Imagined Futures

Being able to predict the future has occupied humans forever it seems. Knowing what lies ahead is linked to survival – physical survival for farmers, hunters, and soldiers; political survival of those who rule; and economic survival for speculators. Ancient wisdom or modern algorithms, are harnessed to gauge weather patterns, the movement of animals, variations in the earth’s axis, revolutions brewing below the surface, where oil or gold is likely to be found or the trajectories of meteors in space.

Villagers heeded shamans, kings consulted oracles and soothsayers.  The life of Hazrat Yusuf was spared by the Pharoah because of his visions and ability to interpret dreams. Ordinary people turn to astrology,  faals and istikharas (answers from spiritual texts) to guide their decisions.

Today a large number of predictions are made by science.  The loudest voice warns of the impact of climate change generated by centuries of plundering the Earth’s resources for industrialization, urbanisation, and consumerism. 

The 19thcentury Industrial Revolution led to the birth of Science Fiction. In France, Jules Verne wrote 65 novels including  ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, and  ‘A Floating City’. In England the younger writer H. G. Wells, even more prolific, wrote over 100 novels including 'The First Men in the Moon', 'The Time Machine' and 'The War of the Worlds'.

In the 16^th century Thomas More coined the term ‘Utopia’ for his novel of the same name, a perfect society located on an island. Just over 370 years, one communist revolution and one world war later, Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, invented the term dystopia, ‘an imaginary bad place’, for his novel ‘We’. Since then dystopic and post-apocalyptic stories have dominated all speculations about the future. A future that will be brutal, dominated by an inhumane powerful few, and a devastated planet incapable of supporting human life, is a recurring theme for fiction, films and television series. The focus has shifted from adults saving the planet from disastrous events or creatures, to young people left to survive on their own, playing Hunger Games or as Maze Runners.  The fear is that technology will turn on humans who genetically modify creatures or viruses, create AI and superweapons in their obsession to dominate nature.

Scholar Eli Noam writes “For several centuries, culture had been flowing largely in one direction: out of Europe, and into the rest of the world.” It has set world culture through universalising economic, political, legal and cultural values. This message is mainly carried by Hollywood films, fiction, news media, international organizations, and globalization’s biggest enabler, the internet. While China is the largest use of internet, they have their own web servers, but other countries are rapidly capitulating to the US based Google. 

It is important to realize that these messages are generated by a small minority of the world – North America, Western Europe, and one can add Australia and New Zealand – a mere 7.38 % of the global population. Their concerns become ‘world’ concerns. These voices shape globalization, and create, as sociologist Manuel Castells calls it, monoculturalisation and information feudalism, disintegrating societies ‘left behind’.

What of those societies left behind? The concern of a village in Malawi in the film “The Boy who harnessed the wind”, is not the impact of AI, but how to grow two crops a year to stave starvation. That is their imagined future, and for many in Pakistanis as well.

Voices that were silenced, are finally being heard. It’s time to reverse the “We talk, you listen” stance of the West, as historian Vine Deloria puts it. Native American chief, Standing Bear, says his people were baffled by the European tendency to see nature as crude, primitive, wild, rude, untamed, and savage. Black Elk says the Great Spirit “takes care of me, waters me, feeds me, makes me live with plants and animals as one of them”. Lame Deer warns “we cannot harm any part of nature without hurting ourselves”. In Africa there is a movement called Vhufa, to reconnect with their ancestors and heritage.  

While technology boasts of innovations that will change our futures forever, David Suzuki in his book, Wisdom of the Elders, says “Examining the old ways of living may be critical for our human survival”.

 

Durriya Kazi

July 29, 2023

Karachi

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com