Metaphoric traps in sensing the future

Metaphor and the Language of Futures (Part #5)

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In terms of spatial metaphors, the future offers the opportunities of "leaps", "jumps" and "breakthroughs". There is much regret that new "frontiers" have not been found to which young pioneers could be drawn. In the same vein, the future is also a place that can be "colonized". Property there can in effect be purchased, if only in terms of options on the "futures market". There is a sense in which a stranglehold can be obtained on the future through judicious acquisition of intellectual property (23).

Using temporal metaphors, the future has been envisaged in terms of a Golden Age to come, respecting a symmetry with a past Golden Age from which civilization has supposedly decayed. Optimists refer to the "good times" to come and story-tellers speak of "living happily ever after".

The future may also be understood in terms of metaphors derived from conditions, values or the governing order. This includes references to the "Thousand Year Reich", the Kingdom of God, the emerging New World Order, global unity, global village, or Gaia, the resacralized Earth. For those in therapy or on a spiritual quest, the future may be understood through appropriate symbols in terms of greater psychic integration or a state of grace. Traditional tools for divination depend much on metaphor to describe auspicious and inauspicious future conditions. The Australian aborigines express their future in terms of the Dreaming and the Dreamtime. Articulations of utopias use this mode which has an a-temporal, eternal quality to it (also suggested by the previous paragraph).

(b) The future as "where"

Implicit spatial metaphors, derived from the scouting party or the ship, suggest that the future is located in some direction "forewards". This suggests it is some kind of place -- to which time travellers have access in science fiction. Such metaphors condition people to think in terms of time as a linear arrow. In this sense society is confined to carriages on railtracks going into the future. The future is "down the track" -- even if there are optional branchings.

These metaphors obscure the possibility that future surprises may emerge "from behind", "from below" or "from above" -- although these directions are a real concern to a migrating tribe or a ship. Associating the future with forewards may therefore encourage a dangerously blinkered perspective on the source and nature of surprises. "Forewards" may be the direction in which we would like to encounter the future, because forewards implies that we are advancing -- or at least facing the potential source of surprise. But the turbulent condition of society may be too complex for this wish to be fulfilled on all occasions. In psychoanalytic terms our future may lie through our past and may emerge from what we believe that we have left behind.

Another location for the future emerges from such phrases as "the future is in the children" or "the future is in me". As with metaphoric uses of seed-to-plant, the future is here enfolded into the potentials lying within a person.

The physicist David Bohm (24) has argued for what amounts to an understanding of the future as enfolded into an implicate order that becomes explicit over time. There is an a-temporal quality to his proposal especially in that explicit phenomena may become re-enfolded, only to become explicit again at some later time. Arthur Young (25) has expressed a related view: "compaction of time would give it the character of omnipresence -- not going "backward" in time, away from the present, but instead going more deeply into the present".

(c) The future as "which"

Much futures literature is concerned less with what future and more with how to discover and choose between "alternative" futures. The focus is on eliciting and articulating such options, and developing decision-making and consensus. This might be considered a content-free policy-sciences approach.

(d) The future as "when"

Metaphors implying that the future is in some way "forewards" relate to the debate on the nature of "progress". In this sense the future is simply in some future time, at a later calendar date. But there are a number of ways of understanding time (26). For many in non-Western cultures, the future is not associated with such a linear understanding of progress but rather with a recognition of recurring cycles. This cyclic understanding may prove to be more consistent with economic and social cycles, as well as with the cycles in an individual's lifespan (27). This approach downplays any sense of the future as a place in favour of an emphasis on recurring stages in a process -- possibly on a "higher turn of the spiral".

Those with more apocalyptic tendencies, and there are many, consider that the world as we know it will cease to exist or to function within a relatively short period, measured variously in days, years, or decades. Peter Russell (28) has developed an interesting variant from Terence McKenna concerning the exponential increase in the "rate of ingression of novelty into the world". This charts the historical increase in intensity of psycho-social activity in cycles, each with a period one sixty-fourth of the previous one, leading to a final crisis in 2012. In this sense the future is subject to a form of time compression, a possibility noted by Jeremy Rifkin (29), and associated with a progressive reduction in attention span (Toffler's "blip culture"). More positively, this may be seen in terms of understanding the future as "now" (28).

For Rifkin, changes in the future of civilization take place only with corresponding changes in conception of time. Temporal compression is what is now being used by the "efficiency" culture as a weapon against those with other cultural rhythms. A change in the metaphor(s) through which time is understood is then a key to a new relationship to the future.

(e) The future as "who"

For many the future can only be understood metaphorically as configured around archetypal figures, whether the returning Christ, the Maitreya Buddha, or the next Imam -- or even the Anti-Christ. A guru succeeds by progressively transforming the devotional metaphor through which he is understood by a disciple as the door to the future. Personal saviours may take political forms, especially in Camelot situations: "Bill Clinton is the future". Social advancement for many is only possible through a patron who is the focus of fantasies. Romantic love, whether yearned for or achieved, represents a reconfigured, timeless future only describable through poetic metaphor.

(f) The future as "how"

The future may primarily be understood in terms of how it is brought about or experienced. There is much use of constructional metaphors through which the future is "built". On the other hand, others are expected to become "victims" of the future if conditions shift to place them at a disadvantage. In this vein, the rapid accumulation of problems and the avoidance of considered response, can make of the future a situation in which "the chickens come home to roost". From a career perspective, with rising unemployment, people may perceive themselves as "having no future".

Metaphor is widely used in texts on management strategy as in Riding the Waves of Change (30), When Giants Learn to Dance (31) and perhaps most extensively in Strategy of the Dolphin (32) and in the Japanese Five Rings (33).

In non-Western cultures descriptions of the future may emphasize fatalistic or karmic aspects, reaping what one has sown, or some notion of destiny and predestination.

(g) The future as "why"

The above cases all configure the future in terms of some kind of answer. The future may also be understood through the questions it poses. For the inquiring mind, it may be only the emergence of new questions which give content to the future and make it livable. For the suicidal, the questions may prove too radical. For some the question may be whether humanity deserves a future.

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