condition due to the ending of fossil fuels and the chain-reaction destruction of satellites by space junk. But the Lakeland Republic, with its capital Toledo, is thriving by adopting the best technology and cultural practices of the past. The giant Wal-marts are replaced by small, independently owned stores and markets. There are horse-drawn taxis and electric street cars run by fertiliser. There’s a great jazz station on the radio and a wide range of newspapers dispense in-depth reporting. Toledo’s taxes support the counties with a level of technology a la circa-1950s, the narrator has no access to computers or internet, making do with taking notes using paper and pen and researches looking things up in massive libraries.
Greer has worked out all sorts of things; apprenticeships replace college degrees, energy generation, healthcare, defence and politics. Lakeland is a multiethnic place where powerful women and gay marriage is the rule with plentiful, meaningful working-class jobs. Green’s RETROTOPIA oversees an optimistic vision of a renewed America, or part of America. Its fiction but it inspires a plethora of thoughts, especially Is technology’s progress the enemy of tomorrow’s human flourishing, or is its ground? Back in the novel its 2065 and it takes place in what was Ohio with the world outside Lakeland sketched in a worse version of today’s America. The Second Civil War destroyed huge sections of infrastructure, exempting the secured areas of the ruling classes. Causal decay leads to decline of societies except in Greer’s RETROTOPIA which explicitly rejects any kind of older social structures or core cultural practices.
The book reads like a left-liberalist ideal of 2020’s America. The sexes are interchangeable, racial, ethnic, and cultural mixing and harmony are complete. Gay marriage is treated as normal and commonplace; children are irrelevant and drugs are fine. And in an original bizarre twist Athiests have well-attended churches where Mark Twain and Bertrand Russell are offered as Sunday readings. Greer prefers to ”mine the past”, not returning wholly to it. The hook on which he hangs everything is that technological progress as a whole is subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns, so society will go backwards the harder it tries to go forwards, pointing heavily at resource exhaustion. The plot concerns the journey, both physical and psychological of a new-comer called peter Carr, who as an advisor to the neighbouring country of the Atlantic Republic’s president , travels to Toledo to spend the next two weeks helping draft a set of key agreements between the two governments. He is baffled by the chaotic technological bricolage he observes everywhere.
The republic is divided into counties, with each county free to fashion its own unique technological landscape. Theirs a tier system with the highest tier, representing 1950s-era infrastructure, and the lowest roughly that of the 1830s. A lower tier means lower tax burdens for the county’s inhabitants. One part of this book, i particularly liked is the satire directed against the existing order. There’s an overlay of modern progressive ideals onto the world of retrological. There is a homage to one of the great eco-novels of the 1970s. Greer admired the work of Earnest Callenbach……….. this book is a solid entry in the oeuvre of a profoundly accomplished author.
