The future could be a white canvas on an easel standing alone in a room, the
smell of oil-based paint wafting through the air, awaiting the artist who will
dab her brush into a multicolor palette and create a brave new world with thoughtful,
magical brushstrokes. Perhaps the future
is a black screen or tabula rasa, a barren field ready to be nurtured into a
thriving garden by visionaries, idealists, and others who think big and
bold. For me, the future, or to be more
exact, our conceptualization of the future, of its possibilities, should not be
any of these things.
Whether we’re talking about human nature or the future, I have reservations
about the tabula rasa concept. Edwin
Black, author of War on the Weak,
which recounts the eugenic movement in Europe and the U.S., wrote: “Mankind’s
search for perfection has always turned dark.”
His cautionary words ring true and remind us of the pitfalls of futurist
ambitions. I just finished teaching a
couple of modules on the Holocaust and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge
respectively. If you’re looking for bold
visions of the future, look no further! Hitler
had in his mind’s eye an Aryan utopia that would spread across Europe and
Russia, while Pol Pot and his comrades sought to reverse the clock to Year Zero
and usher in a new blissful era of agrarian communism. Millions of murders later, the imagined future
became a reified apocalypse. No, let’s
not imagine the future to be an amorphous and vacuous blob awaiting our high
ideals to give it shape, our pure intentions to spread the gospel, or our
social engineering skills to draw up the blueprints.
I can hear the objections already: Your head’s rooted in the systems
of the past and you simply can’t think outside the box. As it turns out, I believe in a better
future; it’s just that I’m not quite the wide-eyed optimist like my sanguine
friends. One of my favorite contemporary
thinkers, Steven Pinker, makes the case that humans have become less violent
over the millennia. His book Better Angels of Our Nature draws upon a
vast array of statistics, the historical record, and explanatory models. I believe we can transform our social
consciousness and find a better way to live as a world community. I’m convinced that we can make our society more
egalitarian and just. We can move on
from the sins of the past and forge a new order. It won’t come easy. It never has.
And it won’t come about by either neglecting the past or our nature.
I do like the image of an artist refashioning the future, as I fancy
myself an artist at times, especially when I'm enjoying an alcoholic beverage or I’m sitting
behind a piano keyboard. In my vision, though,
the canvas is not pristine. It’s not a
blank slate. It contains oil stains and
other imperfections. With brush in
hand, I’m poised before a canvas that has markings, vestiges of the past like a
palimpsest. The challenge and perhaps
fun of creating a better future is to work with or around what we’re
given. Make no mistake. We need people who are able to peer beneath
the thin veneer of the status quo, of tradition, of business as usual, and see new horizons that have yet to be. But the past and future must always coexist as
a continuum in the futurist’s mind—a perfect blend of ideation and context.
I can hear the objections already: Your head’s rooted in the systems
of the past and you simply can’t think outside the box. As it turns out, I believe in a better
future; it’s just that I’m not quite the wide-eyed optimist like my sanguine
friends. One of my favorite contemporary
thinkers, Steven Pinker, makes the case that humans have become less violent
over the millennia. His book Better Angels of Our Nature draws upon a
vast array of statistics, the historical record, and explanatory models. I believe we can transform our social
consciousness and find a better way to live as a world community. I’m convinced that we can make our society more
egalitarian and just. We can move on
from the sins of the past and forge a new order. It won’t come easy. It never has.
And it won’t come about by either neglecting the past or our nature.
