Cora's World: The fragility of our accomplishments (and the beauty of our dreams)

Ozymandias
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.'

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 CO₂level 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.

The choice is yours...

1. Organic intensive gardening: