On the Long Time Project community call, Phoebe Tickell introduced us to an exercise to speak to our ancestors (no, it wasn’t an ouija board). It was called “Inquiry from the Future” from the Moral Imaginations playbook.
A world that we’ve destroyed
If our descendants in 200 years' time looked back on us and asked us what it feels like to live in that every day with deep inequalities and destruction of our environment, a world that we’ve destroyed for them.
The words that came to mind were that we’re living in a careless society, both in the sense of not doing anything about something and living in a community without care. We live in a superficial society where we can pretend to be effecting change to tackle these issues to make ourselves feel better. Still, it’s all superficial if we were to think about it for a second. We live in a kleptomaniac society where we can’t stop setting fire to things around us like it’s an addiction, almost nihilistic.
A world that we’ve created
If our descendants in 200 years looked back on us and shared that their society is now full of freedom and equality, a world that we’ve created…for them and asked us how we did it and what support we wished we had.
I feel that we would have woken up as a society to what I said above, that we’d have collectively, in different ways, a truth & reconciliation process about our past and our present that created the safe spaces, to be honest about the destruction we inflict collectively and the repair we need to do, but also the glimmers of hope and solidarity buried within us that we need to help each other surface, to scratch beneath the surface of the default behaviours in how we consume, see success and treat each other, to what we feel and want to act. The analogy I would use is that we can do the deep work that washes away the pollution that prevents us from seeing the stars. I would ask our descendants what they’d love to create with us if we were here and what they’d love to start with their descendants.
Diverse spaces as governance
And getting into the breakouts made me think that creating communities where you have people from different practices — designers, strategists, playwrights, and community organisers — naturally gets people to be curious about each other’s perspectives because they don’t know enough about the other’s practices to make assumptions. It also creates a form of collective accountability.
