Tlön : Journey to a Utopian Civilisation
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The environmental crisis The world was finally attempting to design the globe’s evolution, but long after it was evident that this was at the brink of total breakdown. It was doing so the hard way by using methods inherited from the fight against terrorism. The Summa Project was run by a technocratic and intellectual elite recruited by the World Government to function as a secret environmental police, whose presence everybody felt, but very few actually witnessed. This was a Project that originated in the ur-antiquity, but had a taste of a distant (or not so distant) future. […]Measures involved […..] imposition of maxima levels of emissions and energy consumption. These levels [….] were then defined as quotas for each state, each region within a state, each province within a region, each community within a province and each individual within a community! Moreover, the plan prescribed, not just for […..] groups of interest (economic, social, cultural, religious or political), but to individuals within […..] the […..] group as well, exact consumption levels for all goods and services. […] the Project calculated model consumption plans for each type of professional role within the societal structure; it then went further and defined numbers of types of jobs per community and finally ended up in drafting a totally planned economy, both from the aspect of production as well as from that of consumption. Ironically, the world community now slipped in a state of hard-fisted, all-encompassing communism, promoted and finally promulgated by those same nations which had championed total laissez-faire economies over the previous period of time. The era of Environmental Authoritarianism was on and populations were treated like subjects rather than like citizen. People’s lives were dictated by central forces and virtually predetermined to a large degree. […] De-escalation of consumption became a crucial notion in everyday life. There was rationing in the consumption of food and beverage, of clothing, of certain important services and, above all, of energy consumption. Every individual’s right of recreation travelling was calculated and fixed in number of kilometres per annum. People had to wait for months or years to travel for vacation once they had exhausted their personal annual quota. […] The necessity for careful planning practice in everyday life proved particularly difficult in practice, as it contradicted some idealistic schools’ belief in considering time programming as hubris. The limitation on physical contact, counterbalanced, no doubt, by increasingly cheaper and more effective long-distance communication, had serious implications upon the behaviour and psychology of people and upon the established morality.[…] Public administration was entering new fields of corruption, motivated by influential persons’ demands to falsify their data of energy consumption. Favouritism in the form of forged certificates of consumption was the commonest offence among civil servants. […..] The population accepted the Summa Project with a variety of attitudes ranging from trust and good will to sheer opposition. Intellectuals as usual split in many currents of thought, which were soon grouped in two main trends: the progressive and the traditional. At first the progressive [….] prevailed, particularly as the public was under the shock of discovering that the state of the earth’s environment was really in danger and not at all a picture painted by fanaticism and doom mongering. But, as the oppression of restrictions prolonged in time and the young generation was gradually waking up to the realisation that its well-being should literally be sacrificed for the sake of rescuing the planet from ecological break-down, the traditionalists’ message (that the methods of total planning and absolute controls adopted by the Project were violently suppressing liberties and humanist values) began to gain momentum. The population was stirred up into opposing restrictive measures and confronting the regime by open acts of defiance. [……] Progressives retorted that the resistance movement was […..] but a convenient excuse to justify people’s inertia to the radical change of the way of life that the urgency of the situation demanded. So the few weak pockets of traditional / humanist resistance diffidently appearing in various provinces were soon crushed by the oppressive methods [……] of the environmental police, directed by SSS, under its notorious leader Jacob Benedictorich Ästlin. The world succumbed to SSS’s iron fist. The Summa Project was finally implemented [….]; the population accepted its inevitability and learned to live under its extreme restrictions and quasi-military rules. The Implementation period lasted for two full decades and was followed by the Recovery Decade, a period in which the world government managed to steer the social vessel back to normality with great care. […….] The people of Tlön rose [……….] in a dignified, determined but non-violent unity and crushed the institutions of the world regime without a nose bleeding right at the time that world government itself was about to relinquish power to small communities. Out of this “unhappy era of self-denial” a new disciplined and mature generation with a strong sense of collective responsibility was emerging. [……] In fact one of the greatest disappointments of liberal and left wing ideologies of the age was exactly the bitter acknowledgement that the impressive sense of social responsibility evident in the population as a whole was a result of coercion -sometimes of cruel oppression- and not of rationality and free will. Anexikakos put an end to this issue by arguing that “coercion was only phenomenal and that most people in fact transcended conventional morality by deliberately subordinating the values of personal liberties to a cause that they conceived as being of prime importance to their survival”, a position to which the perplexed conscience of the left readily acquiesced. Gradually the people, and in particular the people of developed nations, acquired a new morality of international justice in accepting that they should bear first, as the champions of ruthless development in the previous centuries, the cost of the new movement. Some intellectuals branded this attitude as a practical blend of Christian-cum-communist philosophy. [……] Tlön was living the dawn of its Golden Age.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
The narrative in this book, in abridged form, was awarded 1st prize at the UIA (International Union of Architects) 2014 International Architectural Ideas Competition “Utopia and Happiness”. This is a story revealed in a Manuscript written by Ladislas, a 14th century Lithuanian explorer, who traveled in remote regions of the East and discovered ruins of Tlön, a, hitherto unknown, utopian civilisation. Ladislas describes a society which practiced peaceful co-existence and tolerance in all its manifestations and whose mainstream philosophy was idealism. The extraordinary fact was that the Manuscript remained in obscurity for about five hundred years until it passed, sometime in the middle of the 19th century, to the posession of Leonid Krk, one of the leading rare book collectors in London. Krk, a notable scholar in Baltic literature, who translated the manuscript into English, was later sentenced for fraud; most of his possessions and his Drury Lane residence, or what remained of it after the 1868 fire, were confiscated. The manuscript was sold at an auction to Caspar Amorson, a Scandinavian urban planner, who donated to the author an english copy. The Manuscript contains entities about the language, the philosophy, the social values, and the history of the civilisation discovered; it also describes, in an extended section, its architecture and town design and building. As the reader travels through the story, it becomes increasingly clearer that the four Ages in the history of Tlön resemble, in some ways, our stages of evolution. In particular the third, alluding to the environmental crisis, forewarns a Huxley-like scenario of overcoming it.
About the Author
Aristidis G. Romanos is an Architect and Urban Planner practicing in Athens Greece. His architectural, urban design and planning work covers a broad spectrum of subjects focusing mainly in the fields of housing development, urban renewal, the preservation of historic cities and tourist development. Aristidis Romanos has gained a balanced insight into the theory and practice of spatial design, planning and management through his manifold experience: private practice, serving the public sector from responsible managerial positions and teaching and research activities at higher education institutions. He taught at the Architectural Association School (AA), London and lectured at various institutions in USA (MIT, Princeton University), UK, Greece and other European countries. He is a writer with a critical view on the subjects of architecture and town planning, the urban environment and architectural and planning education. He has acted as expert and critic in international architectural and planning competitions and has represented Greece as Delegate to various international fora.