The Left Bank of Paris has always been known for having students, artists, and intellectuals, who while away their afternoons at cafes, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and discussing the latest in fashionable ideas in the fading autumn light. Paris does not have a monopoly on such activity. There is Berlin, Rome, most any cosmopolitan city, but the image of Paris comes to mind for most. It is in these cafes that ideas were conceived, which only many decades later manifested themselves in societies at scale.

During the 1950s, a circle of Cambodian foreign exchange students in Paris spent many a leisurely autumn afternoon at cafes discussing how to organize the peasant society of their country along Marxist lines. They had a vision worthy of Rousseau in which peasants worked as comrades in solidarity. That would have been fine if it had just remained at that stage of idle chat, but it didn’t. This group of student intellectuals, fueled by Sartre’s philosophy of necessary violence went on to commit one of the greatest genocides of the 20th century in the killing fields of their homeland.

In the 1970s, from the same fertile ground emerged student intellectuals who had devoured the ideas of Rousseau and Thoreau and conversed about a society that was in harmony with its environment. It was the beginning of the environmental or green movement. They talked of a society that was “sustainable” in the sense that it would not deplete the resources available to it and would minimize its pollution of the environment. This too would have been fine if it had only remained at the stage of idle chat, but it didn’t.

Today, we are reaping the harvest from those seeds sown so many years ago by those student intellectuals. Throughout the Western world, heirs to those earlier visionaries, are asking us to power a modern economy on technology that is not fit for the purpose. Everywhere one looks we are reaching the limits of what “renewable” technologies can achieve. We see it with the blackout in Spain, the deindustrialization of Germany, and the reliance on a whimsical wind in England.

Is it what those early thinkers envisioned? Like all student intellectuals, their heads were filled with romantic notions about how the world functions, so they did not really have a concrete idea of how their scheme would work. However, I don’t think that they would be disappointed, because their aim was not to raise the living standard of the average man but instead to reach some balance with man’s environment. If that balance made life difficult for people, then so be it. It was never supposed to be the worker’s paradise as envisioned by an earlier generation of Marxist thinkers. For the rest of us living in the dystopia of these imaginative thinkers, we are starting to get a bit tired and disillusioned. Although we are not at the stage where we are being herded into the countryside to work on irrigation ditches, the level of coercion is beginning to be felt in many uncomfortable ways.

I wonder what new inventive social engineering schemes are being conceived right now over coffee and cigarettes at cafes from Paris to Portland that will plague the world many decades to come?

Image generated by ChatGPT.