Sunday, June 9, 2013

#160 / Remembering The Future




On Thursday, May 30th, Gar Alperovitz spoke at UC Santa Cruz. As I have reported earlier, I was quite taken by his most recent book, What Then Must We Do?  I found Alperovitz as engaging in person as I had anticipated, based on reading the book. 

Alperovitz talks in his book about "remembering the future," and he doesn't suggest that this is a good thing! The way Alperovitz uses the phrase, we think we know about the future by "remembering" it, but what we in fact "remember" is the past, and when we project the past forward into the future, and assume we are being accurate in our understanding of what the future will be, we profoundly mislead ourselves. 

Since the future is not determined by the past, any effort to look ahead by way of "remembering the future" is fundamentally limiting. 

In fact, it's wrong. 


Image Credit:
http://www.jonhemmersam.dk/2009/11/14/remembering-the-future/


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