Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
The imagery in this poem is a powerful reminder of the transience
of even the most seemingly permanent and grand human endeavours, all things
must pass, emperors and empires come and go. In our own civilisation, which is
unique in its global scale and technological complexity, there are a number of
visions of the future that are imagined which range from Panopticon
nightmares to Jetson-esque technofantasies to post apocalyptic wastelands.
People have always been fascinated with the idea of predicting the
future and imagining what it might be like and though it is nigh on impossible
to predict specific future events with any degree of accuracy it is certainly
possible to draw out trends. For example, it is observable that we are using
resources at an unsustainable rate globally and altering the chemistry of the
earth’s atmosphere with potentially disastrous results and that these trends
look likely to continue. Whether or not a new hapless Arch Duke Ferdinand will
get shot or other equally random black swan event is obviously much harder to
say.
Unfortunately our visions of the future are just that. They are
projections that are contextual to where their creator is from and say as much
about that society in that moment as any potential future one. At any one
point in time in a society there is a dominant narrative or narratives which
form the social zeitgeist and there are established social institutions with a
vested interest in the content. These institutions naturally are interested
in self preservation and typically are resistant towards social change that
could be perceived to undermine their position giving rise to what could
be called 'societal inertia'.
For example, there has been a great disjuncture in terms of
response to the threat of climate change recognised by climate scientists and
political will to address the issue. Constant obfuscation and delaying tactics
against regulation and the science of climate change by the fossil fuel
industry and some governments mean that unfortunately we are now well on our
way to living on an ice free planet with a CO2 level
above 500 parts
per million as opposed to a pre-industrial average of 280ppm.
Visions of the future are sold to us all every day by a range of
entities. Companies who would like us to buy their software need us first to
buy into a vision of the future where i.e. ubiquitous virtual reality headsets
(or whichever other silly gizmo de jour) are seen as a normal and positive
thing. The same analogy can be made with a political party trying to get you to
vote for them.
Having some intellectual tools to hand to examine the vision of
the future they are presenting to you certainly can’t do any harm. Looking at
the assumptions that underpin a view of the future can be very helpful in
determining whether it is even possible, let alone desirable. The world may
well be a better place with everyone having virtual reality headsets; I do
however think such a future is rather unlikely as the physical resources do not
exist to make it possible (more details about which can be read in article
link below). The same schoolchild errors are made in a range of predictions
about the future; infinite economic growth on a finite planet does still not
appear to have registered with most economists, however insistent the laws of
thermodynamics are.
Though it is not possible to work out the future in advance in any
detail it is certainly possible to make at least an educated guess on what is
more and less likely and what sort of future we might actually want.
Recognising how such processes work is the first step to changing their course.
If today's knowledge of the world is compared to that of the past
the differences are astounding. As our technical knowledge of the world has
increased so it increases further, in the nature of the exponential function.
There is also no guarantee that information gathering will carry on and that it
won’t be lost - if anything history offers a picture strongly counter to this.
It seems quite plausible that the future will be more localised, with economic
growth a thing of the past and that much of our current extremely complex and
brittle technology may not function in future due to a mixture of economic,
social and resource constraint issues (again article link for details). Whether
or not we allow ourselves to descend into a 1984 or MadMax type scenario will
in large part depend on our actions collectively.
Life and human artifacts are always transitory to some
degree but it appears that the main artifacts we are leaving
for our descendants, if we are not careful, are going to be
hazardous mounds of waste and very little of our own accomplishments and
accumulated labours other than a series of Ozymandias style relics.
Imaginings of the future can as much serve as cautionary tales of
what we should best avoid in the present as well as what we should strive for;
dreaming is as much preventing the nightmares from becoming actual as it is
making real our utopias.
To my eyes much of the valiant efforts over the past century
of people campaigning and fighting for equality and against greed and
militarism have in large part kept the nightmares at bay as much as we have
made the world into some sort of utterly new paradigm.
One of the most fun ways that people engage creatively with
possible futures is through sub cultures like ‘Steampunk’, an aesthetic largely
based on Victorian futurism ideas. One writer I rather like John Michael Greer
has put forward 7
sustainable technologies that he thinks will be around in a few
hundred years and I’ve listed them below with a Steampunk theme.
Dream about what sort of future you might like to see and start
working towards it, it can be rather fun!
The future could close in like the jaws of some great slathering
beast or spread before you like the vista of an open road into a blossoming
land of new possibility.
1. Organic
intensive gardening:
2. Solar
thermal technologies:
3. Sustainable wood
:
3. Sustainable
wood heating:
4. Sustainable
healthcare:
4. Sustainable
Healthcare
5. Letterpress
printing and its related technologies:
6. Low-tech shortwave radio
6. Low-tech shortwave
radio:
7.
Computer-free mathematics:
Who knows what
houses people might live in...
or what might
be fashionable to wear..
