Making New Worlds

In November, 2013, Sydney hosted an annual festival called Dangerous Ideas. I was watching a segment on TV which featured three young people who employed an interesting artistic conceit in order to present their version of dangerous ideas. They imaginatively placed themselves in the year 2033 and reported back to us, here in 2013, how the world had developed over the intervening twenty years. Each speaker began with current real trends in the political, environmental, scientific, and other worlds, and then extrapolated them to give us a picture of the future, as if it had already happened. Each of the three pictures was optimistic: the climate-change movement was successful; energy sources had finally shifted to “clean sources”; the excesses of international corporations had stopped, and so on. The point of the exercise was to generate an image of a future, based on current trends, if we now acted upon them. The choice of trends was intended to generate hope, and then action on our part, to bring about the imagined outcomes.

There a number of positions regarding the future implicitly argued in such a presentation. The most important one is the methodology of attaining the projected future outcome. This methodology is brought into sharp focus in sports psychology. Top athletes are taught how to generate and stabilize an image of a favourable outcome and then to attain it through the exercise of mental and physical discipline. This is a highly successful methodology in sports that involve high stress and big rewards and the three festival speakers appear to have something like this in mind in their attempt to shape the future.

There are several difficulties here in this methodology. To imagine the future in the way the speakers did, choices have to be made concerning which current trend to extrapolate—choices that clearly support the prejudices of the speakers, as in my example here. Not everyone wants a world like that of the speakers, by any means. Not everyone wants even to base their current actions on such an imagined world of the future. For example, governments like that of the USA base their very real and consequential foreign policy actions, not on a “green outcome” but on a “worst case scenario”. Even if certain chosen trends were acted upon by many people, there is no way that any outcome can be predicted from our present actions any more than an athlete can predict success. There is just too much uncertainty. At most such methodologies simply generate hope, for a while.

A recent movie emerged (October 2013) that takes this methodology to its logical and absurd limit. Gravity is a film in which:

Dr. Ryan Stone is a Mission Specialist on her first space shuttle mission aboard the Space Shuttle Explorer. She is accompanied by veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, who is commanding his final expedition.… Mission Control in Houston warns the team that space debris from a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite has caused a chain reaction of destruction and that they must abort the mission.…

From this point on, the heroine is subjected to a series of catastrophes until she finally manages to return safely to earth. Throughout the movie she maintains the hope of returning to earth against incredible odds, with one lapse into suicidal despair which is quickly countered by her dead colleague showing her yet another faint possibility for getting back. The plot portrays the supremacy of hope in relation to an imagined future (returning home) over what would otherwise been judged accurately as impossible odds. The movie was released just at the time that the US Government ended a shutdown, narrowly averting default on its accumulated debts. But the crisis was merely put off until January the next year (2014). President Obama said that the US Government should “get out of the habit of governing by crisis”. The hope-laden rhetoric in the media is exactly what the movie portrays so starkly: we can make it back from a $16 trillion national debt level if we act now. Meanwhile catastrophe after catastrophe continues to pummel the US economy.

Imagining this or that future as a way of generating hope and “hopeful action”, far from moving us towards any desired outcome is simply occluding our eyes from the reality that is right in front of us, daily. Our time is incredibly uncertain and our lives are dominated by catastrophic thinking, with fear more and more determining our real actions and outcomes, on the local or world scale. The three presenters at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas were trying to combat this overwhelming tsunami of fear by generating hope, and the movie, Gravity, similarly wants to show that hope can, after all, win through, even in the face of clearly impossible odds. But as the General Accounting Office of the USA states, the level of debt sustained by the USA is in fact, unsustainable.

If we, finally, drop all pretence that hope can have any bearing on the future, we must then face the level of fear running freely through world affairs today and equally we must face the fact that predictability is impossible in regards to the future. We must face that we are “in between worlds”. By this I mean that a former way of being has come to an end and a new way of being has yet to be configured. Thus we live in chaos.

Under these circumstances we can ask: is there any adequate way of addressing the future at all: a way that does not blind us to the fearful realities of our present times; a way that does not address the unknown future in terms of predictability or hope; a way that nonetheless may indeed help prepare the unknown future.