What Is Development? What Is Progress? The Social Science and Humanities of Utopia and Futurology

Introduction: Reinvigorating a Dying Field of Study

Development Studies today has most of the signs of a field in decline if it is not already dead. Scan through the new book titles in the field of “Development” or even “Critical Development” Studies and related subfields, the syllabi and courses in “Development Studies” programs and lists of articles in the journals in the field and related fields [including “Sustainable Development” and “Development (social science)]” and you will quickly note the following:

There is little discussion of the central goal or measurement of “development,” itself, besides a minor debate over “happiness” or utility versus economic growth. Indeed, there is little measurement of anything other than simply economic production, distribution, and basic needs. Discussion and measure of human “progress” and ends of civilization seem to have been subsumed by goals of globalization, homogenization, and production with measurements focused only on micro-agendas of economic and political outputs and harmonization.

It would be easier to describe “Development Studies” today as more of a theology rather than a field of scholarship with its teaching closer to that of propagation of the theology and the technology that implements it. That theology echoes the nineteenth century concept of “development” along a single path (Morgan, 1877) offered again in the late twentieth century as the basis of current thinking (Rostow, 1960). The subfields promoting the “religion” of globalization and growth are those of “nation building” (internal colonialism rather than protection of cultural diversity), harmonization within the global “market” economy (often described as legal imperialism or “plunder” [Mattei & Nader, 2008]) and topics such as “women’s rights” to commoditize women as laborers in this market and growing monoculture (Duncan, 2014) or “community banking” on the Grameen model to engineer production and entrance into the global market at the level of households. These are challenged by the counter-religion of “degrowth”/“slow-growth” (Daly, 2011), “steady-state” economics (Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy; Dietz & O’Neil, 2013), or “sustainable growth” or sustainability, that fails to offer a real alternative vision of the human potential.

Meanwhile, what has developed today as “Critical Development” Studies is little more than a resurrection of Marxist attacks on the inequities of growth with calls for additional homogenization in reaction (Critical Development Studies Network with Marx quoted on its web page; Veltmayer, 2011). Indeed, there is a long line of works on “dependency”, “under-development”, colonialism and neo-colonialism and other critiques of “development” that date back well more than a century to describe processes of imperialist hegemony conducted in the guise of a “civilizing mission”. The critiques simply reappear with new labels and evidence of harm. One can easily find them and they need not be listed or cited again here because the endless recitation is part of the problem. It prevents us from imagining and considering alternatives or even believing that they can exist. Indeed, it is also now cliché to cite and teach Paolo Freire, who showed how simply continuing the critique without offering a vision was in itself a form of participating in the “pedagogy of oppression” (Freire, 1970).

This is not simply a criticism of the field, for Development Studies relies on several social sciences to provide its frameworks of analysis and prediction as well as on the humanities to reinvigorate it. If all these are straight jacketed, we need to look to our artists for that missing inspiration and imagination. Yet, while one might look to the humanities (literature) for alternatives, there is little today that could be described as offering a positive utopian vision. Current science fiction and other literary forms are replete with dystopian images and predictions of where contemporary “development” actually leads rather than offering models. Popular science fiction ranges from critiques of globalism set to the stars (“Star Wars,” “Avatar”) to visions of unsustainability and collapse (“Road Warrior,” “Idiocracy”) to stories of never-ending controls with the collapse (“Robocop,” “Hunger Games”). We seem to be find ourselves between insanity and propping it up (apologists for or mindless implementers of globalization, in the name of short-term diversions like “poverty reduction”) or hopelessness. Scholars today appear to be either examples of Voltaire’s naïve Candide, describing our current path as “the best of all possible worlds” (as economists describe the “self-correcting” market), or are bullied into silence so as to avoid alternatives (Voltaire, 1759).

As many utopian novelists have predicted (or observed), the process of “modernization” or “development” in contemporary globalization has also included an assault on imagination, such that the very idea of offering alternative visions in social sciences and humanities seems to be taboo. This article advocates for a constructive return to alternative models of human and social development based on realistic assumptions, human hopes, and measures of progress in both social sciences and humanities, to rejuvenate what has become a dying, impoverished, and stultifying, if not useless area of study. The article uses two relatively recent books with alternative examinations of utopia – one on early Russian science fiction (Banerjee, 2012) and one from the literature of architecture and gender (Bingaman, Sanders, & Zorach, 2002) – as springboards for a discussion of what is wrong and what can be changed in the field of Development Studies.

Where We Are Today: What Books on Utopia and Science Fiction Tell Us

Two recent books that touch on the idea of utopias, but from outside of the field of Development Studies where such discussion does not now exist, point to what has gone wrong in Development Studies and in academia. They also suggest why scholars and publications are not going to be part of the solution.

In 2002, a group of architects holding discussions at the University of Chicago, created an essay collection that they titled “Embodied Utopias” which the editors described as offering “a new conception of the very nature of utopia” (Bingaman et al., 2002, p. 10). In fact, that conception was to deny even the possibility of alternatives, suggesting that utopias “indeed cannot exist except in the imagination [and] can no longer be a tenable model for envisioning the world” other than in a “tactical” way (p. 11). While the foreword and preface to the book suggested that they would offer new visions based on feminine perspectives of space and time (“how visions of gender and social justice and of the nation can or should be embodied in the built environment” [Leora Auslander, p. xvi]), the reality of the book was simply to attack the idea of imagining better worlds. In fact, the book does not really deal with imagined visions at all, but instead addresses the architectural results of “economic and political power” in contemporary cities that it classifies as the “dystopian landscapes of the present” (p. 5 and book jacket).

The book’s cover jacket notes that “Utopia has acquired a bad reputation in recent scholarship.” Rather than try to reverse it by showing how human imagination could lead to improvements, the book simply puts the nail in the coffin in an almost Orwellian fashion of the “modern” “dystopia” that we live in, where imagination is apparently an academic “thought crime” (Orwell, 1949). “Most previous scholarship of utopia focuses precisely on the reasons for its failure,” the editors tell us (p. 3). So does this one in the next 15 chapters on various historical and geographic urban vignettes.

In a book that kills any real discussion of how to appropriately design spaces and communities to meet real human needs (or to identify those needs), there is a chance for the authors to free their imagination but the way they do so is through the kind of academic fantasy that runs from reality and from promoting humanity. What we are left with is a book that hardly seems to offer much of anything other than brief advertisements of other works of the authors. The chapters offer mostly fantasy theories that lack context, data and, in some cases, any connection even with the reality of the places they are writing about. A chapter on Ha Noi, for example, finds Khmer towers and Cham balustrades though the nearest structures of these peoples were hundreds of kilometers away and describes Vietnamese traditional foods as the “answer to McDonalds.” Other chapters invent words as substitutes for analysis. Bangkok, in Chapter 11, becomes a “simultopia” rather than a victim of neo-colonialism with effects that can be measured. Thai culture is reduced to phrases like “faciality is a semiotic of disembodiment.” French Indochina in Chapter 4 is presented as an example of “degeneration” and “dystopia in utopia” rather than a genocidal empire in its phase of collapse. Washington, DC’s nineteenth century alleys are presented in Chapter 2 as examples of “abjection and feminization.”

Banerjee’s recent book (2012), We Modern People, on Russian science fiction at the turn of the twentieth century could also offer a rich comparison of visions and strategies of urbanization from the cultural context of the Russians. The Russian approach to urbanization has never been the same as that of Western Europeans due to climate, material factors, and history. It is worth looking back to see how the Russians viewed what was possible or desirable in many different forms and to consider them as thought experiments. Yet, Banerjee also makes every effort to avoid this kind of discussion, claiming that science fiction is “a genre seldom associated with politics or policy” (p. 92) even though apparently every other author writing about Russian science fiction presented it through a lens of “utopian or anti-utopian” (p. 158). At the end of this book, which mostly offers commentary on how authors dealt with the currently fashionable idea of “modernity” in writing about new concepts of space, time, power, and the human (as a result of technological changes), Banerjee invents a word to describe her book as about a “heterochronopia” (p. 160), extending on invented words used by previous authors as a way to appear distinctive.

Other than for three sensible short articles in Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach’s book, the authors of both books seem allergic to social science, to measurements and analysis of reality, and attempts to define and suggest improvements to the human condition. Those three are worth mentioning as a way to open the door in the rest of this article on how to bring alternative thinking back into Development Studies. Thomas Markus, in Chapter 1 of Embodied Utopias, reviews some of the best analytical works of spatial logics and hierarchies as well as gender interpretations, offering a list of 10 principles of idealized use of space (p. 31) and also raising those social science questions based on feminist utopian concerns that are currently unanswered or answered with contradictions (p. 26) (What should women’s roles be, in general, and in particular cultures, and what spaces are needed? Should women be nurturing or not?). Elizabeth Wilson, in Chapter 14, “Against Utopias,” highlights the sensible idea that planning (and rational thought) are not our enemies but that the focus needs to be on problem solving and on protecting spontaneity rather than imposing a rigid, static order. She draws attention to the forgotten, overlooked, and unseen as parts of the human reality that needs to be added to study. Elizabeth Grosz in Chapter 15, “The Time of Architecture” reminds us what is missing in the homogeneous a-cultural approach of all of the other authors noting that creating a utopia requires that we “take account not only of the diversity of subjects but of the diversity of their utopic visions” and focus on fair procedures not just on results, in ways that are dynamic and sustainable (pp. 272–273). But the books hardly go further.

There is at least one brilliant classic signpost work on “utopia” that demonstrates where and how things have gone off the track in presenting and discussing alternative visions, and it is very revealing that both books avoid mention of it despite the relevance to their subject. Several articles in Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach mention classic works on “utopia” but they glaringly omit this one. Banerjee cites this author’s works more than that of the Russian authors themselves, and notes how well loved he was among the Russians, but never mentions this work. The work is H. G. Wells’ Utopia written in 1905. What makes it special and important is that despite its singular and unpalatable vision similar to that of earlier “utopias,” Wells spends much of the first half of his book defining the principles of how societies actually work and that need to be considered in outlining a workable vision. He also describes both previous utopian fiction and actual utopian communities and suggests some principles why they failed.

What we have in H. G. Wells’ Utopia is possibly the initial utopian “Development Studies” text. Here is a science fiction writer who understood science fiction as needing to be based on objective scientific reality, offering thought experiments for the humanitarian purposes of improving the lot of humankind. He shows us what was then and that now continues to be missing from the field for more than a century since, how the discussion of utopian visions can integrate several disciplines (science and humanities), and how utopian planning can incorporate humanitarian goals. Wells is a genius whose work has been scratched from history by contemporary scholars. Picking up where he left off offers a path to resuscitate our field.

What Went Wrong: Reconnecting with Lost “Development” and “Utopian” Scholarship

The two books selected as takeoff points for this article seem to wonderfully demonstrate not only what has gone wrong in contemporary scholarship in the era of globalization, but how it should be reversed to restore it in ways that will also invigorate the field of Development Studies. Indeed, they are examples of what contemporary science fiction authors criticize as part of the “dystopian” failure of contemporary industrial societies: narrowing of social roles and of thought, with authors referring only to each other within the lifeless confines of pre-determined thinkable thought in those boxes.

Bannerjee’s book claims to be about “Russian Modernity” but has no context at all of Russian culture and no historical context or clear definition of the fuzzy term “modernity.” Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach’s book on “Embodied Utopias” discussed only modern cities but offers no discussions of “utopias” and even less biological, psychological, or social description of human “bodies” to suggest what kinds of spaces, structures, and interactions are ideal for which cultures and how cultures can move toward them. These books have no grounding in human social and cultural reality or in historical realities. The narrow questions that they start with have little connection to fundamental human questions about existence and needs.

What globalization and “development” have done is to create a false ideology that the world today is somehow so unique that contemporary processes are inevitable, cannot be understood through social science, and that change is impossible or unimaginable. The basis of this false belief is the creation of a fictional concept of “modernity” and its “multiple modernities” that is a-cultural and a-historical. Banerjee is convinced that the technology of the turn of the twentieth century cannot be compared to any other historical era and that even though different groups experience it differently, it also has a singular endpoint. She studies it as if it is a kind of religion, as if the light bulb and electricity and airplanes are a unique kind of magic. Without comparisons, she erases social science and essentially just leaves us praying for magic. But the kerosene lamp and candle and Chinese gunpowder and rockets and early surgery and windmills and waterwheels also changed concepts of time, space, and being human within other cultures in other periods. Space travel did it again at the end of the twentieth century. There has always been technological change in human history. There is no such thing as a contemporary singularity that prevents comparisons. If we apply the methods of social science, we have a chance to find answers and technologies that can improve our world.

In Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach’s book, the “modern metropolis” is also a kind of a-historical and a-cultural singularity in which places like Washington, DC and Bangkok can only be understood in themselves. But Angkor (in Cambodia) was a utopian city in its time, as were Beijing and Babylon and Jerusalem, in terms of scale, relation to nature and geography, color and materials, without even mentioning the cause and effect of religious beliefs associated with them. By denying comparison of these visions and of the contexts, we not only lose the ability to learn anything about human visions, successes, and failures and about impacts of human choices within different cultural contexts but we also lose the ability to imagine anything new.

The guru for this anti-intellectualism and singularity, cited five times in each of the two books, is Michel Foucault (1979). But he is not the only one. The idea that “development” and even history as at their apex and end has been a popular view, perhaps most clearly represented in Fukiyama’s (1992) The End of History.

By eliminating the cultural context in studying Russian literature or Vietnamese architecture, or by substituting elite goals and psycho-analytic discussions (of Russian “identity crisis” or French colonial “degeneracy” for them), these authors have also eliminated the key questions of development choices: how and why the Russians chose certain public consumption and technology rather than private; how they chose certain interactions with nature and with each other; how and why they set and changed values. Tolstoy asked these questions at the end of the nineteenth century in questioning what schools and art should be like and how history worked. Other Russian authors of that time raised other contemporary social issues in fantasy works (like those preceding cloning, on “doubles” by Gogol and Dostoyevsky). But these are discarded in Banerjee’s discussions of context if they do not fit the scholarly straight jacket of “modernity.” The continuity between the Russian literary tradition of magic realism (Gogol, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and some of Tolstoy) is replaced here with tangents like a four-page deconstruction of a comment by Lenin on electrification (pp. 190–194) because of the way Bannerjee limits discussion of Russian science fiction to application of science.

Late in Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach’s book, a quote from Leo Marx succinctly explains how the religion of technology and “growth” has destroyed imagination and any questioning in “development” and it partly explains what has gone wrong in books and perhaps throughout academia, today. “The general faith” he tells us in 1988, was that “things were going to get better and better – not only materially but also morally, politically and socially – and this predominant view assumed that advancing technology was a sufficient basis for that progress” (p. 196). Some 25 years later, that religious belief persists such that only the questions about technology are asked, even though the “better and better” is increasingly disputed.

Re-opening Development Studies by Focusing on “Development”, “Progress,” and Humanity: Starting with the Social Sciences

To remake the field of Development Studies as one that meets human aspirations, we need to begin by identifying the scope of “development” and how we measure it as progress, noting the different subjects it should include within the social sciences. Once the basic social science foundations of this field are clear, we can then consider how to appropriately make it an applied field (next section) as well as how to draw from and encourage the humanities and arts to contribute to this aim (final section).

In recent articles, not yet published, I have been re-opening questions on the goals, meaning, and measurement of “development” and “progress” (Lempert, 2014; Lempert unpublished). This followed previous work seeking to offer alternative approaches to education (Lempert and Briggs, 1995) and an early model for sustainable development (Lempert, McCarty and Mitchell, 1995, Lempert 1998) as well as model constitutions and political systems. In fact, there is already a “universal” international consensus of human aspirations that can be found in United Nations agreements that were concluded shortly after the end of World War II in the hope of building a sane and peaceful world. Though that consensus has now been largely forgotten and replaced by the current “consensus” or religion of globalization, one can find and reconstruct the earlier post-war understanding.

Similarly, it is also possible to generate definitions of “progress” that pre-date Leo Marx’s observation that the definition is now simply confined to advancing technology. We can use the concepts of rights, individual expression, and protections that the international community also established as universals to generate different measures of how we are progressing or, as it appears, either regressing or demonstrating human inability to progress (Lempert, 2010; unpublished).

In Table 1, in the left-hand column, I list the 13 elements of “development” that the international community considered as universal in a number of treaties that were signed immediately after World War II. These universal development goals can be found at four levels: individual, societal, community/culture, and global. In the right-hand column, I have listed the social science disciplines (including theory and application) that correspond to each of these goals.

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Table 1.

Universally Recognized Aspirations for Development and the Social Science Disciplines that Underlie Them

	Development Goals in Four Categories	Discipline/Departments and Courses Addressing the Goals
I.	Individual “Development” Objectives:
1.	Physical (body) development	Human physiology/biology/leisure and recreation; public health
2.	Mental development	Psychology/cognitive development/mental health
3.	Spiritual (appreciation of natural world) development	Environmental biology/sustainability; nature and conservation/biophilia
4.	Moral (appreciation of others as individuals) development	Sociology/social psychology
5.	Social (appreciation of community) development	Community planning/social welfare
6.	Cultural (appreciation of one’s identity) development	Anthropology of (sub)culture; language of (sub)culture
II.	Societal Level “Development” Objectives:
7.	Social equity/social progress/equal opportunity for individuals	Legal principles: rights, social contract enforcement
8.	Political equity/equal rights for individuals	Democratic principles, economic regulation/empowerment tools
9.	Peace/tolerance/de-militarization for individuals	Peace Studies/negotiation, conflict resolution, social organizing
III.	Cultural/Community Level “Development” Objectives:
10.	Sustainability/(sovereignty) of cultures	Anthropology/structural functionalism/rise and fall processes
11.	Social equity/social progress/equal opportunity of cultures	Cultural sustainability planning
12.	Political equity/equal rights for cultures	Anthropology/political science: cultural survival and empowerment
IV.	Global “Development”/Objectives:
13.	Peace/Tolerance/De-militarization for protection of cultures	International Relations/Peace Studies/International Law Accountability and Enforcement

It is interesting to compare this table with current programs in Development Studies and with the approach of the field in general. Note what is not relevant to include here and that is absent from the table but that is the basis of almost every current approach: Economics (Productivity Engineering); Agriculture; and the technologies of globalization for production or cultural harmonization (including a selective approach to rights that mostly focuses on individual rights for women and social subsidies).

One way to simplify the table is to generate a list of the key subjects:

human biological needs;

Just by looking at this list, one can see the difference in taking a human and culture centered approach to considering the human future to the current, threadbare approach of economic “basic needs” or “poverty alleviation” or productivity, taking a limited view of humans that is little different from the view of animals.

Many of the most interesting lines of scholarship that raised questions or offered predictions in these areas have simply disappeared from Development Studies and from academic discourse. Among some of the classics in sociology and social psychology that seem to have disappeared were Toffler’s works on “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave” (Toffler, 1970, 1980), Daniel Bell’s works on “Post-Industrial Society” (Bell, 1972), and Ted Roszak’s “Person Planet” (Roszak, 1978). In economics, John Kenneth Galbraith raised questions of convergence and the future of the “new industrial state” and alternatives (Duncan, 2013; Galbraith, 1967) while Schumacher (1973) and others raised questions about economic scale and the beauty of “small.”

Though these were predictive social “science” works, they also opened up the door to consideration of alternatives that perhaps could be considered utopian and that also seem to have been purged from our field. Among them were discussions of alternative communities such as the Goodman’s “communitas” (Goodman, 1956; Goodman & Goodman, 1947), and others (Reich, 1976) and alternatives to Karl Marx’s vision of homogenization that, frankly, is not very different from the monoculture of globalism today brought to us by industrial societies east and west. Discussions of guild socialism (Cole, 1920) and other forms of democratic socialism also appear to have disappeared.

The literature on how societies collapse and study of change and pathways of human systems in how they work (or fail) in all of their forms (empires or other adaptations) has also been mostly neglected, though a previous article on the social science of empire and the dynamics of such processes appeared recently in this journal (Lempert, 2012). A full social science needs to supplement that deductive social science subfield by trying to create a full list of the human potential for adaptation, considering the dimensions by which adaptation occurs. Doing that is partly empirical (looking at the characteristics of cultures that have existed and at experiments that cultures or subgroups have undertaken) but it also requires imagination to suggest the possible categories of adaptations that are missing and to assure that they can also be studied.

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Table 2.

Modeling Utopian Predictions for Comparative Study

Prediction	Utopian Elements or Potential	Actual Result or Dangers	Mechanisms for Promoting Alternatives and Socio-Political Realities
Industrialization and mass production	Sufficient productivity for wealth	Lack of meaningful work, individualism	Control of military and economic power and social incentives is determinative
“Third Wave” (Toffler)	Smaller communities, flextime, individual control of work	End of social protections; control by symbol manipulating elites
Decentralization and multipolar world	Individual cultural freedoms	Race to the bottom in economic and legal protections and need to invest in militarism for protection	Control of military powers and imbalances is determinative

We might be able to model some of the different predictions of futures and their desirable “utopian” elements for comparative study as a way of starting to classify social change and hopes. It becomes clear, for example, in looking at some utopian schemes that they largely focus on just a few variables of social reality, taken out of context, and neglect to understand that social systems must be understood in terms of a multiple set of variables and interactions together, in context. Table 2 helps show how certain futurology predictions just extract a few utopian variables rather than consider how an entire social system would react or change in response to shifts in just a few variables.

Remaking the Technology of Development Studies: A Social (Science) Technology for Humanity, not for Social Engineering of Control

Development Studies is really an applied, professional field, not a core social science, but its current place within the university leaves it in ambiguous setting. In many places where it is taught, faculty seem to believe that their goal is simply to act as intermediaries for students to find internships and job contacts with international organizations that appear to be promoting a mission of neo-colonialism (Lempert, 2009). In doing so, it is hardly serving the role of promoting the full meaning of development in all societies and communities according to human aspirations or to the range of social science methodologies. Changing the field means relinking it with the missions and technologies of social science for human needs. Doing that may also require finding the right way to position and label the field so that it is clear how it fits in relation to others. Perhaps the best term may be Social (Science) Technology for Humanity, or Social Technology Studies, and not other terms that have become abused, like Social Engineering.

Using the international consensus of development, one could easily suggest that an applied professional field of development is really a form of engineering of societies using social sciences; that is, “social engineering.” But, like Development Studies, “social engineering” has also largely deviated from its humanistic mission. If “Development Studies” is now a form of colonial engineering of weaker cultures outside of the global order, to be sucked into the global economy, “Social Engineering” is now the term used for the social control and internal colonialism doing the same now within the “center”/“developed” societies.

“Social Engineering,” was once just a neutral term for applied social science to improve humanity (coined by J.C. Van Marken in 1894), but it has been distorted along with much of the social sciences. The current definition on Wikipedia is: “efforts to influence peoples’ attitudes and social behavior” in two areas; political social control and psychological manipulation to reveal information for the purposes of control (Wikipedia, 2013). Along with it, for example, is the growing field of “criminology” used for state control.

The terms of “cultural engineering” and “social systems engineering” have yet to catch on, but Social Technological Studies could in a way that could promote humanistic goals. The term dates to 1895 in an article by Charles Richmond Henderson (1895) and was defined in 1898 as the “use of knowledge of the facts and laws of social life to bring about rational social aims” (Small, 1898).

Beyond simply getting the label right, a renewed Development Studies that focuses on social science technology for humanity would have at its core the examination of experimental communities and the results alongside the dynamics and pathways of cultures and societies. Rarely examined in the Development Studies field today are planned communities like the Israeli kibbutz, the Amish community in the USA, planned communities like Brooks Farm and communes, and alternative towns like Kerala in India. Model American towns like Arcosanti and planned community architecture suggested by Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri also seem to have been forgotten from Development Studies. We have focused on the gated communities and corporate secession of the rich (Reich, 1991) and Disney (“Heterotopian Pleasure Garden” in Chapter 10) and on cults and their suppression (Waco, Texas Branch Davidians or Jonestown, Guyana sect) but not on the aspirations and potential for building Chicano and African identity and communities in USA. In the 1960s, those attempts were repressed but they offered hope that could be rekindled, particularly at a time when the current path of globalization and homogenization is recognized as unsustainable.

The central areas of study of this newly redefined discipline will be pathways of social change, modeling, and understanding of systems dynamics for social systems; understandings of the directions of causality and feedbacks between environment, culture, and technology (rather than the simplistic models that are unidirectional and often wrong because they minimize the impact of environment driving culture by assigning too much value to individual choice), along with understandings of deep structure and deep psychology to see what is possible; and mechanisms of convincing elites to change. Certainly, the impact of new technologies like human genetic engineering will also need to be incorporated into their field as a way of modeling change (Kurzweil, 2005).

Re-examining the Role of Humanities and Literature in “Utopian” Thinking

Alongside social science, the humanities and literature have an important role to play in moving Development Studies forward. They can offer new visions of and thought experiments analyzing human societies.

In the past, humanities existed as “culture critique” to offer comparisons and to raise questions of alternatives and choice. “What is productivity for? What best promotes long-term human survival? What elements of being human do we wish to promote? What went wrong with our transformation in the industrial revolution and how do we reverse what went wrong? What is possible?” The humanities need to play that role again in a way that supplements social science, both in presenting what artists are doing and in producing art.

Though it is still in its infancy, some colleagues are beginning to open up the social science of “living in space” in ways that try to project how different communities can be created at least in non-earth environments (Lempert, 2011). At its best, that study is grounded on past experiences and known principles of actual cultural diversification and migration that has occurred historically (Finney, 1985).

We should feel free to welcome science fiction and fiction in the form of social thought experiments that can be tested using social science and that can inspire social science. We should be ready to “mine” the existing record of science fiction to separate out future projections that are really just dark visions of our present placed in a slightly different setting, from actual thought experiments of visions for improvement that can be useful in our field. Among some notable examples are the science fiction works of Ursula (Kroeber) Le Guinn, whose father was in fact one of the leading twentieth-century anthropologists and who incorporated social systems thinking into the worlds she imagined, and authors like Theroux whose parables on “development” draw from close observations of human behavior in explaining how created communities often contain the seeds of their own destruction (Theroux, 1981). A reader of this piece in draft also enthusiastically points to works of Doris Lessing as models to draw from (Lessing, 1992).

Though I cannot make this pledge on behalf of this journal, I would welcome social science and development journals to open up their book review sections to include discussion of contemporary science fiction and fiction based on the perspectives those books raise regarding the scope and effectiveness of our fields. I am ready to do so in a completed future article to be presented here.

Is it really utopian to think that academic and applied institutions, scholars and practitioners will ultimately turn again to caring about the human potential and its future, rather than just focus on escapism and their short term career interests?