Foresight and Futures Literacies (again)

What would you say if someone told you to choose between romance-fiction and the ability to read and write? I suspect you would say that person is confused. The ability to read and write is a prior requirement and enables access to a wide range of different uses of this general capability.

And what would you say if someone asked you about the origins of writing? Of course, there is a large scientific literature on the subject and the invention of this amazing and multi-purpose tool can reasonably be understood as having many sources. But there is one underlying observation, that writing is built upon a prior attribute of humans, our linguistic ability. Undoubtedly, speaking and writing co-evolve, but the notion of recording and diffusing words rests on an awareness of the ability and utility of such words.

Foresight, as a label for a specific way of engaging in anticipation, for the purposes of planning, is one ‘genre’ or sub-category of the more general capacity of humans to imagine the future – for different reasons, using different methods, in different contexts. Futures Literacy is NOT a method. In the same way that the ability to read enables one to appreciate and invent different kinds of text, so being futures literate enables the appreciation and invention of different reasons, methods, and contexts for imagining the not-past, not-present.

Offering people the choice of either becoming futures literate or engaging in foresight, is as foolish as asking someone to choose between learning to read and reading any specific text. It is the capability that enables the deciphering of the text, any text. Equally, efforts to analyze, study, critique, and invent text are anchored in existing practices and history. Studying literature means that the literature exists. Anticipation, the systems and processes that enable humans to imagine the future for different reasons, using different methods, in different contexts, are all around us.??

Futures literacy is NOT a brand or a specific discovery of any person or institution. It is a label for describing and sharing observations, practices, analysis, opportunities to better understand and use a phenomenon – anticipation – that is observable and practiced every day, everywhere, all the time.

The study of human anticipatory systems and processes is one way to enhance, through better understanding (covering all its varied epistemic sources), a primordial component of human functioning – the ability to imagine the not-past, not-present. A better understanding of human anticipatory systems and processes can be referred to using the terminology of being more futures literate. In the same way that knowing how to use the tool of writing, that rests on the practices of language, can be referred to as being more ‘literate’.

In so far as all skills are hierarchical, someone is more or less skilled, there is the risk of such hierarchies being used to reinforce inequality and control access. Guilds or academic credentialing engage in such power related practices on the back of the fundamentally hierarchical nature of skills. Furthermore, there are many different kinds of skills, and even different ways of living such skills. For instance, the skill at acquiring and wielding knowledge occurs and functions in a vastly different range of ways (reasons/practices). In a similar fashion, the acquired aspects of the basic human capability to imagine the future (i.e. futures literacy) can be expressed in a vast range of different ways, with different motivations, modalities, outcomes, etc. Hence futures literacy encompasses many different categories of this skill (including those that belong to distinct ontological/epistemic/relational spheres) – hence we can observe many different expressions of this skill – hence we can say that there are a wide range of futures literacies.

Can any person or institution claim to be the purveyor or originator of language, literature, or anticipation? Does anyone argue that there is only one language, kind of literature or anticipatory system/process? Or, that it makes sense to confine the ability to speak, write or anticipate to only one particular purpose, vocabulary or even set of methods?

The proposition that one must choose between engaging in foresight and futures literacy is a non-sense. It misunderstands the meaning of the terms and sows confusion on a topic of vital relevance to humanity. Cultivating an understanding of futures literacies involves developing skills that enable not-only specific context/purpose dependent activities like foresight, forecasting, divination, strategy, etc. but also the prior and inescapable activity of perceiving the world. Anticipation plays a fundamental role in perception, not just choice. Efforts to subsume human perception within the mono-culture of colonizing the future is deeply embedded within the functioning of the currently hegemonic juggernaut of monumentalist, exploitative, hierarchical forms of social organization.

Recognizing and advocating for an open and diverse framework for understanding the multiplicity of human anticipatory systems and processes is not just good science it is fundamental to recognizing that today’s solutionism is just more blah, blah, blah aimed at preserving ways of living bereft of meaning and addicted to perpetrating horror. Presenting futures literacy as an alternative method that competes with foresight is one way of reinforcing the marginalization of futures studies and the destructive elitism of current imaginaries.