Writing
about the future
Talk
given to the fourth Freelance Journalists, Artists and Photographers
conference of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Sydney,
April 28, 2001.
Imagine
yourself a medieval monk.
You are standing in a library and reach out to take down a large
leather-bound volume. As
you place it on the lectern, you have a sudden premonition that
something rich and strange is about to happen. The book is an old
friend, a commentary upon Aristotle. You are familiar with the smell of the leather,
the feel of the fine vellum pages, the pattern of theory and argument,
commentary and response, the marginal illustrations and annotations.
You intend to open the book, and add to its centuries of argument.
Something
happens, though, in the interval between taking the book down and
placing it on the lectern. You imagine that things could be different.
The book when you open it, will be totally transformed. It will be the
book you have always longed to possess, the book you have been seeking
all your sequestered life. It will be the book of all knowledge.
When
you open it, you will find great wonders. There will be light and
sound and words and pictures that move. This book will be connected to
all the other books in the world, and when you inscribe your words in
the book, there will soon be commentaries in response. There you will
find other worlds remote from your library, yet within it. Search for
the word Paradise, if that is your desire, and back will come
information about Paradise apartments to lease in Florida, or the
words Paradise. Girls! Girls! Girls!
- complete with illustrations that will make your hair grow
curly. Then, something more akin to what you might have expected – a
guide to religious beliefs of the afterlife.
In
short, out medieval visionary has seen into the future, and has
imagined the notebook computer with built in modem and mobile phone
facility. The future book is interactive, digital and video, and can
talk to all the other books like it, in the world.
Back
to the past. You stand at your lectern, looking down at your book with
its fine vellum pages. You have had a vision that things could be
other than what they are, but you will not tell anyone about it.
No-one would believe you. Instead, you open the pages of commentary on
Aristotle, take up your
quill, and add to the old familiar arguments that the earth is the
centre of the universe. Your vision fades, and you return to the
ageless rhythm of your monastic life. Your goal is Paradise, the abode
of the soul after death, where the desert shall blossom as the rose,
and there, free from sorrow, pain and death, you believe you will
dwell forever.
The
internet search for the word Paradise, throwing up as it does an
eclectic mix of commerce, pornography, and theology tells us something
about the book of all knowledge that we have today – the uses both
profound and trivial, sacred and profane, towards which the new
technology is being put.
Enough
of the visions.
I’m
delighted to be invited here to this convention – and I think I’m
right in assuming that what the organisers want me to talk about
writing about the future.
You’re
probably a bit like me – when I first was asked to write about the
future my first reaction was a panicky: ‘I don’t know anything
about the future’. But I think getting into the futures area has
been worth while, for me, and the fact that I don’t know the future
doesn’t seem to matter. The futures area is wide open.
The
secret is, lots of people pontificating about the future know less
than we do.
I
think that writing about the future doesn’t have much to do with
prediction or prophecy. It’s more to do with questioning the past
and the present.
In April 1999 and
again in August 2000 I was invited to two seminars organised by the
Seattle-based Foundation for the Future. At the first seminar there
were twenty two participants, the second seminar roughly double the
number. We were a mix of mainly scientists, but there were futurists,
archaeologists, cosmologists, astronomers, true believers in SETI, the
search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, believers in cosmic
spirituality, and others. The topic under discussion was the long-term
future of humanity, specifically the next 1000 years. The Humanity
3000 meetings were be the
first of a series of 1000 meetings planned for the next 1000 years. It
is privately endowed. Only in America are such things possible.
I'd like to reflect on the special conjunction of science,
popular science, science fiction, cosmic spirituality, and futures
studies, cosmology, archaeology and rocket science, that took place.
What
will it mean, to be human, in the year 3000? Imagine human identity in
an age of machines that will be smarter than their human creators.
Imagine a multi-planetary society, with space exploration swiftly
becoming cheaper. Imagine space-adapted humans, or a situation in
which that which moves of-planet may bot be human. Imagine a new kind
of human-directed evolution.
One
thing required of each of us at Humanity 3000 was a personal vision of
the 1000-year future, and I’d like to suggest this to you as
something to sit down and work out for yourself. It’s worth the
considerable brain-strain involved. Interesting things happen when you
ask yourself this question.
My
first thought was to backtrack 1000 years. If 1000 years ago, people
were told that one day they'd have the vote, the reaction would be
disbelief. What's a vote for, when you've got your own local
war-lord? Moving forward a thousand years from now, my first thoughts
were towards the high technology innovations – we live in a hi-tech
society – it’s the first thing that comes to mind,
that the future will be technologically stranger than I can
imagine. Damien Broderick calls this the
Spike, the unknowable rapid transition to new levels of
complexity.
Then
I'd flip back a thousand years, to the warlords, slavery, the feudal
system, and note that these persist today, the year 2001, in too many
places. Hence I decided that my guiding image of the future is the
yo-yo; one jolt forward, one back and over the loop, and a thousand
years on becomes a bit of more of the same plus the totally new.
Then
I thought – the images crowding into my mind come not so much from
science, but from its extrapolations in popular culture, in science
fiction and fantasy. Still, however strange the science in science
fictional worlds, there’s a jolt back to our time, to previous times
– these worlds are still imagined in terms of haves and the
have-nots. The technologically sophisticated and the primitive are
intermingled, the alien with the savage. Tumbling together in my head
are scenes from Star Wars and The Epic of Gilgamesh,
Bladerunner and The Secret Life of Plants, TV news clips,
etc. Two such images really struck me recently. When the Russian
submarine Kursk went down, TV cameras took us to its home base, a
harbour full of the hulks of rusting ships and listing nuclear
submarines – that vision of technology in ruins was very striking
– I felt as if I was looking at the ruins of an ancient Greek temple
in some place like Sicily, where
earthquakes and wars of the past 3000 years have brought the
temple to ruins. The home harbour of the Kursk submarine inspired a
similar feeling of awe at human cleverness and ingenuity brought to a
stage of terrible neglect, and disaster.
Another
image – In November 1999, with demonstrations that
took place in the streets outside the meeting of the World Trade
Organisation in Seattle, we saw on TV images of people
dressed as sea-turtles, lining up before riot police dressed as
hi-tech RoboCops.
The
future is a multi-layered thing, a layering in story as well as in
history, science and archaeology. Something is happening in my head
with this mix of popular science and popular culture that is more than
a linear projection into the future, the unknown building on the
known. I am telling myself stories about the future, stories which
come from my life history, and from the culture in which I live.
I’d like to unpack some of this, and present a few ideas that
comes from the academic discipline called Future Studies.
I’d like to talk briefly about a way of trying to understand
how people talk about the future. It’s called ‘causal layered
analysis’ that comes from an interesting futurist living in
Queensland, educated in the USA, born in Pakistan, Sohail Inayatullah.
His experience of many cultures gives him an interesting
take on the future. I like reading anything he writes.
(Reference here – Sphail Inayatullah, ‘Causal layered analysis.
Poststructuralism as method’, Futures, 30, no.8 1998,
pp. 815-829.)
It’s a way of analysing
what people are saying about what’s happening now, how things
are changing. It’s approach
that divides the task into four stages.
Imagine
people sitting in a meeting talking about the year 3000. Discussion
can be analysed as follows.
First:
the litany. Some people will respond with a list of present day issues
and problems. Each will be on their own hobby-horse. One will say :
the economy is in a bad way. Another will respond – the environment
is in a bad way; a third will say: at a personal level, people are
stressed out and feel their lives are meaningless. and so on. It’s
list of what’s wrong now – and goodness knows, there’s plenty
wrong – but we want more if we are to be futurists.
Secondly:
coming into the discussion, following on from the litany of
complaints, we’ll have people in our Humanity 3000 meeting who will
be experts in their fields. They will have done research on these
problems and issues, looking for explanations for our present ills within
systems of social organization that
have produced the problems –that’s their work. They take empirical
evidence and look at economic, historical and cultural factors, and
present often convincing arguments – but often at the end of the
expert’s view of the world we are left with that nagging feeling –
yes, but? It’s because, says Sohail Inayatullah, social causes are
being explored within a certain worldview which while valuable for its
purposes, is only a partial story. The solutions produced within a
worldview are legitimated within that world view .
The
third level is that of the world view. Doing futures studies is like
doing applied philosophy. You ask further questions. What are the
assumptions that are being made? What are the contradictions? What are
the prejudices? What’s going on that in way is independent of the
actors, the experts
putting forwards their results? Sohail Inayatullah includes social,
linguistic and cultural structures.
Journalists
ask similar questions about assumptions people make, about whose
interests are being served by a particular action, etc.
One
example, in talking about the year 3000, many of the speakers were
from the USA. The assumption common to all was the dominance of the
belief that the USA will still be a dominant world power in the year
3000 – but, will it be? A mild comment from Dr Lim, from Singapore,
who said, ‘What if Singapore is the dominant world power in the year
3000?’ This led to considerable disbelief – but I’m thinking
why not?
The
place for the irrational has to be acknowledged - because its in
there, - no matter whether science says, lets all be rational, we are
creatures that both rational and irrational, both capable of calm
reason, and of deep emotion, and that’s probably also going to be
the case 1000 years from now. This
thought leads into, fourthly, the symbolic level of metaphor and myth.
To Sohail Inayatullah it’s
where the gut/emotional level experience shows again, often in a
visual image. He asks people from many cultures about their images of
the future, and he finds interesting differences.
Someone
in Europe might say: the future is like a roll of dice, while an Arab
might say ‘trust in Allah but don’t forget to tether your camel”
. Could be the future is a finely woven carpet, with God as the
weaver. Or from America something without limits, full of choice and
opportunity. Or from Fiji, being a passenger in a car where the driver
is blindfolded – a double whammy in terms of a sense of
helplessness.
Images at Humanity 3000 included lots of streams and
waterfalls.
Where,
practically does this kind of analysis get us, in trying to imagine
the world in the year 3000?
It
gives a set of techniques that can help the writer think though issues
I’ve suggested that it’s a good exercise to do, thinking
towards the year 3000 and writing a personal statement . What next do
you do with the statement? I reckon, examine it, and think about it
about where you’ve put the following four features:
1
science and technology
2
governance – how societies and nations cohere, or disintegrate
3
spiritual transformation – I’ll put this in, though I’ve not
discussed it yet and its a big subject
4
some totally new event that happens and disrupts everything
The
first factor I’ll call ‘Futurelandia’
This is a word coined by Johan Galtung. Galtung invites us to imagine
the future as a kind of country to which we are travelling and to try
first to see it as a kind of open space. It might be, that as we try
to think about the future, we imagine science and technology as the
main factor influencing the future. Then, says Galtung and others,
it’s as if science and technology has already landed in this future
country, and already colonised it, so that seeing the future in other
ways becomes quite difficult. Futurelandia
is a kind of Disneyland of future sciences, a panorama of glittering
technological dreams. Or nightmares.
The
second is governance. There will be responses that
take the most important factor in the next thousand years of
humanity on earth to be both world and local governance. Good
governance creates the conditions for science and technology to
flourish, as well as the rest of us going about our daily lives. If
governance breaks down, there surely isn’t going to be any organised
science happening. This response sees social cohesion as the major
thing to keep going in various ways, whether its by some kind of new world government,
or through global networking of stronger local communities.
The
third is spirituality, various transformations leading to spiritual
growth and away from violence as the way to solve social ills. You
might call it, less
contentiously, an ethical
dimension to the future where a new spirit of co-operation flourishes,
both towards people and towards the natural world.
The
fourth is natural catastrophe – and let’s pick, for the sake of
this hour, a big one- let’s choose asteroid impact.
Here
you have four things – science/governance/spirit/ extraneous
disastrous factor X.
Now
which of these four you might think of first in thinking of the next
1000 years is very much an outcome of the interests, the socialisation
of the individual writer. Your personal vision of the thousand year
future tells me more about you than perhaps it tells me about the
future. Feeding into this vision will be your personal guiding myths
and metaphors about the future, too – images which come from the
interaction of the individual life history with the social life in
which we’re all embedded. It seems to me – a good idea, I think to
ask yourself / if you can work out what these might be
-- a kind of homework exercise.
I’ll give an example of where this worked, for me – I was
asked to write a piece for a journal roughly along the lines –
‘how did I come to be a futurist? What was the knowledge base that I
brought to my writing about the future?’ And do it in 1500 words.
Now bear in mind when I was asked to do this I felt rather
desperate.
It’s not that I
set out in my career to say, at the age of eighteen,
I’m going to be a futurist. But somehow, we end up where we
end up.
One theme I've
explored in a variety of ways has been the theme of women and science.
Way back in 1982 I wrote a study guide for Deakin University on
Charles Darwin and Social Darwinism. From its origins in 1859,
Darwin’s theory of evolution totally transformed our understanding
of our origins, our relationships to each other, to other animals, to
society and to the environment. The theory of evolution, or gradual
change by means of the mechanism of natural selection, is one of those
great idea nestling as the kernel of truth amid all kinds of fantastic
extrapolations from it – and this includes
as an aside, the work of futurists extrapolating from it into
the future.
When I looked at the rich variety of ways in which the idea of
evolution was exploited in the years following the acceptance of the
broad features of Darwin's theory, I found myself asking the question
– what did women make of these ideas? . Social Darwinism is the term
used to label various social prescriptions and descriptions on the
relation of the natural to the social world, writing which claimed the
authority of science, even though different social Darwinists used
this authority to come to different, sometimes contradictory
conclusions. One school of thought claimed co-operation was a social
consequence of our biological origins, while another took ruthless
competition between people as 'natural' and hence necessary for the
advance of civilisation. What struck me in the various histories of
social Darwinist thought was that the social Darwinists seemed to be
all men. Where were the views of women? In the Victorian Age and after
in Britain, America and Australia, surely there must have been some
women who adapted evolutionary thought to their political advantage.
When I went looking for these women in history, I found them (as one
does).
I
described this process in my article ‘The history of wrong ideas and
their future”.
I
finished this article with the idea of my preferred future. I said I
wanted to help create a future world in which there will be more
possibility for laughter.
That’s
what writing this piece did for me. I got to the end of it, and I had
an image of the future, my desired future. I didn’t start out with
that idea, but I ended with it, even if I went round in a kind of
circle, and kept the world view with which I started. Whoops, I
didn’t make any spectacular transformative breakout there.
I
end up where I start, but along the way, I got plenty of ideas for
stories.
OK
so that’s my personal release, but then teasing stuff out of this
personal story, there’s a sense there that the public consultation
process, with its roots in a local protest, is also challenging the
grand narrative of progress where progress means more technology. The
emerging myth that I like to think might be happening is the narrative
of sufficiency, where progress is interpreted as meaningful
livelihoods, the valuing of nature,
spiritually enrichment, conserving technologies, etc.
One
strong image crowds in here. I
go back to Seattle, 1999, with those sea-turtles, and the riot police
ranged against them. The vision is one of a
sustainable future for all ranged against the future imposed by the
economic technocratic
elite, grass-roots
activism versus the defence of a privileged economic order. The
turtles stand for something new: firstly the globalisation of the
perception of injustice; secondly the extension of the politics of
recognition to non-human species.
Anti-globalisation protesters voiced their concerns in a global
fashion, in their concern for the lives of people, and other species,
remote from them.
In
principle, I’ve worked
out, I’m on the side of the turtles.
I get to this point, and I’ve worked out a notion of
the
kind of future I’d prefer. This is where futurists like us to get,
rather than trying to work out that this is what the future will be
like.
One final thing I’d like to throw up that comes out of
future workshops in which people from everywhere come together is the
idea of co-evolution. I think what is new as we go into the 21st
century, third millennium stuff – is a profound sense of our
biological nature. Conscious
evolution is a term that embraces various ways of thinking about the
future of evolution. What’s wrong with us? What can we do about it?
How can we become more capable humans?
In
Darwin’s nineteenth century version of
evolution, the process is largely independent of human control.
People might breed variations in pigeons, dogs and plants, but their
efforts were puny compared to the might of nature acting,
unconsciously, to preserve the fit, and to eliminate species
ill-adapted to their environment.
Today
in the third millennium, new technologies of gene manipulation and
modification are adding the element of conscious human choice to the
process. Evolution is now moving on two broad fronts. There are still
the vast impersonal forces in nature (of which I mentioned, earlier,
asteroid impact) while at the same time scientists are consciously
choosing which genes to select for modification in the hospital, the
laboratory, and the field.
Conscious
evolution is where
biological evolution meets cosmic evolution.
Some
Humanity 3000 participants were enthusiasts for a
cosmic spirituality in which a feeling for the universe is the
key to both personal and planetary salvation.
Some
participants went straight to the an event roughly four billion years
from now, when the planet earth comes to an end, swallowed up by the
sun as it flares up in the last stage of its existence. They saw it as
a human imperative to leave earth, well before it dies, to venture
forth into the solar system and beyond to keep life of some kind
keeping on. They see humans co-evolving with the universe, and with
machines, in order to accomplish this tremendous task.
More
realistically, just sticking to our own planet, I like what the
Czech immunologist and poet, Miroslav Holub (1923-1998) had to say.
Holub saw himself as a
unit of something bigger,
which he called ‘genome’ rather than ‘spirit’.
His individual genome was the sum total of all the genes in his
body, yet also shared in the genetic process of all life. Holub saw
his life as a continuous part of an evolutionary whole which stretched
from the past history of life on earth into its future. He placed
himself before the genome in a spirit of humility; ‘we are not the
aim of the process’.
In
his poem, ‘The root of the matter’, Holub wrotes: ‘the root of
the matter is not/in the matter itself and often/not/in our hands.’
Where is the darkness, he asks? Where is the uncertainty? The
scientist, in the spirit of humility, is asking what the individual
can do in a world where nothing is one hundred percent sure.
Holub
imagined a kind of biological or genetic supraconsciousness, where the
biologist finds meaning in life by accepting responsibility for the planet
as a whole, and as a viable system. The
immunologist plays a part in this process of stewardship through seeking
to control the disease process in plants, humans, and other animals. In
talking about a genetic supraconsciousness, Holub goes way beyond the
‘here and now’ of present biological knowledge, but does so in a
spirit of humility before human ignorance of the whole. I
like his vision.
