However benign their intent, utopias always sound strangely unattractive. SUV-careering 21st-century urbanites have little desire to live in the anodyne calm of More's "optimal republic", Swift's Houyhnhnm Land, or what was promised to us as new Labour's new Britain. But this, according to Nobel Prize nominee and "systems philosopher" Ervin Laszlo, is where we're going wrong: our naughty habits are killing the planet and each other. It's not an original thesis, but Laszlo has come up with a way to ram the point home with (he hopes) unprecedented force: we are now, he trumpets, at the "Chaos Point", past which humanity may slide into the abyss.
Like the "Clash of Civilisations" and the "Tipping Point", this is yet another product of the crisis-branding industry. Laszlo has all the usual prescriptions for averting apocalypse - consume less, don't flush your toilet, drive a hybrid car. But The Chaos Point (Piatkus) nurses an added fundamentalism: Laszlo wants you to forswear cigarettes, alcohol, tea, coffee, drugs of any description, meat, the mainstream media and "loose 'hooking up' for one-night stands". Perhaps oddly, given this affinity with the religious right, he then predicts the world will be saved by "Cultural Creatives", who are distinguished by their fondness for "experimenting with gourmet, ethnic and natural health foods". It's enough to make you feel like firebombing Planet Organic.
Fortunately, The Chaos Point is not just a series of dreary moral imperatives. The text is spiced with a selection of frankly trippy illustrations, including a graph plotting "non-actualised alternative evolutionary paths", a web of arrows and spheres culminating in an "autocatalytic cyle" (sic) and an enormous horse rather glumly facing off against the industrial revolution. It also has an introduction by Arthur C Clarke, who scotches Laszlo's scientific pretensions by wittering on about talking to aliens and making a giant rope of Buckminsterfullerene, up which anyone can be hoisted into space for $10. With philosophers like this on the loose, it's no wonder we're at the chaos point.
