Foresight Classics: Earth Might Be Fair

My journey into classic views of the future recently turned up an expected gem – unexpected in the sense of my not being aware of the book. While I confess to not being a great fan of collections of essays, I nonetheless dipped into a 1993 collection of essay titled “Visions of the 21^st Century” edited by Sheila Moorcraft. I’ll just report on one here, for now at least, and it’s the last of the collection: Jay Ogilvy’s “Earth Might Be Fair.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that I really enjoyed it, as I’ve long been a fan of Jay’s work.

To properly set the stage, the editor’s purpose was to collect visions that did not necessarily foretell nor describe, but rather inspired, challenged, and empowered.

Let’s get right to one of the meaty ideas in Jay’s essay that seems so relevant to us today, especially readers of this blog who may be following my ongoing cataloging of notions of the next economy: “one of the problems of a postmodern economy is to find alternatives to the industrious productivity of work as a measure of economic health.” (italics mine). Indeed! A key idea that our next economy conceptualizers are playing with is how does an economy or society work –without work! Jay points that some of our key problems today — hunger and homelessness, for example – are not problems that can be solved by science and technology by are rather human problems. We have enough food, but it’s not evenly distributed. We have enough shelter, or at least materials for shelter, but homeless exists for many other reasons.

He proposes the interesting idea of the “sublimation of the economy.” The industrial economy of material things is giving way to the information economy of ephemeral entertainments and services. One way to interpret this shift, he suggests, is rather than lamenting the lost certainties of the past is a scenario the celebrates the advent of the sublime. It can be a “self-referential, emergent creative lifting by the bootstraps that create meaning where there was none.” It’s new territory!

Playing with this idea of the sublime creating new meaning enables us to play with new scenarios. What if society committed to real educational reform? What if energy companies built a business around negawatts (saving energy) instead of megawatts? What if the sublimation of the economy lightened the burden on the Earth? While it may seem utopic, he notes that “social agendas do change.”

I think he also raises a challenging issue in this vein as we think about the next economy and our preferred vision of the future: “there is no universal understanding of the best way to live a deeply fulfilling human life.” I think this in part explains why we see so many concepts of what’s next – we really don’t know what the ideal ought to be!

There’s much more in this essay, but I don’t want to rewrite it. Once again, as I revisit the classics, I see many cases where futurists have produced truly useful and provocative works about the future that at the very least introduced concepts that paved the way for us in the present to build upon. Jay has clearly done us this service with this inspiring, provocative and relevant vision of the future….almost 25 years old! – Andy Hines