Charming the goddess
The future has just settled at our dinner table - a half familiar stranger too striking to go unnoticed, too powerful to control, and too tantalising to ignore. She is fierce, disruptive and fearsome - yet she is clearly here to stay. We are now charged with the task to draw her into a conversation. But how does one talk to the future?
We tend to imagine the future in the light of our own ambitions and fears, rather than as an actual being trying to engage with us in dialogue. But, as Martin Shaw points out, the future is not an idea, it is a goddess. ‘In Roman myth the future is a goddess, and her name is Antevorta. The future is not an idea, it’s a divinity. Antevorta is especially prized when something new is being birthed, her and her sister Postvorta - the past - are invoked in childbirth. Both future and past are aspects of a wider being, Carmenta. Carmenta is the goddess of technical innovation, midwives and the successful birthing of a child.’
If the future is a goddess, we better meet her with respect. We want to listen to her, - she is close to her sister, Postvorta, the goddess of the past, so no doubt she knows a lot about us and our shenanigans, - before we wish to be heard. Remember, we are the hosts, and she is a guest - polite inquiry will go further than raging accusations. She is also from the otherworld, so linear thinking and overgrown charts and statistics may not fly well while we advance our story. As we settle into a dialogue with her about the situation we are now in, we better weave self-reflection, personal responsibility, curiosity, openness and deep insight into our narrative. I wonder if we also need to invite Postvorta and Carmenta along, to close the circle. The learnings of the past, and skills of innovation and midwifery will be needed. We must proceed with both cunning and honesty - while we seek change, accountability for where we find ourselves is in high order.
Fully aware of the suffering, danger, and insecurity that the COVID-19 crisis brings for many, and of the need to grieve, not only the dead but all lives that are being interrupted by the current collapse of the economy, we may want to consider being grateful to nature for ‘pulling the emergency brakes on our world’. In the larger scheme of things, on earth level, from the perspective of critters, we are troublesome newcomers, clearly unable to control the destructive system we have been building for centuries. We humans carry the responsibility for the crisis, not the bat and the pangolin. As the virus reminds us: ‘If you had not changed all that is, and what was still yesterday a luxuriant, chaotic, infinitely populated world or rather worlds, into a vast desert for the monoculture of the Same and the More, I would not have been able to set out on the planetary conquest of your throats. If almost all of you had not become, over the last century, redundant copies of a single, untenable form of life, you would not be preparing to die like flies abandoned in the water of your sweet civilization. If you hadn’t made your environment so empty, so transparent, so abstract, believe me that I wouldn’t be moving at the speed of an aircraft. I have only come to carry out the sanction which you have long since pronounced against yourselves. Forgive me, but it is you, as far as I know, who coined the name “Anthropocene”.’
We have been talking about the necessity of system change, for decades. The inhuman and unsustainable logic of market capitalism is well documented and is now part of general public discourse. And yet, until March 2020, it seemed all but impossible to even slightly alter the way we work, live and consume. Who would have thought that the red tapes put down by economists, politicians, business executives, financiers and the generally powerful can be lifted so fast, when the reality of a health crisis, with a looming economic depression and the potential of global political upheaval in its footsteps, became tangible. It is extraordinary to witness how quickly the seemingly unchangeable structures that underlie our world can turn out to be foundations of a sandcastle that get washed away by an unexpected wave of the ocean.
What will the future look like, now that we witnessed that it can be so different from the past? If the future is a goddess, then she needs to be coaxed and gently swayed rather than to be strong-armed and controlled. Addiction to human exceptionalism brought us where we are now, so let’s stop the heroic stories. Instead of ‘fighting the virus’, how can we charm and weave new futures while entertaining Antevorte during the forced quiet of the lock-down?
Almost 15 years ago, I gave a presentation about my artwork, and now I find among my notes the following paragraph: Our stories are bound together by fear and compassion. Correction. Our stories are bound together by fear rather than compassion. Correction. What we call compassion is our fear. And this constitutes our story.(1)
At the time, I was focused on how stories of the past haunt the spaces of the present, alluring us towards or deterring us from certain possible futures - with particular emphasis on hidden stories, ones that we may not even be aware of. The insight emerged from working with my own family history, embedded in larger geo-political and national narratives in Eastern Europe, and transplanting my processes into the context of a post-9/11 USA. I was not concerned with the future, rather slowly learning to sit with the shadows of the past.
Now, that we are in search of a new conversation with the future, it strikes me that this is exactly the point where we have got it all wrong. Most of us - on a personal level, on a societal level, and on a global level, - allowed fear to replace compassion, and this has become our story. Lacking deep roots in local communities that would never fail anyone who belongs there, we are taught that we are ‘individuals’ and therefore alone. The recognition of our own individual vulnerability perpetuates our future as a permanently precarious present: our imagination is saturated with fear, so we keep summoning futures that are not any different from the past. Just recently, in a GAIA breakout room, someone admitted his relief that the stock market was finally going up again. How likely is it that we solicit a brighter future if we hold fast onto large chunks of the present, out of fear? How can we radically re-imagine the deep structures of our lives if we are disproportionately afraid of the change that is necessary for any transformation?
Antevorta lets me carry on. She is sipping her second glass of red wine, her boots kicked under the table, and seems eagerly listening. Does she want dinner? She flashes her pointy eye teeth as she smiles, and, provocatively, she asks: shall we turn over a new leaf?
Of course, a new leaf, but how? Nowadays, I feel her presence in every wave of the current of now, in the split-second-before of every gesture, thought, or step. How can we charm and beguile, and rebuild our relationship with the future?
We need to let go of fear. I don’t indicate reckless fearlessness, rather, acceptance of our own situation: grieving the damage we have wittingly or unwittingly unleashed on the planet, while stepping lightly away from the stubbornly human-centered tales we call history and unleash a renewed wonderment and curiosity of the living world. As we hold space for our fiery house guest in the double bind of grief and amazement, we may find the inspiration to craft the story of the future around thanking the new coronavirus, for causing a disruption deep and long enough to make us finally stop and reconsider our options.
Picture: David Wojnarowicz: Untitled (Buffaloes)
(1) I am sure I was paraphrasing Peter Esterhazy, but I find no reference anymore to the original.
Katalin Hausel is responsible for organisational health and evaluation at collaboratio helvetica. She has gained three Masters degrees over the years. Katalin has a past in writing code, making and teaching art, working on rural regeneration and social cohesion projects, building IT tools, designing learning and evaluation tools, developing learning and evaluation solutions, working on new forms of collaboration and generally putting her mind to complex situations and finding a way through. Lately, she has been focusing on developing a framework for social innovation initiatives to use observation and organisational learning as a project evaluation methodology instead of predefining objectives. As a dedicated discipline-roamer and paradigm-shifter, she has been exploring how to craft situations, tools and spaces for transformation and learning to support systemic change and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).