It’s okay to think big

I may be preaching to the choir, but perhaps I can provide some support for big thinkers … as we become an increasingly endangered species. I’ve been getting some pushback on ideas that include or hint at development, stage theories, or heaven forbid, grand narratives.

Let’s focus on “development” since it guides After Capitalism in its quest to define guiding images for the long-term future. Put simply, a development model suggests there is a long-term direction of change toward greater complexity and choice.

When I share that After Capitalism assumes a development trajectory, especially in academic settings, it is greeted with skepticism if not hostility. [To be fair, the more balanced critics very correctly point out that is an assumption and there are other explanations, which I agree with].

What’s at the root of this skepticism? I’d trace it back to the emergence of postmodern philosophy captured in The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard’s influential 1979 work on the postmodern turn, which favors local, contextual, and situation-specific explanations over broad, global, and more generalized ones. This turn, which is particularly prevalent in academia, questions the very idea of grand or meta-narratives. It is thriving in today’s “takedown” and “cancel culture” context, in which there is an army of critics poised to attack any ideas — big ones offer a nice juicy target.

A lot of my work, not just After Capitalism but also the values work published in ConsumerShift, assumes a development model of change. Our University of Houston Foresight program devotes an entire course to Social Change. Among the different types of social change are “shape” theories:

• Development: change in a consistent direction over time. A variation, Progress, assumes that the direction is a positive one; Development is neutral.
•  Cyclical: change does not have a specific direction, but follows a general pattern of birth maturity and death; essentially what goes around, comes around; every change ultimately ages and dies, then the cycle starts over again.
• None: there is no directional pattern at all; change may or may not move in a direction, with emergence, complexity, evolution as examples.

A few caveats about the developmental shape of change. First, it specifically avoids taking a position on whether the change is “good” or “bad” — it is simply a consistent direction. Second, it allows for some cyclicality and iteration within that overall direction. There can be steps backward, sideways, and loops, but overall change is forward. Third, it directly confronts the growing proliferation of what might be called collapse, doomer, black pill, or even “end of times” works that are increasingly in vogue today. The After Capitalism work does include versions of a Collapse future but deliberately emphasizes the possibilities from moving past that in developing positive guiding images.

After Capitalism acknowledges the utility of the postmodern turn with its emphasis on the local, contextual, and situation-specific — indeed much of the solution space involves efforts at this scale. At the same time, the work seeks to reinstate the concept of big thinking necessary to developing guiding images. – Andy Hines