The case for Hope

===

“What percentage of your country’s budget is spent investing in itself and its future?

Everything for a civilization has to do with investment. Investment is the linchpin of the project of civilization. Town squares, universities, science, art, literature, medicine — all these come from investment. Civilization in a very real sense is just the act of collective investment. That is how we come to “be” civilized, to have things like schools and roads and hospitals and drugs and books and so forth. And then we live, hopefully, in peace, and intelligence, and with empathy. Everything depends on investment. Why do I say that? 20% needs to become 50%. But how big is that number, in hard terms? Our economy as a civilization is — let’s call it $100 trillion for simplicity’s sake. We invest $20 trillion of that back. It’s not high enough. That number needs to rise from $20 trillion to $50 trillion. That’s $30 trillion, in a decade or two.

Our investment rate is still exactly the same. This is why, every year, the UN has to do this sad dance — goals and pledges unmet, the worst case scenarios come true. The investment rate — our investment rate civilizationally — isn’t rising.”

Alex Steffen

===

Hope can be a squishy topic. Interestingly, so can despair. Despair can be mired in the general malaise of polycrisis, metacrisis, and any number of seemingly unsolvable crisis. All I can say is if we increase our investment in hope, we will be increasing our investment in civilization and, I imagine, will be increasing our investment in the solutions to whatever despairs, and crisis, real and imagined.

Which leads me to suggest Hope applies limits on a seemingly limitless system.

A single-minded pursuit of wealth, i.e., materialism, doesn’t really fit into this world because it contains within itself no limiting principle despite the fact the world itself, the environment and its resources, are limited. Its kind of obvious, without even squinting, to see the environment is trying to tell us that certain stresses are becoming excessive. And while we have certainly made some fairly dubious decisions in the past, the existing situation we are in is a consequence of technological success and corporate greed in the pursuit of profits. Limitless doesn’t really need fairness. It simply seeks growth and profits and wealth with no real, well, limits. In fact, most businesses simply view ‘fairness’ as in what they deserve and assume ‘what they deserve’ will trickle out to the benefit of society and everyone else who ‘deserves’ it. The soul of business seems to be profit and no real ethics and principles beyond that. John Maynard Keynes said “soul is useful and fair is not” kind of meaning that we, and business, have a nasty tendency to suggest we are embedding ‘soul’ into the creation of goods and services which absolves us of many of the ultimate negative consequences. So this is where I bring Hope into this seemingly black abyss of a situation. The case for Hope rests on the fact that ordinary people are often able to take a wider view then those normally being taken by experts. Yeah. The power of ordinary people, those who feel most powerless, is our hope. That may sound a bit odd in a world in which we seem to suggest ordinary people are not capable of assessing complex issues and we need to ‘have people focus on one thing.’ But the truth is ordinary people know how to do the ordinary things to address complex problems. They may not be able to argue the complexity or explain the complexity, but they know how to take the actions to address the seemingly unsolvable complexity. So maybe what I am suggesting is that it is ordinary people who will apply some limits to a limitless system, and not just Hope in itself. In other words, the future is bounded by conditions and capabilities of the mind and Hope changes the conditions, therefore, the capabilities.

Which leads me to hope for technology.

Technology effects both conditions and capabilities and therein lies its importance to the Future. The limitless system is fed by limited resources which represents the largest challenges and opportunities for technology. Presently there is an ongoing battle between technology enhancing the already grim use of limited resources and technology seeking to break the system’s shackles from the unsettling use of limited resources. This is where humans have to take the high road. I say that because designing a future with profit in mind is very different than designing a future with healthy sustainable thriving Life in mind. The latter may demand we stop ‘fixing’ existing technologies, maybe begin eliminating them in fact, and create completely new technologies that which will shape the future. I am suggesting we stop stacking new ideas on top of existing flawed ideas and instead create an entirely new ‘stack.’ My point is the infrastructure of the future has yet to be designed and the imagination required resides somewhere in someone’s hope for something better – not incrementally, but exponentially. I imagine I could invoke ‘the butterfly effect’ here. What I mean by that is the future most likely resides in some small hopeful idea which breaks the congestion of the status quo – subtly creating instability in the existing system permitting real change to occur. And this is where technology gives us real hope. Billions of people, using technology, imagine futures without artificial scarcity, without resource extraction, without unequal opportunities and power inequalities, without hierarchies, and without the unhealthy work/life construct. This is where both hope and despair thrive, but it is, distinctly, Hope that suggests an opening for vibrant, compelling future. Technology becomes a tool for not only the hopeful, but as a platform for all hopeful ideas to shape a more hopeful future.

Which leads me to modernity, i.e., the quality of being current or of the present.

Modernity reflects a world constantly in motion. Technically, I believe it is called the oscillation between translations of strategic space into logistical time and then back again. Modernity is a complex weave of communities, connected peoples, cities, supply chains, international coalitions, and technology, all nested within a political landscape governed by competing technologies and interdependent administrations. Modernity is reality, not simple, not causal, but relational amongst all things. Modernity is flux or, as Paul Varilio suggested. “the comprehensive technologization of the world signals both integration and disintegration both control and accident.” This is where hope comes in. Systems struggle to maintain control, but real progress occurs through ‘accidents of the system,’ i.e., the shit that happens the system doesn’t plan. What I mean by this is the best laid plans of the system, the constrained logistics, the unbending regulations, the power structure, are inevitably broken by someone’s, or group of someone’s, hopes.  In fact, it is within these hopeful accidents in which people and political will (and institutional wills) are forged and progress occurs. And this is where ‘information’ comes into play. Information is an architecture which frames and shapes the social construct and contract. The information, well, feeds accidents. In fact, progress is actually the cumulative inevitability of successively increasing integrated accidents. This is a derivative of J. G. Ballard’s depiction of Technology which suggests that the invention or adoption of a new technology is also always the invention and adoption of a new accident.

‘The invention of the ocean liner is also the invention of its catastrophic sinking. The internal combustion engine is also the invention of greenhouse gasses. The discoveries of genomic science also bring with them the catastrophes of genetic bombs. Even the integration of personal social lives into information networks suggests the inevitable accident of the networks crashing the very social bonds that they seek to create.’

Simplistically all of these inventions and solutions just increase the scale of our shared risk, uhm, and shared opportunity. And with that said I will circle back to technology’s relationship with modernity. Humans are, well, humans – bounded by humanness. Technology shifts humans beyond biological constraints and limits – as Daniel Schmachtenberger says: “a polar bear cannot make a nuclear bomb.” What this means as a species is that with technology we have the ability, the capabilities, to exponentially change the present conditions. Therein lies Hope’s path to something better.

Which leads me to the future.

Hope and the future are inextricably linked. But they are not only connected through aspirations, but also by decisions and action. What I mean by that is we should be thinking creatively, not predictively, about the future in order to make possible the futures we hope for. In fact, there really is no reason to have hope and think about the future unless you try and change things. Your objective is never to replicate existing ideas and patterns, but rather craft the ideas and patterns necessary to shape hoped-for futures. Certainly, to some extent we need to embrace some aspects of the past that we believe will extend into the future, but having hope and attaching it to a future is never simply about extrapolating into the future things that either shouldn’t exist but worse, will not. The future is always shaped by the hopeful people seeking to bend the arc of life and things to shape a better future. And that is where I will end today. Hope is always the energy source needed to bend the arc and build a system in which hopes and futures can be built. That is my case for Hope. Ponder.