Contending voices: futures, culture and development

This essay discusses some aspects of the World Commission on Culture and Development (WCCD), a major UN initiative. It describes, in particular, the fate of a proposal to establish a General Agreement on Culture and Development (GACD) similar to other international agreements, but which takes a ‘bottom-up’ rather than a ‘top-down’ approach to negotiation. The proposed GACD would contribute to the resolution of culture-related crises and promote new directions for development based on cultural diversity and shared global values. The aim of the essay is: to indicate the aims and progress of the Commission; to consider how cultural futures-oriented thinking might assist in the conceptualization of a GACD; and to reflect on how different voices within the world community affect the progress of such initiatives and proposals.     

Are futures organisations “ahead of their times”? A view of the World Futures Studies Federation in the 21st century

This paper explores the idea of what it means to be “ahead of the times.” In doing so the paper looks at new generations of ideas; new generations of individualism; and new generations of organisational structures and cultures. Weak signals can already be identified from a century ago indicating new ways of thinking within several disciplines such as science, philosophy, psychology and education. These signs of what many regard as evolutionary change in human thinking run parallel with many of the exponential changes manifesting in the external world. The paper argues for a shift beyond egotistic individualism to collective individualism, laying foundations for major organisational transformation to meet the needs of uncertain futures. The paper suggests that futures studies as a field needs to be sensitive to the developmental and paradigmatic changes that have been occurring both within and across the knowledge spectrum. Finally, the World Futures Studies Federation is examined as a case study to determine whether it is, indeed, ahead of its times.     

Integral consciousness through the global lens: The great shift in the presiding technology of consciousness

It is now more evident that humanity is in the midst of a profound evolutionary shift in all dimensions of our cultural life and in our human condition. One symptom of this great shift is the increasing sense of “crisis” as our older dysfunctional forms of life and mind face a certain meltdown in this metamorphesis. Ironically, our entrenched patterns of “minding” and consciousness feed the crisis and eclipse the depth of the real crisis. The shift we now face has long been emerging since the dawn of civilizations, and is nothing less than an evolutionary shift, a maturation of our human form and technology of consciousness. Indeed, the essence of the global crises turns essentially on this “crisis” in consciousness—a radical dimensional shift in our rational capacities and mind processing powers. And this shift has been long seen and anticipated in our hitherto dormant global wisdom tradition through the ages. This essay suggests that our future sustainability now turns on bringing forth this mindshift from egomental patterns to more mature holistic, integral and dialogical patterns of being human through our dilated global lens.     

Globally scanning for “Megatrends of the Mind”: Potential futures of futures thinking

This paper focuses on emergent signs of evolutionary change in human thinking that run parallel with many of the exponential changes manifesting in the external world. Weak signals are identified from the early 20th century indicating the emergence of new knowledge patterns. These signals have strengthened in the last 40 years. The paper first identifies new ways of thinking within several disciplines such as science, philosophy, religion and education. New knowledge patterns are then identified in discourses that traverse disciplinary boundaries through transdisciplinary approaches such as futures studies and planetary/global studies. The paper then discusses evolution of consciousness, identifying research that theorises new ways of thinking as being related to individual psychological development and/or socio-cultural evolution. Finally, evolutionary concepts are discussed that attempt to meta-cohere the new knowledge patterns via the terms postformal, integral and planetary. Notably, academic research on “futures of thinking,” “evolution of consciousness” and/or “global mindset change” has been, until now, largely ignored by mainstream academic discourse on evolution, consciousness and futures studies.     

Art: Futures of the past

This essay makes a demand: it calls for a divorce between art and culture in order to reaffirm a future for art. It asks whether in a scenario in which political culture has surrendered to cultural politics, can art reaffirm and reconfigure itself as a site of exuberance, wonder, vitality, affect, memory and learning, and create a place of ethical and critical resistance?     

How to make enemies and influence people: anatomy of the anti-pluralist, totalitarian mindset

This essay outlines the characteristics of what I call the ‘totalitarian mindset’. Under certain circumstances, human beings engage in patterns of thinking and behavior that are extremely closed and intolerant of difference and pluralism. These patterns of thinking and behaving lead us towards totalitarian, anti-pluralistic futures. An awareness of how these patterns arise, how individuals and groups can be manipulated through the use of fear, and how totalitarianism plays into the desire in human beings for ‘absolute’ answers and solutions, can be helpful in preventing attempts at manipulation and from the dangers of actively wanting to succumb to totalitarian, simplistic, black-and-white solutions in times of stress and anxiety. I present a broad outline of an agenda for education for a pluralistic future. The lived experience of pluralism is still largely unfamiliar and anxiety inducing, and that the phenomenon is generally not understood, with many myths of purity and racial or cultural superiority still prevalent. Finally, as part of that agenda for education, I stress the importance of creativity as an adaptive capacity, an attitude that allows us to see pluralism as an opportunity for growth and positive change rather than simply conflict.     

Long-term thinking and the politics of reconceptualization

This essay is a response to the dominance of short-term thinking in Western culture. It begins with a critique of the minimal, or fleeting, present and then explores some possibilities for extending what might be meant by the ‘present’. It suggests that considerable utility may be derived from a more careful and considered use of particular timeframes. It is doubtful whether questions of sustainability, the rights of future generations and, indeed, the disciplined study of futures can be resolved without a number of innovations based on long-term thinking. The latter part of the essay considers two—the creation of institutions of foresight and an international programme of 21st century studies.     

Navigating towards sustainable development: A system dynamics approach

Traditional fragmented and mechanistic science is unable to cope with issues about sustainability, as these are often related to complex, self-organizing systems. In the paper, sustainable development is seen as an unending process defined neither by fixed goals nor by specific means of achieving them. It is argued that, in order to understand the sources of and the solutions to modern problems, linear and mechanistic thinking must give way to non-linear and organic thinking, more commonly referred to as systems thinking. System Dynamics, which operates in a whole-system fashion, is put forward as a powerful methodology to deal with issues of sustainability. Examples of successful applications are given.Any system in which humans are involved is characterized by the following essential system properties: Bounded rationality, limited certainty, limited predictability, indeterminate causality, and evolutionary change. We need to resort to an adaptive approach, where we go through a learning process and modify our decision rules and our mental models of the real world as we go along. This will enable us to improve system performance by setting dynamic improvement goals (moving targets) for it.Finally, it is demonstrated how causal loop diagrams can be used to find the leverage points of a system.     

Global communication and pluralization of identities

As a burning issue of the modern era, national identity is currently subjected to two main contradictory forces. Globalization processes from above and localization forces from below are simultaneously integrating and fragmenting national identities. This essay examines the negotiation of cultural identities in light of the historical transitions from premodern to modern and postmodern modalities and sensibilities. The essay argues that the commodity fetishism of the marketplace is as important an element in contemporary cultural formations as the identity fetishism of militant social movements. Both phenomena are fostered by global communication processes in which identity formations increasingly depend on commodification and distantiation. While global advertising focuses on consumption to frame status identities, mediated communication appeals to primordial myths to structure civic and political identities within imagined communities. The two phenomena must be considered as dialectical twins in contemporary motivation, legitimation, and hegemonic crises.     

Total recall : aliens, ‘others’ and amnesia in postmodernist thought

Postmodernism sees itself as a champion of plurality and seeks to represent voices of ‘other cultures’ which have been suppressed, neglected or marginalized by modernity. But is postmodernism necessarily a good thing for non-Western cultures? Is it, in its rejection of all metanarrative, its overriding concern for the present at the expense of history, its insistence on blurring the distinction between image and reality, and its absolute moral relativity, a liberating force or a new form of cultural assimilation? Is postmodernism totally divorced from modernist philosophy or is it simply the cultural logic of secularism? This essay explores these questions on the basis of four new books: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty;¹ The Condition of Postmodernity by David Harvey;² Contemporary Political Culture: Politics in a Postmodern Age by John R. Gibbons (editor);³ and Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism by Andrew Ross (editor).⁴     

From space to time : The music of old earth and new time

With this article I.F. Clarke resumes his series on the long advance towards modern ways of looking at the future. Two hundred years ago, he says, the world still managed well enough with the old short-scale measure of time. According to that system the beginning of human life dated from the creation of Adam and Eve on the afternoon of Friday, 28 October 4004 BC. Then came the first palaeontologists who pushed back the origins of organic life by millions of years. Their discoveries changed the perceived role of Homo sapiens in earth history as decisively as the Renaissance astronomers transformed all thinking about the place of our planet in the universe. The dominant evolutionary ideas of the 19th century joined with the evident technological advances to confirm the idea of progress as the most favoured doctrine of the age. It is still with us.     

Are artists and engineers inventing the culture of tomorrow?

The human body represents the ultimate entity through which the world is shaped and interpreted. These days, advances in the field of biotechnology redefine the borders between human beings and their environment; contemporary evolutionary patterns coincide with a technology that have developed detached from any cultural discourse. From an artistic point of view, it is unfortunate that there is little possibility to be responsibly involved in the discourse concerning biotechnology and culture. In fact, this matter concerns our society and its various agents. No longer can it remain solely the realm of engineers whose research, while largely ignoring the broader social ramifications of biotechnology, exerts increasing influence on our daily lives.Given this cultural backdrop, it is not surprising that several artists and designers have critically positioned themselves within the fields of biotechnology and genetic engineering; thus in the late 1980s, a new term, Bioart, evolved: shaped by a complex technology and its appropriation by artists, Bioart engages and examines genetic engineering and its impact on the contemporary cultural environment.This article reflects on these developments and questions the possibility of an artistic practice related to synthetic biology. It bases itself on a project realized by a group of students in the fields of media art and genetic engineering from the Bauhaus University Weimar and the University of Heidelberg called Super Cell, presented at the iGEM competition 2010 at MIT. Furthermore, it draws upon and investigates potentialities for a social and cultural involvement of practitioners on an interdisciplinary level.     

Limits to the economy of knowledge and knowledge of the economy

In this essay, we explore the view that the growth of knowledge is a complex evolutionary process. We pay particular attention to the division of knowing in a knowledge economy, to the restless nature of knowledge and to the principle of variation and selection that makes the growth of knowledge an evolutionary phenomenon. The foundations for this discussion are located in Adam Smith's suggestion that the most fundamental aspect of the division of labour is the division of knowledge, and the consequential existence of roundabout and combinatorial ways of producing knowledge. This notion of roundaboutness also connects our discussion with the writings of the Austrian school of economists. It is this school of thought that has come closest to understanding the open-ended and evolutionary nature of knowledge based economic activity. The theory of complex adaptive systems, when applied to the economic and social domain, has enabled us to confront the distinction between knowledge and the institution of social understanding. We map the difference between knowledge, which is private, and understanding, which is social. If knowledge is a characteristic of individuals, understanding then becomes an emergent phenomenon arising from the interaction between individuals in specific contexts. Understanding has boundaries it has components that possess great heterogeneity and is sustained by the connections of information flow. It is a socially distributed process whose growth is dependent on a systemic context, on the way a given set of individuals interact to share information and thus to further develop their idiosyncratic knowledge. Recognising that understanding is necessarily distributed leads to the insight that economic activity, which is necessarily social, depends on shared understandings, that is to say, correlated knowledge. This provides a clue as to the unpredictability and unevenness of knowledge accumulation, and of course the unpredictability of capitalism as a knowledge driven system.     

Of great apes and robots: Considering the future(s) of cultural heritage

Because cultural heritage management is an inherently retrospective discipline, too many valuable heritage places were lost because they are not recognised and assessed in time. This paper advances strategic thinking in cultural heritage management by addressing two on-the-horizon and over-the-horizon issues: the management of artefacts created by our closest relatives, the great apes; and the management of artefacts created in the future by the first artificial intelligence (AI)-imbued, self-reflecting robots.Given the increasing understanding that chimpanzees have cultures and traditions in tool use, there is a need to recognise their heritage value in reference to human evolution. Likewise, it is now also time to explore how we are going to deal with the non-human, robotid artefacts. The contemplation of the role of non-human heritage will ultimately foster a re-appraisal of human heritage. The paper outlines some of the conceptual issues that need to be addressed if our heritage is to have an ethical future.     

Imagination workshops: An empirical exploration of SFP for technology-based business innovation

This article explores the potential use of Science Fiction Prototypes (SFPs) as a vehicle to promote creative thinking and innovation in the business and technology development process. In particular, the paper describes a tool, “The Imagination Workshop”, which business people can use to drive near and far term product innovation, futuristic business and entrepreneurship. A key contribution of this article is the use of a modified evolutionary model of the Science Fiction Prototyping creation process (cyclic SFP), which, instead of being linear process (as in earlier approaches), is based around a set of feedback loops in the form of an iterative evolutionary co-creative process. In addition, the paper describes how the SFP methodology has been applied to business innovation and entrepreneurship in two small UK companies. Finally, it reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of these methods from a business perspective.     

Transcending flatland: Implications of Ken Wilber's meta-narrative for futures studies

The Western futures project was originally founded on empiricist notions of prediction, forecasting and control. While other approaches to futures work, other traditions and ways of knowing, have certainly become established, the early framing of Futures Studies arguably occurred out of this broadly reductionist framework—what Wilber has since termed `flatland'. As a result, current ideologies such as: economic growth, globalisation, the pre-eminence accorded to science and technology, and `man's conquest of nature'—were insufficiently problematised. Technology-led views of the future remain influential within Futures Studies, bureaucratic thinking and popular culture. In this view, the future is less open than it might be because it is seen merely as an extension of the present. Critical Futures Studies question such assumptions. The paper explores how the work of this leading transpersonal synthesist can contribute both to a broadening and deepening of Futures Studies and thus help to activate cultural options that are presently obscured.     

Preparing for the unknown… unknowns: ‘doomsday’ prepping and disaster risk anxiety in the United States

This article examines the collapse-based thinking energising ‘doomsday’ prepping: a growing American phenomenon centred on storing food, water and weapons for the purpose of surviving disasters. Existing understandings of prepping indicate that its practitioners are driven to prepare by peculiar and delusional certainty that apocalyptic collapse will occur in the near future. This view, however, has not yet been tested by empirical research. This article draws on ethnography with 39 preppers in 18 American states to present a new understanding of this phenomenon, as it shows prepping consistently being practiced in the absence of both apocalyptic predictions and certainty regarding the future occurrence of disaster. Demonstrating that preppers’ activities are undergirded by precautionary projections around numerous non-apocalyptic ‘threats’, the article argues that prepping principally responds to uncertain anxieties around disaster risks. Moreover, it establishes that these imprecise anxieties are regularly influenced by preppers’ consumption of disaster-based speculation in mainstream news media – showing that their concerns tend to emerge in response to numerous disaster risks that are widely reported and recognised in wider American culture, rather than marginal conceptions of ‘threats’. The article, therefore, contends that, rather than being a marginal apocalyptic practice, prepping is a phenomenon with clear, previously unacknowledged links to broader risk communications and concerns in the twenty-first century United States – one that must be understood as a reflection of the broader resonance of disaster-based speculation and uncertainty in this cultural context.     

Creativity, the corporate curriculum and the future: a case study

This paper explores the proposition that the successful companies of the future will be those that find the means to help their employees to think and act creatively. Based on a case study of British managers’ perceptions of creativity and how it can be nurtured in a large US-based manufacturing company, the study shows that prevailing models of creativity in the organization are inadequate. Firstly, the structure of management in the organization and many features of the culture and corporate curriculum of the company, inhibit creative thinking and action. It is not the intention of the company to do this. The company has developed many methods of problem-solving and team-working intended to release the creative energy of employees. The organizational culture of the company is not, however, as supportive of creative endeavour as it needs to be. Secondly, the models of creativity in the minds of managers and supervisors reflect a wider cultural misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Creativity is perceived in highly individual terms. It is thought of as something which expresses itself fully in non-work areas and it is not seen as a process that can be facilitated through new ways of working and thinking within the organization. To have a successful future, this company, like many others, must change the ways in which its managers perceive the creative potential of their employees.     

Whither history? Encounters with historicism, postmodernism, postcolonialism

Postmodernist questioning of historians' claims to historical truth has created a sense of crisis in historical consciousness. The essay argues that the crisis is not a crisis in the writing of history, as most historians still continue with business as usual, but a crisis in the cultural meaning of history. While this crisis has been associated with the so-called “linguistic turn” which was to result in a paradigm shift in historiography in the 1970s, it has other important dimensions; including Third World questionings of EuroAmerican understandings of the past and, perhaps even more importantly, the intrusion into the representations of the past of the new media. The essay argues that new kinds of history that have appeared since the 1970s from women's history to the history of social movements to “microhistory” have themselves contributed to the complication of our understanding of the past, and what might be called postmodernity's histories. It suggests that historians have always assumed the tentativeness and contingency of claims to historical truth, and argues against a premature panic concerning the status of history. Constructivism is here to stay, but that does not necessarily point to the disappearance of history, only to more complicated ways of grasping the past.