The Story Of Our Future
Author: Peter Willis - Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL)
( Article Type: Sustainable Development )
We are all creatures of story. We tell stories to one another from the nursery to the novel to the cinema, stories that illuminate what matters to us, stories about experience and what meaning we choose to make of it. Stories are also a formidable psychological tool to help us use experience (ours or another’s) as a way of thinking about and moving towards the future. Most stories, whether overtly or subtly, imply a set of assumptions about reality “This is how the world is...” and illustrate consequences... “If you do like he did or she did, this could happen to you”.
This is as true of the great religions – which are compelling stories that imply assumptions about who we are and why we are here, and definitely spell out consequences for human action – as it is of one’s Monday morning catch-up over coffee with colleagues. There one assumes a shared understanding of what it means to be a South African in this time and place, and one’s account of the week-end will usually be laced with consequences. No consequence, no punch line, no story.
But we do not only enjoy stories, they are essential to us. Research suggests that our brains may actually require the frameworks of narrative and metaphor to be able to think about the world and ourselves at all. I would argue that in a very real sense each of us is living a story (or more actually multiple intersecting stories) all the time.
It goes beyond your and my individual life story. Groups, organizations and countries develop and live stories, sometimes grand narratives. Think of our dominant narrative, South Africa’s story of liberation and democracy, of becoming a Rainbow Nation. We have proudly told our story to the world – most recently through the FIFA World Cup - and will go on re-telling and recycling it in ways that reinforce our sense of being a nation on a journey together.
However, while there have been clan, religious and national narratives since time immemorial I believe that only in the past century has there emerged a dominant global narrative, understood in every corner of human society. I would describe it as the Narrative of Human Material Progress or, in economic terms, the Narrative of Consumption and Growth. Its core assumption is that human progress is primarily a question of material comfort, where acquiring more money and more stuff is the central task. As for consequences, the narrative tells us that if you are lucky, clever or diligent enough you will acquire more wealth, more stuff and you will be happy. This narrative has gripped the imagination of all but a tiny minority of humans, and it continues to do so. Whether we are rich or poor we believe implicitly that we are living in a story about striving for material advantages whose punch line is happiness. Note that this story guides us not only as individuals but as corporations and nations. Can you think of a single company or national economy that is not currently seeking to ‘grow’? And growth in all cases implies material throughput. More growth, more stuff, more happiness.
The high priests of this dominant narrative have been the economists, the technologists, the bankers and the ad men. To them we readily bow as they keep this vital story alive for us, at all times pointing towards the punch line and reminding us what we must do to reach it. In the last thirty or forty years, however, a counter-narrative has grown up. I refer to it as the Narrative of Constraints. It assumes that science and measurement can discover truths important to our life on Earth; as for consequences, it tells us that if we pursue the Narrative of Growth we will end up undermining the very fabric of human civilization. The high priests of this narrative are the natural scientists. If one listens carefully to this science-based Narrative of Constraints and finds it credible one cannot but loosen one’s attachment to the Narrative of Growth. The one intersects and cancels out the other. They cannot both be true simultaneously ... which leaves us in a dilemma. Being a species for whom living in a story is essential, it is no small matter to have one’s dominant narrative cancelled out by an opposing narrative, particularly by a narrative that offers no replacement vision to strive for. For science does not say “If you reduce your ecological impacts you will live happily ever after.” It only speaks with confidence about what may happen if you do not. So it is no real substitute for the Growth Narrative upon which we have become so dependent.
We find ourselves at an impasse. The dominant story of our era is found to be fundamentally flawed and there is no ready replacement to hand. Pause a moment here. This is an impasse humanity has never had to deal with before – at least not on such a vast scale. We appear to have run out of credible story. While at one level worrying, this is perhaps also a once-in-a-species opportunity to re-understand ourselves and our place in the universe. To begin with, notice that neither the Narrative of Growth nor the Narrative of Constraints contains a plausible definition of what it means to be a human. The religious stories made quite a speciality of this but neither economics nor science has anything to offer. A human in economics is a unit of economic activity, in science is a composite of trillions of molecules. Neither satisfies our sense of being alive, connected to other beings and curious about our purpose, our future. We are left then with the question, “What does it mean to be truly human in this age (when our greatest narratives have cancelled one another out)? Where do I find myself and my meaning as a human being?”
At this point I must warn you – I do not have a new replacement narrative up my sleeve. Indeed I don’t think such a thing exists yet, at least not at any scale. I do, however, suspect that the story of our future is emergent and its seeds are detectable, lying scattered all around us. I would guide your attention to two current phenomena. One is the extraordinary scale of our connectedness through modern transport, IT and electronic communications. While I think it quite possible that we may not prove able to maintain present levels of these things (the science of constraints predicts some speed bumps up ahead brought on by fossil fuel and carbon limits), we humans have only in the last 15-20 years started to experience ourselves as one human family, with consequences that I suspect could be quite radical but are only starting to unfold.
Then there is the extraordinary blossoming of initiatives by groups of people all over the world whose purpose is to heal the fractured relationship either between human and human or between humans and Nature. It’s worth remembering that this is a very recent phenomenon in human history, beginning with the tiny but effective anti-slavery movement in Britain the early 1800’s and blossoming today in a worldwide profusion of different compassion-driven organizations. The great American activist and writer Paul Hawken in his fascinating book ‘Blessed Unrest’ calculates that there may be close to 2 million of them worldwide and rising. Here in South Africa I am frequently amazed by the amount of sheer innovation and energy poured into such compassionate initiatives by people from all backgrounds. The pages of this Enviropaedia, for example, are as full as they are because of this very trend.
What distinguishes these organizations is that, by and large, they have seen through the Story of Growth, acknowledge the validity of the Story of Constraints and, without working to a widely agreed plan, are setting about doing whatever their compassion and creativity guides them to do. So while I believe we are in for a very turbulent few decades (remember that the ‘Great Letting Go’ of the Story of Growth has yet to happen on any real scale), I am more encouraged than I had expected to be by the upwelling in quiet ways of humanity’s finer gifts – generosity, compassion, tolerance, creativity. Perhaps after all we were not mistaken in referring to ourselves as ‘humankind’. Perhaps these qualities, undervalued for so long, will help us build a new, fresh and credible narrative, the story of our future.
