Future Rising

LISTEN. "The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" Pragmatism III

If Sapere Aude is the motto of enlightenment, that's the question it's motivated by.

Enlightenment is a state of mind, a commitment to learning for the sake of doing, and doing for the purpose of ameliorating the human condition, alleviating suffering, pursuing happiness, offering some form of hope and expectation for the future of life. 

I once taught a course called The Future of Life. We began with that "really vital question," and continued with Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar, Stewart Brand's 10,00 Year Clock, and much else. I introduced it this way:

“Future” and “life” both sprawl in an almost untameable way, of course, so we’ll have plenty of parsing to do as we go along. That means even more basic, orienting questions: Is the future all about me, or about us, at all? Or is it all about successors to whom our relation is murky? Should we consider our main obligation to be to ourselves as individuals, to our (contingent) historical epoch, to our wider communities, our DNA, the species, the planet, the carboniferous form of life, or— as the late Carl Sagan said– to the very cosmos, “ancient and vast” and ongoing, itself?

So many questions. We’ll begin looking for answers with a nod to Dan Dennett, who pointed out that we are the beneficiaries of generations of people who cared about us while knowing they’d never meet us, and with a forward-looking glance backward from 19th century futurist Edward Bellamy (“Looking Backward“). How easy it is to get details wrong, but how exciting to dream of real progress in subduing the inherited scourges– including economic and political as well as biological plagues– of the past.

"Real progress": that's the goal of enlightenment. 

If I were to teach the course again (and it would be a natural sequel to Enlightenment Now), I'd have us read the little book I just finished by Andrew Maynard. Future Rising: A Journey from the Past to the Edge of Tomorrow, in a sequence of short smart chapters that explore the future from every angle, says we're "uniquely capable of imagining and creating different futures"... and of feeling an obligation to our descendants to leave them an earth worth living in.

It's a cliche to remark on the fragility of our home planet. I like former astronaut Cady Coleman's Buckminster Fuller-ish perspective on that, in the foreword. "The Earth from space does not look fragile--the rock itself will survive long after we do. But there is a sense of our vulnerability... We are the crew of Spaceship Earth and it falls on us to find a way to continue to thrive on our precious and beautiful planet." 

The iconic Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 (1968) has inspired many "to think of the future as something that we can and should aspire to, and to imagine the possibility of a vibrant home we would gladly bequeath to generations to come... a future that we have a hand in designing and creating." Our great challenge now is to inspire many more. Quickly. That's the vital project of enlightenment now.