On Foresight and Bewilderment, Predictions and Incapications
A reflection on slowing down in urgent times written March 02020 in response to Bayo Okomolafe
On Our Always Uncertain Future
I work in a field called foresight. Sometimes it’s called futures studies, or even futurism, though there are a whole host of associations with that one (techno-futurists, Italian futurism, etc.) that can be misleading. In a moment like now when the future suddenly seems much more uncertain, I’ve been wondering what it means to be someone who “works in the future.” I make no claim to have a clearer or more accurate understanding of what a post-COVID future looks like, but I do think I have some expertise, and also some responsibility, to be thinking about it critically, differently, and explicitly.
In the past few months, COVID-19 has transformed the present into something that often feels like a foresight scenario, the “what-if’s” of a far-off, hypothetical, global pandemic now very real headlines with very real implications. And there have been so many articles, interviews, podcasts, discussions, and arguments over the past few months trying to understand what the future will look like, should look like, could look like.
The momentum of the status quo has (I would say, finally) been disrupted on a scale we haven’t seen in decades. We want to know what things will look like in a month from now, in a year from now. We want to plan, we want stability, and we want certainty. But if foresight, and this moment, have taught me anything, it’s that we didn’t have certainty or stability before any of this either. We can plan and think through all the possible futures before us, but we will never be able to predict or truly know what we are heading for.
Instead, we can learn from this moment and recognize that we need to get better at listening. At tuning in, at slowing down, at trying to stay open to possibility and learning. Listening to ecologies, to the systems we are now seeing we are a part of, to our communities, to our planet, to this virus, to our emotions. If we can listen, truly listen to what is happening right now, we might learn how to move into our new future.
On Slowing Down in Urgent Times
This week I listened to a conversation with Dr. Bayo Okomolafe, Executive Director of the Emergence Network, with host Ayana Young on the For the Wild podcast called “Slowing Down in Urgent Times.” I was struck by how a conversation recorded months before the coronavirus situation was at the forefront of everyone’s consciousness could be translated so easily into the current context. But, as many of us have known, these have been urgent times since long before 02020.
In his interview, Bayo speaks of how modernity has trained us in the myth of stability. We crave linearity, cause-and-effect, neatness. And it’s true, it can be easier and more comfortable that way. But paying attention to stability means that when crisis hits, like it has right now, we are not as well trained in finding a messy, stumbling way forward. At building resilience, at understanding systems and entanglements and interconnectedness and long-term implications. In these urgent times, I have sometimes found myself feeling like I should be using my foresight experience to help people understand what the near future might hold, offer them a glimpse of possible stability and certainty. But I know better; stability only feels easier and more comfortable until something disrupts it. What people (me!) want right now is to know what the future will look like, what they need right now is to know how to live and move forward in an uncertain present.
On Invisible Systems Suddenly Visible
Bayo speaks of the need to think less about capacity building and more about incapacitation. Or as I understand him, our need to focus less on what more we need to get us out of this crisis (more information, more certainty, more speed) and instead to focus on what we learn from the ways it has incapacitated us. What is here, in this moment of uncertainty and slowness, that we did not notice before? What are we learning now that we might bring with us into our futures?
We might see this incapacitation as a moment to focus on the systems that have now become more transparent than ever. On its face, COVID-19 is a healthcare crisis, but its effects are not evenly distributed and straightforward. They are influenced by different models of healthcare systems, political responses, individual versus collective cultural values, how circumstances and economic status and historical oppression affect whether people can work from home or close their business or access technology or care.
We see how food that seemed to appear magically year-round in our stores now has workers associated with it, and labour policies and minimum wage policies associated with them. When we no are no longer driving our cars across our cities, we are suddenly confronted with the urban planning practices and infrastructure choices our cities have been making, whether our neighbourhoods are walkable, whether we have ways to get in touch with our communities for things we need. When we are asked to stay home, to stay close, we see the trees and birds and ecologies in our own backyards or are faced with their absences. When we are asked to work from home, we can start to ask whether productivity and value should be measured by time spent in an office, whether what we spend our time contributing to is considered essential, and who defines what is essential and to whom?
When we have to rely on only virtual and remote communication, we can decide whether our culture’s acceleration toward the virtual, the nomadic, the place-less, and the detached is, in fact, what we want for our future, whether we could be advocating just as strongly for the place-based, in-person, and communal. When we are faced with streams of numbers and metrics from all our media, we can unpack why certain populations seem more vulnerable than others, and we can ask whether they were vulnerable to begin with, what histories made that true, and what our role we can take in protecting and advocating for them.
On Sitting with Uncertainty
A skilled weaver of story and myth, Bayo ends his interview talking about the Biblical story of Job. Job’s story was never part of my own cultural upbringing, but Bayo’s take resonated with me. Job is a good, prosperous, devoted man who nevertheless has his property, his children, and his health all taken away from him by God (or Satan, with God’s permission). Bayo talks about how he never really understood the message of Job; why does God not offer Job an explanation of what has happened and why?
Bayo reframed Job’s story and understood: “Sometimes the best answer to a pressing question is not the answer itself.” Maybe amidst all of these tragedies, there were no good and satisfying answers God could have given him. Maybe what God could offer Job at that point was, in Bayo’s words, “the gift of bewilderment,” “the straying away from the arrogance of easy arrival.”
And maybe that is what we are being offered right now, too. Maybe instead of seeking a way forward in a pressing situation, we can try to learn from the gift of bewilderment we are being given. At the cracks that are now showing and the humbling that come with having the myth of stability and linearity disrupted. I am not going to use my foresight experience to offer ideas about what our future might look like. It won’t be “right,” and focusing one linear vision will obscure other possibilities. Instead, I am going to take a good look at the invisible threads that constructed my pre-COVID reality and think about whether this is the opportunity to mend or re-thread any of them. I am going to sit in this uncertain moment and do a lot of good listening. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll hear what our future is telling us.
