Anglo-Futurism: Love

One of the issues I have with popular modern philosophy is there is rarely any discussion on love, not sexual love, but selfless love. I find the conversations are mainly around technical ways of seeing the world, power dynamics and redefining words to manipulate people.

I know some areas of philosophy, like conservatism, mention the love of home, the love of beauty and the love of the nation. But in the today’s academia, this is not common.

This is why I’ve ventured more into Christian theology than philosophy. Because at its core is love. Not just selfless love, but God’s sacrificial love.

AngloFuturism is a compound word. Whereas, I suspect, Futurism struggles with the notion of a self-sacrificing God, Anglo has this concept deep within its foundations. Anglo is partially built upon the Christian story and therefore draws upon this heart of selfless love.

One narrative we draw from Creation in Christianity is God made the world as an expression of love. When seen from this perspective, we can anrgue everything is built upon a foundation of love. I would even say, ‘selfless love is the mortar between the bricks of reality’. It binds everything together.

When we build something out of a selfless love, it tends to last. When we build using the fleshly passions of selfishness, anger and envy, whatever we construct will more quickly fail. Power structures require vastly more energy to maintain compared to structures built through loving familiar relationships.

Think about the sacrifices made by those great men who went to war in WW II. Their story built the foundations of the Western World in which we live in today. Their selfless act of duty and love of country, provided an enduring framework for liberalism. Which still stands, over 75 years later. Though with the denigration of Winston Churchill in the UK, I wonder how long it will last.

With regard to AngloFuturism, selfless love needs to be at its core. The love of family, community and place leads us to act selflessly towards it. And with an air of duty.

By having an ideology centred on selfless love, we should be able to build structures which last, and eventually form enduring colonies in space.

Communities based around post-modern liberalism, corporate communism or an earthbound dictatorship barking orders to an off-world colony will not work in the medium or long term. But a community built on sacrificial love will.

Mutual respect will not cut it, as on occasion community leaders will need to make decisions which ignores the needs of an individual and curtail personal freedoms. But if everyone loves the community, they will be happy to make these necessary sacrifices. The ones which everyone has to make, in order to maintain a functioning colony.

This kind of love is generally found in families. This is why the first permanent colonists on Mars should be called a family. Binding them together as siblings. It reenforces the loving familiar bonds and encourages self-sacrifice.

AngloFuturism isn’t just about space colonisation, but helping to build resilient communities on Earth too. Having a selfless love of ‘home’ is a key to kickstarting something positive with the potential to change things for the better. Placing sacrificial love at the heart of AngloFuturism will make it stand head and shoulders above every other ideology which simply hunts for power.

The future is not just starships flying off to Mars, but also living in a web of relationships centred around familiar love. Here on Earth and in the Heavens.