Visions of the Great Turning: Utopianism and Conscious Evolution in New Age Science Fiction

Abstract

The Ideal of Human Unity (Sri Aurobindo [1950] 1999) began as a series of Sri Aurobindo’s earliest articles and was one of the fruits of his initial collaboration with Mirra Alfassa and Paul Richard. Composed in the shadow of the First World War, Ideal was collected towards its end, and revised after the end of the Second World War before his passing in 1950. In it, Sri Aurobindo ponders the necessary conditions for a unified world state, identifying two probable outcomes of either a peaceful confederation of nations or even smaller city-states or tribal groupings, or else a rigid and centralized world government that he feared would tend toward authoritarian forms. I approach this concept through the related idea of ecological civilization as expressed in the novel Ecotopia (Callenbach 1975), which has now developed a wide body of scholarship. This foundation is further expanded upon through the pair of novels by local neopagan author Starhawk (1993, 2015) that more directly address an impending socioeconomic and environmental collapse, and advocate for the restoration of balance between the divine feminine and divine masculine. Another precondition for the world state that Sri Aurobindo foresaw was the emergence of a religion of humanity that would embody the perennial wisdom sought for and expressed by the Earth’s diverse spiritual traditions. The final chapter endeavors to weave together these various threads under the banner of conscious evolution, a field with roots in integral theory popularized most by the late futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard (2015). An obscure New Age utopian science fiction novel, 2150 A.D. (T. Alexander 1976), adds color to this inspiring field. The ideal of human unity also remains notable for Sri Aurobindo’s repeated references to philosophical anarchism, which he illuminates not as a violent overthrow or an absence of government, but as humanity evolving into a self-governing organism guided by its inner spiritual realization of the interconnected oneness of all creation. I seek to contribute to the still-emerging paradigm at one time called “Cultural Creative” by Ray and Anderson (2000, 1), which we may begin to tentatively refer to as the Integral worldview.