Transforming our relationship ~with~ the future

Transforming our relationship ~with~ the future

Originally written as my contribution to the Jihlava Inspiration Forum book, October 2022

The following is my response to the invitation for a brief 1,000 word reflection on the topic:
"How should we transform our relationships for the future? And what can each of us do about it?"

Transforming our relationship ~with~ the future

"The crisis we face is fundamentally one of relating"

The more deeply I reflect on these words from the extraordinary Eve Annecke, the more truth they reveal.

And indeed, useful truth… of that special kind that opens real, practical paths for transforming our future. [i]

That said, I must be clear.

My own dark optimism does not permit me to convey the popular idea that our future can be “anything we dream”; nor even that it will be bright, at least in any common sense of the word.  Quite to the contrary, our time is one of lessons long ignored coming back to bite.

Our time is one in which the common assumption that our children will be better off than us has already quietly reversed.  One in which the hard consequences to hubris come starkly into view, even as we stubbornly insist that our destiny is off-world, exploring the stars...

A Dictionary for Our Times

A Dictionary for Our Times

Originally published in the Spring 2020 edition of STIR magazine

Extracts from David Fleming's extraordinary, posthumous Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (Chelsea Green, 2016).  Selected for this issue by its editor Shaun Chamberlin.  Endnotes omitted.

Asterisks mark words with their own separate entry in the dictionary.  Any of these can be read in full and for free at the newly-launched LeanLogic.online

Expectations. The attitudes and assumptions which shape the way we make sense of events and plan our response. Unless our expectations are right, or at least expressed as a considered set of probabilities, we plan to fail. But, right or wrong, expectations are self-reinforcing, for we see what we expect to see. We may not realise how critical expectations are in guiding perception, but they are decisive. In the context of our perception of *art, the art historian E.H. Gombrich reminds us of . . .