Video: Thomas Homer-Dixon on Climate Change and Commanding Hope (DocDrop)

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[Music] singularity [Music] my name is nicola and you're watching singularity fm the place where we interview the future if you guys enjoy this podcast you can

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help me in one of two ways number one is you can go on itunes and write a brief review about my podcast it would really help me a lot and number two is you can simply go to interviewthefuture.com

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and make a donation now i want to start our episode today with a brief story there are very few moments that stand out in my time from my time when i was an

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undergraduate student at the university of toronto and one such moment was the following so i was in front of a room full of students trying to make two identical pendulums

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behave in a perfect synchrony and go perfectly together now i i gave it a number of attempts and perhaps the best that i could do at the time was i think 30 if i'm generous to myself maybe 45

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seconds or so or so which actually kind of impressed my professor at the time maybe it was the best attempt at that time but yet the whole point of that course or at least that lesson

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was about the topic of complexity and of course the specific moral of the story was how nearly identical complex system that started seemingly identical

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conditions can very quickly diverge and start behaving in a very radically different divergent way and not only that but how it is incredibly hard to understand

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those complex systems to begin with how it's even harder to predict how they will behave in the future and maybe even harder than that to try and attempt to control such systems

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so needless to say that was one of my favorite memories from my undergraduate degree at the university of toronto and the professor who was teaching that course was actually a very famous superstar professor

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he is the author of a number of fantastic books the first one that i read back in the day was called the ingenuity gap then his next book was the upside of down

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and most recently on the topic of our conversation today uh his recent book is called commanding hope the power we have to renew a world in peril so without further ado thomas homer

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dixon welcome to singularity fm i'm delighted to be with you and that's such a fun story i remember the moment well you do really oh absolutely so this is a

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uh this is a double-hinged pendulum and it was two double-hinged pendulums together so for folks who are not in the know these are really quite extraordinary devices so it's a pendulum with two pivots basically one at the top like a normal

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pendulum and then another one in the middle of the of the of the arm of the pendulum and they're designed so that both of those pivots can operate simultaneously

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and uh uh and and if you have two of two of these side by side as was the case here you can do your your very best to try to make them behave in exactly the same way when they're dropped from a height

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and they very quickly as you were saying diverge in their behavior because even the tiniest tiniest factors a slight tremor of the hand or maybe a bit of air turbulence in the room that

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influences one and not the other will produce ultimately a huge difference in how they behave and the way they flip back and forth so it's a really fun demonstration it impresses everybody but i didn't get everybody to come up to the front of the class i think you were

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one of the only ones to actually try it out yeah i was always the the kid who would sit on the first row in all my classes actually so precisely for moments like that but interestingly

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enough out of my five years at ufc that moment has like really left the mark in in my mind and it's like kind of like a real amazing lesson that i've taken with me ever since to be honest i don't remember

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that much else from that class but the the the complexity uh moral of that story is like now i can't even forget it it's so well taught so the interesting thing

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is that that was the i had that that pendulum and i was using it in another course uh and i think i just brought it into the class that you were in just to give people a quick

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demonstration of this general idea but the complexity scientists call it sensitivity to initial conditions and these double hinged pendulums are highly sensitive to initial conditions and they're just you know to tie this

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story off one of the people in that that class that i was actually taking the pendulum to was an undergraduate student mike lawrence who went on to waterloo to study with me as a master's

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student and ultimately his phd and when he finished his phd he was so thrilled that he had his father who is uh an accomplished machinist actually build a double-hinged pendulum and as a thank you present and send it

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out to me here in british columbia i haven't put it together yet but i'm very excited because they're just such wonderful demonstrations of this basic principle absolutely absolutely now thomas unfortunately not

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all of our audience or probably none of them had this amazing opportunity to study with you or under you so if we presume that they have complete ignorance about who you are and what you

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have done and let's say you meet them one-on-one in a at a conference or in a bar somewhere in victoria or elsewhere in the world in the good old days when we actually could meet

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physically together how would you introduce yourself who is thomas omar dixon i'm a writer and i'm an academic and an enormously curious person

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who is very concerned about uh the world that my children are going to inherit sarah and i have two children a a 12 13 15 year old boy ben and a 12 year old girl kate

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so a very important part of my identity is my identity as a father to these two children feel like any parent numerous responsibility to them

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my academic work has focused on uh over the years on the sources of violent conflict so when i started as an undergraduate and went on to do my doctorate at mit i was very interested and still remain very interested in why people

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fight each other why people kill each other on mass sometimes millions of deaths result from mass conflicts between human beings i i still regard that as an extraordinarily bizarre behavior

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and i wanted to understand that more deeply and then the other part of my academic interest focuses on uh our relationships with the natural world fundamentally an environmentalist i'm deeply concerned about climate

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change and very anxious to see the energy transition towards a zero-carbon economy underway faster than it's happening so i've brought those interests together in my work uh the relationship between

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social breakdown and environmental stress how how various kinds of uh environmental problems such as climate change might ultimately undermine social stability around the

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world and how we can prevent that from happening so my writing focuses most specifically on those issues yeah i remember uh when we were in that class we were studying excerpts from your first book

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that was on environment scarcity and violence um but perhaps another short sideways story why do you go by todd instead of thomas

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is there a story behind that not much no when although it doesn't relate to the current book commanding hope um when i was born you know not a spring chicken

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i was born in 1956 and uh and uh the the what the the trip of those days of course dunesbury's a bit dated now a lot of people wouldn't remember it but it was

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that it's a highly political cartoon strip uh of those days was pogo by walt kelly and pogo it was it was a family or a community of animals in the

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in the uh everglades swamps in victoria of of florida and uh my parents were huge fans of the wall kelly strip pogo and pogo who's an opossum would refer to the tads which were the

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little animals running around in the swamp and when i was born i was this small thing in a crib and so they started referring to me as the tad in the crib

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and it's stuck so the connection to the to the book commanding hope is i actually i actually include a card a a very famous uh cartoon from walt kelly pogo cartoon

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uh in the book uh and people will probably heard this expression uh pogo is is sitting on the edge of a of a swamp that's full of

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junk garbage uh tin cans plastic old tires and things and he says to what the friend beside him he says we have seen the enemy and he is us and it's it's probably walt kelly's

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most famous famous aphorism we have seen the enemy and he is uh us and i i refer to it and i include the cartoon because when it comes to problems like climate change we are

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uh we can't externalize these problems and say they're somebody else's fault we're all in some sense responsible our fundamental human natures as consumers as top predators

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uh and various other characteristics of human beings and the social structures they set up have made us have created this problem of climate change so it's very internal to us it's not something we can blame on other people and i use walt kelly's cartoon as a way

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of just hammering home that point i think it's a great story and i think it's a great cartoon uh and it's uh it's full of wisdom and insight and it goes to the heart of the problem

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uh to represent and capture what the problem is but also to represent and capture why is it so hard to actually go about resolving it uh so we are going to jump right into

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your book and start talking about uh the meat of the matter here however before that i just want to ask you with one sentence each perhaps just so that we get the chronology of ted's sort of intellectual

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ideas in terms of books what's the thesis of your the ingenuity gap and what's the thesis of the upside of down so that then we can see how the next thesis

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of your latest book compares within that kind of line of thinking sure that's great so you're quite right that this these are sort of a it's sort of a trilogy of the books now you mentioned one other thing just as sort of a precursor which

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is the original academic book i did from princeton university press which was titled environment scarcity and violence it's still it's still in print uh 20 years after it was published and that really focuses on those relationships between environmental

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stress and violent conflict that was the beginning of my academic my academic trajectory i guess you could say after i came out of graduate school uh but um i realized that one of the critical problems

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one of the one of the one of the issues that had to be addressed if we were trying to understand why some societies suffer so much from environments water scarcity deforestation absence ultra land and

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have critical to economic results poverty mass migrations of people because of those environmental problems is because they couldn't they couldn't solve those problems effectively they couldn't generate solutions either they didn't have the

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right institutional arrangements or they didn't have the right scientific establishments to generate solutions to those problems so that led me to this idea of the ingenuity gap which is basically the idea that

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that humankind is facing an increasing gap between our need for solutions or what i call ingenuity and our ability to deliver those solutions uh and and uh and so the book is really about

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whether we can solve the problems of the future whether our problems are becoming too complex and too difficult for us in and given the our capacity to deliver solutions through our through

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our political systems our social systems our research institutions etc and uh it's it's uh not entirely a bleak story but i i do suggest that our problems are becoming harder faster than we can solve

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them and exhibit a would be climate change uh it's a it's a problem that for some reason we just can't we can't really address effectively and it's the reason reasons why

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are not obvious not straightforward and so i spend a fair amount of time in the book unpacking those reasons so basically two parts to the problem one is what are the factors making our problems

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more difficult whether it's climate change or widening economic and social inequalities deepening political polarization in our societies and then on the other hand what are the factors that are keeping us from responding effectively

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most most analysts don't separate those two questions very clearly so that was the first book the ingenuity gap which came out in 2000 uh in in the second book with the upside of down

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took the analysis of the human kinds crisis a number of steps further and looked at basically the question if we have a chronic ingenuity gap if we can't solve our problems

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what are the ultimate consequences and i talked about the possibilities of major social ruptures and societal collapses as a result of in an inability to address these huge challenges that we face

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and uh and i used the example of rome the roman empire and why it collapsed and i and i i examined ways in which our current situation is similar but also different from the roman crisis

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uh the the the title the upside of down though was supposed to suggest that these crises that are emerging in the future could provide opportunities for for creative renewal of our societies and institutions

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the upside of the of the of uh crisis the upside down so that was the second book and it came out in 2006. and a lot of critics uh said at the point and they were quite right that there was a lot of down in that

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book and not a lot of upside and and it's partly because i i kind of ran out of space i'd written about 130 000 words and i more or less finished my analysis of why we're facing

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major social ruptures and perhaps even societal collapse and i hadn't gotten to the upside but the other part of it was that i actually wasn't ready to run that upside it took me another well ultimately another 14 years to

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publish the third book which i worked on for a total of eight years it was by far the hardest of all the books i've ever written to write i started it three times twice i threw out enormous amounts of material

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because it wasn't working it was only in 2016 that i realized really had to be about hope that the core of my prescription the two first books the ingenuity gap and the upside of down were both highly diagnostic

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but the core of my prescription in this third book had to be had had to be a focus of ho on hope on the concept of hope and and why it's so important and how we can sustain it and and i i realized that had to be the case

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again through my children because i realized that that the the thing that giving me the most anguish in the world most uh a sense of crisis was the

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possibility that my children would grow up merge into the world as adults and lose their sense of hope into a world of turbulent violence and would lose sense of hope

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so that that's when things really started to crystallize at that point and it really is the third book in a trilogy i don't know if i have any more books to write at this point i think i kind of said what i wanted to say but it

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took it took longer than i expected wow so okay so i remember even you know that surprised me in a number like seeing your next book books title

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containing the word hope really surprised me in so many different ways so first of all i remember from undergrad you had a bit of a reputation as dr doom uh if i remember correctly

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uh secondly uh i remember a conversation i had with you once when i came to visit you in your office hours and how we were talking about our shared interest in philosophy and how you're sharing with me that

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you felt like you didn't make much more much progress there and how you you went into a lot more rigorous scientific approach where you can actually measure things and and where you can actually see that you've made the difference and

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you've made some progress and now you're throwing in a concept so i'm going to ask you to break down this concept for us what is hope and can we measure it

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how do we define it even uh because that's cut that's what really surprised me here it's not really a scientific concept that many scientists would like

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uh pointers steer us towards yes so you know you're quite right that uh just to go back you know first of all i think that uh the first two books i

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wrote laid out a diagnosis that was quite by many standards at the time uh pessimistic so i was labeled the doom meister or doctor doom

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because i was saying that you know as we get into the 2020s things are going to start to become very very difficult and we're going to see major social disruptions as a result of this panoply of challenges that humankind is

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facing yeah i should interrupt just for a second and say that saying that in one of your first books you even predicted the financial crisis of 2008 in a way yes so actually the upside of down it's not a long passage but

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actually pointed to the instabilities in the housing market in the united states and i said that this could be could be the a source of a global financial crisis i mean there are other people saying that kind of thing but

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but i i by the standards of the time i was i was a a a pessimist even though i sort of characterized characterized myself as a realist i looked at the data and the science that i had and just said that we're in real trouble

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so so i think nowadays that trouble is more broadly so honestly i get this thing about being doctor doom uh and and sort of dismissed as a pessimist i get that much

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less now people are coming to me and saying so what's going to happen next and actually compared to where i was in the early 2000s i have a much less clear understanding of where we're going in the future

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because because what's happening now is the system is has is unstable global systems and social systems aren't stable and so they're they become unlocked and there's more possibility for variance in the future

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uh both positive and negative um more and more that's just in the pendulum in more hinges in the pendulum exactly and and uh so that gets to the you know the second issue that you raised which is my somewhat complex relationship with

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philosophy i i i i love philosophy and and it's informed me enormously all the way back to my graduate work analytical philosophy in particular philosophy of mind but ultimately one has to actually try

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to do things if i'm concerned about the future of my kids what what is it that we're going to do in the world we're not just going to think about it and try to parse it and break it apart into into pieces and understand what's going on we actually need to

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intervene and try to change things and so this third book is very much a book about activism it's about personal engagement it's about agency how we can how we can make the world better as individuals and perhaps

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collectively as as societies and uh and and so so you know i decided as i said in 2016 or so that it really needed to be about hope because i was concerned about my

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kids losing hope but then the philosophical the philosophical side of me emerged and i said okay so let's what is this thing hope because a lot of people dismiss it and say that it's

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it's a kind of weak emotion it's distracting it leads us to wishful thinking and so you know what can we what is the thinking about hope and if we apply our scientific lens

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to it what can we do perhaps to make it a more powerful and and significant and useful emotion in our in our lives which is why the title of the book is commanding hope

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there's this idea that we can in a sense make hope do our bidding we can command it to be a useful powerful emotion for us and then the version of hope that we come up with which i articulate in the book

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is itself it commands our attention it's powerful it's a powerful notion of hope it's a muscular notion of hope so i build that out in three stages i talk about honest hope astute hope and powerful hope all three

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of those components honest astute and powerful are components of this larger notion of commanding hope and honest hope is basically about making sure that our our our hope is grounded in a

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in a realistic understanding as we face ourselves about how difficult say climate change is or or uh the economic crisis the world are facing that we actually

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acknowledge with the best scientific information we have how serious those are so that's in a sense honest hope is a relationship to truth it's a moral stance towards truth uh steve hope is about the kind of knowledge that we

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should have if we're going to hope well and i put a lot of emphasis on uh accurate knowledge how we think about the world and how other people think about the world

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so thomas we we had a brief uh technical interruption uh or intermission unfortunately but we're back online so perhaps you already shared with us about honest uh hope perhaps you can walk us through the

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next two steps or two two different types of hopes that you talk about in your book sure uh thank you for everybody's patience on this uh so the second of the

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uh components of commanding hope is what i call astute hope and this is really uh more of an epistemological stance if the first is a moral attitude or a moral stance towards truth this is a

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this is a a a kind of hope that reflects a particular form of knowledge uh in this case knowledge about how uh how we look at the world and what our

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perspectives are especially our sort of ideological social and economic perspectives as well as uh how other people look at the world and especially try to unpack how our potential allies in political

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mobilization and potential opponents if we're trying to achieve solutions to something like climate change how those opponents look at the world and understand better their perspectives

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so that's what that's the grounding of astute hope and i introduced in the book several uh tools that allow people to unpack world views more effectively ideological perspectives

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uh on issues such as climate change or inequality and the way society should operate and now and in the future and then the third component is what i call powerful hope and this is a hope that's focused on a

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very clear object or vision of the future so some notions of hope uh don't really aren't really oriented towards a view of the future they are what psychologists would call

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object-less but my notion of hope is one that articulates an idea of the future a possible world that is very attractive and that can motivate us to push through the

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challenges that we face today and the challenges we'll face in the future and that's more of a psychological stance if the first is a moral stance towards truth the second is an epistemological stance towards the kind of knowledge that we

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need to hope well the third is as a psychological uh a psychological perspective on on what hope needs to be in order to give us a sense of agency

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and powerful motivation to persevere through difficult times so those three components i mean frankly they're a reflection of my own kind of hope my hope is is realistic ruthlessly realistic about

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the nature of the challenges we face i spend a lot of time thinking about how the people around me are looking at the world so that i can either ally with them more effectively talk to

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them more effectively bridge my differences with them or strategically work around them in my political engagement to try to solve problems like climate change and then thirdly it all only matters if

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i have an idea of where i want to go what is the world that i want to have in the future that is appealing and that a world in which i think my children will thrive so in some sense this notion of pope is

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very much a reflection of the way i unpack the concept but in in the book i ground this in philosophy and psychology positive psychology in particular because there are a lot of people out there who

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thought very clearly and well about hope and so that's those those ideas are a starting point for the way i approach the topic and you know one key takeaway for me from the beginning of the book on hope

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from you that i'm i think i'm gonna take on from now on in my sort of everyday life and it would make me self-conscience self-conscious about the way i speak about hope and the way i use hope

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even is the the the the uh distinction between hope that and hope too can you please talk us through that please yes so this is an important part of uh

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of what i guess i would call powerful hope it's a the distinction that allows us to have a sense of agency in our use of hope so most people when they're asked about hope will use statements like i hope that

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it's sunny tomorrow or maybe you know more in a moment of humor i hope that i win the lottery uh or or in very practical sense i hope

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that my my ill mother will get better if she's got cancer or something like that so these are common hope statements but each one is a

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is a hope that locution or a hopeful that expression so i hope that something will come to pass a possible world and the future that i desire will come to pass it's very passive it's it there's

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there's this sense that we have no control over any of those outcomes and in many cases we may not so for instance i don't have any control over the weather it's sunny today as you can see but tomorrow it might not be i can hope that it's going to be sunny but i can't

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actually change it one way or the other and that may be the trade true with for instance my mother's illness um but i argue with commanding hope that at least with respect to the challenges

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that humankind faces these terrible problems that we're facing we need to adopt a different kind of locution a hope to locution now every time you say i hope to something uh there's a verb there's a

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verb that follows hope two it's a verb that says we are going to be actively engaged i hope to plant my garden tomorrow i hope to convince my neighbors to uh to

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not play their music so loudly i i hope to you know i hope to work with my community to try to limit carbon emissions i hope i hope to help the world

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cap carbon cap global warming at 1.5 degrees in each case we're saying i'm going to be a part of that process i i have agency uh some small role to play in producing that

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desirable world that we're that we are hoping for and so it's a very different approach to hope and that's at the core of my notion of powerful hope because that's a notion of hope that

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really emphasizes agency our capacity to actually make a difference in the world and i think one of the reasons that hope is frequently criticized and regarded as a passive emotion is because people automatically think of it in terms of hope that

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but it's quite easy to make the flip to hope too and that's something i encourage in the book that's why i believe it as a as a matter of personal exercise and personal conduct i think it's a very healthy to

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switch myself from the sort of classic hope that to hope too which immediately puts the responsibility or the onus on me to realize or recognize

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and acknowledge the fact that i am to some degree or another participant in the action and therefore to some degree or another i do have an imp import and impact on the whole system

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uh and and i'm responsible for recognizing at least that fact and i'm responsible for at least controlling my own maybe minuscule part of the system but still i'm responsible for that

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and i should be proactive about it rather than passive so so i i thank you for that kind of insight i think it's very healthy there's one other thing too and this is uh uh

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this sort of reflects this idea that reinold niebuhr suggested in the middle of the 20th century to have the wisdom to distinguish between those situations we can change in those situations we can't so it is important to sometimes say but

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the best i can do is to hope that in this situation and part of what honest hope is about is teasing out the places where we can have agency and make a difference in the places where we can't although i argue that frequently we throw up our

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hands too soon and say there's nothing we can do whereas many cases if we use our imaginations a bit there's a lot we can do so we have to be very careful about shifting back to hope that

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uh we should start with hope too what can i do and then if if in the end we decide there's not much we can do or nothing then then we move on to what we can do but uh that's that that's a

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very important process of using our imaginations to explore possibilities before we make that that we we decide that the situation is uh more deterministic and there's not so much we can do let me

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just ask you to zoom back out a little bit with me and talk about the site subtitle the power we have to renew a world in peril now we discussed sort of the power in our responsibility with that distinction

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about hope but let's talk about a world in peril now if i were to ask you to zoom out as far away as possible and think about what is the biggest pair the biggest top

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two or three perils that humanity as a civilization is facing today how would you rank them well um right at the top of the list and not

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the top of most people's lists but right at the top of my list is our absolutely disastrous relationship with the natural systems around us and the fact that we are we are pushing those natural systems beyond the boundary of their capacity to

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repair themselves or to stabilize themselves i mean climate change is the most obvious obvious example i think now to people most people get that we've got a real problem with climate i don't think they realize how serious the problem is for

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the most part but uh but the our disastrous relationship with the natural world is manifesting itself in a lot of ways you know collapsing pollinator systems

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and we need pollinators to produce a lot of our food disappearing fish stocks around the world coral reefs dying you know coral reef supply are the principle the fisheries they're supported by coral

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reefs are the principal source of protein for about a billion people on the planet uh uh mammalian populations around the planet are collapsing and so we're starting to get a lot of signals that the

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the resource extraction and the pollution output into our natural resource extraction from and pollution output into our natural systems are starting to push these systems beyond the boundaries of their

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stabilizing mechanisms and if they flip you know once you get and i start the book with a story about this once they flip into a different state we're not going to be able to get them back into the productive stable states that

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have allowed human civilization to flourish so for me that envelope of natural systems around human civilization uh is vitally important and gets nowhere

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near as much attention as it deserves and to the extent that we're just damaging it or destroying it uh it's going to rebound on our on our civilizations and undermine

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our our economic well-being uh dramatically reduced ultimately our gross domestic product the the amount of goods and services we can produce through our economies and that will in turn affect social and

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political stability to the extent that our economies become weaker less productive uh we're going to deepen divisions within our societies rich and powerful groups will do what they can to hold on to what they've got

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and others will become increasingly vulnerable to uh to stress and of course to the environmental shocks that are at the same time increasing in in in in becoming increasingly extreme

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so uh so this is a this is a bad future we wreck our natural environment we end up wrecking our economies and we wreck our political and social stability so this goes back you know to the beginning of our interview where i talked about my very early research

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and it's it's ultimately why why i spend so much time in my books talking about issues such as climate change climate change is going to become this century the dominant threat to the human species

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it i have absolutely no doubt about that if we go even to three degrees warming and we're about 1.2 right at the moment above pre-industrial temperatures but if we go to even three degrees warming there isn't an ecosystem on the planet

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that will not be shredded by that and there's no prospect for anything resembling liberal democracy to serve to survive in a world that's three degrees warmer than it was pre-industrial times uh we won't be able to grow the food

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among other things that we need to support the 10 billion people who will be on the planet so so uh so that's right at the top of my list and then they're they're a series of i guess you could say sort of subordinate or derivative

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problems i've sort of talked about them uh widening economic inequalities rising political polarization the rise of populist authoritarianism um uh some of the technological stresses

00:36:03

that our societies are facing which are uh uh creating i mean i'm thinking for instance in particular uh developments in social media technologies that seem to be reinforcing divides between groups and deepening

00:36:17

deepening we they divisions uh between identity groups and he and here's a big one and i think and and this is sort of at the confluence point of a lot of this stuff

00:36:28

is what i would call a kind of epistemic fragmentation where where we're losing the ability as societies to have agreement on very basic facts and to the extent that we don't agree on

00:36:41

basic facts about the nature of the world and the nature of the challenges we face it's very hard to to solve those problems effectively democracy for instance can't effective effectively function

00:36:52

if if the people who are talking to each other don't actually agree on what the problems are and don't have any a basic agreement about the the facts of the matter or the nature of reality around it

00:37:03

and that epistemic fragmentation is now life especially within western democracies and we can see it of course in the united states so that's my i guess you could say my short list of challenges uh and and it's daunting because they're

00:37:18

all happening simultaneously in a way people don't recognize they're all kind of integrated with each other and they and they're reinforcing each other it's people call this kind of perfect storm but they don't but the problem with the

00:37:30

language the perfect storm terminology is it sort of implies that each one of these things whether it's economic stress or climate change or political polarization rising authoritarianism

00:37:41

you know collapse of mammalian populations they're all kind of separate distinct problems but actually they're all they're all affecting each other at this point and it's those synergies those that kind of synchronization of these

00:37:54

problems that's most dangerous for us uh because it kind of it's it's likely and this is a point i make going all the way back to the ingenuity gap it's likely to kind of overwhelm our coping mechanisms our institutions our

00:38:06

capacity to solve problems so this is a it's a thick stew of issues for us and uh and it and i can understand why and this is where hope comes in a lot of people look at it and say and to the extent they understand

00:38:19

what's going on they say oh wow can't do a deal with this this is too big this is too much i'm just a little person there's nothing i can do and they either deny that it's happening or just end up in a

00:38:31

in despair and walk away and throw up their hands well we'll we'll get into that in a second but before that let me just uh push back a little bit not from my thoughts because i actually really like that

00:38:43

epistemic fragmentation thesis i haven't heard it defined quite like that before and i absolutely love it i think it's it's perfectly capturing sort of the foundation of the problem

00:38:55

because we're kind of like playing a game but if we are playing under the same rules then we're playing the same game then we can get somewhere but if we're not playing under the same rules or we're refusing to even recognize that

00:39:09

even we're playing with each other or something then it becomes really dangerous because it's completely out of control and then it becomes really unpredictable right and and i think that concept of epistemic fragmentation really captures

00:39:21

it well the problem is can i yeah can i just jump in very quickly so so the the idea of a game is really important and the rules of the game so what's happened is that to the extent that that we've we

00:39:33

have lost the common understanding of our reality then people start attacking the rules of the game and and that's you know going back to my work on conflict

00:39:45

that's it that you're only a few steps away from mass violence at that point because as soon as you start to attack the rules of the game you you you're starting to say that some people are not playing by rules anymore that we agree with

00:39:58

and they are essentially outside the the moral ambit of our community in other words we don't we we have we don't think anything they think is legitimate anymore even their status as human beings is not legitimate

00:40:11

anymore and that's that's just a short step away from the kind of massive uh inhumane violence mass violence that we've seen uh for instance in the 20th century where where you have

00:40:24

genocides uh carpet bombing uh grotesque acts of terrorism etc it's it's that it's that move towards believing that other people are not playing by the rules of the game that is

00:40:38

so dangerous so do you think then that we are not far away from that kind of a moment right now you know it's very interesting i i think that it's kind of up in the air i said at the beginning it's like all the

00:40:51

pieces are unlocked and everything is in motion and i think the pandemic has been a a moment that has both accenture accentuated these tendencies but also reminded us in some ways of something that's very

00:41:03

important and that we should remember with respect to a problem like climate change that we are in a situation of shared fate on this planet this is a very small place and there are a lot of us here and we've got to do things now pretty carefully or we're all going to

00:41:16

we're all going to to end up in a all of us in a very bad place we can't it's not the case that a few of us can go off and gate ourselves off and protect ourselves you know i get asked uh quite frequently

00:41:30

by people so where can i go where can i go when climate change gets bad where can i go when things start to fall apart and my answer is well nowhere because it's going to affect us all

00:41:42

climate change is affecting the entire atmospheric ocean oceanic system of the planet is you could go you try to go to tasmania or new zealand or iceland but but the energy imbalances and the

00:41:56

extremes of climate are going to get you there just as much as anywhere else well peter is going to new zealand definitely and then his buddy elon musk wants to go to mars

00:42:08

yes well very few of us are going to get to mars and you know for the folks who want to fly to new zealand when things start to fall apart you know my first question is well i you know are you going to take your pilot's family are you going to

00:42:20

take your mechanics family are you going to take an entire warehouse of all of the bits of technology from the bearings in your in your jet engines to extra chips for your computers

00:42:32

uh down there so that you can sustain the complex system of services and technologies that you rely upon and what happens by the way when it's some kind of new virus or antibiotic resistant bacteria

00:42:46

infiltrate their way into new zealand which they will and the medical system of the world has fallen apart and you're there by yourself watching this come i mean you know you can you can try to shut yourself off from

00:43:00

these changes but all that's really going to happen for these extraordinarily wealthy folks with their in their in their estates in new zealand with their landing strips and stuff is that they're just going to have an extra couple of decades to watch things

00:43:13

fall apart around them and that doesn't sound very appealing to me so so you know to get back to my point we're in a situation of shared fate and i think that that the pandemic has helped

00:43:26

remind many people around the world of this reality so whether we're going to go to the what i would call the mad max world where everybody thinks no but other folks aren't playing by the rules and we need to fight and we

00:43:39

need to we need to prepare to kill them or whether we're going to go to the pathway where we we see that we actually have to pull together to solve these problems together i think that's very much

00:43:50

up in the air i think it's an open question at the moment well how do you feel from sort of i don't want to call it criticism but it's kind of like they're they're kind of stealing the the

00:44:03

the light from this issue in a way by i mean take elon musk he says that the biggest threat humanity has ever faced is artificial intelligence and then you have bill gates steve wozniak

00:44:15

uh even dr stephen hawking said that the the beginning of ai may be the end of humanity uh elon musk even said that that uh ai is more dangerous than nukes which i totally disagree with him and actually

00:44:29

when i go and do my keynotes i often say that in my view the biggest the most dangerous phenomenon on the human on our planet is uh human stupidity it's not artificial intelligence because we're not anywhere

00:44:42

close to artificial general intelligence but yet human stupidity is prevalent all over the place and as you said in the beginning the enemy is us right and and that's that's that's

00:44:54

also the point that i'm trying to get across when i go out and speak there but yet people with who are kind of getting disproportionate amount of mass media coverage like elon and others are pushing the line that ai is the most

00:45:07

dangerous thing on our planet well so that you raise a bunch of really interesting points and by the way to my previous list i would need need to add nuclear weapons and their possible use

00:45:19

that's an issue that i started working on when i was a graduate student at mit that was one of the principal reasons i went there as part of a group of researchers focusing on the u.s soviet arms race in those days in the 1980s

00:45:32

it's still an enormous challenge i actually talk in the book about a woman back in the 1950s stephanie may who mobilized mothers around the world to she's my next question so keep that story okay

00:45:45

it's the best story for hope so keep it to the side so we'll keep that but but but the nuclear weapons issue figures quite prominently in the book and i'd also agree that in some broader sense and this is why i spend so much

00:45:58

time inside people's minds and talking about psychology and social psychology that that it's a kind of human stupidity or or hubris uh lack of moral compass

00:46:09

incapacity to see the world as other people see it that that we need to address and so in the book that's why i spent a lot of time providing people with some basic tools so they can for instance understand

00:46:21

other people's worldviews better uh so artificial intelligence um when i was at mit i spent a fair amount of time working with artificial intelligence researchers

00:46:35

in the 1980s now of course it was very different in those days that was just the beginning of neural network research thinking machines and the like um and uh but i did get a pretty good

00:46:46

understanding of the basic premises of of uh artificial intelligence and potential applications for instance in natural language understanding understanding everyday speech and uh

00:46:59

and i've watched the evolution and the the hype around artificial intelligence over the last few years with a bit of skepticism it sounds like we probably shared that skepticism i think the most dangerous thing about ai is not

00:47:11

super smart ai it's uh stupid ai it's artificial intelligence that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes in our societies but not good enough to not make really

00:47:25

bad mistakes yeah exactly and i think it's interesting that people have backed off a little bit with uh autonomous vehicles you know everybody was super excited about autonomous vehicles we'd be driving them everywhere by 2020.

00:47:39

yeah and then you know it turns out that it's actually fairly easy to spoof uh an autonomous vehicle system and it's recognition of a stop sign by putting some kind of you know little distracting symbol on

00:47:52

the stop sign and then it no longer recognizes it you know and then there's this broader issue of of being able to get inside other people's heads as we're driving down the road all the time we're looking at other

00:48:05

people and because we have very advanced theories of mind we are coming to very quick decisions about what they are doing in their driving behavior or whether there are pedestrians on the side of the street about to cross in a crosswalk or something

00:48:18

and we do things like we look we look at the direction of their eyes we look at the expression on our face if we're talking about somebody that might be just about to step into a crosswalk we look we look at whether they're having a conversation with somebody

00:48:31

we look at whether they think they're distracted or paying attention and we do all that processing incredibly fast it's something that we've learned to do ever since we were you know we were toddlers basically interpreting social arrangements and

00:48:43

social behavior around us and it's it's uh and and it requires a very sophisticated understanding of of human intentionality and human agency

00:48:55

and uh and and uh it's you can try to program that into an ai system using a series of decision rules and you will get it right most of the time maybe even 99.9 percent of the time

00:49:09

but that 0.01 percent of the time can kill people and and i i think what we're going to find with a lot of these technologies is that is that human beings actually do this stuff better

00:49:21

and will continue to do it better for a long period of time so i don't i don't see i don't see the terminator future coming to pass i see

00:49:32

something more like um i think i would be a good a good example of stupid ai in in pop culture i was thinking of colossus the forbidden project which was a movie from the 1970s that was sort of

00:49:46

a precursor to the terminator series but even there the computer is is obviously incredibly smart it outstrips human intelligence in this case i think it's more likely that

00:49:59

that we will think we will think that we this particular set of procedures ai procedures that we linked into our strategic nuclear weapons system uh will keep us safer but we haven't recognized that they're

00:50:12

unintended that there are consequences glitches in it that make it actually stupid and it mistakes the flock of geese for an incoming barrage of russian missiles and and you know unleashes everything in response

00:50:25

before we can intervene you know so that's stupid ai and and uh i find that actually very dangerous i don't i don't think that it's going to supersede human intelligence any time

00:50:37

soon but we could end up relying on it too much that it causes us catastrophic problems yeah i i agree with that but so before i ask you about stephanie's may story let me just ask you one last thing here

00:50:49

on this because uh you know there's people like stephen pinker who would tell us about the better uh angels of our nature you know i've had here ray kurzweil who was telling us that the singularity

00:51:02

is near i've had peter diamandis who told us that you know we are going to live and we already live in a world of abundance and not only that but the future is better than we think so you have these people who you know i

00:51:15

call just like you the techno solutionists um and yet they are again taking a big uh chunk of the media coverage and they're very capable of sending their message out there

00:51:27

uh people want to hear their message people want to pay for their message then the doomsayers like you are the skeptics and and the sort of poor philosophers like me they're not so

00:51:38

popular so how do you feel about that uh what's the best attitude and behavior towards it and how do we resolve that problem or if it's a problem at all well maybe it's self-serving but i would say it's one of the burdens that

00:51:52

realists have to have to bear right so i'm not inclined and this may you know this is self-serving and maybe enormously unfair but i'm not inclined

00:52:04

simply to tell people stories they want to hear of course people want to hear that the future is going to be good of course of course people want to hear that there's this trajectory of increasing abundance that we can use our our our minds to

00:52:18

solve all the problems we have and we'll live together forever on top of it right exactly and and uh you know as as you know i think it's in chapter nine of the book i actually

00:52:31

or chapter eight i i i mentioned these folks all of the ones you just talked about curtsville tinker diamandis all of them are all mentioned and i refer to them as techno optimists

00:52:43

and pinker is a little bit distinct because for him it's not just about improving technology and technological possibility in the future it's about it's about the capacity of human reason to expand its ambit

00:52:56

its scope and and how that over time it drives and expanding expanding um uh radius of empathy and and uh what you might call more

00:53:09

tolerant values within our societies producing more peace more cooperation there's there's much especially when it comes to pinker there's much unsympathetic with and that i think we could have a very constructive conversation but

00:53:23

i think one of the mistakes that all of these folks make is they they have a a fairly selective interpretation of the past where they identify a series of data points that suggest that things have

00:53:35

have improved a lot and they have improved a lot when you look at mortality sickness around the world when you look at general quality of life we've seen extraordinary improvements in in the spread of basic freedoms although

00:53:48

some of that's been ratcheted back over the last little while last few years but if you look back over the course of the last century the quality of human life in general has improved enormously but the mistake is to assume that that

00:54:01

it's it's to extract extrapolate those trends into the future and assume that the future is going to be simply a a linear extrapolation or a more or less straight-line extrapolation of the past

00:54:13

and instead i think what we're looking at is the emergence of potential tipping points and massive negative non-linearities in the system and we can say that because we've seen these kinds of things happen in civilizations before

00:54:25

where people have said oh it's all good and we're all okay and we just have to keep doing more of what we're doing and we're on a great trajectory here and then and then things go off a cliff and the evidence is suggesting that there are cliffs coming we don't know

00:54:38

how close they are but they could be it could be coming soon and they could be a disastrous consequence for us so there's this tendency to look to the past and assume the past is going to be

00:54:56

[Music] a version of the past and and uh and then the other part of it is that they they frequently they're quite selective in their use of data and uh they highlight

00:55:11

successes and they are paying attention to sort of the structural inequalities in the global system and enormous numbers of people who haven't actually seen a huge amount of improvement at all or the cost there the cost of the species and the plan the

00:55:25

biosphere right and these external costs which are building up kind of what i say beyond the horizon of our visibility we dump a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we don't see the consequences for a long time

00:55:37

and that's allowed us to transfer wealth essentially from the future and from our natural environment into our present consumption but those costs are now starting to impinge upon us in major ways so

00:55:48

you know i look at pinker's books his latest one enlightenment now and i read very carefully his section on climate change he takes climate change seriously but for me this is a litmus test right he takes climate change seriously he

00:56:01

recognizes the gravity of the problem but he still thinks that ultimately we you know we can solve this fairly easily if we just apply our brains to it well we've been trying to apply our brains to it in some ways for almost 30 or 40 years now and we aren't making any

00:56:13

progress virtually no progress when you look at carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere uh and and so it suggests that maybe that kind of optimism about human

00:56:25

reasoning and rationality is misplaced yeah and even the whole idea of of what the enlightenment was i interviewed aydah palmer who is one of my favorite historians from the university of chicago

00:56:37

and she was talking about how people have this kind of romantic view of the enlightenment but how most people don't know the fact that life expectancy dropped from 35 to 18

00:56:50

during the beginning and middle stages of the enlightenment and how there were many communities where men of fighting age were completely uh disappeared were an extinct species simply because of of the

00:57:02

violence that was ever present in those societies uh especially at the heart of the enlightenment you know the italian city-states and and all the neighboring countries like it was literally

00:57:15

the hopsian state of war of uh of one against all at all times basically uh and even when it's historically a peace period there's still ever-present violence at so many levels right yes

00:57:29

yes so and even during the industrial revolution which laid the foundation for this explosion of wealth around the planet in the 20th century but in the early parts of the industrial revolution you know the dickensian period in the 19th century there was a

00:57:43

sharp decline in the well-being of large numbers of people as they were moved into essentially these labor pools to drive to power factories and the like so there are huge costs these transitions

00:57:55

involve huge costs and it's it's easy to be pollyannaish about it to sort of look at only the the the bright possibilities on the bright sides and select the data and i think there's a lot of data selection going on with these folks yeah

00:58:08

especially if you're on the beneficiary end of things if you end up being on the upside rather than the downside uh unfortunately uh todd time is really advancing so i'm starting to get concerned here we only have 20

00:58:21

minutes left so let's quickly touch on the heart the the best story about hope that i've heard in a very long time which is the story of stephanie may and then we can hopefully jump towards

00:58:33

what we can do about all of this so now we've laid the groundwork and we spent most of the time laying the groundwork of the how profound of a problem we're facing today and we touched on many of its facets now let's talk about the most hopeful

00:58:46

story i've ever heard one i've never heard before i actually read your book which is the story of stephanie may okay so stephanie mays it's very serendipitous i stumble upon the story um so i'll tell

00:58:59

i'll tell a story about the story and then i'll tell the story itself the story about the story is that back when i started my university education here on vancouver island at the university of victoria in 1976 i

00:59:11

guess 75 76 long time ago there was a canadian scholar and uh international public official by the name of bill epstein at the university of victoria he was

00:59:24

taking lee from the united nations to write a book on nuclear proliferation he was one of the world's leading authorities on the spread of nuclear weapons around the world

00:59:35

and uh he was also the most senior canadian in this in the united nations secretariat but he was visiting for a year to write his book and we got to know each other he became my mentor for a number of years and

00:59:47

somewhere around that time it might have been a couple of years later he said to me he said to me you know it was the mothers that made all the difference he said it was mothers mobilizing around the world that stopped the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and

01:00:01

uh if you're unfamiliar with that history that you're about to share with us that sounds like the most ridiculous statement yes it does and and and actually you know their mobilization around the world

01:00:12

was the impetus for the partial test ban treaty which was the first major arms control agreement between the united states and the soviet union that put testing of nuclear weapons underground instead testing in the atmosphere so you know you know i filed that in the

01:00:25

way and backed my mind and think about it but 40 years later when i'm working on this book i realized i needed a story that would really capture this notion of hope that i was developing and

01:00:37

i i i remembered what bill had told me so i went to the web as we do nowadays and i entered a few search terms and before long i came up with a a chapter in a book and i had no name on it but just said the title of the chapter

01:00:49

was my mother helped save the world and uh uh and and so i started investigating and after a while i discovered that the chapter was about this woman stephanie

01:01:01

may and i'll tell the story in a second that the chapter had been written by elizabeth may who's the leader of the green party in canada at the time and somebody i happen to know so i wrote to elizabeth right away and i said gee i'd like to know more about

01:01:14

your mother and and her her work to stop the testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s and uh and so st so elizabeth said well you know i think my brother still has her memoirs

01:01:27

at our old house in cape breton because the may family had moved from the united states to canada in in the 19 early 1970s so i went out to cape breton a couple of months later and i met

01:01:40

jeff jeff may jeffrey may and he brought over his mom's memoirs is a 400 pages type manuscript of which no no other copy existed and he said at the same time he said i think you'll be interested in these

01:01:53

scrapbooks so he tossed a couple scrapbooks on the table and the scrapbooks were full of stephanie may's correspondence with some of the most remarkable people in the 1950s and 60s pure gold i just couldn't believe it i

01:02:04

was absolutely stunned by this so that became the material for for telling the story about stephanie may and the story is basically this stephanie may was a housewife in bridgeport connecticut in the 1950s

01:02:18

and she was reading the newspaper and she learned that these enormous number of tests that the soviet union united states were conducting in the atmosphere of atomic bombs and and then hydrogen bombs were basically shrouding the entire

01:02:31

planet in in radioactive material which was bioaccumulating uh into uh ultimately uh fodder and the and the milk from cows that her children were

01:02:44

drinking and was substantially increasing the risk of leukemia for children around the world and stephanie just thought this was outrageous so she started what she could do at a local level she started a petition

01:02:56

and she phoned local clergymen and parish and and priests and others in her community and asked them to distribute her petition in there to their parishes and working with another housewife

01:03:08

uh over a period of time she got a couple of thousand signatures on a petition which was a lot in those days you know this is hard you you actually had to you had to do the lego no email you had to do the legwork it wasn't all

01:03:21

web-based in those days she was working with carbon copies and gestetners and things like that so the the cut a long story short within it within two or three years she had connected

01:03:32

with and mobilized mothers all over the united states and in you know i talked about by 1961 she went to england where she met bertrand russell she became very close friends

01:03:45

with the philosopher bertrand russell she went to england and was at the head of the aldermaston march which was a march from a nuclear research facility called aldermaston to london and then in front of a hundred thousand people in trafalgar

01:03:58

square in london she brought greetings from all the mothers in the united states who were working on on this challenge of stopping testing so i follow that story through the whole book uh

01:04:10

in the last there are a number of episodes because it was hard for her there were many times when she wanted to give up when it seemed like it was impossible um but the final episode she's she's uh

01:04:23

engaged in a hunger strike outside the soviet mission uh and this is i think about 1960 61 late 61 if i recall and uh uh the soviets there had been a

01:04:37

moratorium agreed to testing between the united states and the soviet union and the soviets had just declared they were breaking the moratorium and they were going to explode the biggest bombs in history yeah so so stephanie said this is crazy

01:04:50

you know this is not just about opposing the united states it's about opposing the soviet union too and and her community of activists was not was not inclined to go as far as she was and stephanie said well i just have to

01:05:02

do something so she she went on hunger strike outside the soviet mission in uh to the united nations in new york and uh and and she was just there by herself for days

01:05:14

and then all of a sudden the media started to pay attention and she got national attention across all the major media in the last days or a hunger strike and at that point hunger strikes started all the way across the country

01:05:26

other mothers deciding that something had to be done so so i use i use stephanie's story as a way of talking in a very personal way about this notion of hope because her hope had those

01:05:37

characteristics of honesty astuteness and it was psychologically powerful in just the way i tried to articulate in the book she said living which was a living and breathing example of commanding hope i think an example

01:05:51

today of somebody who is who has exhibited the same kind of hope is creta dunberg the young swedish climate activist who who is extraordinarily

01:06:03

astute about how to operate strategically in her in her political and social environment she's deeply honest about and realistic about the nature of the climate crisis and the science and she has a very clear moral vision of

01:06:15

where she wants to go just the way stephanie did so that's the powerful hope component that's the object of her hope is very clear in her mind and i think these things these stories tell me that this is a capacity that we

01:06:27

all have inside ourselves to make a difference stephanie didn't start out to change the world she just started out to do something and she ended up changing the world but in the end she actually led to to the treaty her actions led us to

01:06:39

the treaty banning atmospheric nuclear weapons testing right so there that you know the interesting thing is there are a lot of different people involved i mean there were scientists and politicians and journalists and and there were all kinds of people who

01:06:52

said this is nuts but what stephanie did and i i do a systems analysis using some work of the famous systems theorist donald meadows she actually very deliberately

01:07:04

she wasn't a systems theorist of course but she knew what she was doing strategically she created channels of communication between mothers who otherwise have been this kind of diffuse amorphous group disconnected group of

01:07:17

people she created a community identity of of concerned mothers across the united states and then she created a channel of communication between those mothers and very powerful politicians in in washington and those politicians

01:07:30

she didn't let those politicians forget about the mothers she just kept hammering away and she was very good at making her point about the importance of the mothers and the children in in in sort of crystal clear

01:07:43

aphoristic ways like single sentences and single arguments that just you know sometimes just left her opponents kind of speechless they didn't know what to say because she was very smart and she knew how to operate within

01:07:56

the system because she knew she had this kind of very astute understanding of how the other people she was working with saw the world with whether they were opponents or allies and she could

01:08:07

work strategically with those with those folks and around those folks as necessary so that's she um she was kind of a prototype of the of of what all of us can do today i think

01:08:20

the kind of of the kind of astute systems operator that you need today so that we have about 10 minutes left so we managed to sort of lay out the story of the

01:08:32

honest situation or or challenge that we find ourselves in we've gone through the story of stephanie may which is one of the most hopeful story about how a housewife a simple housewife from connecticut can start the

01:08:46

butterfly effect which leads to the uh the treaty banning atmospheric nuclear weapons testing which by the way goes back to the pendulum right because these small things can make a very big difference right

01:08:58

absolutely absolutely dead on and and so but but now i want to bring in another element which where the pendulum metaphors is probably uh imperfect because i want to bring in the importance of a story

01:09:10

and and you hear in one place of your book and you're quoting somebody else uh when you say when we get our story wrong we get our future wrong so we have about eight minutes dad

01:09:23

what is the story that you want to tell us about how we should go about solving these problems and the story of the future that would kind of inspire us and give us hope to actually start

01:09:36

taking those actions what's that story so that's a wonderful quotation from david corton who uh who talks about the importance of stories and this is something

01:09:46

i begin the book with my daughter kate finding uh an academic article a scientific article on on my wife sarah's desk and it's it it's a it's a grim scientific article it basically talks

01:10:00

about potential tipping points in the global ecosystems in the future if we continue to damage uh global ecosystems as we are right now and it comes up with a specific prediction

01:10:11

for uh when those non-linearities might occur when we might start to see the global collapse of ecosystems around 2045 and kate is four and she can't read the article and she asks her mother so what's the story about

01:10:25

mummy what's sarah going to say right so she says she says uh it's about how the world might change when you're a little bigger darling and it goes back to her marking at the

01:10:38

time but states kate flips flips the article over and takes out takes some of mommy's colored pens and does a picture which is reproduced in the book of her own story of the future which is a flower growing out of the landscape and

01:10:51

a big happy face on the flower and little kate's a stick figure at the bottom waving at the at the viewer so she's created her own story about the future and so i come back to this issue of stories and how we organize our thinking

01:11:03

and worlds around stories and especially stories of ours of what our own purpose in life is uh how we respond to our desperate fear of mortality and death i draw on the work of the anthropologist

01:11:16

and social psychologist ernest becker which has been elaborated by social psychologists in something called terror management theory we create these hero stories these sense of immortality projects we're going to be good parents we're going to be

01:11:29

going to write a book we're going to have a wonderful podcast we're going to be a good community member we're going to be we're going to help build our local faith community all of these things give us a sense of endurance and possibility beyond our mortal

01:11:42

existence right they are symbolic hero stories or immortality projects so we need to we need to create these possibilities so people can see themselves in the future in such a positive way at the end of the

01:11:54

book i say there's another episode with kate where she's very scared because she thinks something bad's happening and she turns me with tears in her eyes and she she asks will this story have a happy

01:12:06

ending and it's funny you know we never ask that as adults because we know that most stories don't have a happy ending and in fact there's no ending to most stories the world just keeps unfolding but

01:12:20

this book is really my my in a sense attempt to articulate a story for my children um i'd start at the beginning of the book by talking about how kids build their imaginary realities

01:12:32

and ben and kate when they were playing together when they were young use the phrase how about all the time how about you know we create this with lego blocks how about we imagine this world and then live in it for a while

01:12:45

and we forget to do those how abouts and in some sense this book commanding hope is my how about for the children and i think i think they can have a life full of purpose and meaning in the future this

01:12:59

is going to be to you know get directly to your question this is going to be a period of time of enormous import for the for the human species it really is all on the line this century

01:13:10

we're either going to live we're going to grow up and learn to live as as a mature species a morally mature species a not stupid species in this small ecosystem

01:13:23

and flourish together along with nature or we're going to probably wipe ourselves out it won't happen in one big bang it'll be a it'll be a long extended process of disintegration of social order and

01:13:37

and decline and well-being but over the long run that's a that's a species dead end it might take centuries it might take millennia but it's a species dead end so everything's on the line and this is a moment where everybody can

01:13:50

play a role it's an extraordinary exciting time in in the evolution of our species and it's a time when we can start to articulate new possibilities for the future moral possibilities about how we see each other

01:14:03

uh so that we we we don't end up fighting each other so i don't know and the other part of this the other part of this thinking about stories is to recognize that we don't know the worlds around us the systems

01:14:16

around us well enough to know that good things are impossible so if somebody had said and to come to the great thundberg example if somebody had said in 2017 that a

01:14:28

a little girl 14 or 15 years old is going to sit on the steps of the swedish parliament building with a sign saying in swedish school strike and her little backpack beside her and she was going to galvanize a global movement to tens if

01:14:41

not hundreds of millions of people to demand climate action we would have said oh that's a ridiculous idea it's never going to happen and yet it was right there across the boundary of what complexity scientists call the adjacent possible it was just invisible to us

01:14:53

and greater thunderberg single-handedly pulled it into the present and made it possible pulled it into reality there are many many other possibilities out there a positive possibilities i'm sure just because we don't see them doesn't

01:15:06

mean they aren't there and that gives me an enormous sense of hope you do the stephanie may thing you do the great thunderbird thing you do what you can in your own lives you think big and you use your imaginations

01:15:18

we don't know what the possibilities are here for positive change we may be on the cusp this is the core of my positive story we may be on the cusp as a species of a transformative revolution in

01:15:30

human perspectives and living on this planet it has happened before in the past the great german existential philosopher carl jaspers has spoke of the axial age between 600 bc

01:15:42

bce and 200 bce during which five human civilizations all shifted their cosmologies simultaneously they weren't communicating much with each other but that shift in cosmology laid the groundwork for modernity we may

01:15:56

be on the cusp of a second axial age in the 21st century and and because the moment that we face as a species is completely unprecedented we've never been in a situation like this before so it's it's quite conceivable that

01:16:09

unprecedented positive changes are possible for us that's the story i tell about to my children uh that that they can be part of uh it's scary exciting but it's also

01:16:23

meaningful and meaning is the most important thing of all if you're going to push through scary times dad for those of our viewers and listeners who may be interested in in hearing more about your story and going following you further along

01:16:36

on your journey and perhaps even doing what we all hope they will do which is to become active participant in that story what's the best place for them to follow you and your work

01:16:48

well they can go to my website which is uh homerdickson.com uh without a hyphen h-o-m-e-r-d-i-x-o-n.com they can go to the book website commanding hope there's a lot of stuff there

01:17:00

including direct links to some of these tools for modeling people's belief systems one that i talk about in the book called cognitive effective mapping we have software that allows anybody to do that basically to represent

01:17:14

other people's points of view their emotional responses to to the world to a problem like climate change or to black lives matter or anything you can use these maps for all kinds of useful purposes uh but the

01:17:27

other thing i think it might be worth keeping an eye on is this new institute that that i've worked to found uh here on vancouver island it's called the cascade and in some ways commanding hope is a

01:17:39

100 000 word pitch for what we're trying to do in the cascade institute which is identify these possibilities for producing really big changes with relatively small interventions again going back to the pendulum

01:17:51

you know if you just if you just start the pendulum in a slightly different way it follows a very different pathway and and so the cascade institute is about finding what we call high leverage intervention points in

01:18:04

people's belief systems in our institutions in our technologies that allow us to tip the world more quickly in a very positive direction and there's lots of material there that anybody can read

01:18:16

that that can show show them how what some of these possibilities might look like and how we can implement some of them in our in our personal lives so that's in terms of the substance i'd start with

01:18:28

the cascade institute website it's cascadeinstitute.org and uh the institute's only been around now for 10 months but there will be a lot more there and that's probably where we're going to be putting all of the stuff that's relevant to

01:18:41

this more hopeful story and you know i remember when i was playing with the pendulum itself you know maybe i'm waving my own flag here but my third attempt i think was pretty good and pretty impressive

01:18:52

relatively speaking so i think hopefully what we could manage to do is kind of like you know push it over 30 40 50 60 years which would give us more leeway

01:19:04

more more time to come up with better solution better coordination better story that would create that weakness that you're talking about or the dalai lama calls about uh talks about oneness yes and and so that

01:19:18

that we can we can we can do what's required of us to do but you know if we just like i took that pendulum example for the rest of my life uh now if people were to take a single

01:19:32

lesson or the most important thing from our conversation with you today what would you like that to be well you come back to the stephanie may story and the great at the dunberg story i mean in some ways stephanie may

01:19:45

granted doonberg is an enormously unusual person for a whole bunch of reasons but stephanie may you know by all intents and purposes she was a regular what we would have called in those days a regular housewife i mean she showed the capacity of an

01:19:57

individual perhaps at the right time and place but also an individual who who who's stubborn smart persistent can produce extraordinary change but you know you mention the issue of

01:20:10

weakness one doesn't ultimately do it by oneself one has to build communities and a sense of common identity around these projects and uh and so that starts you know

01:20:22

fundamentally with what one does in one's family and within this community the conversations we have around the dinner table how one how politically involved one is and and uh and the kind of how much time one

01:20:34

spends to actually learn about the issues so that one's smart about them these things are all all things that ultimately we can do as individuals it's going to the changes will happen if house positive changes will happen they

01:20:46

will happen because because of the aggregate effect of the actions of all on enormous numbers of individuals if we don't act if we don't have hope necessary to

01:20:59

mobilize ourselves as individuals to act as individuals then the worst outcomes will come to pass so in some sense it all starts ultimately in our own in our own hearts and in our own emotions and it starts it's a necessary

01:21:11

condition i would say is this kind of hope it's not the it's not sufficient because then you actually have to do something but it starts with believing that we can do something and we can make a difference when we work together with each other

01:21:24

well you know what that kind of brings me to and you talk about the book the the token uh uh distinction between two types of hopes ander and estelle

01:21:36

so so can you perhaps send us away because i think this goes to the co to the heart of what you're talking here if i get this right yes so tolkien very interesting i have a section in the book where i talk about

01:21:49

the lord of the rings and i and because i was reading it to ben and i realized about halfway through the first book that what the one reason this is such a riveting story for so many people is it's really a reflection it's a meditation

01:22:01

tolkien was meditating on what we should do when a situation looks completely hopeless because it looked hopeless for the fellowship of the ring and yet it wasn't and in many respects what tolkien is articulating in a book

01:22:14

is very similar to what i call commanding hope the the fellowship was realistic astute and they had a powerful notion of the possibility of the future so so again it's the same kind of hope

01:22:28

but tolkien was a brilliant man and as is clear and deeply grounded in philosophy and human psychology and it turns out that he reflected on the topic of hope the the concept of hope is mentioned

01:22:41

about 300 times in in the lord of the rings over the three volumes but it isn't unpacked in detail but in in papers that were published posthumously by his son

01:22:54

uh there is an exchange a fictional exchange that tolkien wrote between a an elf uh elf king and or elf prince i think and an old woman

01:23:07

about the nature of hope and uh they introduced in this conversation the difference between two kinds of hope amdir and estelle uh now these are these are concepts of

01:23:19

hope that are fictional within tolkien's cosmology within within his lord of the rings cosmology middle middle earth cosmology but still he's clearly homing in on his own philosophy

01:23:32

of hope and amder is a kind of hope very similar to what i would call commanding hope it's it's uh grounded in the best knowledge we have of the world it it it's it it requires that you have

01:23:45

some sense that good things are possible the possibility may be very small but they're still possible we can have hope with very small possibilities but those possibilities he would argue with

01:23:57

this notion of amder have to be granted grounded in uh real empirical facts and understanding of the world but then he had this other notion of hope

01:24:07

called esthel which was a hope that uh is more objectless it's more an attitude towards future it's the sense of that that even if we can't see any clear

01:24:21

positive possibility in the future that would ground am dear the amder kind of hope we can still have this sense that that there are things we don't know that mean that things could turn out well for

01:24:32

us and and for me what i think tolkien is saying is that just as i was saying before our systems around us and our worlds are so complex that we actually will never know enough to be sure that

01:24:44

there's no grounds for hope we cannot ever know enough to be pessimists basically we cannot know enough to be pessimistic and how does gandalf put it at one point he says he this is a remarkable

01:24:57

statement i mentioned we read this a thousand times he said despair is only for those who know the future without any doubt we do not and and that for me is is the uncertainty itself

01:25:10

most people find uncertainty very scary but for me the uncertainty about the future is an enormous source of possibility it's emancipatory it means we can use our imaginations to explore alternatives

01:25:21

all the time despair is only for those who know the future for sure and we do not no we do not i love that thomas homer dixon thank you very much for being with us

01:25:33

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