Naive Realism

Population density. Data from the G-Econ project, Yale University

There are innumerable recommendations for surviving current crisis. I propose naïve realism.

Think for a moment that there were 2 billion people in the world in 1940; that we are now 6 and will be 8 billions inhabitants in the world in 2050. Sum to it that our planet can not possibly feed that amount of “animal spirits” (Keynes). John Gray insists (see “Homo Rapiens and Mass Extintion”, 2002, in his last book Gray’s Anatomy, Allen Lane, 2009) that the “plague of peole” is not going to reach the “Era of Solitude” (Wilson), when humankind would be alone because all the rest of animals have been killed, nor the eradication of humankind (Lovelock): The future is going to be a combination of genocide, war, epidemic, natural destruction and the sort of generalized social collapsed that has taken place in post-Comunist Russia.

Just as we do everyday, that we live knowing that we are going to die, we have to choose what kind of life we want to lead in a world that is condemmeded to change radically and violently in the next future. I call it naïve realism, adapting slightly Keynes' “naïve optimism”. Gray puts it this way: "From a human point of view, this may be a discomfiting prospect; but at least it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude".

What architects and artists should do in such a situation?. Well, maybe to preserve the aesthetic as a value, as some of them have always done: the harmony of the aesthetic experience is the only way humans experiment their subjective unity authentically. There is nothing more we can do, but we should not do either anything less.