We've Been Here Before, Haven't We?

October 21, 2015

We were here nearly 30 years ago riding hover boards, cheering the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, making video phone calls, holographic movies.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

Yes, I am kind of jumping on the cultural bandwagon of Back to the Future Part II. Today is the day Marty McFly and the crazy doctor landed in the future. I could get all philosophical and say that it is now no longer back to the future, but back to what used to be the future. Kind of like after 1984, 1984 isn't futuristic any more.

Like I used to try to confuse my daughter saying, "You know we aren't there, yet, because we can never get there. Once we are there, it's no longer there, but here."

(She didn't care for it that much, either.)

In any case, here we are and people are going crazy about what they got right and what they got wrong. We are searching for how the future of today is so different from the future of yesterday.

Let's just stop. It was a movie, people. It wasn't supposed to be future-telling. It was imagination. It was fun. Let's not take it too seriously. Let's just enjoy it.

So if you see Marty McFly today, ignore him. He's not there. Neither is that DeLorean dropping out of nowhere. It's all in your head. It's not happening.

But watch out for the Cubs. I hope THEY are real. (But it will now take a miracle.)

Maybe the Maya Were Right?

Democrats and Republicans continue to trade comments and charges and counter charges. The "Fiscal Cliff" remains just around  the corner.

Republicans are stuck, taken prisoner, by the ultra-conservative anti-tax forces. They feel the need to protect a teeny-tiny minority of the very wealthy from having to pay more. Because of an image that raising taxes on anybody, hurts everybody.

Democrats have the unenviable position of making significant spending cuts without cutting the "national security." That means cutting the personal and "social" security of many. There goes their base of support.

A political stand-off.

Compromise is out-of-the-question. So offers and counter-offers are made that aren't even serious.

This evening the vote in the House was called off- the GOP couldn't get enough votes.

Tomorrow is Dec. 21. Maybe we won't have to worry about the "fiscal cliff."

But if we do survive, maybe the two sides will have to get together and do something.

I can hope can't I?

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By the way, I have a new end of the world prediction. I just became aware that the cat calendar on the wall of our living room ends in 10 days. That can only mean that the cats of the world know something we don't about what's about to happen. The nine lives have run out and we will end time in one giant ....

Nah, let's not go there.

Worst-Case Scenarios

I was walking through the local Barnes and Noble the other evening and a book title caught my eye.

X-Events: The Collapse of Everything by John L. Casti

This, of course, was right after watching the news when people in the DC-area were complaining about their electric company not being able to get the electricity back on after the super derecho storm swept across hundreds of miles a week ago. Which of course was followed by the latest disaster of record-setting heat over more than half the nation which was followed by the devastation in the west where wildfires turn into record-setting firestorms. Locally this comes after rain in Duluth and Cannon Falls tore streets to shreds and spread water everywhere.

Oh, and did I mention the headline that if you want to see what global warming will look like, just take a look at the United States this summer.

So the title grabbed me.

Casti is no fly-by-night disaster maven. He is a complexity scientist and systems theorist. He worked for many years at the Santa Fe Institute and the RAND Corporation, and has also served on the faculties of Princeton University, the University of Arizona, and New York University.

Barnes and Noble says that Casti concludes that

[t]he intricate, over-complex systems on which we depend are increasingly vulnerable to sudden, complete collapse, catapulting us back into pre-industrial chaos. After a catastrophic "X-Event," he notes, almost everything is at stake: communication, transportation, food, water, medicine, electricity, and finance. A wake-up call to an overnight apocalypse that could hit us all too soon.

What might some of these be? Well in addition to running out of oil or a nuclear war there are these:

• Long-term widespread failure of the Internet
• Breakdown of the global food-supply system
• A continent-wide electromagnetic pulse destroys all electronics
• A global pandemic
• Failure of the electric power grid and clean water supply
• World financial collapse

Fun reading, huh?

But as a veteran reader of what is often called science fiction, or futurist fiction of what they refer to as "dystopian" visions, none of this really comes as a surprise to me. For as long as there has been science fiction, there has been this tendency to extrapolate into a dark and dismal future when all our technology disappears.

Interestingly Casti doesn't appear to be a hopeless doomsayer. He seems to say that it is possible to be prepared so the worst doesn't turn into an even darker worst. No we can't predict which problem will finally attempt to do us in, but we can keep from sticking our heads into the sand and ignore the possibilities.

Here's One to Think About

Came across this quote in the book 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. It is so deeply profound in its simplicity, not to mention truth:

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: "At the time, no one knew what was coming."

In that unwillingness to live with uncertainty we do more difficult and harmful things than we can imagine. We don't want to live in uncertainty. We read horoscopes or look for prophets. We read tea leaves and the Dow Jones average. We look for clues where we would like to think there are some and refuse to admit that the future is absolutely inscrutable.

Think about it.

Map or Guidebook?

Missional theologian Alan Roxburgh wrote this a couple of years ago.

We’re like Abram — called to leave cherished places and move out into spaces where we’ve never been. But this is God’s journey and the Spirit is with us. In the Bible is an imagination to guide us. It’s not a road map or secret guide from the past to be unlocked. In his book Can These Bones Live? the Baptist theologian Barry Harvey put it this way:

…the Bible provides nothing like a map that charts the precise path for us to follow into the future. What it does give us is the travel itinerary of God’s people, that is, the story of their pilgrimage as strangers and foreigners through this world toward the kingdom of God… An itinerary, by contrast, consists of a series of performative descriptions designed to organize our movements through space: ‘to get to the shrine you go past the old fort and then turn right at the fork in the path’.

He is so right. Since his reflections here come from thinking about the power of the unexpected (i.e. The Black Swan concept) it is only natural that he goes this direction. Which is in direct conflict with those who see the Bible as a step-by-step blueprint (or AAA Trip-Tik) on what's going to happen. Many over the years have been surprised or saddened by the things they expect to happen but don't.

In some way or another the goal is the Kingdom of God. What that looks like and what we do about it is a mystery each day. It is not a mystery to be solved with point by point ideas, but by living in God's presence.

The (Non-) Power of Prediction

This is the time of year for predictions. As this past year has shown us, it is so easy to tell what's going to happen in any given year. Not!

Well, Seth Godin makes that point in the following neat post from last week.

I just found this post, lost and forgotten, in the bottom of a folder I was backing up.I meant to publish it in January, 2002, when I started this blog:

Predictions for 2008

I know it's six years away, but I've found that short-term predictions are too easy to make. So, here you go:

• I predict that the number of blogs will explode, to more than a hundred times as many as we have now. If you're an opinion leader, you'll have one.
• A virtually unknown politician, a black man who's father is from Africa, will be elected president, in a landslide. He'll take the office from George W. Bush, leaving with the lowest approval rating of any president in history.
• Fidel Castro will step down.
• People with AIDS will be living longer than ever before, but the disease won't be cured.
• Americans will watch more video online than on TV.
• An earthquake in Myanmar will kill more than 100,000 people and their government will do nothing.
• The economy will be in the middle of a once in a century meltdown.
• Apple will make a cell phone and dominate the MP3 market as well. And the music industry will be in tatters. Napster will fail.
• Starbucks will sputter, but the quality and availability of dark chocolate will get better and better.
• You will know who the governor of Alaska is.
• After six years, Ingrid Betancourt will be rescued.
• Britney Spears will have a hit record.
• I'll have written some more books and will release a goofy action figure to raise money for Acumen.
• China will become the fourth largest economy in the world, but they'll get in trouble for putting poison into milk and toothpaste.
• Google will be the center of the Web.
• Most newspapers will either be on the verge of bankruptcy or considering it.

Sorry to kid. But just think about how impossible it is for your to predict what your life is going to be like in four or six years... being ready for anything is the only rational strategy. So, why exactly are you planning on the future being just like it is now, but with better uniforms?

I love that last question, actually. It is one of the difficulties with life- it never turns out like we expect it to. We plan for the future based on what we know of today and expect it to be the same. But it won't. One of the best characteristics to develop is the ability to flow. Which is what happens when you can fight or flee.

So we have flowed through another year. Life will never again be like it is. For better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness or health I can promise you that it will change in the next 12 months. Not much we can do about it so I guess we should be ready to go with the flow again, using what we already know about life, applying it to the new and the not so new that will happen.

I add to that the one thing that I am sure of- no matter what. God is still in charge and I am not. With that I can at least get through each day.