From change to progress: critical spirituality and the futures of futures studies

This paper argues that for futures studies (FS) to have a future that is relevant to current shifts in meaning and consciousness, then it must incorporate into its methods and practices a sense of mystery founded on a critically spiritual sensibility. Critical spirituality redefines rationality and empiricism by including within their framework both the somatic and the meditative as valid and necessary components of any research activity. In the short term this means a shift away from the current Western obsession with change and a stepping back to allow for critical distance in order to understand that it is in the appreciation of progress — a fundamental shift in consciousness to include the spiritual dimensions of human experience — that discourse will emerge to take FS to the heart of civilisational renewal. In allowing for mystery, silence and the meditative empiricism required to access these categories, critical spirituality lessens the gap between thought and action and thus enables truly transformative academic practice to emerge.The idea of progress has been central to the unfolding of the modernist project over the previous century. Yet as the century drew to a close it became increasingly hard to keep faith with the idea in the face of growing disillusionment and the obvious failure of modernism to deliver what people most wanted: happiness born of personal fulfillment. A growing range of voices in the critical futures field have been questioning the assumption that change in material terms equates with progress.These voices fall into four main areas.

• Post modernist and post structuralist thinkers;

• Feminists empowering postmodern discourse with value laden analyses of power;

• Post colonial thinkers with a debt to neo-Marxist and critical theorists;

• Neo-humanist thinkers with an investment in all three of the above, who work from a critically spiritual perspective.

In this paper I am going to argue that a Neo-humanist vision of the futures of Futures Studies is one which will fully engage the human potential by activating a critically spiritual methodology. This is important as many of the tools of futures work are actually intended for use in anticipating and managing change (uncritically) but have little relevance when considering the nature of progress. Those methods and techniques which engage with the less analytic more visionary process of futures are much more relevant to progress because they actively involve the individuals in the act of ‘futures building’ as opposed to ‘futures scanning’.‘Progress’ here is used to mean fundamental change in the consciousness of both the individual and collective mind. It is essentially spiritual and has no clear temporal or spacial restrictions being timeless, or as Joanna Macy would have it, anchored in “deep time” [1]. Change, on the other hand, is very much associated with technical and material movement, having no connection with the inner fabric of the human psyche. There is no appreciation of spirit here, though great attention is paid to gross national product and the latest technical innovation to hit the market.Futures Studies has the potential to be responsive to future human dilemmas. But to be so it will need to make the effort to embrace tools and concepts that lie beyond the narrow pall of academic rationality as it is currently constituted. A greater space is already emerging within the field that not only tolerates but promotes imaginative and creative processes that break down the intellectual prudery of those who are attached to their own discipline and have little capacity to envision beyond narrow and self imposed confines. Thus we find music and song, poetry and story, art and theatre effective vehicles for work on deeper forms of consciousness. Visioning and imaging workshops such as those run by Joanna Macy, Elise Boulding, John Seed and Warren Ziegler (to name but a few) are growing in power and sophistication. Meditation and other reflective practices — the spiritual quest — seeking to plumb the depth of the human soul become relevant when seen within a broadened definition of rationality and research.Clearly futurists need to be able to assess and describe likely changes in the short, medium and long term but their central goal should be to facilitate areas of human endeavor which can benefit from a closer linkage between action, the consciousness that informs and directs the action and the spirit that underwrites the consciousness. Equally clear is the fact that not all futures trends are as relevant to this deeper layer of operation within Futures Studies.     

A 20-20 Vision for India: targets, policies and implementation

We live in a unipolar world not only politically and militarily, but intellectually too with globalisation attaining the status of dogma. As globalisation has not always helped developing countries, swadeshi, or self-reliance, has been strongly advocated by influential groups in India. Logically, there is space for both: globalisation for improving competitiveness of tradeables, and swadeshi for maximising employment through non-tradeables.India has been growing well but not as well it could because of excessive impedance to growth. Impedance has three components: weight of tradition, reluctance to change, and friction against movement. Positive feedback in the form of local autonomy has been suggested as a remedy. As positive feedback is inherently unstable, it should be circumscribed by negative feedback. Integral feedback, integrating over all local units combined together, and over time, should minimise risk of instability.Apart from local autonomy, India will progress fast only if bureaucracy is assured security. In particular, frequent, arbitrary and often vindictive transfers of officials have become a dreaded menace. They should be subjected to the rule of law. Politicians have become a problem; many of them bank on promoting hatred. As a remedy, each voter may be given as many votes as there are candidates, and also the option to make each vote either positive or negative. Then, any hate vote gained will be nullified by the negative votes. Hate will cease to be profitable.President Kalam’s proposal for shifting investment from congested cities to rural areas by linking loops of villages by four types of connectivity—physical, electronic, economic and knowledge—promises to hasten India’s growth, and improve the environment too. Ultimately, that way we can dream of a future where even the poorest will enjoy all basic Maslow Needs—water, shelter, education, health services, connectivity, good environment, and enough surplus of money and time to enjoy leisure.

Will I be rich, will I be pretty?

Will there be rainbows day after day?

—Song in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much

Anticipatory action learning: Theory and practice

Anticipatory action learning (AAL) draws from action learning/research traditions and Futures Studies to develop a unique style of questioning the future with intent to transform organization and society. Case studies from futures workshops are used to illustrate the main points of anticipatory action learning. These are: (1) sensitivity to the environment—workshop dynamics and ways of learning/knowing of participants, (2) questioning leads to anxiety in the organization, (3) anticipatory action learning can be easily appropriated, (4) resistance must be named, understood and transformed, and (5) the future is deepened by authentic understanding of the other.     

In occupied territory: future.con

Creating sustainable, diverse futures involves challenging assumptions that Western civilisation and linear, profit based models of unlimited development are universal. This is deeply threatening to many, but objections to such colonised futures are growing. Challenging these world-views means engaging with the complex and intersecting issues of culture, environment, globalisation, gender and sustainability. This paper tests Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) as a method to excavate the levels that have created the worldview behind one image of a colonised future. Analysis reveals a ‘Future.con’ which excludes most of humanity and pre-dicts a technological future in which humans may only exist to serve the machines they created. It is also the kind of image that, in a higher education context, fits and maintains pervasive but limited world-views. It could be different. Images and some of the tools of CLA can also be used in education to help envision sustainable, culturally diverse futures.     

Creativity, skepticism, and visioning the future

Members of the World Futures Studies Federation share not only the usual professional goals of advancing and developing their field, but also an extraordinary commitment to envisioning and creating a future world of increasing human freedom and well-being. Both aims, obviously, would be moved forward if futurists could establish more futures studies courses, departments, and research centers than now exist at colleges and universities. To do so requires vigor, creativity, and élan, which futurists seem to have in abundance, but it also demands more logical and empirical rigor, skepticism, and critical capacity in futures work.     

Future kinship and the study of culture

Throughout the 20th century, body and machine have provided distinctive parallel metaphors for the concept of culture. But now these metaphors are merging as human lives are increasingly engineered through technonatural processes. In one imagined future, biotechnology will give us the means to determine our own genealogy and the potential to play a role in the ‘culturing’ of the future, as the natural and unpredictable transmission of human characteristics is transformed into a predictable process arising from the manipulation of the gene pool. New procreative possibilities—fertilization in vitro, gamete donation, maternal surrogacy etc—challenge us to reconstrue notions of identity and kinship; the article speculates on the implications of this for possible cultural futures.     

New generations of futures methods

This paper presents and further explores the issues discussed during the “New generations of futures methods” session at the WFSF 19th World Conference, Budapest, Hungary. The generational interplay has many different facets and can be looked at from many various perspectives. This paper looks at a broader role of young people as agents of cultural change in societies, their relation to futures studies and the implications of their fresh ways of thinking for futures methods. Also, the past evolution of futures methods and the challenges facing the present and future generation of futurists in regard to methodological as well as general development are reviewed. In an effort to draw together these issues and provide practical ways forward for futurists and their field four integrating themes are addressed:

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Allowing for differences, how do we develop solidarity between generations?

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What does the near-future outlook tell us that might help to achieve this?

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What personal, organisational and social capacities are needed?

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What methods are available for building social foresight?

     

Life in the tube

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus, Cyberia, and Playing the Future, explains how sensationalism in the media tends to promote our culture's natural, unexpressed agendas. This is an optimistic appraisal of the seemingly banal and exploitative fora of tabloid television, ‘Court TV’ and ‘Cops’. Such low-brow media, when approached from an evolutionary perspective, reveal themselves as the process by which closeted social issues are brought out into the cultural conversation exactly when they need to be.     

Darwinian dystopia: the shape of things to come

Acknowledging that evolution is directionless, shaped only by context and history, and that predicting the future is, therefore, a risky business, scenarios for ‘short-term’ (next few centuries) and ‘long-term’ (10s-100s of thousands of years) futures are offered. The short-term future will be determined by the appearance of transnational corporations that represent levels of social complexity above that of the nation state. Best described as laissez-faire capitalism run amok, the rise of transnationals controlled by powerful managerial elites is warranted or justified by the simultaneous emergence of neo-conservative ideologies that resemble the pernicious social Darwinism of Victorian England. The long-term future will be shaped by the failure of humans to control their fertility. In the face of cultural barriers to rational control of population growth, and as global populations exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, countless millions of ignorant, miserable humans will barely eke out an existence, surviving only long enough to reproduce more of the same. The prospects for speciation are nil, given that high global population densities will preclude reproductive isolation.     

Reductionism or layered complexity? The futures of futures studies

Futures studies is likely to evolve through changes in five areas. They are: (1) forecasting to anticipatory action learning; (2) reductionist to complex; (3) horizontal to vertical; (4) from short-term empiricist research to the return of long-term history, including grand narratives; and (5) scenario development to moral futures.     

Foresight and long-term policy-making: An analysis of anticipatory boundary work in policy organizations in The Netherlands

Public policy is founded on analysis and knowledge. However, knowledge – and especially knowledge about the future – is not a self-evident element of public policy-making. This paper conceptualizes the problematic relationship between anticipatory policy-making and anticipatory knowledge. Our study identifies possible key-variables in the linkage between foresight and policy, such as positioning, timing interfaces, professional background, instrument usage, procedures and leadership. We describe the organization and flow of policy and futures knowledge. Furthermore, we generalize these findings toward a theory concluding how ‘goodness of fit’ between knowledge about the future and policy can be achieved, so that the likelihood of informed future-oriented policies might increase.     

India’s strategic future: 2025

Based on the geopolitical developments in India’s neighbouring countries and India’s response to them, this paper depicts four scenarios—Storms and Fires, Rainbow in the Sky, Light and Shadows and Across Space. Each scenario explores a set of possible events and the consequences triggered by it. While Storms and Fires is based on the rise of a sharp nationalist Indian sentiment in the face of heightened security tensions in the region, Across Space outlines the future of India’s worldview shaped by the present government’s policy of US primacy. Light and Shadows is based on differential policy towards neighbours—conflict with Pakistan and cooperation with other neighbours. This scenario is predicated on the supremacy of economic objectives whereas Rainbow in the Sky is based on the regional cooperation as the primary guiding force of the Indian foreign policy. Though major geopolitical events in its neighbourhood will impact the immediate future of India, India’s response and internal strengths and weaknesses will determine its long-term future. It is therefore essential for the country to develop a well considered trajectory of its strategic options for the next 25 years.     

Time-scales in futures research and forecasting

In this article a study is presented of the ways in which some well-known futurists have considered time-scales in their central works, looking too at a few frequently applied forecasting methodologies. It is found, that there is obviously yet no common view of the extent of the time ahead meant for the terms future and futures and in using the time-horizon specifications, such as short-term and long-term. A survey of how time-scales are taken note of and presented in individual futures research articles is also given.On the basis of the study and survey made, the conclusions list three recommendations, which could be taken into consideration in futures studies.     

Revisiting the ‘Court of Generations’ Amendment : A conversation

In 1991, futurist Bruce E. Tonn proposed a ‘Court of Generations’ Amendment to the US Constitution. His proposed ‘Court of Generations’ lacked punitive powers but, hopefully, would have sufficient legitimacy to counteract extreme present-minded thinking evident in US political processes and institutions. Although Tonn's ‘Court of Generations’ Amendment has been well received in the futures community, who else has heard of it? Otherwise, has it made any difference? How can the cumbersome and nonfuturistic amendment procedure in the US Constitution generate a futures-oriented ‘Court of Generations’? And for those who sincerely look forward to a ‘Court of Generations,’ precisely what kind of tactically savvy visionary leadership will give the ‘Court of Generations’ any chance of being approved? During 1997, Vincent Kelly Pollard engaged Dr. Tonn in an Internet conversation aimed at clarifying these issues.     

Integrating futures studies with organizational development: Design options for the scenario project ‘RWS2020’

Most futures studies are not used by managers and strategists and do not influence the direction of organizational development. Although the contribution of future studies to management is in theory all but self-evident, the practice in organizations is that futures knowledge is hardly used, or at most, is used selectively and strategically (‘politically’). This article acknowledges that gap and claims that it is a fundamental divide between to very different domains. However, out of that re-conceptualization of the relation between futures studies and management, a new direction for an integrated praxis arises. In an empirical case study, we show that by means of an intelligent process-design and professional balancing of several key-dilemmas, futures studies can be connected to management processes and organizational development. The future can be brought back into the everyday practice of management. However, in order to do so, the futures field needs to set aside some of its methodological claims and move towards the field of strategic management. Not because futurists need to abandon their specific knowledge and expertise, but to make the most of it.     

Retrieving the dream: How students envision their preferable futures

This article begins by recalling the crucial role that popular images of the future play in societal development. It notes the apparent dearth of positive images as we approach the millennium and highlights the value of futures workshops as a procedure for enabling participants to envision the future more clearly. In particular attention is drawn to the work of Elise Boulding and her findings in this field. A pilot-study is then described which used the process developed by Boulding to help students identify the key features of their preferable futures. Some support is found for her contention that a ‘baseline’ future often emerges from such work.     

Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world

In this article, we challenge the hegemony of western science fiction, arguing that western science fiction is particular even as it claims universality. Its view remains based on ideas of the future as forward time. In contrast, in non-western science fiction the future is seen outside linear terms: as cyclical or spiral, or in terms of ancestors. In addition, western science fiction has focused on the good society as created by technological progress, while non-western science fiction and futures thinking has focused on the fantastic, on the spiritual, on the realization of eupsychia—the perfect self.However, most theorists assert that the non-west has no science fiction, ignoring Asian and Chinese science fiction history, and western science fiction continues to ‘other’ the non-west as well as those on the margins of the west (African–American woman, for example).Nonetheless, while most western science fiction remains trapped in binary opposites—alien/non-alien; masculine/feminine; insider/outsider—writers from the west’s margins are creating texts that contradict tradition and modernity, seeking new ways to transcend difference. Given that the imagination of the future creates the reality of tomorrow, creating new science fictions is not just an issue of textual critique but of opening up possibilities for all our futures.

Science fiction has always been nearly all white, just as until recently, it’s been nearly all male

(Butler as quoted in [1]).

Science fiction has long treated people who might or might not exist—extra-terrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at home variation—women, blacks, Indians, Asians, Hispanics, etc [1].

Is all science fiction western? Is there non-western science fiction? If so, what is its nature? Does it follow the form and content of western science fiction, or is it rendered different by its own local civilizational historical processes and considerations? Has western science fiction moulded the development of the science fiction of the ‘other’, including feminist science fiction, in such a way that anything coming from outside the west is a mere imitation of the real thing? Perhaps non-western science fiction is a contradiction in terms. Or is there authentic non-western fiction which offers alternative visions of the future, of the ‘other’?     

Envisioning new--buying used: Are the Pacific Islands caught between alternative communication futures?

With the ‘complexification’ of today's society, due in large measure to rapid technological convergence in the fields of communications and informatics, developing Pacific island countries are faced with what at the surface appears to be a devil's choice: jump on the high-tech bandwagon and risk being subsumed by the Western-dominated ‘cyberculture’, or withdraw from the technology-induced developments evidenced in richer countries and thereby run the risk of falling even further behind. This dichotomy is, of course, false and paints a rather nihilistic picture of Pacific islands futures. The contention here is that such a polemic is selling the Pacific islands a ‘used future’. Therefore, it is vitally important, at this juncture, for Pacific island leaders, entrepreneurs and citizens to recognize that creative, long-term future strategies for planning and optimizing the application and use of high-tech communications in economically advantageous and culturally appropriate ways are desperately needed.     

Futures research and the IPCC assessment study on the effects of climate change

Mainly based on a survey of the occurrence of futures research-related references in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, I have investigated the contribution of futures research to the IPCC assessments of the effects of climate change. The assumption I have made here is that, if futures research has made a contribution to the IPCC assessment work, it should also be reflected in the references quoted or cited. I have also briefly commented on the activities by the futurists themselves regarding the future challenge of climate change. As a complement to the contribution survey, I ask and discuss to what degree futures research could and should be participating in a study like that of the IPCC. The survey of the futures research contributions showed that, up to now, futures research has been only modestly represented in the IPCC climate change effect assessment studies. The contribution both could and should have been more extensive than it has been up to the present, a view to which I return in the final discussion.