Futuring: The Nightmares of the Powerful
The single most shared piece of writing in the New York magazine was this spectacular essay by David Wallace-Wells:
It’s a familiar trope - “the end of times” - but with a climate twist. Burning forests, melting icebergs, rising waves lashing the shore and armed mercenaries guarding the rich from the riff raff. We have seen that story in many guises.
It’s an archetype that I call the ‘nightmare of the powerful.’ When you’re a (typically white) person living in a prosperous country in which things work most of the time, every day life doesn’t hold any terrors. The unknown comes in the form of apocalyptic nightmares - the collapse of all civilization, climate catastrophe and so on.
Contrast that with India. Most Indians live lives of injustice, of systems designed to exploit and discriminate. We don’t need nightmares at the edge of the horizon; everyday life reveals enough evidence that life isn’t ideal. In this reality, being told that the world might collapse because of climate change feels like an awkward truth.
The flip side is that we don’t have to imagine a spectacular resolution either, launching enormous machines that will suck carbon out of the atmosphere, making the world safe for humanity as a whole. Instead, we can imagine mundane forms of flourishing that leave the earth better off than when we started.
It’s a mistake to think the visions and nightmares of the powerful are the only ‘true’ visions and nightmares; that’s a linear mind in action, not a wicked mind. Part of our exploration of India in the era of climate change is to demonstrate the ‘wickedness’ inherent in that imagination.
One way to think about this exploration is as the cultivation of a specific skill: futuring. Futuring, like any other depiction, can be cartoon like or realistic, crude or nuanced. Utopias, apocalypses, slow disasters and gradual progress can all live within the universe of possible futures. We are rarely taught how to do it, let alone how to do it well, but a wicked mind should have a reasonable grasp of the skill. The course that just ended was our first experiment in collective futuring. We hope to refine that offering as a core virtue of a wicked mind.