Is our obsession with the future becoming unhealthy?

In ancient Rome, Janus was the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Fun fact: many people (as did I, until I wikipediad (is that even a word?) him just now) believe that the month of January is named after Janus but according to ancient Roman farmers’ almanacs it was related to the Goddess Juno.

Back to Janus, though. He looked both forward and backward, to the future and the past, to the beginning and the end.

I think that we need to rekindle this lost Janusian view of the world. Even in exponential and black swan-ridden times, it’s important to remember the past because “History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” as Mark Twain famously stated.

Cycles of human nature

Many believe that history moves in cycles, which are obviously never a copy-paste version of one another but might offer insights into similar dynamics. I had the honour of interviewing the incredible Carlota Perez who believes that technological revolutions happen in strings of waves that follow the same structure, with an installation period, an inflection point and a deployment period:

Or there’s the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn, who believed that scientific revolutions do not follow a linear pattern, but move along similarly structured cycles:

The common denominator in these cycles aren’t events or even certain triggers. It’s not about “if this happens, then that will too”. It’s about design. To compare: each human is designed in a very similar manner (that’s why healthcare works) but we are all different (that’s why non-personalized healthcare is actually still sickcare, but that’s another story).

The structure of ‘living’ systems

Just like that, waves of change seem to be structured in the same manner, though they are inherently different. And, so, though the future may be completely unpredictable, chances are that it will follow a certain design.

What often happens before the “fall’ or death of any kind of system (a civilization, a company or anything else), for instance, is a typical dynamic of closing and siloization. It happened at the end of the Roman empire. And it’s happening now in many Western cultures, too, with the closing of borders and the crushing of any type of diversity. (Which makes me wonder if the glory days of the West are coming to an end but that’s a different question.) We often refer to lack of innovation (and thus of adaptability to the changing context) as the most negative impact of such a lack of diversity, but we almost never talk about the core reason why. It’s about design: closing a system stops the flow that it needs to stay alive. It’s physics. It’s what Adrian Bejan calls the Constructal Law:

And so, even if we can’t know the future on the basis of past data and a linear mindset, the structure of the past can tell us very useful things.

The system of time

Western people love to put reality in compartments. We have Plato and Socrates to thank for that. (Read here why.) That has been beneficial in many ways (it drove the development of science) but it also resulted in a flawed view of the world that focussed on separate entities - and often a specific type, the succesfull ones - and neglecting the relationships between them. Asian cultures, on the other hand, have a much more connected, relationship driven and holistic view of the world.

Nowadays, there’s a lot of buzz about networks, connections and systems - corona has pushed this forward - of individuals, companies, communities, nature and technology, but no one seems to pay attention to the concept of time in the matter. Time is a system too, with the past, present and future that are connected and influencing each other. And if Western culture chooses to obsess over what’s to come and neglect what has happened, we are the poorer for it.

A chain of events

Catastrophes like Chernobyl do not come out of nowhere. They are always the epitome of a chain of (sometimes unlikely) events as Adam Higginbotham explains in Midnight in Chernobyl. Same for the storming of Capitol Hill. It was the end of a reinforced feedback loop of which president Trump was just as much a symptom as he was the cause.

Time is not a nicely chopped entity with all the value amassed on the future side. Even in future-obsessed and exponential times as these, there is a lot of informational value in the past. And, if you know where to look, you might even see trickles of the future there. COVID-19 may have been unexpected for most of us, but same thing here: it was triggered by a chain of past (cultural, societal, environmental…) events that go way back before the end of 2019. That’s the reason why Bill Gates did see it coming: he put several adjacent and almost colliding patterns together and he understood the cyclic design (point 1 above) of pandemics:

Again, you can’t predict the future by juxtaposing data from the past, but if you know where to look (not just at the ‘obvious’ threads, but at many adjacent and related ones), you might notice a direction.

Hiding unfortunate truths

And thirdly, though I COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY disagree (I can’t stress this enough. Had I been able to put this in font size 18, in bright red and underline it, I would have done so ) with what they stand for, I can’t help but feel a certain discomfort when we take away representations of past dictators and other agents of completely unacceptable intolerance.

The reason for that is twofold:

• History-washing: I’m not sure if hiding despicable episodes of our history like nazi Germany, transatlantic slave trade and Belgian Congo is healthy and helpful. I feel that they need to be engraved in human consciousness to help us avoid that they will happen again. To help us learn. There is a big difference between appreciating these parts or acknowledging them as useful information. And yes, there is also a big difference between a statue (which tends to express reverence and respect) and a painting that illustrates history instead of worshipping a certain figure.
• Polarization: I once read in a BBC article that “If you really want to understand a people, don’t study the statues they erect. Look at the ones they’ve pulled down”. I believe that hiding (very) unfortunate truths often seems to have further polarization as a side effect. It’s never just as simple as taking away a painting from a museum because it is politically or even ethically incorrect. It also feeds the “us versus them” dynamic, which always tends to escalate rather than end up in dialogue. Because where do you draw the line? Public statues? Paintings in musems? Books? And who gets to decide?

I really do understand that these effigies are an insult to those who suffered from it (or to their ancestors) and I totally follow why they want them to be removed. So I do admit that I do not have the answer here (I never promised you one anyway). But I also believe that hiding information - for whatever reason - is dangerous. It’s not because we cover up past events that they did not happen and that we cannot learn from them that we need to do better.

This piece was first published in my bi-monthly newsletter 'The Questions'. If you like what you've read, it would mean a lot to me if you considered subscribing here.