The impact of the future
I recently read an article bemoaning the recent spate of dystopian and utopian movies; arguing that by visualizing dire fictional situations and how those characters get out of them, we dull our responses to the real-world dangers all around us. Rather than learning helpful attitudes and strategies, we learn to be spectators.
At least that’s what I think it said, because I couldn’t find the article again when looking for it. I did find several other interesting pieces referencing this topic, however, that are worth noting.
Todd Mitchell writes that “[post-apocalyptic books offer us an escape from denial](http://toddmitchellbooks.com/what-dystopian-and-post-apocalyptic-books-say-about-us/)”–specifically, the denial of deep-seated problems in our society, environment, and selves. He views it as a starting point for action:
> In some ways this is similar to the Greek notion of catharsis, but it’s not quite the same thing. Where catharsis offers an audience a way to release emotion (and blow off some steam), dystopian and post-apocalyptic books offer us a way to escape the constant cultural need to deny the underlying problems of our society.
Noah Berlatsky uses Ursula K. Le Guin’s [Always Coming Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home) (on my nightstand now) to argue that dystopias, to the utopian protagonists, are “[not a nightmare of the future, but a nightmare that there is a future at all](http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/the-utopia-at-the-end-of-the-world)—and a past, and a series of exciting events connecting the two. To be in history is to be in a dystopic narrative illusion.” To those who imagine a better world, a dynamic system is terrible–far better to get to a perfect place and never change a thing.
Claire Evans writes that what we need isn’t more far-future utopias *or* dystopias–rather, we need “[something new: a form of science fiction that tackles the radical changes of our pressing and strange reality](http://creativetimereports.org/2015/08/20/claire-l-evans-anthropocene-fiction/).”
> But purely apocalyptic stories don’t help us reckon with reality’s slower, but equally devastating, emergencies – forests that vanish acre by acre, sea levels that rise a few millimeters each year, demand for consumer goods that gradually leech the planet’s resources…
> The point is to show them not just how the story ends but how we might get through the middle – while we still have a shot at changing it.
In response to the newest installments of _Star Trek_ and _Mad Max_, Brogan Morris writes that [dystopias and utopias face different challenges in impacting society](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4918/mad-max-and-the-function-of-cinematic-dystopia). Utopias can give us a free pass to sit back and let problems inevitably solve themselves:
> Glorious utopian visions like Star Trek’s, though, all too often fail to address contemporary issues. Such optimism tends to ignore problems by implying the future is rosy regardless of our actions today…
> Interstellar’s conclusion is troublingly cheerful, though: when an advanced, spacetime-manipulating future race comes to the rescue at the eleventh hour, humanity is saved. A sideswiping twist, to be sure, but one based in impossible pseudo-science, offering hope that’s totally out of our reach. It suggests our survival as a species is inevitable, if only we sit back and wait for something other than ourselves to save us.
While dystopias can leave us too depressed to act:
> In Fury Road, what’s left of the human race continues to wage war and wring the Earth dry of fossil fuels, even though the planet is already a desert as a consequence of man’s actions (and simultaneous inaction)…its subtext couldn’t be more serious: we either divest and disarm, or lose the world to more chaos, more hardship, more despair.
The best approach seems to be providing hope without a free pass; challenge without despair; a thread of possibility leading out of the darkness:
> It’s difficult to measure the impact of dystopian fiction on film. We know 1983’s speculative nuclear holocaust drama The Day After so depressed Ronald Reagan that it convinced him to rethink his ideas on nuclear proliferation…Such concrete examples of dystopian cinema having a direct meaningful influence, however, are rare. The best dystopian films instead tend to contribute to ongoing discussions or create indelible images of our fears of tomorrow.
In Stuart Candy’s 2010 thesis [The Futures of Everyday Life](http://www.scribd.com/doc/68901075/Candy-2010-The-Futures-of-Everyday-Life), he notes that there isn’t yet a great framework for measuring the impact of futures work (especially the experiential kind he practices):
> To discuss such seemingly disparate configurations in terms of their experiential features and impact enables a perspective which has X-ray glasses with respect to conventional boundaries of discipline, medium and setting; boundaries that hide their fundamental comparability…
> A valuable next step in the research agenda suggested by this would be to design and implement more systematic evaluations, such as ethnographic observation or post-intervention questionnaires of participants across different conditions.
Futurist pioneer Fred Polak noted in [The Image of the Future](http://smile.amazon.com/The-Image-Future-Enlightening-Orientating/dp/B001OZS90I?sa-no-redirect=1) that in order to imagine a different world, we must mentally separate ourselves into the real and “The Other”:
> Man is only able to conceive of the existence of The Other, the something which is basically different from the here and now, because his mental structure has a
dividing property built into it. … It is the capacity for mental division which enables man to be a citizen of two worlds, this world and an imagined world.
Does imagining the “other” living in a different world cause us to draw closer to it, or to give up our hope of reaching that place? The key seems to be connecting our real selves to that imagined place, perhaps through experiences of the type Candy designs.
The Kony 2012 phenomenon gives new insight into these issues. As Dinaw Mengestu writes, [Joseph Kony turned out to be more than “a click away”](http://www.warscapes.com/reportage/not-click-away-joseph-kony-real-world):
> The most common defense of Kony 2012 is that it raises awareness. This is the new activist model – to raise awareness through the power of our celebrities…[But] no one denies that Kony should be brought to justice. Millions of Americans may not have known that before, but millions of Africans have, and thousands of people have been working valiantly for years to do just that.
> Change has never come with a click, or a tweet; lives are not saved by bracelets. We all want solutions, but why should we think or expect an easy one exists for a twenty-year-old conflict in Uganda when we have none for the wars we’re engaged in now…
> If we care, then we should care enough to say that we need to know more, that we don’t have an easy answer, but that we’re going to stay and work until we find one. You can’t put that on a t-shirt or a poster. You can’t tweet that, but you can live by it.
At the end of the day, there is change that you feel, and change that you live. We need to find ways to create more of the latter.