[Dialogue] Imagining the Future

[Wayne Nelson]

While I was at my brother's place recently, I had a free evening. Fishing
through the channels on his TV, I fount the "Gospel of John." The one we
watched in the early - mid 70's with Jesus tossing lines over his shoulder.
The line that caught me this time was, "I come not to judge the world, but
to save it." It reminded me that the focus on what's wrong is not the place
I really want to be looking.

This article appeared in the most recent copy of "The Walrus", Canada's
version of Harpers or Atlantic Monthly - more or less. It's an interesting
twist on things that you may enjoy.


Imagining the Future - Why the cynics are wrong
by Bruce Mau
 
Let me begin with an admission. I am a designer, which means I cannot afford
the luxury of cynicism. Designers are called upon to come up with solutions
to problems of every imaginable description, from designing a machine to
provide kidney dialysis at home to creating an interface for complex
critical systems like air-traffic control. No matter what the specific
nature of a project ‹ whether it¹s a park or a product, a book or a business
‹ optimism is always central to my work. It¹s as important to what I do as
research tools, computer systems, or a sense of colour.
 
Three years ago, the Vancouver Art Gallery invited me to produce a major
exhibition on the future of design. They had no fixed ideas as to what that
might mean, except for the scale; they wanted something that would mark a
significant commitment by their museum to the design field.
 
My first impulse was to say no. To discover what is happening in design
around the world and to explore its potential across all the disciplines
seemed too daunting. Besides, I was happily working on a full slate of
projects that were already very demanding and personally rewarding.
 
But something was irritating me. There was something floating around in our
culture that I found deeply troubling. It got under my skin until it became
an itch I had to scratch. There seemed to be a growing split between reality
and mood, a conflict between what is actually happening in the world ‹ what
we are capable of, what we are committed to, what we are achieving ‹ and our
perception of how we¹re doing. The prevailing mood feels dark, negative,
harrowingly pessimistic, and tending to the cynical. Bizarrely, this kind of
negativity has become the vogue even in creative fields, which are
traditionally committed to vision, beauty, and pleasure, to notions of
utopia ‹ to possibility, in other words. This is especially true in design.
How, I wondered, had the virus of pessimism crept into the one area of art
that is charged with looking forward?
 
First and foremost, design is committed to a better, smarter future. It¹s
the art form pragmatically focused on finding solutions for how we live in
the world. But it seems we have mistakenly conflated the word ³critical²
with the word ³negative² and embraced a cynical perspective. Art speaks
mostly in dystopian terms, while business is charged with envisioning our
future. Today the talent to make beautiful paintings is a bus pass to the
suburbs of art discourse; cranky architects scowl from magazine covers and
moan, absurdly, about their powerlessness. Gloom and doom are everywhere.
 
These days, to express optimism in educated company suggests that you are
either willfully ignorant of the facts or simply a fool. To be serious, to
be critical, to have a voice, we have to be cynical. To strive for something
‹ something better ‹ is a Pollyanna project for the naive.
 
In stark contrast to this prevailing wind of negativity, the experience of
the team that worked with me on Massive Change (as the Vancouver project
came to be called) was quite the opposite. In the face of global challenges
‹ and there are many of unprecedented seriousness, from the AIDS disaster in
Africa to the environmental impact of our growing population ‹ we
nevertheless witnessed action coming to bear on almost every significant
problem. We saw new possibilities in collaboration and connectedness, which,
along with the Internet, would allow designers around the world to draw on
knowledge and expertise that had never before been accessible.
 
My experience with this project has been delightful, with one startling
exception: I discovered how controversial optimism can be.

THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM
 
Despite our collective despondency, we live in a time when more people are
richer, healthier, better educated, more literate, and more productive. We
live longer, travel more, and enjoy greater access to knowledge and freedom
than at any other time in human history. Worldwide, we now number more than
six billion people ‹ partly because we are able, with varying degrees of
success, to sustain that number. We have beaten back the Malthusians.
 
And there are other victories worth noting:
 
WE HAVE BEATEN BACK HUNGER
 
Through ongoing innovations in agriculture and the development of crops that
produce a higher yield ‹ India has become a net exporter of rice, for
instance ‹ we are feeding more people. Not the whole world, it must be said,
but we have come a long way. According to a 2004 report from the United
Nations, more than thirty countries reduced the number of hungry people by
at least 25 percent during the 1990s.
 
WE HAVE BEATEN BACK DISEASE
 
I don¹t want to sound overly optimistic here. AIDS continues to ravage
Africa, and until we find ways to deal with that tragedy, a deep shadow will
haunt our future. However, there is a genuine commitment to finding a cure
for big killers like malaria and dysentery. In the past, a disease like SARS
in China, Hong Kong, and Toronto would have wiped out tens or even hundreds
of thousands of people. It didn¹t. Because we collaborated globally to fight
SARS, we lost only hundreds.
 
WE HAVE BEATEN BACK CHILD MORTALITY
 
Since the sixties, we have halved the rates of child mortality for most of
the developing world, including China, India, and Brazil, and at the same
time we have increased global life expectancy by seventeen years. The
average number of children per woman in most of the developing world has
gone from more than five to fewer than four, while child mortality in some
countries has gone from between 10 and 40 percent of the population under
five to less than 10 percent. According to Gapminder.org, ³Today most
countries in Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world have small families and
infant mortality is low. We now have a completely different world!²
 
Related to this shift is the changing role of women. In a conversation I had
with E.O. Wilson, the author of The Future of Life, he said, ³If you want to
do something for the environment, educate and liberate women,² because ³when
women are educated and liberated, the birth rate declines.² The statistics
suggest that this is exactly what is happening.
 
WE HAVE BEATEN BACK DEATH
 
Not literally, of course. I am not that optimistic! But for most of recorded
history, life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Many died in infancy.
If we survived, we married young, and died young. Even by the end of the
nineteenth century, life expectancy was just over thirty-two years. Today,
average life expectancy worldwide is now sixty-five years.
 
‹-
 
One way to measure global progress is through the United Nations Human
Development Index. The HDI measures a basket of factors including life
expectancy, school enrolment, adult literacy, and gross domestic product per
capita. Taken together, these offer a useful portrait of the development of
a society and its ability to meet the needs of its citizens.
 
Looking at human development around the world since 1975, it is striking to
see that with few exceptions the trends are all positive. Not only do the
United States, Canada, and other Western nations show steady improvement,
but more recently countries like India, China, and Brazil are moving in the
same direction. With the glaring exception of Africa, we are moving to a
more developed world. Of the thirtytwo countries still classified as low
development, with an hdi of less than 0.5, thirty are in Africa. But public
awareness of Africa¹s situation is at least on an upward swing, a dramatic
change in its long and tortured history with the West.
 
Another way to consider progress is to look at our commitment to reach
certain objectives. At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, 189
countries adopted a global to-do list. The eight goals are to eradicate
extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote
gender equality and the empowerment of women; reduce child mortality by
two-thirds; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other
diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and cultivate a global
partnership for development. The fact that we have come together to
articulate these goals, and committed ourselves to meeting them, gives a
sense of the true nature of our human project.
 
Are we on target to get through the list by the deadline of 2015? No. Are
some places getting worse, not better? Certainly, but very few. Are some
developed countries negligent in meeting their obligations? Yes. But are we
making progress? Absolutely. We may be behind schedule but we are mostly
moving forward. For instance, based on current trends, child mortality rates
will be 15 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 1990. If the trend
continues, we won¹t meet the Millennium goal until 2045. Thirty years late ‹
but still a staggering human accomplishment, made possible by collective
global collaboration.
 
Another way of measuring progress is to look at not only what we have
defeated but what we have embraced. We have embraced wealth in all of its
dimensions. In fact, one accomplishment of Massive Change was to reconfigure
notions of wealth to include freedom, education, literacy, mobility, human
rights, health, sanitation, communication, collaboration, science,
technology, knowledge, and now, increasingly, sustainability.
 
To a large degree, the greatest challenge we face as a global culture ‹
sustainability ‹ is a consequence of our great success. We are six billion
people today, not because we have failed in designing solutions to the
problems we have faced, but because we have overcome many of the worst
problems afflicting people around the world.
 
CIRCLING THE WAGONS
 
In the course of our work on Massive Change, we met an extraordinary man
named Stewart Brand. An innovator and entrepreneur, he was the founder of
the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural landmark in the late sixties and
early seventies. He led a campaign to convince NASA to make a photograph of
the Earth from space, an image that has become a defining icon of our age.
 
Brand is also a founder of The Long Now Foundation, an effort to expand our
cultural time horizon from the next fiscal quarter to the long term. He
believes that when people think things are bad and getting worse, they do
the usual things people do to protect themselves: They circle their wagons,
hunker down, and close the border. They move to gated communities in their
cities and in their hearts. They take what they can get while they can still
get it. 

However, if they come to understand that things are improving ‹ that we are
working together to make things better ‹ they will invest in their
communities and their businesses, in their children and their family, in
their culture and education. They will do so because once they discover that
things are actually getting better, enlightened self-interest will make them
want to be part of the improvement.
 
I think we have been missing something quite important in assessing where we
really stand, and this gap limits our forward momentum. We have been missing
it because the old politics of Left versus Right are no longer relevant or
helpful. A more collaborative approach is emerging. Rather than seeing
things in terms of Left or Right, this approach seeks indicators of social
and economic progress along a continuum running from retrograde to advanced.
 
To grasp the approach, think of an image whose pixels have been distributed
to a million citizens worldwide. It is an image of collaboration, shared
problem-solving, accessibility, and collective enterprise. It is a complex
and beautiful image, perhaps the most beautiful image of all time. In
contrast, our understanding of the world is driven by a media culture
obsessed with violence and conflict. The tenor is one of negativity and
crisis, which translates into pessimism and cynicism, and from there to
apathy and paralysis. This negative world view can erode human agency ‹ and
without that, we¹re basically sunk.
 
As a global culture we are beginning to outgrow polarized and binary
divisions but we still confuse the media with reality. If we were to publish
a newspaper called Reality, it would be a mile thick. The first quarter-inch
would arrive on your doorstep, scare the hell out of you, push the worst of
human possibility into your world, make you want to lock your doors, inhibit
your impulse toward community, and drive you to xenophobia, resentful and
fearful of all the violent others determined to ruin your life. The rest of
the mile of newspaper ‹ the reality of our world, the part that never gets
published ‹ would be Massive Change, the story of how millions of people
from every part of the world are working together to confront the dilemmas
we face as a global society.
 
The media is our siren and our lullaby. In a never ending cycle, it shakes
us up, alerts us to danger, then puts us back to sleep, reassured that
someone else is taking care of things.
 
But what we need to be reminded of is our own potential. We have the power
to make change on a global scale, to solve the problems we are facing today.
We have the means to make the things we love more intelligent and more
delightful. We have the imagination and the ability to invent new ways of
sustainable living in advanced, courageous, and open societies.
 
All we need is the optimism to realize it.


< >  < >  < >  < >  < >
Wayne Nelson - ICA Associates Inc
416-691-2316 - http://ica-associates.ca