history

The best time in history

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Bob Olson, Olson Carriage & Harness, Black Forest, CO"What was, do you think, the best time in human history?"

Bob Olson, Olson Carriage & Harness, teaches people skills from the past. He is an expert at horsemanship. He shows people how to teams of draft horses pulling a wagon, carriage, or sleigh. 

Bob lives and works on his ranch in Black Forest, Colorado. I met him when he made his team and 100-year-old covered wagon available for a short fiction film created by my son Robert Mahaffie. (Here is a link to Robert's film).

In our conversations, Bob and I ranged widely. And Bob was particularly challenging as we talked about the past, the future, the good and the bad in each. I knew Bob likes old things and the old ways of ranch life. He knew my work was about change, technology, and the future. But we both appreciated the others sensibilities. We spent no time on disagreement.

When we visited the Olson ranch, Bob threw a profound and impossible question at me: "John, what was the best time in history?"

He had just backed his team of Percheron draft horses, harnessed in a hay wagon, into the barn. He'd put the team, Vickie and Minnie, in their stalls and given them straw and water. Then he put the question to me, his big city visitor, my cell phone a tactile presence in my pocket. And the lack of service on the ranch having been established and lamented. 

In his quiet way, he waited to see what I had to say, a gentle smile played across his face.

I had no good answer, but maybe that's the point. After being flummoxed for a moment, I told Bob that figuring out how to think about his question was what mattered, not an answer. I think he agreed, and he didn't demand my answer.

And of course, the answer depends. As with any complex question, so much depends on definitions, contexts, and so on.

We agreed we couldn't really answer the question, but we also agreed, that the best time for humans might be prehistoric times. Back then, despite the hellish risks and suffering that might befall people, despite hunger and cold and thirst and conflict, and despite the fact that you might, if you were lucky, survive to be 30 years old, by the measures of the time, with a simplicity of expectation, you might be well satisfied.

Prehistoric peoples didn't need "mindfulness coaches". They didn't worry, I think we can presume, about their or their children's self-esteem. They didn't become paralyzed by uncertainty of whether to cut back on refined sugars and add more chia to their diets. And on and on.

I'll keep pondering Bob's question. I don't expect to answer it, but expect to gain from the pondering.

Thanks Bob! 

Image: Jane G. Mahaffie

Every little act changes the future

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Yankee_in_KAC_bookFor this little thought experiment, a tip of the pen goes to Tomás Vargas, a young man of sixteen who likes to ask questions, to ponder, to turn thinking upside down and try it out a different way. So regular and wide-ranging are his musings, I’ll bet he won’t even remember his comment to me on how in time travel you can alter the course of history.

I don’t know when Tomás came upon that idea, but it has long been in stories, on TV, and in movies. Growing up, my brother Jim and I watched a short-lived TV show, The Time Tunnel, in about 1966-67, when we were seven and eight, the show was about time travel. I don’t remember it well, but central to the episodes was the care you have to take in traveling to the past to not change history. This is a long-established moral, in fact, it figured in the plot of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published in 1889.

But I take this notion up with the future in mind. Suppose you travel forward in time. Your actions will alter the course of things too. What does that tell us? It says that every action, at any time, matters. And our focus forward, our simulating of time travel into the future, means seeing how actions large, but also small can alter the course of things, and how we may want them to. And I believe thinking about the future, trying out ideas and scenarios about it, can alter the future too, and we should put our thinking to work in just that way. So maybe it’s dangerous to go back and alter history, but it is critical to work intently at altering the future, and your actions, large and small, matter.

Image: http://de.wikipedia.org

Pinterest for fiction writers

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I have been experimenting with using a Pinterest pinboard for gathering pictures that I can use to add to my visual sense and ability to describe things, for a fiction project. My novel-in-progress is set in 1916-17 at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s at the earliest years of the rise of Jazz, and that music, including Ragtime and Stride piano play a role in the story.

In my hunger to understand the period, I want to know what things looked like: clothing, hats, shoes, the college campus, phonographs, luggage, dormitories, classrooms, hairstyles, ads in the newspaper, and so on. To my delight, there are lots of images available from online archives and websites. Pinterest lets me “pin” them to a board dedicated to this project.

I don’t know much about how others are using Pinterest, but this use has been much better for me that collecting images in files on my computer, or bookmarks. My collection is all in one place, and I can poke about in it to help me write what I hope is more image-invoking prose, and give my story more reality and concreteness for the reader.

Have a look at my pin board: College circa 1917

Let me know what you think.

Sam Adams and the art of persuasion

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I am ever-more convinced that at the core of getting people to effectively explore their future is the ability to communicate and persuade people about change. So as I finished an excellent biography of Sam Adams this past week, I was struck by his approach to persuasion. It’s not hard to argue that he was critical to inspiring and launching the American Revolution—he was world-class at persuasion.

Here are, in brief, the techniques I’ve observed in learning about his political life.

Arm and Induce – enable people to discuss and learn more about, and understand the issues, rather than just telling them what they should believe. Thus Adams published pieces outlining the facts, ways the argument could be construed, points of view, and so on, and let people come to their own conclusions.

Draw implications – explore, non-judgmentally, what the outcomes of particular situations and changes could be. Lay out the possibilities, again, without suggesting a certain conclusion or a singular way of understanding the situation. This is like building a set of scenarios and offering as objectively as we can, a range of views of the future. Thus Adams opened up the questions at hand, broadened the views taken, and showed the possible meaning and implications of actions taken by the British Parliament and Crown.

Frame / Reframe – create new, better ways of understanding the issue, most often by opening up the question to a broader context and a deeper view into the future. Thus Adams didn’t only draft responses to the Stamp Act of 1765. He didn’t make it simply about an undue tax or cost burden on the colonists, he raised the issue to a fuller view of the colonies’ rights to self-government and implications of taxation without representation. This added a moral focus to a fiscal one. It inspired thoughts of self-government.

Build a network of allies and advocates – get more people first exploring the issue and then, presuming the merits of a particular point of view, aligning to support a cause or take a stand. Thus Adams got patriots in each colony to build “committees of correspondence” and ultimately legislative bodies independent of England to explore what people in the newly-emerging states wanted. This built a constituency in every colony for thoughts of greater self-government, and ultimately a home for talk of independence. It led directly to the formation of the Continental Congress.

Be patient – In all this work Adams restrained his natural impatience with a situation he was deeply unhappy about. He knew that patience was essential. As he started this process in the 1760s, few of his fellow colonists were ready to think about independence. They needed time to learn to think about profound change, and accept the scarier parts of it, but also gain comfort with a vision of life very different from what they were used to. He had to be patient.

We can draw lessons from this for foresight in society and in our organizations. Perhaps the core lesson is that it is not enough to simply insist you your view—opinions aren’t strong on their own. You have to bring people along.

Know yourself and your times, first

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The last line in This Side of Paradise is: "I know myself, but that is all". The book is about the coming of age, socially and intellectually, of a young man in the 1910s. Essentially, it takes him the whole book to understand himself just a little. In trying to do so, he also has to work hard to understand his times. Those were fast-changing times: a shifting mix of remnants of the Victorian Era, Edwardian Era sensibilities, and the opening of the Jazz Age.

Most of us face the same problem in getting to a deep or deeper understanding of ourselves, what we believe in, what our times are about, how society is changing, and what it means to us. And in all that, we’re expected and we need to, be able to understand how the future is emerging.
Most of us cannot stop what we are doing to try to know ourselves better. Nor can we stop all planning and action until we understand our world and our times. But we need to keep trying to develop that understanding. It will strengthen our insights on the future (and the present). Time spent thinking with some care about these things is important to everyone, and it deserves a commitment. You can argue it is part of your work—most any professional work. Don’t neglect it.

Presentism

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Presentism is the tendency people have in studying and writing about history to apply today’s values to a prior time. I always noticed this on the TV Show M*A*S*H, which, to me, blended Vietnam-era sensibilities with a Korean War story line. Presentism is one of the biggest dangers in historical analysis, since it can lead to interpretations of past behavior that are simply wrong.

When we explore the future, we can fall into the same trap. One tendency is to look at a single dimension of change, for example, the commercialization and proliferation of a new technology, holding the rest of the world constant. We get today’s world with a twist. We might, through this, have a view of our world with photovoltaic energy, otherwise unchanged, or our world with $500 per barrell oil, otherwise unchanged. So many other things will have also happened that will shape our values, attitudes, behavior, and what’s happening around us. The world is never “otherwise unchanged.”

Another tendency–which is extremely hard to avoid–is to look at future possibilities with today’s attitudes. Routinely, in my work as a futurist, I hear people say that the next wave of computer and communication technology is cold and impersonal. They say, “where’s the human contact?”. But when that next wave of technology arrives, for example when we got instant messaging and mobile telephony, we found that more people were in touch with others, more of the time.

If we take a “one trend future” approach, our efforts will not be adequate. We are likely to overlook countertrends, amplifying trends, social forces, cultural forces, and so on. The ongoing effort in foresight is to try to understand how the future might shape up against a backdrop of social forces and conditions undergoing constant change. That is hard to do, and is surely a task we can never truly complete. But we have to try.

A frank acknowledgement of our “presentism” in discussions with colleagues, and even to ourselves, can go a long way towards avoiding narrow explorations of the future, and can keep us sharp and attentive to the wide sweep of forces of change we need to pay attention to. So ‘fess up, admit your limitations, then fight your way past them. Don’t be a presentist when you need to be a futurist.

Molecular biologist Deric Bownds, in Deric Bownds’ Mindblog, has written insightfully on this topic. [Link]

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