politics

Can irony change the world?

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On an October 2011 visit to a college dorm hallway in Colorado, we saw a spot where a water fountain had been removed, and the wall cavity patched with cinderblock. The dorm residents had put up a sign: “Occupy Water Fountain”. It was during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Also during the Fall of 2011, scattered across the Internet were pictures of funny (really funny) protest signs from the Occupy Wall Street protest and its affiliated protests across the US.

And each weeknight, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report hysterically slay hypocrisy and make fun of politicians.  I am a huge fan. This past few weeks, Stephen Colbert’s elaborate satirization of American campaign finance, notably the new mechanism of the SuperPAC, has intensified, gaining all kinds of attention, support, and condemnation.

Do irony or satire or humor have a place in changing our society for the better? I think there’s enormous power in them to do so, but I also think that there is risk that they take us off task, and actually weaken resolve. Satire, in effect, can diffuse or divert anger, even as it may educate more people about hypocrisy, injustice, and government foolishness.

I am concerned that the United States has become a mockutocracy–a place where mockery is the standard behavior and where it may often supplant the sequence of anger, organization, and action that we need to drive needed change. Does mockutocracy work?

The jury is still out. What is satire accomplishing in the current wave of events, including the problems in US electoral politics and the US Congress. It can feel good and entertain us, but does the satire just create an alternative to a political party–a club of cynics? The participants of that “party” participate mainly by endorsing the mocking, and expecting not much to change. Are many even motivated to vote and take other political action?

It’s not that the fans of satire don’t want things to change, but more that they succumb to the sense that the mockable will always be that way. That, I think is the risk. Can we learn to go more reliably from satire to political action? I think we must.

The past cannot be our guide to the future

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American strict constructionists say that the U.S. Constitution is an inviolable, bible-like guide to what must be in U.S. governance. The Constitution’s words, interpreted from the perspective of the framer’s “original intent” are to be adhered to no matter what.

It has become common in current U.S. politics for people to say that judges interpreting the law to fit new situations is “judicial activism”. This view and the political conflict from it seem likely to expand in the emerging U.S. political climate.

Strict constructionism does not allow for much if any modern interpretation of the Constitution’s articles and amendments, despite the historical and ongoing practice of interpreting the Constitution for new legal situations. Judicial review, in fact, is 209 years old, dating to the Supreme Court case Marbury vs. Madison, 1803. Yet it seems to be under challenge by some people today. They want to stick to the original language of the constitution, and what they think the Framer’s meant by it.

But living by standards set in 1789 is impossible. So what does it mean to wield the Constitution and “original intent” as a measure of what is right and wrong with the country?

Environmentalists have a different Constitution to wield. It is, to put it simply, “nature” or “natural.” Nature, in their view means the Earth as it was before humans altered and manipulated it. “Natural” means a state of things unaltered by humans, and implies that we should use pristine nature as a guide for what we do and don’t do, and presumably work to reverse human-driven harm to the ecology, to put things back to their natural state. At the extreme end of this is the Earth First movement, which offers radical action as a way to put things back to their natural state.

But living by that standard is also impossible. It is too late to reverse civilization and its effects on the earth.  So then what does it mean to wield “nature” as a measure of what is right and wrong with the planet?

There is no guidebook for the future, no prescription or recipe for deciding what the future should look like. It’s not available in the Constitution, and it’s not available by studying what is “natural”. We have to find it as we go along.

We can keep to the spirit of the Constitution, the philosophies and broad goals of the founders of the United States, and I believe we should.

We can keep to the ideal that more natural is better than less, and protecting and putting right ecologies is a goal, and I believe we must.

The United States of 2012+ cannot be the United States of 1789. And the Earth cannot be the pre-human or pre-human civilization Earth. Each has to be devised, managed, and adjusted now, in today and tomorrow’s terms. There is no guidebook for the future.

Why do people turn to the U.S. Constitution, or an ideal of what is “natural” as a guide? Rather than trust others: policymakers, scientists, etc. to decide how things should be changed, they prefer to not trust today’s people to monkey with things. The independent text of the Constitution or a seemingly objective notion of what is natural are reassurance against contending groups who might have different plans and ideas. So we adhere to impossible standards, and assert their inviolability. Most people know better, and pragmatism finds its way through.

In neither case is it possible to chart a future course wielding a literal recipe for what should be. We have to foster change, adaptation, innovation. We can hove to the philosophy of the Framers of the Constitution, and we can fight hard to take care of nature, but ultimately we have to invent new ways forward. A nice summation of the environmental situation and the notion of how we will pilot “spaceship earth” can be found here.

All this, in my view, is an argument for the suite of tools from foresight for informing, interpreting, envisioning, and communicating about change.

Framing and reframing, part 2: emotional connections

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Emotional framingMy Leading Futurists LLC partner Jennifer Jarratt and I believe one of the most critical things we do for our clients is reframing. Over 22+ years working to be more effective as futurists, we’ve learned that truly helping people understand the future means not just reconceptualizing things (nearly any good business consultant does that) but connecting in meaningful ways to their worldview. Reconceptualizing can make an intellectual connection, but reframing can make a stronger, emotional connection.

That means helping people think about change from a personal, human, emotional perspective. Offering a compelling look at the future is not about explaining “how would that work?” It’s about answering “how would that affect me?”
 
The work of George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at Berkley, has helped us surface and examine how we do that, why it matters, and how we can do it better. Lakoff’s book, The Political Mind, is particularly valuable in understanding the importance of frames and how people react to them.
 
Lakoff defines a frame as “a conceptual structure used in thinking.” [Link] He explains that it is the emotional content of a framing that connects most strongly to people.
 
In The Political Mind, Lakoff explains the centrality of framing in politics. While perhaps the stakes are higher in political battles than in exploring the future, we believe the ability of people to break through to new insights on the future is essential to having a successful future.
 
Let me share an example of reframing of the kind Lakoff explains so well. I mentioned this situation in a related reframing context in a previous post, but the case also distinctly highlights a central part of reframing: the power of an emotional hook in how something is framed.
 
The Janney Elementary/Tenleytown Branch library public private partnership (PPP) was an intense issue in my community in Washington DC over the past few years. It was a proposal to combine a commercial real estate development on Wisconsin Avenue, NW in Washington, DC with a redevelopment of the public branch library and adjacent public elementary school. The land to be used for the commercial development would have included the city’s land where the now-demolished library is intended to be rebuilt, and part of the adjacent elementary school property. The sites would have been joined and reworked, with a new library, retail space, apartments, and garage parking for the elementary school staff. The developer was to contribute to renovating and adding on to the 1925 elementary school building.
 
In our neighborhood debate, a group that opposed the PPP framed the core of the issue as a “land grab” with the city surrendering land to a private developer, irrevocably. There are detailed technical arguments that can be, and have been made on each side of the issue. It’s quite possible for pro-PPP people to explain the potential deal not as a land grab, but as a multi-million dollar benefit to an aging, over-crowded elementary school. But the “land grab” notion was a stronger framing than any that had come up from proponents of the PPP. It connects in people’s minds to stealing—in this case, a corporate entity, the real estate developer, in cahoots with the city government, stealing from our children.
 
What happens so often in political debates is that one side comes up with framing that resonates with people’s emotions well, and the other side tries to counter that framing with a technical discussion of facts and truths. This is what has happened in my neighborhood.
 
Emotion usually wins out over the facts. A few days ago (March 16, 2009) the city relented and killed further discussions of a PPP on the site. So, perhaps the opponents who framed this as a “land grab” won the argument with their well-framed opposition.
 
In exploring the future, we need not see framing a simply a crass appeal to emotions. We can see it as a way of more effectively breaking through to people’s consciousness with ideas about a changed world. In our thinking, then, we specifically put the emphasis on reframing—recasting the situation with a new way of looking at it that can alter how people think about the possible and desirable future. Sometimes that means showing a new side to an issue, balancing people’s fears with ideas that suggest how a big change could be a good thing.
 
Effective work in foresight then, means not only depending on technical explanations and a wholly logical appeal to people. That’s why I’ve written so extensively here about the importance of stories, the value of images, the power of other voices, among many others.
 
As Jennifer and I work further on our concepts around reframing, we’ll publish ideas here and at www.leadingfuturists.biz. We’d of course be delighted to hear your ideas about this and we’re ready to help you in your exploration of the future any time.
 
Here is my take on some people who are really good at reconceptualizing and reframing. 
 
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