6

Imagine Possibility

Things look bleak. The propensity to despair is strong, but should not be indulged. Sing yourself up. Imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it. Gary Younge

“I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS!”

“What’s that, Ben?”

I was making dinner in our kitchen, which opens onto our family room, where Ben was sitting on a couch. He was reading a children’s book about the world’s oceans— First Encyclopedia of Seas & Oceans— that we’d bought when visiting an aquarium.

“Up to seventy million sharks are caught each year,” he read carefully. “Their fins are used to make soup. The rest is thrown away.”

It was late October 2011. Ben was six and already reading well. But I was pretty sure he didn’t know how big a number seventy million is— except that it’s really, really big. I certainly didn’t expect what happened next.

Coming into the kitchen, he stood right in front of me, arms straight and stiff by his sides, hands clenched into two little fists. “This just isn’t right,” he exclaimed, red in the face. “I can’t believe it. We have to do something.” And then, after a few consoling words from me that clearly didn’t help, he dashed upstairs to his room.

I had food on the stove, so I didn’t follow. Twenty minutes later he reappeared holding a drawing he’d just made of a submarine. The vehicle had a transparent pilot’s dome on top, viewing station at the front, propeller at back, and fins on the sides. It also had an articulated arm ending in a nasty-looking claw. “We’ll use this claw,” Ben declared, “to cut the fishing lines of the people catching the sharks.”

Now, in case anyone thinks Sarah and I brainwash our kids with radical environmentalism, let me be clear: although I suppose we could be classified as North American middle-class environmentalists, we do try to encourage a diversity of views in our family about the best relationship between humans and nature. And at the time of this conversation, we hadn’t talked to our children much about Earth’s woes. For Ben and Kate, nature was still a source of wonder, mystery, fantasy, and magic. The North Pole wasn’t melting— it remained an icy place where Santa lived. We didn’t want our children to feel sad, so like many parents, I suspect, we postponed telling them about environmental crises as long as we could.

If Ben’s reaction to the news about sharks wasn’t inspired by any explicit prompting from us, that made it all the more fascinating. Where did it come from?

On reflection, I decided it sprang from his emerging moral impulses. Ben hates seeing animals and people suffer, and he also has a strong sense of fairness. The news that people kill a huge number of sharks each year just for their fins threatened his world in a personal and immediate way. Perhaps he even made the connection in his mind that if people can hurt sharks for such a silly reason, then they can probably do similar things to other people, even to him.

Then, with his picture and story about the submarine, Ben turned himself from a passive observer of something horrible into an active agent that could stop that outcome. He used his imagination to tell a story that brought the circumstances under psychological control and made them far less threatening. And sure enough, after he drew the picture, he was much less exercised. He went to work with his Lego, and we didn’t hear about sharks for the rest of the evening.

That wasn’t the end of the matter, though. Within a few days, he’d organized his entire grade-one class to write letters protesting overfishing around the world, particularly of sharks. At first Sarah and I were just surprised observers, but eventually we helped to send all the letters to Canada’s minister of fisheries and to the fisheries branch of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

A few years later, I asked Ben what he wanted to be when he grows up. It was the first time I’d asked the question directly. “Oceanographer,” was his matter-of-fact reply. His response on that earlier occasion— drawing a picture of a line-snipping submarine— had evolved into something much bigger in his mind. To use the language of the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, he’d imagined for himself a hero story that gave his life purpose and meaning.

It’s easy to scoff at our children’s ambitions, because they often sound silly. But then again, maybe our kids— by imagining hero stories that give them at once hope and a sense of purpose to help make the world better— are doing something many of us have lately forgotten how to do.

CROSSING EDGES

Ben’s submarine story was a “How about” declaration of possibility. Arising in his imagination, it served as an object— a vision of a desirable world— that became a motivating goal for his hope TO change the future.

Ben’s reaction also showed how hope operates along and across the edges of our reality. Hope is a liminal phenomenon. The ancient Greeks seem to have understood its essential “edginess”— Elpis was, after all, trapped at the lip of Pandora’s jar. Today, I think this property of edginess is a key source of hope’s ambiguity and contentiousness, but also potentially of its power.

I’ve become fascinated by edges. They include, of course, the physical edges in our daily lives— like those between a road and its shoulder, between the inside and outside of our homes, and between what we can see and what we can’t, because it’s around a corner. But it’s life’s metaphysical edges that really intrigue me, like those between what we know, more or less, and what we don’t really know at all; between the past, present, and future; between events inside our minds and outside; and between the impossible and the inevitable.

All four of these metaphysical edges play key roles in our hope, and I could see them in Ben’s response. Most obviously, his story focused his hope both beyond the edge of the known into the unknown and beyond the edge of the present into the future. He also used his story, and the hope it engendered in him, to bridge his inside-outside edge— to reconcile his internal sympathy for sharks with the external reality of their slaughter.

And finally, the future state he imagined— one with a little submarine busily cutting fishing lines— fell in the boundary zone between the impossible and the inevitable, at least as he perceived it. Scholars have long known that if we’re to hope for something, we need to believe its probability lies somewhere between these two extremes. The thirteenth-century Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed in his Summa Theologica that “the object of hope is a future good, difficult but possible to obtain.” 1 Psychological research supports the observation: a study of university students’ subjective experience of hope concluded that “the objects of hope tend to fall in the middle range of probabilities.” 2 This is the zone of uncertainty.

We’re deeply ambivalent about the first of these edges— the edge between the known and the unknown. It simultaneously captivates and scares us, because beyond it lies a domain of emerging novelty and unexpected combinations— a place that the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman has wonderfully called the “adjacent possible.” 3 Hope is one way we turn this unknown terrain into something less scary: just as Ben did, we use our imaginations to leap across the edge into the unknown future and highlight there a possible world we desire, thus bringing it back across the edge into the known.

But for our hope to be honest, that possible world must be more than just desirable: it must reflect our best judgment about how things could turn out. And if we’re going to reimagine and reinvigorate hope in ways that help us, we must think carefully about the relationships between time, imagination, possibility, and prediction.

TIME TRAVEL

To be able to cross the edge from the present into the future, we need to first go to the past; and to make use of what we find in the domain of the unknown, we need to first start with the known. And in both cases, our vehicle for these trips is an imagination tempered by the knowledge and clear-eyed realism that honest hope demands.

When we recall something that happened to us in the past, as when I think of Ben describing his submarine, we’re using what cognitive psychologists call “episodic memory.” It consists of images, sensations, and emotions associated with specific events we’ve experienced, as distinct from “semantic memory” of concepts and facts. With episodic memory, our brain’s hippocampus links information from three other brain regions to create an integrated recollection of what happened, when, and where. It’s an impressive feat, but if the memory in question remains purely objective— as if we’re separate from the remembered event and viewing it from outside— it’s ultimately little different from a video recording with a time-and-place stamp.

Our brain performs true magic, though, when it makes the memory subjective. Then, it seems like we’re inside the event and part of it. For an instant we feel the way we felt at that moment; we have a fleeting sense that we’re living it again, as if we’ve been instantaneously transported backwards in time. When I recall Ben showing me his picture, he’s standing in front of me again in the kitchen, holding the sheet of paper, and I feel the same mix of perplexity, wonder, and pride I felt at that very moment. On such occasions, our brain is doing much more than simply viewing a streaming image that has a time-and-place stamp. It’s engaged in what scientists call “recursive thinking,” something that’s almost certainly a hallmark of human cognition— unique to us as a species.

Recursive thinking involves “recursion,” and recursion isn’t an easy concept to grasp. Computer scientists use it to describe what happens when a computer program invokes or “calls” itself. In psychology, recursion is most easily understood as thinking about thinking. And although this cognitive feat is a bit mystifying, we perform it all the time: not only do we regularly think about our own thinking, we also think about our thinking about other people thinking, and we think about other people thinking about our thinking— one can continue ad infinitum in loops of increasing complexity.

Recursive thinking lets us travel in time. On those occasions when we feel like we’re living a past moment again, we’re conscious of our consciousness at that moment. As the psychologist Michael Corballis says: “In remembering episodes from the past…we essentially insert sequences of past consciousness into present consciousness.” 4 And what we can do for our memories of the past, we can also do for our visions of the future: we can insert sequences of our imagined future consciousness into our present consciousness.

But in this case our mental feat is even more amazing, because what we imagine hasn’t occurred yet, and maybe never will. Our imagination takes chunks of episodic memory— what we recall from the past— separates these chunks from their original contexts, and then recombines them in new configurations. It uses these chunks almost like letters of an alphabet to create the sentences of stories we generate about possible worlds— stories in which we’re sometimes central protagonists, or subjects. These stories then become vehicles to explore the future and what it might mean for us, which can help us decide what to do in the present. As the late French biologist and Nobel Prize winner François Jacob has written: “Our imagination displays before us the ever-changing picture of the possible. It is with this picture that we incessantly confront what we fear and what we hope.” 5

Our imagination does face some practical limits, of course: the further its stories depart from our everyday knowledge, memories, and experiences, the hazier these stories generally become in our minds and the harder they are to share with others, which can reduce their utility as starting points for conversations to explore the future. Writers, painters, filmmakers, and other artists trying to depict the future have always struggled with these limits. George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 and Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey both had to use— as part of their storytelling alphabets— common conceptions of technology at the time, which is one reason these works seem oddly quaint now, albeit still immensely powerful and astonishingly imaginative. A series of French artworks published at the turn of the twentieth century titled En L’An 2000 (two shown here) are also reminders of how our ability to imagine the world tomorrow is shaped by what we know in the present.

An aerial battle

At school

Any time we use the phrase “hope to,” we’re taking ourselves on a similar mental voyage to the future. Even when I say something as mundane as “I hope to plant my vegetable garden tomorrow,” I’m combining bits of memory of my past experiences gardening and then using the linked set of memories as a vehicle to project my consciousness into the future. For an instant in my mind, I’m in my garden tomorrow, boots on, trowel in hand, and digging in the dirt.

PUSHING BACK IMPOSSIBILITY

But here’s where things get tricky. We can hope for something in the future only if we’re uncertain about whether it’ll come to pass, as we’ve seen. If we know for sure the outcome won’t happen, then hoping for it doesn’t make sense. If, on the other hand, we know for sure the outcome will happen, then we won’t hope for it, because hoping isn’t necessary.6 The uncertainty in the zone between the impossible and the inevitable creates a mental space; our imagination can then populate that space with desirable possibilities, some of which we can make objects of our hope.

Alas, good prediction— prediction that accurately estimates future outcomes— is antithetical to uncertainty, because the better our predictions, the lower our uncertainty about the future. And honest hope, if it’s truly honest in the way I’ve described, must be informed by our best predictions. As our predictions of the future improve— because our scientific theories capture reality’s inner workings more accurately, and because we have more and better data about the world— the space for imagined possibilities that can be objects of our honest hope narrows, especially when we learn that some desirable outcomes we thought were possible are almost certainly impossible. Although Ben could imagine his submarine cutting the fishing lines, and I might imagine planting my vegetables, those futures are off limits to our honest hope if we have strong reasons to believe they can’t happen. (Of course, Ben, being only six at the time, couldn’t have been expected to know his “How about” wasn’t possible on the mass scale he imagined.)

This is the underlying explanation of today’s tension between honesty and hope. The stubborn facts about our global reality— about things like worsening climate change, economic inequality, mass migration, political extremism, and authoritarianism— are making many futures we desire unlikely, even impossible, according to our best predictions.

Once again, it’s as if the space for hope is being squeezed ever smaller as the walls of our problems close in— the way I felt that evening when I was overlooking the sea. So, many of us, desperate to maintain some of this space, increasingly ignore the stubborn facts and predictions— those closing walls— and tell ourselves the situation isn’t so bad. This behavior has become pathological and self-destructive. It’s one factor behind the spread of misinformation about, for instance, supposedly widespread corruption among climate scientists, endemic laziness in poor communities (“welfare queens”), and criminality among immigrants. These “fake facts” allow people to blame a specific group for the worsening problem in question, which helps them maintain their hope that, if only the group responsible would change its ways— or if only it could be controlled, excluded, or even eliminated— then the problem would go away.

But there are honest, fair, and constructive things we can do to keep open the space for hope. For example, as we saw in the last chapter, we can remind ourselves that in a world of complex systems we often don’t know enough to be sure that a desirable future, like the peaceful end of apartheid, is impossible. More assertively, we can use our imaginations, tempered by the best knowledge and predictions available, to try to judge more accurately the edge between what we really can and can’t change. Sometimes outcomes that we’ve accepted as impossible in reality aren’t, because we can still do something, as agents, to make them happen. In these cases, any verdict of impossibility is premature.

If our hope is to be honest, we shouldn’t ignore the facts or deny or avoid well-grounded predictions that a future we might want is impossible— say, a future where climate warming is stopped at 2 degrees Celsius. But we shouldn’t just passively accept these predictions either. Instead, we need to vigorously interrogate them and to push back against impossibility. With imaginations still well-informed by the best evidence and science, we can explore the feasibility of worlds in which we’ve changed the apparently unchangeable. We can examine the future’s possibilities objectively— at arm’s length, as one might say.

Stephanie May didn’t accept that nuclear testing was inevitable, unlike many people at the time; nor did she accept that the superpower conflict was cast in stone. Instead she used her imagination to explore how things could be different, and how she and like-minded activists could make them different. In her memoirs, she wrote:

The fallout drifted thousands of miles— all around the globe— and fell without respect to national boundaries. What the world needed, I thought, was an international lobby of women who would protest against the fallout which man (or men) internationally were creating.

But how could such a lobby be formed? To be successful it would have to have the most influential women in the world behind it. I envisioned such a lobby. It would be called The Lobby for Humanity….

In October I started writing letters to influential women throughout the world— to Mrs. [Eleanor] Roosevelt, Lady Winston Churchill, to the women representing both Chinas— Madam Chang Kai Shek and Madam Sun Yat Sen (for the lobby would have to put humanity before politics), to the wife of the President of France and in India to Madam Pandit.7

This first campaign didn’t succeed. But the responses she received encouraged her to persist in imagining how to make possible what many thought impossible.

Today, we face a similar situation. It’s now widely assumed by social and political commentators, for instance, that the deepening ideological polarization in Western societies between groups on the political right and left is a permanent and inescapable feature of our world’s social landscape. But I’ll show how, with the aid of new social science knowledge about the ways people’s worldviews work— knowledge that my colleagues and I used to develop our tools for mapping worldviews— we can use our imaginations to discover new and feasible ways to bridge the gulfs between these groups.

All of this may sound a bit like the often-quoted Serenity Prayer that the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the middle of the twentieth century.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

I’m suggesting something more radical and, I think, far more liberating. Niebuhr believed we need an external agent such as God to help us see clearly the boundary between what we can change and what we can’t. And he implied that this boundary is fixed, that there’s nothing we can do about it, so we can only serenely accept it. With both assertions, he downplays our agency.

And while wisdom, whether granted by God or not, might help us see what we can and cannot change, it’s not remotely enough by itself. Wisdom is a rich intuition distilled from accumulated past experiences and knowledge; it’s contemplative and often passive. Imagination, in contrast, is a continually unfolding mental experiment that’s oriented towards the future, towards opening up possibility; it’s engaged and active— and an implicit assertion of our agency.

While wisdom can provide imagination with valuable letters for its alphabet, in the form of recognized patterns drawn from experience and a sense of balanced judgment of what’s possible, it’s imagination that uses that alphabet to tell stories that can be the basis for our honest hope. Wisdom and imagination play equally vital roles helping us discern what’s open to positive transformation.

CREATING “HOW ABOUTS”

In addition to pushing back against premature verdicts of impossibility (so we can see where we might change the apparently unchangeable), we can also, as noted earlier, look for and even create entirely new possibilities for our future— “how abouts” that we’ve not previously imagined, like Ben’s submarine.

Once again, the complex nature of our world comes to our aid here, because complexity expands the number and variety of novel, unexpected combinations in the adjacent possible, the zone of the unknown beyond the edge of the known.

It’s easiest to understand how by looking at our ability to anticipate the way a complex system will change through time. We all know intuitively that when we’re dealing with a system like our town or city— social systems that are most certainly complex— this ability degrades quickly the further we cast our mind into the future. Our mental image of future events becomes murkier and murkier. When we imagine events near the present— say, tomorrow’s traffic patterns in our city or next week’s municipal council debate— we can reasonably assume they’ll resemble equivalent events today or in the recent past. In other words, we can hold many of our city’s parts and processes constant in our minds and then focus on the few aspects we think might change.

But as we cast our imagination ever-further into the future— to a year or even to ten or twenty years from now— we should acknowledge that many things we’ve taken as “constants” will change, increasingly so the further we voyage into imagined time. Our city’s traffic patterns will shift as new buildings, roads, signals, transit systems, bike lanes, and crosswalks are added; as some two-way streets become one-way, or vice versa; and as new technologies, like electric scooters and autonomous vehicles, appear. Also, ten or twenty years from now, some of the issues before our municipal councils will be radically different— in the 1990s, no municipalities were discussing whether to declare a climate emergency; now towns and cities around the world are doing so.

The further we voyage into imagined time, too, the more we need to acknowledge that factors we’ve not anticipated at all—like the COVID-19 pandemic that hardly anyone foresaw in 2019— will play steadily larger roles. As the overall number of changing elements expands into the future, the possibility for new, unexpected combinations among the city’s multitude of social, institutional, and technological components grows even faster. Add to this mix the inevitable nonlinearity of complex systems— the fact that occasionally small changes will produce huge effects, as when a council member’s illness tips the vote on a critical municipal issue— and the range of potential paths our city could follow into the future widens explosively the further we look forward.

We have trouble even envisioning many of these paths, especially decades hence, let alone accurately judging which of them our city is most likely to follow. Some experts in risk and probability call this psychological relationship to the future “deep uncertainty.” It seems to have become acute in recent decades, as our world has become exponentially more complex, densely connected, and hyper-kinetic, and as our demographic, environmental, economic, and social stresses have multiplied.8

When faced with deep uncertainty, it’s human nature to reach for what we know. And what we know— or at least what we think we know— is the direction we’re currently heading. So, we tend to extrapolate from our recent path into the imagined future, suggesting, essentially, that the future will be a more or less straightforward extension of that path. For instance, if our city’s population has been growing at a regular pace for many years, we can project that rate of change forward and then imagine what the city will be like with the predicted rise in the number of people in ten, twenty, or even fifty years. Well-run societies use such projections to make plans for new school construction, water and sewer infrastructure, training of doctors and nurses, and the like.

This way of predicting the future is really just another way of holding things constant, because we’re holding a trend constant. It often produces useful results, and I’ll employ it myself in the next chapters, because many kinds of change do occur in the same way and at the same rate, or at a reasonably predictable change in rate, for long periods. Yet by definition, it can’t anticipate any big and sudden shifts in a complex system’s behavior— for instance, the flips from one state or equilibrium to another I mentioned before. And our world today has lots of this kind of change.

In the realm of technology, think of the sudden arrival of the World Wide Web, which was nonexistent in 1992 and widespread by 1998, and which in just six years fundamentally altered the way hundreds of millions of human beings communicated. In the realms of politics and economics, think of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s, the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, the rise of populist nationalism across the West more recently, or the economic upheaval caused by the novel coronavirus in 2020. Far more often than in the past, it seems, momentous surprises— sometimes broadly beneficial— can now burst out of the blue, most clearly in humanity’s social affairs. Currently, even our most astute observers are almost always terrible at predicting these sudden changes— even if in retrospect the precursors are often clear.

So, the complex nature of our world can itself create new and unexpected possibilities for our hope. These possibilities may be inherently hard to see before they arrive, but if we can focus our resources on better understanding how the complex systems around us work, we may be able to see some of these possibilities in advance and actively work to realize them. As I’ll discuss later, we may even exploit the enormous leverage inherent in today’s hyper-nonlinear world to shift humanity’s path in a radically more positive direction.

An important additional feature of our complex social world multiplies this potential leverage. Most things in our social world— traffic patterns, municipal councils, courts, parliaments, stock markets, and international organizations like the United Nations— exist only because enough people believe they exist and then act in light of those beliefs. In contrast, most things in the physical or natural world, like mountains, oceans, and air, exist regardless of whether human beings believe they exist. For example, our countries are real only because we share roughly the same beliefs about their reality.9 If someone magically eliminated from all human minds all beliefs about the United States, the United States as a country would no longer exist. Of course, the physical things that we currently think of as being parts of the United States— its landscape, buildings, and people— would still be there, but the country itself wouldn’t be.

We can take advantage of this feature by experimenting in our imaginations with radically new beliefs about our social organizations, group identities, political institutions, laws, and norms. And if we communicate some of these new beliefs among ourselves and adopt them widely enough, we’ll literally create a new social, economic, and cultural reality for ourselves. If, for example, we can imagine and communicate widely around the world new, powerful forms of the basic idea that our shared identity as human beings overrides our narrower national, ethnic, religious, and class identities— social “facts” or concepts whose importance many of us accept unquestionably today— then that new global identity— that new kind of humanity-encompassing “we”— will start to become part of our dominant social reality, and our collective behavior towards people, societies, and cultures has the potential to profoundly change.

In many ways for the better, I contend.

THE OPEN FUTURE

There’s a final feature of our reality that can help us create new possibilities for honest hope— new “how abouts” that we’ve not previously imagined— and in some ways it’s the most fundamental feature of all: time.

Time is real. That statement probably seems almost silly to most of us. Of course time is real: we live in time and experience time every day, so it must be real! That’s just common sense.

Yet among physicists, who think a lot about time, the overwhelming consensus has been that what we perceive as time— chiefly time’s flow from the past through the present into the future— isn’t in fact real, in the sense that it’s not a fundamental feature of the universe. Rather, it’s an illusion: our perceptions of time’s flow and of the distinction between past, present, and future are artifacts of the way our brains construct our experience of reality.

Physicists have taken this view largely because they’re committed to two underlying assumptions about the nature of the universe. The first is that reality is governed by natural laws, like Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, and the equations in Einstein’s theory of relativity. And the second is that these laws have stayed the same and held true everywhere in the universe from the first moments of its existence at the Big Bang and that they’ll continue to hold true forever.10

If the laws that rule reality are universal and eternal, then they’ve not only determined all past events that happened in the universe, they also preordain all possible future events. In principle, with complete knowledge of these laws and the present state of the universe, we should be able to derive or “compute” all past and all future events. Most modern physicists adopt essentially this idea: that we live in a “block universe” in which all events that have ever occurred or ever could occur in the entire universe— for all the past and all the future— exist together in the same space at the same instant.11

The idea of universal and eternal natural law is immensely influential in our modern world. Almost all scientists— not just physicists— accept it at least implicitly. One could even say that the broad acceptance of this idea is one of modernity’s defining characteristics. It’s also perhaps modernity’s misfortune that this idea leads to the conclusion that all future possibilities are already determined, that the future is closed to true novelty and that, more perniciously, our latitude to exercise our agency is tightly bounded. “A world without time,” writes the brilliant physicist Lee Smolin in his book Time Reborn, “is a world with a fixed set of possibilities that cannot be transcended. If, on the other hand, time is real, and everything is subject to it, then there is no fixed set of possibilities and no obstacle to the invention of genuinely novel ideas and solutions to problems.” 12

A generous and thoughtful polymath in his mid-sixties, and an authority on quantum gravity, Lee Smolin was one of the founders of the renowned Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo. I count it as one my life’s great blessings to have met him when I moved to the Waterloo community. Lee is among those rare scientists both willing and able to convey the subtleties of science to the public, and he has written several popular books explaining the inner workings of modern physics. He’s also something of an iconoclast, challenging the orthodoxy of his corner of the scientific community, most famously with his sharp critique of string theory, which is still physics’ dominant explanation of nature’s fundamental forces.

But his most sweeping and subversive challenge to conventional physics is his argument that physicists need to rethink time— its deep nature and how it’s represented in their discipline’s theories and research projects. He argues persuasively for the reality of time in our lives and universe, and as a new foundation for theoretical physics, and he extends the argument’s implications far beyond physics into all the other sciences and into moral and political questions in our everyday lives. (He developed this argument in collaboration with Harvard University’s legal and political theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger; together, they’ve written an academic book, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time.)

For the sciences, perhaps the most significant implication is that if time exists fundamentally, then natural laws that are universal and eternal probably don’t exist fundamentally.13 Their argument has enormous implications, too, for our thinking about hope: if time isn’t real, then to keep our hope honest we must focus on ensuring that the objects of our hope— the future states we desire— are among those that already exist in the block universe. Honest hope can only involve imagining as accurately as possible a future that’s already present. So it will tend to be passive— a hope THAT a specific future already exists and will come to pass.

But if time is real, then the future doesn’t yet exist, which means it’s open to true novelty. The act of hoping can also involve creating new building blocks of reality itself, as we first imagine and then bring to fruition genuinely new possibilities. So our hope can indeed be active— we can hope TO create, as agents, a desirable future.

The late German philosopher Reinhart Koselleck held that the idea of an open future emerged in the West only in the late-eighteenth century.14 By the mid-twentieth century, the relationship between this idea and scientists’ concept of time had become a matter of lively debate. In conversations with Albert Einstein, the philosopher Karl Popper argued for the reality of time. “I tried to present…as strongly as I could my conviction that a clear stand must be made against any idealistic view of time,” he writes in his autobiography. “And I also tried to show that, though the idealistic view was compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, a clear stand should be made in favor of an ‘open’ universe— one in which the future was in no sense contained in the past or the present, even though they do impose severe restrictions on it.” 15 Another thinker who argued for an open future was Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin, who in the 1950s famously launched a full-throated attack on historical determinism as both cognitively incomprehensible and morally indefensible.16 But I find the Smolin-Unger thesis more convincing than Berlin’s: by reconceptualizing time, it attacks the heart of the argument used by physics, today’s dominant scientific discipline, to deny the possibility of an open future.

This isn’t mere semantics or a metaphysical digression, like so much debate about the nature of time through history. Lee Smolin, for instance, is very clear on the political and social implications. He eloquently notes that a civilization “whose scientists and philosophers teach that time is an illusion and the future is fixed is unlikely to summon the imaginative power to invent the communion of political organizations, technology, and natural processes— a communion essential if we are to thrive sustainably beyond this century.” 17

“YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO TAKE AWAY MY HOPE!”

So exclaimed a young woman to her mother, an American friend of mine who’s an expert on climate and energy issues. My friend had just described to her daughter how hard it will be to change our energy systems fast enough to prevent global warming’s devastating effects. Sometime later, my friend mentioned to me her daughter’s response. That was years ago, yet the words have kept coming back to my mind.

That’s partly because I empathized with her daughter: hope is a crucial psychological lifeline for most of us, which means we’re understandably afraid and angry when other people say things that might cut that lifeline. But her words have come back, too, because they raise uncomfortable questions: one set of questions we might ask ourselves in a situation like the daughter’s, and another set in a situation like my friend’s.

If we find ourselves in the daughter’s situation, what right or entitlement do we have to hope when truth threatens our hope? More pointedly, what’s our responsibility to listen to and accept the truth?

And if we’re in my friend’s situation, what exactly is our responsibility to sustain people’s hope when we have accurate knowledge about dangers they face? And if we don’t have a right to take away their hope, are we then obliged to actively hide the truth from them, or perhaps deceive them in some way, so they can hold on to some kind of hope— even if we know it’s false?

At the time of the conversation, the daughter was already an adult. Most of us probably believe, at least at first thought, that a competent adult should be able to hear the truth, even if it threatens some of their hopes, and particularly if the person providing that information has expertise on the topic, as well as some responsibility for the other’s well-being. So, for example, we probably think that a patient should be willing to hear accurate information from his or her doctor about a serious illness like cancer. My friend is an expert on climate change, a problem that threatens her daughter’s future well-being, and my friend clearly has some responsibility for her daughter’s well-being. For these reasons, my first reaction was that my friend was right to tell her daughter what she knew, and that her daughter shouldn’t have resisted hearing that information because of its implications for her hope.

But then I thought some more, because questions like these are now acute for researchers, such as climate scientists, who are experts on the potentially cataclysmic dangers humanity faces. In fact, they’re at the center of a controversy that has split the environmental movement.18 On one side are people, including many scientists in the relevant fields, who believe that the truth should be told, even if it’s dismal. On the other are those who think that dismal truths simply scare people and cause them to retreat into helplessness. These folks say that if we want people to do something about a dire problem like climate change, then it’s usually better to soft-pedal its seriousness, even if doing so means hiding or bending the truth a bit.

But neither side seems to fully recognize that two critical factors underlie this controversy. The first is one’s degree of certainty that the outcome will be extremely harmful, should the problem continue unaddressed. Even if we know a problem like climate change might cause us great harm, we cannot be completely certain that this harm will happen if it arises from a complex system. A doctor might have only a rough sense of the probability that a kind of cancer will kill a patient. Is the doctor then being dishonest and irresponsible if he or she emphasizes that uncertainty to sustain the patient’s hope? Surely not always. When my fellow writer and I were asked by that audience member years ago “Is it too late? Is it hopeless now?”, I answered that exploiting uncertainty’s fuzziness about the future in order to sustain hope can be an honest thing to do.

But at what point does it become dishonest?

The second factor underlying the controversy over how much truth should be told is one’s estimate of the difference one could make by trying to address the problem. Of course, lots of uncertainty often surrounds this factor too. But usually we can come up with a reasonable if rough estimate of the difference.19

By splitting the two factors into two values— which is, admittedly, an arbitrary thing to do— we can set up a two-by-two table, like the one shown here, which gives us a sense of how the factors might combine:

 

We believe we can make no difference.

We believe we can make at least some difference.

We’re certain that the outcome will be extremely harmful.

1.
Hope dies here.

2.

We’re uncertain that the outcome will be extremely harmful.

3.

4.
Hope lives here.

Factors affecting the life or death of hope

When we understand complexity— that we usually don’t know the full possibilities of change and novelty in the complex systems we live in and that small differences in these systems can dramatically shift the path we take with those systems into the future— we help move ourselves honestly from the table’s top row of cells to its bottom row. When we emphasize that the future is open and that with the aid of our imaginations we can see better how to change it or maybe even create it (rather than just discover a future that already exists), perhaps by leveraging our world’s complexity, we help move ourselves honestly from the table’s left column of cells to its right column. And if we use both approaches together, we help shift ourselves, again honestly, towards the bottom right corner— to cell 4— where hope can live.

This line of thinking made me realize that my initial reaction to the daughter’s response was too judgmental. Now I think that she had a point, but mistakenly framed it in terms of her exclusive right, rather than in terms of rights and responsibilities on both sides of the conversation.

If we find ourselves in something like my friend’s situation, we surely have the right— a natural right, grounded in defensible moral principles— to speak the truth, if we have access to it, regardless of what that truth might be or its implications for others’ hope. But with that right, I now realize, comes a responsibility to help people— as best as we can— cope with that truth emotionally by explaining how honest hope might still be possible, perhaps through their taking meaningful action.

If instead we find ourselves in the daughter’s situation, we might not have a right to hope itself, but we do have the right to have our need for hope respected, based on an expectation of common decency of treatment. But with that right comes the responsibility to listen to truth and to adjust our hope in the context of that truth— to, in other words, keep whatever hope we can find honest. As we’ll see later, this can mean radically changing the object of our hope by substituting a new desirable future in the place of the one we had originally.

And if, in the end, we conclude that all honest hope is impossible— that we’re inescapably in cell 1— then we have the responsibility to accept that apparent reality and not retreat into false hope.

But we’re not there yet.