Composing and Engendering the Future: Presenting the Future (Part 4)

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Presenting the Future (Part 4, 2001)

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"Future generation"

(reprinted from /converse_x_h_1#future)

How does the future emerge into the present? How does potential become actuality? What are the cognitive traps associated with phrases such as: "where does the future come from" and "the far-distant future" ? How are present initiatives established as future realities? Why does past understanding appear so quaint from the present and what does this say of present understandings that are taken so seriously now?

The sustainability of global conversation or dialogue is therefore viewed as necessarily dynamic rather than static. Insights from chaos theory and strange attractors merit attention (Judge, 1993b). Its meta-stable nature ensures its coherence by engendering "futures". Global conversations thus evolve through "generations", necessarily accompanied by schisms that challenge any previous sense of coherence. "Participants" in a conversation today are the children of those participating yesterday, or an hour ago -- even if they are physically indistinguishable. As with computer backups, one can usefully speak of grandfather-father-son relationships between one's own successive "incarnations" in social intercourse.

How then is the future generated? How does one understand the nature of a future generation from one's current mode of comprehension? How does one comprehend across the generation gap -- and seek comprehension in return -- if only by oneself?

Whilst such questions are challenging for society as a whole, they are even more challenging for oneself. Each person has multi-generational qualities, from the "child within" to the nascent elder. In the process of maturation, the challenges of communication between one's own internal generations become increasingly evident. They can no longer be satisfactorily projected onto the outside world.

How does one engender a future -- preferred or otherwise? Is there some internal procreative process, as suggested by depth psychology's enthusiasm for alchemical symbolism? Reproductive biology certainly achieves a future generation through mating. How does a new generation of reality-handling acquire viability and inspire confidence within one's own psyche? Can what is superseded be truly cast off like a reptilian skin, or must past generations be carried with us into the future --"unto seven generations"?

Whilst there is of course merit in speculating about future generations in centuries or millennia to come, there is another kind of inquiry into future generation which merits reflection. As implied above, a future generation, in the developmental or psychological sense of the maturation of an individual, has its own challenges. But of even greater challenge is the much more immediate focus of how one engenders the immediate future -- over the next hours or minutes.

It is easy to argue that this has nothing to do with the "future" as framed by this conference. But this may be a flaw in the way future studies is understood and a reason for its marginalization. Do futurists suffer from conceptual presbyopia? Failure to attend to how the immediate future is determined by "doing" in the present moment, may obscure modes of understanding vital to meaningful insight into the future of biological generations -- to the epochs in which future studies may prefer to roam. Any sense of well-being is associated with the immediate present, rather than with the distant future. It is now that the help from "You and I" is required by the conference theme, whether for the young or the elderly.

How does future generation occur on this scale -- and what insights does it offer for understanding on the larger scale? As various schools of meditation have it, one attends to a certain complex of events for a while (seconds, minutes or hours), as an act combining mindfulness, empathy and action -- with, or without, others. Then, by distraction or choice, that focus dies and one passes on to some other complex of events. This process can be experienced as a sequence of generations of attention foci -- maybe returning cyclically to a former focus. It is through this process that one engenders a future into which one is then borne (Sogyal Rinpoche, 1994). Any practice, discipline or habit can be considered a form of "meditation" in this sense.

When a generation is understood as taking some 14 "years", possibility of change is perceived as limited by most. But understood as lived cycles of experience many hundreds of "generations" may take place within that same period of years. Such generations may be existentially more significant, and give rise to more variety, than is often associated with conventional thinking about the future 100, 1,000 or 5,000 years hence -- which is usually unchallenged by the reality of experiential change.Focus on the scope for change through psychological generation may well offer vital clues to change over longer periods of years. Greater attentiveness is therefore required to the potential emergence of fundamentally new varieties of significance over such periods.

From this perspective the challenge becomes how creatively to traverse a succession of generations -- the "Wheel of Life" for some Eastern religions (Sogyal Rinpoche, 1994). Various approaches might be taken to this psychological "reincarnation" process through many "little deaths". The generations could be "managed", as attempted by those favouring highly structured schedules (and armed with pocket "organizers"). One contrast would be to live the succession completely spontaneously as a child of the moment. They could be "navigated" with the spirit of an explorer, entrepreneur or opportunist. They might even be "surfed". They could be treated as an aesthetic exercise in composition or design -- "composing" a lifestyle as explored by Mary Catherine Bateson (1990). Or, like a breeder, focus could be placed on "breeding" better futures by combining suitable quality bloodlines engendered in past experience. The process could even be treated as an exercise in "gardening" a life -- life husbandry. In each case blending constraints from the past with potential distractions by the unforeseen creates pitfalls and opportunities. What strange new insights and disciplines will the future bring to this process?

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