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Postmodern times: Are we there yet?
Futures 43 (2011) 136–141
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Futures journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/futures
Introduction
Postmodern times: Are we there yet? Ziauddin Sardar’s declaration that we have entered ‘postnormal times’ [1] has caused controversy and debate among those aboard the omnibus of futures studies. A few rejoinders have already appeared [2–4]. At a time when the past is collapsing into the present at such a rate that nostalgia begins with last year could the future have imploded upon us in the guise of a new era? Do postnormal times really mark a sharp break from history – all our pasts? Is it not a normal human reaction to see our own times as different, uniquely distinct from everything that has gone before? Are the specific features of postnormal times unlike anything encountered in the past? And, are these features so different that they thwart our imagination? Or, are postnormal times merely strange? If so, are they sufficiently strange to produce a conundrum: that one can dispute whether the evidence for postnormality is cogent and compelling, question whether the case for catastrophe is a convincing argument – and yet concur with the conclusion? The consensual conclusion being that current conditions culminate in a compulsion for change which can best be combated by conjuring value laden virtuous futures visions. Have I used enough Cs now? Or, strangely enough, are C words a key to a new way of conceptualising the crises and contretemps at hand: how to make sense of the incomplete jigsaw puzzle of today and what we conceive of tomorrow? And if the concatenation of C words constitutes a clue could we not decode them by reference to their origins in the past? To C words – the alliterative triad used by Sardar is chaos, complexity and contradictions – we shall return shortly. But first we should observe that the notion of postnormal times derives from the theory of postnormal science developed by Jerry Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, first presented in Futures, and championed by this journal for the past two decades. As Stephen Healy points out in his contribution to this special issue, ‘post-normal science (PNS) was conceived as a means of confronting the increasingly ‘‘normal’’, post-normal character of numerous contemporary challenges in which conventional distinctions between the spheres of facts, values and politics break down’. It was initially inspired by global environmental issues and went on to be seen as ‘paradigmatic of the shift from a traditional ‘‘predict and determine’’ model of science to a more contextually sensitive ‘‘assess and consult’’ one’. Like most theories it has its champions and detractors. But the evidence that science is becoming postnormal has been accumulating systematically; and the confirmation for the theory of postnormal science is taken for granted in certain scholarly circles. In the process, Ravetz himself has acquired both a halo and an aura of controversy. The contribution of Ravetz to contemporary intellectual thought has not always been recognised. His scholarly outputs have shifted the grounds of debates in the history and philosophy of science [5–7] and have made decisive interventions in our understanding of risks and regulation [8,9]. His contribution to the methodology of policy related research, analysis of uncertainties, philosophical and social criticism of science, and the history and criticism of mathematics have been truly immense – with scores of key papers, a list that would be too long to cite. Ravetz, who published his first paper in Futures way back in 1984 [10], served as a Consulting Editor to the journal for many years during which played a key role in shaping its intellectual and scholarly contents. From a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in Philadelphia in 1929. His father was a truck driver and union organizer. Ironically, for someone from a communist background, he managed to obtain a Pepsi-Cola Scholarship which took him to Swarthmore College; and in 1950, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright Scholar to do a doctorate in mathematics. He taught History and Philosophy of Science at Leeds University for many years. In 1971, while still at Leeds University, Ravetz published his first major study, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems [11]. The book, which argues that the industrialisation of science has corrupted it, was hailed as a decisive critique of science. Virtually all the criticism of science that emerged in the 1970s with the environment movement, and later with the debates about ecology, limits to growth and genetic engineering can be traced back to this seminal work. In the 1980s, Ravetz worked, with his lifelong collaborator, the Argentinean mathematician and philosopher, Silvio Fontowicz, on developing a method and notation for the representation of uncertainty in quantitative information. The end product was another ground-breaking book: Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy [12]. All the mathematics associated with risks that we know today owes its origins to this text. The theory of postnormal science, focussed on policy oriented science ‘where facts 0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2010.10.001
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are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’ emerged from Ravetz and Fontowicz work on risks and uncertainty. Ravetz met Sardar in 1973. At that time Ravetz had been appointed the Executive Secretary of the newly established Council for Science and Society, one of the first public institutions in Britain to explore the issues of risk, the politics of science policy and to challenge the established view of science as a ‘neutral’, benign phenomena devoted to Truth and Goodness. Sardar was a postgraduate student of information science. The two struck up a friendship that has endured ever since. Apart from collaborating on various books [13,14], the two have had numerous scholarly adventures in different parts of the world. As an occasional witness I can report their normal entertainment is intellectual discourse, of the kind which sets observers minds boggling and causing their internal risk assessors to whispering ever louder ‘Warning! Overload! Warning!’ During these tours de force of ideas Ravetz bobbles with content on his ocean of knowledge and Sardar fizzes around like a famous breakfast cereal of futures studies: ‘Snap! Crackle!. . .’. Always beware for there is bound to be a ‘Pop!’ as some cherished shibboleth crashes under the weight of its exposed inadequacies, at which Ravetz bobbles even more contentedly. A Ravetz zinger is a different matter, quietly advanced with customary courtesy, patience and kindness it arrives, a stealth bomber undetected by radar behind its coating of Seraphic composure, and despite being a dedicated peacenik, its delivers a payload of nuclear proportions. The devastating impact of his insight is in contrast to the avuncular innocence and invariant sweetness of Ravetz as friend and mentor. A trait which, on occasion, has left him at the mercy of Sardar’s sense of humour, puckish when not entirely malevolent, and inveterate ability, familiar to any who have spent much time aboard the futures omnibus, to make people do things they would rather or indeed should not. Thus it was that a bemused Ravetz, who has dedicated years to renunciation and denunciation of consumer excess, was seen staggering from a Christmas grotto of Malaysian merchandising unsure of how he became encumbered by inordinate plastic bags full of trinklets, triffles and folde-rolles he had been inveigled to purchase because Sardar was bent, rather had bent Ravetz to his desire to test the validity of his newly coined postmodern mantra ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Sage observers might conclude this incident did much to hone Ravetz’s conception of risk analysis. Or maybe that happened when Ravetz was pitilessly induced by Sardar to consume in one gulp an entire mound of unexpurgated horseradish on his first encounter with Japanese cuisine. Apart from being fascinated by the combination of innocence and immense erudition, there is little doubt that Sardar is genuinely appreciative of his mentor’s subtle thought – the tormenting the one to highlight the other is doubtless perverse compliment – and is heavily influenced by Ravetz’s ideas on science criticism, the history of science, and postnormal science in particular. On 26–27 June 2009, family and friends of Ravetz organised a conference in Oxford on Post-normal Science to celebrate the 80th birthday of the celebrated scholar, Sardarian devised pratfalls not being permitted. Six papers from the conference are published in this special issue of Futures. Collectively, these papers demonstrate that postnormal science has become an indispensible tool of criticism and understanding in a whole range of diverse areas from depletion of fishing stock to curriculum design, climate change to knotty environmental issues. And postnormal science is increasingly being taught at undergraduate level. The issue also includes two contributions from Jerry Ravetz himself. The first, ‘Postnormal Science and the maturing of the structural contradictions of modern European science’, sums up the state of knowledge in PNS as Ravetz sees it. The second, ‘Climategate and the maturing of Post-Normal Science’, presents an engagement between Ravetz and his critics. Characteristically, Ravetz, with his ‘ex-Marxist congenital green radicalism’ seeks to engage with his critics who see science as ‘a tool in the hands of socialists’. He seeks to reassure his critics that he is as much concerned with ‘Truth’ as any fundamentalist, whether they believe in purity of science or religion. In the process of this engagement, Ravetz’s discovers that certain basic questions need to be asked about postnormal science. It’s a captivating dialogue that provides not merely insight but also illumination of Ravetz’s thought. That PNS could be seen to be ‘corrupting science’ and ‘denying truth’ is an indication of panic within certain segments of the scientific community. PNS, as Ruth Beilin and Helena Bender demonstrate in their paper, essentially acts as a torch light: it illuminates science to ‘critical gaze’, thus ‘disrupting’ and ‘interrupting’ the established ways of reading and ‘accepted stories’ and enables the creation of a space within which questions about unstated assumptions and received interpretations can be raised. When PNS is used in the classroom, the students become part of the ‘extended peer community’ that PNS advocates, leading to a more thorough examination of uncertainties. All of which leads to positive change in the discipline itself: ‘dissolving paradigms’ and new and innovative ways of seeing and knowing. Bev France describes how PNS was used by biology teachers in New Zealand to examine biotechnological processes and products. The industrialisation of biotechnology in New Zealand generated an intense political debate which demonstrated, writes France, that ‘science is not practised in a vacuum, and that the scientific process does not guarantee that scientists can provide answers with a degree of certainty that the public desires’. The debate exposed the inherent issues of uncertainty in biotechnologies leading to ‘awareness that the stakes are high for all’. PNS enabled each group of stakeholders in the discourse to explore each other’s viewpoints. PNS is particularly useful for focussing on uncertainties. As Kjellrun Hiis Hauge shows, ‘expert advice’ on fish quotas, provided by such institutions as the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), is based on numerous uncertainties that are seldom acknowledged. The uncertainties are treated as technical problems that can be quantified and solved; when, in reality, they are often epistemic, intrinsic to the discourse itself. The idea that ‘science’ can be separated from ‘policy’ is a superannuated joke. Hauge argues that the obsession with quantification and precision, a symptom of a mechanistic management system, is in fact an attempt to deny the post-normal nature of the science that is being applied. Jeff Howard concurs; and suggests that environmental sciences are full of postnormal categories – or ‘nasty surprises’ – that trap scientists, technologists, regulators, policy makers, the media and the public. The ‘nasty surprises’ include ‘acid
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precipitation due to long-range atmospheric transport of sulfur dioxide’ which are a threat to aquatic ecosystems and forests; depletion of atmospheric ozone layer which, apart from the obvious ecological damage, also leads to increases in skin cancer; ‘greatly elevated tissue concentrations of a neurotoxin in the general human population due to large-scale industrial use of lead (especially in gasoline)’ leading to ‘impairment of neurological development at concentrations very close to those found in the general population; damage to growth and reproduction of marine organisms; and rapid, widespread extinction of species due to overexploitation and wholesale destruction of habitat. Each surprise presents a real and present danger to human survival. Howards shows in some detail, with the example of case studies, how the ‘environmental nasty surprises’ (ENS) emerge and what contribution PNS can make to anticipating and managing these surprises. But Howard wants to go further. He asks: ‘while addressing ENS is arguably a crucial task of PNS activity, however, it is a class of phenomena pointing to a central ambiguity of PNS theory, present since its beginning. Is PNS needed and warranted only when a controversy erupts and only as long as active controversy persists?’ Is extended peer review, asks Howard, ‘warranted only when journalists, lawyers, and others can somehow muster the resources necessary to force their way into the analysis? Or is it warranted and needed on an ongoing basis, even when would-be extended peers can no longer hold the factory/laboratory door open and even when could-be extended peers have not recognized a need to try?’. Howard’s critique of PNS and its limitations lead him to argue that its framework needs to be extended. The episodes of nasty surprises have to seen as interlinked and systematically related which make it necessary for PNS to expand its legitimate range. But ‘nasty surprises’ are not limited to environmental issues. They lurk everywhere as deeply embedded but latent ignorance, as unrecognised problems, as issues we have no way of seeing or perceiving. Or as Shirin Elahi puts it, ‘Here be Dragons’. In the days of old, when knights were bold, the sign ‘Here be Dragons’ lead to the realisation of lack of knowledge and hence the necessity of increased vigilance. In the contemporary world, Elahi suggests, ‘human psychology, institutional frameworks and scientific convention have removed these unrecognised sources of ignorance from the mental maps of modern society’. This could be fatal for an interdependent, interconnected, globalised world. Postnormal science, along with ‘wicked problems’ and ‘black swans’, serves as a placard announcing ‘Here be Dragons’. That we confront the dragon, and the associated varieties of ignorance, has now become an imperative. Elahi suggests that one way forward is to use foresight and futures methodologies, including scenario planning, for identifying, monitoring and tackling our ignorance. Like Howard, Stephen Healy too argues for a fundamental shift in the framework of postnormal science. Healy takes Sardar’s assertion of postnormal times as given. PNS has been enormously successful in ‘integrating the contextually informed insights of lay stakeholders with those of technical stakeholders in ‘‘extended peer communities’’ so as to generate ‘‘extended facts’’’. It has helped to temper technocratic decision-making by emphasising complexity and engaging broader uncertainty. But ‘extended facts’ only go so far. They do not ensure that ‘proposed solutions are effective, endure and are widely accepted’. In practice, decision making, which always involves politics, is less ‘rational’ than suggested by PNS. The emergence of ‘complexity, chaos and contradictions’, which characterise postnormal times, suggests Healy, ‘is taxing current institutions to the point where failure is becoming recognizably ‘‘normal’’’. What is needed is ‘the reinstatement of effective societal oversight by making the implicit in political practice, explicit’. Healy sees consumerism as ‘the most fundamental contradictions of postnormal times’. The obsession with efficiency, that has been the cornerstone of ‘normal’ times, now faces the ‘Jevons paradox’. But the ‘insight that the savings from efficiency gains are, invariably, expended on further energy/material intensive investments should not, however, be viewed as a ‘‘paradox’’ in ‘‘the age of shopping’’. Rather, under current conditions in which the continuing structural facilitation of further consumption focuses corporate, technical and political activity, and the exhortation to spend provides a constant backdrop to life, this ‘‘paradox’’ has, unsurprisingly, become a ‘‘norm’’’. Far from being ‘natural’, most of our consuming habits have been manufactured. For example, the very idea of comfort, Healey argues powerfully, was historically constructed involving political economists, moral philosophers, scientists, humanitarian reformers and novelists, who gave a new physical emphasis to comfort as ‘they reconceptualised values, redesigned material environments, and urged the relearning of behaviours’. Healey wants to lift postnormal analysis from the single domain of science and focus it on ‘forms of life’. Rather than simply problematising ‘normal science’, we need to problematise ‘normal’ society. This is exactly what Sardar tried to do in his ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’ paper. His main thesis is that it is not just science but society, culture and what we take as civilisation as a whole that have gone postnormal. Postnormal times are a product, to use Howard’s words, of ‘a chronic, even deepening condition of the late-post-industrial technological world, a condition that persists in latent form’ and has numerous dimensions, knowable and unknowable. Sardar’s topology of ‘triple whammy of ignorance’ take us closer to Elahi’s dragons. And his three virtues – ‘humility, modesty and accountability, the indispensible requirement of living with uncertainty, complexity and ignorance’ – are necessary to resolve some of the contradictions inherent in ‘expert knowledge’ as described by Kjellrun Hiis Hauge. Moreover, Ravetz’s ‘maturing contradictions’ of European science – knowledge and power, knowledge and ignorance, the True and the Good, innovation and property, elitism/democracy, and reality and safety – are hardly limited to science. We can see these contradictions in most disciplines as well as social and political issues, as Healey argues. All this, as well as new scholarship [15,16] directly confirms the characteristics of postnormal times. So back to the C’s; and Sam Cole in his witty, self- deprecating, subversive yet by no means dismissive response to Sardar. Whether times are in fact ‘postnormal’, because our problems are ‘uniquely large relative to our ability to comprehend and deal’ with them, or ‘strange’ is a valid question. Cole is a strange man, he contends the problems of today are ‘resolvable, rather than insuperably overwhelming’ because ‘we have already evolved in, and survived, strange times’ and therefore ‘have sufficient latent reserves of knowledge’ available ‘to help ‘‘transition’’ us from our follies’. This is, of course, optimism of
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a monumental nature based on the assumption that because we have managed to solve our problems in the past we will continue to do so forever in the future. What we are faced with is an evidentiary question. Cole argues we need to turn to the past to gain perspective and appreciate that the strange events of today are an enduring part and parcel of ‘our unpredictable and chaotic world’. But what about those Cs? Cole suggests that Sardar’s triad of complexity, chaos and contradiction are part of a burgeoning Alliterative Revival, demonstrative of what could constitute an Alliterative Logic Theory: a way of organising problems, a way of managing information, ideas and action. By means of internet investigation Cole traces the Alliterative Revival to the point where his evidentiary question collides with a historic moment that establishes his argument for strange times. He quotes Old English poetry from the era of Black Death, the causal catastrophe that was no mere carbuncle of effects and yet was resolved by change. It is a nice try, but a very strange construction of alliteration. Cole, inevitably a C man himself, could consider that Old English poetry is the product of an even older tradition, still extant as it happens, in Welsh poetry. Not only does Welsh, the original expression of Britons, have poetic forms where alliteration predominates but also Druidic wisdom, the knowledge of the priestly caste, conventionally worked in triads. The Black Book of Carmarthen [17] a much later written compendium said to preserve these old Druidic forms is entirely composed of such triads. And there we have a key. Old Welsh poetry and Druidic knowledge originated in a predominantly oral culture. Alliterative triads are not only powerful oral tools for remembrance but can forge important mental maps of essential connections that live in the memory where they prompt reflection. The technique is by no means confined to the Welsh in their history, though it is often complained of by literary pedants when it transitions into modern day usage of English speaking Welsh persons. Oral cultures use sound values to indicate and alert their audience to meaning. Alliteration is the provocative point, the point from which thought, as well as emotion and remembrance, begins. The device is testimonial to a time when there was only rhetoric, the use of language in the service of logic, to stir people to stop and think and more importantly remember the vital connective lineaments of information and arguments. We can presume that Sardar is an adept of Urdu poetry where alliteration along with rhyme, rhythm and a host of other techniques based on sound values convey more than is said and therefore inspire ideas beyond what is stated. And so we return to the conundrum. Whether late or soon, Cole and Sardar fundamentally agree the world is too much with us and that its getting and spending is laying waste our powers, if I may be permitted to mangle some non-alliterative lines by Wordsworth. Wordsworth was very much a futures man. Like so many of his generation he thought he had found a utopian future in the French Revolution – until it became the Reign of Terror and he retreated appalled into pastoral romanticism and even eulogising the sink hole that was London in 1801. Cole and Sardar are united in a desire to confront ‘the follies’ of our world and find a ‘transition’ to better futures. For Cole this is tackling a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle of which we have only 100 pieces to determine what the scene represents. As he says we are always looking for ‘islands of knowledge in a synthesis of individual and collective minds – hopefully sufficiently rapidly to deal with issues, make institutions more adaptable, enhance social rights, mediate cultural traditions and so on.’ In that endeavour he does not quibble with Sardar’s recourse to a framework of operative values whose virtues are humility, modesty and accountability, and not only because it is non-alliterative. For Sardar these prudential values and virtues are not a Wordsworthian retreat to some earlier idyll but the dynamics of tough questions. Cole’s response makes them something more. The collective jigsaw puzzle needs to be cobbled together using parallel layers of experience. ‘Whatever our starting points’, or evidentiary issues, ‘we seek pathways to survivable, visionary, and utopian futures’, says Cole. ‘If it takes a few more pretensions, alliterations, acronyms, equations or rhetoric (PRAAER) along the way, so be it.’ This is no backhanded put down of Sardar. This is a ramshackle acronymic endorsement of futures as a form of prayer. So no pretension there. The resolution of the conundrum is all in the meaning attached to prayer, or PRAAER. The religious will tell you prayer is not a resort to fatalistic consolation while the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Its meaning and purpose is a call to action forged in concentrated contemplation that calls upon an enduring value framework which must be operated whatever the circumstances to secure true deliverance from earthly trials and tribulations – postnormal or strange. On this shaft of light Cole is content to walk on in search of dawn with Sardar. That Sardar’s postnormality is overly reliant on rhetoric is a common, indeed seemingly obligatory starting point for commentators. For Gary the rhetorical trope is metaphor, what Sardar offers is an embryonic metaphor for our global age, one he seeks to extend. Gary is not arguing with Sardar’s declaration of postnormal times but seeing it as metahistory. And, as he notes, by tradition metahistorians do not have to ‘explicitly delineate each factor’. Sardar’s ‘rough map of the new typology’ though ‘incomplete’ is sufficient to begin plotting the position of our problems with readily available tools, specifically Holling’s adaptive cycles and panarchical systems. What results ‘can be viewed as two ends of a seesaw’ or the ability to endorse the ‘post’ in postnormal by identifying ‘back loop dynamics of fast-moving variables that can cascade up to systemic collapse’ as well as negate the ‘post’ by pointing to ‘larger slow moving variables in front loops’ which can help the fast moving ones to recover. On reflection this could serve just as well as an endorsement of Cole’s argument that we have evolved in and survived strange times and have the reserves of knowledge to tackle what confronts us without the need to name ours as a uniquely significant era of transition. Despite his vision of a yes/no seesaw Gary, more explicitly than Cole, accepts Sardar’s framework because it ‘has the power to change the way the world is socially constructed’. So ultimately it is a matter not of what’s in the name, nor the precise definition of the problems of our global age but once again the parameters within which they are tackled. In which case Sardar’s cogency is not his analysis but in his prescriptive stance on the values and virtues required to determine how prudential and positive change should be conceptualised and sought.
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Apart from rhetorical tropes the underlying question for everyone is what are we looking at? What exactly is the scope and scale of the human predicament whether postnormal, strange or some sort of seesaw? Kapoor turns this around to ask who is looking at the problems of this global age and more importantly from what vantage point are they being viewed. It is indeed a telling to note that, looked at from and through the perspective of the West, normality is not merely imperilled but could indeed be over. While viewed from the rising powers of India, China, Brazil and other emerging markets the normality they yearn for is arriving and the future looks far rosier. We have not a global age so much as the old fragmented world of us and them; the present and future as much as history is still differently experienced and understood, Kapoor argues. Sardar is indeed aware of different perspectives and has argued in previous papers that as viewed from the West the future of the nonWest has already been colonised [18,19]. However, surely it is far too glib to argue that what are existential dilemmas for the West – terrorism, economic recession, climate change – are mere irritants, non-existent or other peoples’ payback so far as the new power brokers, those to whom the future really belongs, are concerned. For Kapoor the ‘normality’ enjoyed by the West over the last five decades was both illusion and aberration. Therefore, he implies ‘postnormal’ is a Westcentric concept. The task in hand is for ‘knowledgeable intellectuals and scientists, visionary leaders and activists and concerned citizens’ to pool their efforts and personal choices to evolve a new, democratic, global normality that gives ‘freedom to diverse human civilizations, communities and cultures to bloom.’ Sardar may look at the issues of our time from the vantage point of the West. But he is surely right to insist there is no way the rest of the world can avoid or insulate themselves from problems in a world without borders, with global scope which emanate from the follies of the West. Nor is it clear that the rising powers and emerging markets are free from and intent on avoiding, obviating or not imitating those follies as they claim their place in the sun. And Sardar most certainly stresses the imperative for the freedom of diversity in tackling the issues he identifies as postnormality. So, once again, whether one calls the new dispensation postnormality or a new normality there is agreement that without ‘collective application of ethics and creative imagination, the future could be bleak’, as Kapoor puts it. Sardar’s argument effortlessly accommodates Kapoor’s conclusions of what would comprise ‘new normality’. Indeed, Sardar’s values and virtues would make no sense unless their objective was to fulfil Kapoor’s requirements. So as Kapoor says ‘do we have any other option but to apply ourselves to the co-creation of this new normality?’ even if some would call it postnormality. Whether we are all postnormalists now or indeed in postnormal times is clearly a matter of debate. Where there is agreement is on the need for an ethical framework of values and virtues within which to find answers to human problems and construct alternative futures. There is also agreement that in pursuit of alternative futures imagination and creativity will be needed and these are the subject of Montuori’s response to Sardar. Far from taking issue with Sardar’s argument Montuori is concerned to get on with the business in hand by considering the prospects for the creative imagination, whether it is fit for purpose to come to our aid in these troubling times, whatever we call them. He points to the ways in which creativity in the West is changing from the model of the tortured individual genius encountering lightening bolts of inspiration to a ‘more collaborative, contextual, and indeed ecological perspective’ becoming an ‘everyone, everyday, everywhere’ process. The lone genius was often mythologised as self destructive just as the atomistic creative process could be ‘decontextualised’ seen in isolation from its effects on the social or natural world in which it occurred and on which it impacted. However, dramatic changes are occurring in the way creativity is being conceptualised and experienced. Evidences of participatory culture, from karaoke to Wikipedia and video games are turning attention to ‘everyday creativity’. This participatory culture, a return ‘to an earlier form of creativity’ when amateurs provided their own creative undertakings at home is now turning the pacified/passive consumers of the tv age into creative agents in the cyberamplified, networking, distance no object internet age. A consonant point is made by Kapoor, who argues that the rapid spread of the mobile phone in India and across the Third World is exponentially increasing the number and empowering the capacities of ‘change agents’ making bottom up initiatives of personal choice a vital part of realising alternative futures. However, Montouri then considers a serious problem: the failure of imagination, the difficulty the average person has in answering the ‘where do we go from here?’ question as images of the future have turned into dystopian scenarios fraught with doubt of whether a better future is attainable, even if one could conceive of what would constitute ‘better’. This failure of imagination is traced to the loss of faith in metanarratives – in religion as much as in science – and its resolution, he argues, lies in Lyotard’s postmodern construction of petits recits, or little narratives. One wonders whether Sardar, a trenchant critic of postmodernism [20] as but another face of the same old gaze of western exceptionalism and continued dominance, will thank Montouri for this particular addition to his argument. However, it is clear that Montouri sees the shift to ‘everyday, every(wo)man creativity’ and from ‘universal to local creativity’ as a means to operate within the ethical framework Sardar advocates. Montouri calls for ‘grass-roots philosophical futurism’ as a means to a ‘new, contextual, collaborative, emergent, networked, participatory creativity’. And this must involve ‘above all the development of a new sense of responsibility for our creative actions, a responsibility informed by both an awareness of the extent to which creativity is already operative in our daily lives and choices, and the extent to which it assists us in moving towards a vision of a more collaborative, ecological, diverse world.’ I suspect that ‘postnormal times’ will go the same way as ‘postnormal science’. It will have, and should have, its critics and detractors. Its theoretical underpinning can only emerge stronger and more refined from trenchant testing. It should be borne in mind that even if we have arrived already in postnormal times we keep on travelling and our destination ought to be better futures. In which case, it is Sardar’s mode of travel, whatever the times that are of overarching importance. The values and virtues of the ethical framework he insists upon are not new, the ‘better’ in better futures derives from applying them more imaginatively, intelligently and above all with unwavering consistent, appropriate commitment to sustainable,
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humane solutions to the plethora of human and natural problems for all. If we arrive at that collective conclusion we can withstand the worst the challenges of postnormal times portend. References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]
Z. Sardar, Welcome to postnormal times, Futures 42 (June) (5) (2010) 435–444. S. Cubitt, R. Hassan, I. Volkmer, Postnormal network futures: a rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar, Futures 42 (August) (6) (2010) 617–624. J.M. Gidley, Postformal priorities for postnormal times: a rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar, Futures 42 (August) (6) (2010) 625–632. G. Ringland, Frameworks for coping with postnormal times: a response to Ziauddin Sardar, Futures 42 (August) (6) (2010) 633–639. J.R. Ravetz, The Merger of Knowledge with Power: Essays in Critical Science, Cassell, London, 1990. J.R. Ravetz, Astronomy and Cosmology in the Achievement of Nicolaus Copernicus, Ossolineum, Warsaw, 1965. J.R. Ravetz, I. Grattan-Guinness, J. Fourier, 1768–1830: An Account of his Life and Work, Based on a Critical Edition of his Monograph on the Propagation of Heat, Presented to the Institut de France in 1807, M.I.T. Press, Massachusetts, 1971. J.R. Ravetz, The Acceptability of Risks, Council for Science and Society, London, 1977. J.R. Ravetz, Genetically Engineered Organisms: Benefits and Risks, John Wiley, Chichester, 1991. J.R. Ravetz, On the regulation of technology: examining the linear model, Futures 16 (June) (3) (1984) 217–232 (with Harry Otway). J.R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971 (several editions). J.R. Ravetz, S.O. Fontowicz, Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy, Dordrech, Kluwer, 1990. Z. Sardar, J.R. Ravetz (Eds.), Cyberfutures: Politics and Economy on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press, London, 1996 (numerous editions). Z. Sardar, J.R. Ravetz, Introducing Mathematics, Icon Books, London, 1999. T. Morton, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2010. V.A. Brown, J.A. Harris, J.Y. Russell, Tackling Wicked Problems: Through Transdisciplinary Imagination, Earthscan, London, 2010. M. Pennar (Ed.), The Black Book of Carmarthen, Llanerch Press, Burnham-on-Sea, 1989 (in Welsh). Z. Sardar, Colonising the future: the ‘Other’ dimension of future studies, Futures 25 (2) (1993) 179–187. Z. Sardar, Other futures: non-western cultures in futures studies, in: R.A. Slaughter (Ed.), The Knowledge Base of Future Studies: Directions and Outlook, vol. 3, DDM Media Group/Futures Study Centre, Hawthorn, Victoria, 1996. Z. Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture, Pluto Press, London, 1998.
Merryl Wyn Davies 30 The Walk, Merthyr Tydfil CF47 8RS, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 7 October 2010
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Introduction
Postmodern times: Are we there yet? Ziauddin Sardar’s declaration that we have entered ‘postnormal times’ [1] has caused controversy and debate among those aboard the omnibus of futures studies. A few rejoinders have already appeared [2–4]. At a time when the past is collapsing into the present at such a rate that nostalgia begins with last year could the future have imploded upon us in the guise of a new era? Do postnormal times really mark a sharp break from history – all our pasts? Is it not a normal human reaction to see our own times as different, uniquely distinct from everything that has gone before? Are the specific features of postnormal times unlike anything encountered in the past? And, are these features so different that they thwart our imagination? Or, are postnormal times merely strange? If so, are they sufficiently strange to produce a conundrum: that one can dispute whether the evidence for postnormality is cogent and compelling, question whether the case for catastrophe is a convincing argument – and yet concur with the conclusion? The consensual conclusion being that current conditions culminate in a compulsion for change which can best be combated by conjuring value laden virtuous futures visions. Have I used enough Cs now? Or, strangely enough, are C words a key to a new way of conceptualising the crises and contretemps at hand: how to make sense of the incomplete jigsaw puzzle of today and what we conceive of tomorrow? And if the concatenation of C words constitutes a clue could we not decode them by reference to their origins in the past? To C words – the alliterative triad used by Sardar is chaos, complexity and contradictions – we shall return shortly. But first we should observe that the notion of postnormal times derives from the theory of postnormal science developed by Jerry Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz, first presented in Futures, and championed by this journal for the past two decades. As Stephen Healy points out in his contribution to this special issue, ‘post-normal science (PNS) was conceived as a means of confronting the increasingly ‘‘normal’’, post-normal character of numerous contemporary challenges in which conventional distinctions between the spheres of facts, values and politics break down’. It was initially inspired by global environmental issues and went on to be seen as ‘paradigmatic of the shift from a traditional ‘‘predict and determine’’ model of science to a more contextually sensitive ‘‘assess and consult’’ one’. Like most theories it has its champions and detractors. But the evidence that science is becoming postnormal has been accumulating systematically; and the confirmation for the theory of postnormal science is taken for granted in certain scholarly circles. In the process, Ravetz himself has acquired both a halo and an aura of controversy. The contribution of Ravetz to contemporary intellectual thought has not always been recognised. His scholarly outputs have shifted the grounds of debates in the history and philosophy of science [5–7] and have made decisive interventions in our understanding of risks and regulation [8,9]. His contribution to the methodology of policy related research, analysis of uncertainties, philosophical and social criticism of science, and the history and criticism of mathematics have been truly immense – with scores of key papers, a list that would be too long to cite. Ravetz, who published his first paper in Futures way back in 1984 [10], served as a Consulting Editor to the journal for many years during which played a key role in shaping its intellectual and scholarly contents. From a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in Philadelphia in 1929. His father was a truck driver and union organizer. Ironically, for someone from a communist background, he managed to obtain a Pepsi-Cola Scholarship which took him to Swarthmore College; and in 1950, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright Scholar to do a doctorate in mathematics. He taught History and Philosophy of Science at Leeds University for many years. In 1971, while still at Leeds University, Ravetz published his first major study, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems [11]. The book, which argues that the industrialisation of science has corrupted it, was hailed as a decisive critique of science. Virtually all the criticism of science that emerged in the 1970s with the environment movement, and later with the debates about ecology, limits to growth and genetic engineering can be traced back to this seminal work. In the 1980s, Ravetz worked, with his lifelong collaborator, the Argentinean mathematician and philosopher, Silvio Fontowicz, on developing a method and notation for the representation of uncertainty in quantitative information. The end product was another ground-breaking book: Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy [12]. All the mathematics associated with risks that we know today owes its origins to this text. The theory of postnormal science, focussed on policy oriented science ‘where facts 0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2010.10.001
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are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’ emerged from Ravetz and Fontowicz work on risks and uncertainty. Ravetz met Sardar in 1973. At that time Ravetz had been appointed the Executive Secretary of the newly established Council for Science and Society, one of the first public institutions in Britain to explore the issues of risk, the politics of science policy and to challenge the established view of science as a ‘neutral’, benign phenomena devoted to Truth and Goodness. Sardar was a postgraduate student of information science. The two struck up a friendship that has endured ever since. Apart from collaborating on various books [13,14], the two have had numerous scholarly adventures in different parts of the world. As an occasional witness I can report their normal entertainment is intellectual discourse, of the kind which sets observers minds boggling and causing their internal risk assessors to whispering ever louder ‘Warning! Overload! Warning!’ During these tours de force of ideas Ravetz bobbles with content on his ocean of knowledge and Sardar fizzes around like a famous breakfast cereal of futures studies: ‘Snap! Crackle!. . .’. Always beware for there is bound to be a ‘Pop!’ as some cherished shibboleth crashes under the weight of its exposed inadequacies, at which Ravetz bobbles even more contentedly. A Ravetz zinger is a different matter, quietly advanced with customary courtesy, patience and kindness it arrives, a stealth bomber undetected by radar behind its coating of Seraphic composure, and despite being a dedicated peacenik, its delivers a payload of nuclear proportions. The devastating impact of his insight is in contrast to the avuncular innocence and invariant sweetness of Ravetz as friend and mentor. A trait which, on occasion, has left him at the mercy of Sardar’s sense of humour, puckish when not entirely malevolent, and inveterate ability, familiar to any who have spent much time aboard the futures omnibus, to make people do things they would rather or indeed should not. Thus it was that a bemused Ravetz, who has dedicated years to renunciation and denunciation of consumer excess, was seen staggering from a Christmas grotto of Malaysian merchandising unsure of how he became encumbered by inordinate plastic bags full of trinklets, triffles and folde-rolles he had been inveigled to purchase because Sardar was bent, rather had bent Ravetz to his desire to test the validity of his newly coined postmodern mantra ‘I shop, therefore I am’. Sage observers might conclude this incident did much to hone Ravetz’s conception of risk analysis. Or maybe that happened when Ravetz was pitilessly induced by Sardar to consume in one gulp an entire mound of unexpurgated horseradish on his first encounter with Japanese cuisine. Apart from being fascinated by the combination of innocence and immense erudition, there is little doubt that Sardar is genuinely appreciative of his mentor’s subtle thought – the tormenting the one to highlight the other is doubtless perverse compliment – and is heavily influenced by Ravetz’s ideas on science criticism, the history of science, and postnormal science in particular. On 26–27 June 2009, family and friends of Ravetz organised a conference in Oxford on Post-normal Science to celebrate the 80th birthday of the celebrated scholar, Sardarian devised pratfalls not being permitted. Six papers from the conference are published in this special issue of Futures. Collectively, these papers demonstrate that postnormal science has become an indispensible tool of criticism and understanding in a whole range of diverse areas from depletion of fishing stock to curriculum design, climate change to knotty environmental issues. And postnormal science is increasingly being taught at undergraduate level. The issue also includes two contributions from Jerry Ravetz himself. The first, ‘Postnormal Science and the maturing of the structural contradictions of modern European science’, sums up the state of knowledge in PNS as Ravetz sees it. The second, ‘Climategate and the maturing of Post-Normal Science’, presents an engagement between Ravetz and his critics. Characteristically, Ravetz, with his ‘ex-Marxist congenital green radicalism’ seeks to engage with his critics who see science as ‘a tool in the hands of socialists’. He seeks to reassure his critics that he is as much concerned with ‘Truth’ as any fundamentalist, whether they believe in purity of science or religion. In the process of this engagement, Ravetz’s discovers that certain basic questions need to be asked about postnormal science. It’s a captivating dialogue that provides not merely insight but also illumination of Ravetz’s thought. That PNS could be seen to be ‘corrupting science’ and ‘denying truth’ is an indication of panic within certain segments of the scientific community. PNS, as Ruth Beilin and Helena Bender demonstrate in their paper, essentially acts as a torch light: it illuminates science to ‘critical gaze’, thus ‘disrupting’ and ‘interrupting’ the established ways of reading and ‘accepted stories’ and enables the creation of a space within which questions about unstated assumptions and received interpretations can be raised. When PNS is used in the classroom, the students become part of the ‘extended peer community’ that PNS advocates, leading to a more thorough examination of uncertainties. All of which leads to positive change in the discipline itself: ‘dissolving paradigms’ and new and innovative ways of seeing and knowing. Bev France describes how PNS was used by biology teachers in New Zealand to examine biotechnological processes and products. The industrialisation of biotechnology in New Zealand generated an intense political debate which demonstrated, writes France, that ‘science is not practised in a vacuum, and that the scientific process does not guarantee that scientists can provide answers with a degree of certainty that the public desires’. The debate exposed the inherent issues of uncertainty in biotechnologies leading to ‘awareness that the stakes are high for all’. PNS enabled each group of stakeholders in the discourse to explore each other’s viewpoints. PNS is particularly useful for focussing on uncertainties. As Kjellrun Hiis Hauge shows, ‘expert advice’ on fish quotas, provided by such institutions as the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), is based on numerous uncertainties that are seldom acknowledged. The uncertainties are treated as technical problems that can be quantified and solved; when, in reality, they are often epistemic, intrinsic to the discourse itself. The idea that ‘science’ can be separated from ‘policy’ is a superannuated joke. Hauge argues that the obsession with quantification and precision, a symptom of a mechanistic management system, is in fact an attempt to deny the post-normal nature of the science that is being applied. Jeff Howard concurs; and suggests that environmental sciences are full of postnormal categories – or ‘nasty surprises’ – that trap scientists, technologists, regulators, policy makers, the media and the public. The ‘nasty surprises’ include ‘acid
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precipitation due to long-range atmospheric transport of sulfur dioxide’ which are a threat to aquatic ecosystems and forests; depletion of atmospheric ozone layer which, apart from the obvious ecological damage, also leads to increases in skin cancer; ‘greatly elevated tissue concentrations of a neurotoxin in the general human population due to large-scale industrial use of lead (especially in gasoline)’ leading to ‘impairment of neurological development at concentrations very close to those found in the general population; damage to growth and reproduction of marine organisms; and rapid, widespread extinction of species due to overexploitation and wholesale destruction of habitat. Each surprise presents a real and present danger to human survival. Howards shows in some detail, with the example of case studies, how the ‘environmental nasty surprises’ (ENS) emerge and what contribution PNS can make to anticipating and managing these surprises. But Howard wants to go further. He asks: ‘while addressing ENS is arguably a crucial task of PNS activity, however, it is a class of phenomena pointing to a central ambiguity of PNS theory, present since its beginning. Is PNS needed and warranted only when a controversy erupts and only as long as active controversy persists?’ Is extended peer review, asks Howard, ‘warranted only when journalists, lawyers, and others can somehow muster the resources necessary to force their way into the analysis? Or is it warranted and needed on an ongoing basis, even when would-be extended peers can no longer hold the factory/laboratory door open and even when could-be extended peers have not recognized a need to try?’. Howard’s critique of PNS and its limitations lead him to argue that its framework needs to be extended. The episodes of nasty surprises have to seen as interlinked and systematically related which make it necessary for PNS to expand its legitimate range. But ‘nasty surprises’ are not limited to environmental issues. They lurk everywhere as deeply embedded but latent ignorance, as unrecognised problems, as issues we have no way of seeing or perceiving. Or as Shirin Elahi puts it, ‘Here be Dragons’. In the days of old, when knights were bold, the sign ‘Here be Dragons’ lead to the realisation of lack of knowledge and hence the necessity of increased vigilance. In the contemporary world, Elahi suggests, ‘human psychology, institutional frameworks and scientific convention have removed these unrecognised sources of ignorance from the mental maps of modern society’. This could be fatal for an interdependent, interconnected, globalised world. Postnormal science, along with ‘wicked problems’ and ‘black swans’, serves as a placard announcing ‘Here be Dragons’. That we confront the dragon, and the associated varieties of ignorance, has now become an imperative. Elahi suggests that one way forward is to use foresight and futures methodologies, including scenario planning, for identifying, monitoring and tackling our ignorance. Like Howard, Stephen Healy too argues for a fundamental shift in the framework of postnormal science. Healy takes Sardar’s assertion of postnormal times as given. PNS has been enormously successful in ‘integrating the contextually informed insights of lay stakeholders with those of technical stakeholders in ‘‘extended peer communities’’ so as to generate ‘‘extended facts’’’. It has helped to temper technocratic decision-making by emphasising complexity and engaging broader uncertainty. But ‘extended facts’ only go so far. They do not ensure that ‘proposed solutions are effective, endure and are widely accepted’. In practice, decision making, which always involves politics, is less ‘rational’ than suggested by PNS. The emergence of ‘complexity, chaos and contradictions’, which characterise postnormal times, suggests Healy, ‘is taxing current institutions to the point where failure is becoming recognizably ‘‘normal’’’. What is needed is ‘the reinstatement of effective societal oversight by making the implicit in political practice, explicit’. Healy sees consumerism as ‘the most fundamental contradictions of postnormal times’. The obsession with efficiency, that has been the cornerstone of ‘normal’ times, now faces the ‘Jevons paradox’. But the ‘insight that the savings from efficiency gains are, invariably, expended on further energy/material intensive investments should not, however, be viewed as a ‘‘paradox’’ in ‘‘the age of shopping’’. Rather, under current conditions in which the continuing structural facilitation of further consumption focuses corporate, technical and political activity, and the exhortation to spend provides a constant backdrop to life, this ‘‘paradox’’ has, unsurprisingly, become a ‘‘norm’’’. Far from being ‘natural’, most of our consuming habits have been manufactured. For example, the very idea of comfort, Healey argues powerfully, was historically constructed involving political economists, moral philosophers, scientists, humanitarian reformers and novelists, who gave a new physical emphasis to comfort as ‘they reconceptualised values, redesigned material environments, and urged the relearning of behaviours’. Healey wants to lift postnormal analysis from the single domain of science and focus it on ‘forms of life’. Rather than simply problematising ‘normal science’, we need to problematise ‘normal’ society. This is exactly what Sardar tried to do in his ‘Welcome to Postnormal Times’ paper. His main thesis is that it is not just science but society, culture and what we take as civilisation as a whole that have gone postnormal. Postnormal times are a product, to use Howard’s words, of ‘a chronic, even deepening condition of the late-post-industrial technological world, a condition that persists in latent form’ and has numerous dimensions, knowable and unknowable. Sardar’s topology of ‘triple whammy of ignorance’ take us closer to Elahi’s dragons. And his three virtues – ‘humility, modesty and accountability, the indispensible requirement of living with uncertainty, complexity and ignorance’ – are necessary to resolve some of the contradictions inherent in ‘expert knowledge’ as described by Kjellrun Hiis Hauge. Moreover, Ravetz’s ‘maturing contradictions’ of European science – knowledge and power, knowledge and ignorance, the True and the Good, innovation and property, elitism/democracy, and reality and safety – are hardly limited to science. We can see these contradictions in most disciplines as well as social and political issues, as Healey argues. All this, as well as new scholarship [15,16] directly confirms the characteristics of postnormal times. So back to the C’s; and Sam Cole in his witty, self- deprecating, subversive yet by no means dismissive response to Sardar. Whether times are in fact ‘postnormal’, because our problems are ‘uniquely large relative to our ability to comprehend and deal’ with them, or ‘strange’ is a valid question. Cole is a strange man, he contends the problems of today are ‘resolvable, rather than insuperably overwhelming’ because ‘we have already evolved in, and survived, strange times’ and therefore ‘have sufficient latent reserves of knowledge’ available ‘to help ‘‘transition’’ us from our follies’. This is, of course, optimism of
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a monumental nature based on the assumption that because we have managed to solve our problems in the past we will continue to do so forever in the future. What we are faced with is an evidentiary question. Cole argues we need to turn to the past to gain perspective and appreciate that the strange events of today are an enduring part and parcel of ‘our unpredictable and chaotic world’. But what about those Cs? Cole suggests that Sardar’s triad of complexity, chaos and contradiction are part of a burgeoning Alliterative Revival, demonstrative of what could constitute an Alliterative Logic Theory: a way of organising problems, a way of managing information, ideas and action. By means of internet investigation Cole traces the Alliterative Revival to the point where his evidentiary question collides with a historic moment that establishes his argument for strange times. He quotes Old English poetry from the era of Black Death, the causal catastrophe that was no mere carbuncle of effects and yet was resolved by change. It is a nice try, but a very strange construction of alliteration. Cole, inevitably a C man himself, could consider that Old English poetry is the product of an even older tradition, still extant as it happens, in Welsh poetry. Not only does Welsh, the original expression of Britons, have poetic forms where alliteration predominates but also Druidic wisdom, the knowledge of the priestly caste, conventionally worked in triads. The Black Book of Carmarthen [17] a much later written compendium said to preserve these old Druidic forms is entirely composed of such triads. And there we have a key. Old Welsh poetry and Druidic knowledge originated in a predominantly oral culture. Alliterative triads are not only powerful oral tools for remembrance but can forge important mental maps of essential connections that live in the memory where they prompt reflection. The technique is by no means confined to the Welsh in their history, though it is often complained of by literary pedants when it transitions into modern day usage of English speaking Welsh persons. Oral cultures use sound values to indicate and alert their audience to meaning. Alliteration is the provocative point, the point from which thought, as well as emotion and remembrance, begins. The device is testimonial to a time when there was only rhetoric, the use of language in the service of logic, to stir people to stop and think and more importantly remember the vital connective lineaments of information and arguments. We can presume that Sardar is an adept of Urdu poetry where alliteration along with rhyme, rhythm and a host of other techniques based on sound values convey more than is said and therefore inspire ideas beyond what is stated. And so we return to the conundrum. Whether late or soon, Cole and Sardar fundamentally agree the world is too much with us and that its getting and spending is laying waste our powers, if I may be permitted to mangle some non-alliterative lines by Wordsworth. Wordsworth was very much a futures man. Like so many of his generation he thought he had found a utopian future in the French Revolution – until it became the Reign of Terror and he retreated appalled into pastoral romanticism and even eulogising the sink hole that was London in 1801. Cole and Sardar are united in a desire to confront ‘the follies’ of our world and find a ‘transition’ to better futures. For Cole this is tackling a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle of which we have only 100 pieces to determine what the scene represents. As he says we are always looking for ‘islands of knowledge in a synthesis of individual and collective minds – hopefully sufficiently rapidly to deal with issues, make institutions more adaptable, enhance social rights, mediate cultural traditions and so on.’ In that endeavour he does not quibble with Sardar’s recourse to a framework of operative values whose virtues are humility, modesty and accountability, and not only because it is non-alliterative. For Sardar these prudential values and virtues are not a Wordsworthian retreat to some earlier idyll but the dynamics of tough questions. Cole’s response makes them something more. The collective jigsaw puzzle needs to be cobbled together using parallel layers of experience. ‘Whatever our starting points’, or evidentiary issues, ‘we seek pathways to survivable, visionary, and utopian futures’, says Cole. ‘If it takes a few more pretensions, alliterations, acronyms, equations or rhetoric (PRAAER) along the way, so be it.’ This is no backhanded put down of Sardar. This is a ramshackle acronymic endorsement of futures as a form of prayer. So no pretension there. The resolution of the conundrum is all in the meaning attached to prayer, or PRAAER. The religious will tell you prayer is not a resort to fatalistic consolation while the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Its meaning and purpose is a call to action forged in concentrated contemplation that calls upon an enduring value framework which must be operated whatever the circumstances to secure true deliverance from earthly trials and tribulations – postnormal or strange. On this shaft of light Cole is content to walk on in search of dawn with Sardar. That Sardar’s postnormality is overly reliant on rhetoric is a common, indeed seemingly obligatory starting point for commentators. For Gary the rhetorical trope is metaphor, what Sardar offers is an embryonic metaphor for our global age, one he seeks to extend. Gary is not arguing with Sardar’s declaration of postnormal times but seeing it as metahistory. And, as he notes, by tradition metahistorians do not have to ‘explicitly delineate each factor’. Sardar’s ‘rough map of the new typology’ though ‘incomplete’ is sufficient to begin plotting the position of our problems with readily available tools, specifically Holling’s adaptive cycles and panarchical systems. What results ‘can be viewed as two ends of a seesaw’ or the ability to endorse the ‘post’ in postnormal by identifying ‘back loop dynamics of fast-moving variables that can cascade up to systemic collapse’ as well as negate the ‘post’ by pointing to ‘larger slow moving variables in front loops’ which can help the fast moving ones to recover. On reflection this could serve just as well as an endorsement of Cole’s argument that we have evolved in and survived strange times and have the reserves of knowledge to tackle what confronts us without the need to name ours as a uniquely significant era of transition. Despite his vision of a yes/no seesaw Gary, more explicitly than Cole, accepts Sardar’s framework because it ‘has the power to change the way the world is socially constructed’. So ultimately it is a matter not of what’s in the name, nor the precise definition of the problems of our global age but once again the parameters within which they are tackled. In which case Sardar’s cogency is not his analysis but in his prescriptive stance on the values and virtues required to determine how prudential and positive change should be conceptualised and sought.
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Apart from rhetorical tropes the underlying question for everyone is what are we looking at? What exactly is the scope and scale of the human predicament whether postnormal, strange or some sort of seesaw? Kapoor turns this around to ask who is looking at the problems of this global age and more importantly from what vantage point are they being viewed. It is indeed a telling to note that, looked at from and through the perspective of the West, normality is not merely imperilled but could indeed be over. While viewed from the rising powers of India, China, Brazil and other emerging markets the normality they yearn for is arriving and the future looks far rosier. We have not a global age so much as the old fragmented world of us and them; the present and future as much as history is still differently experienced and understood, Kapoor argues. Sardar is indeed aware of different perspectives and has argued in previous papers that as viewed from the West the future of the nonWest has already been colonised [18,19]. However, surely it is far too glib to argue that what are existential dilemmas for the West – terrorism, economic recession, climate change – are mere irritants, non-existent or other peoples’ payback so far as the new power brokers, those to whom the future really belongs, are concerned. For Kapoor the ‘normality’ enjoyed by the West over the last five decades was both illusion and aberration. Therefore, he implies ‘postnormal’ is a Westcentric concept. The task in hand is for ‘knowledgeable intellectuals and scientists, visionary leaders and activists and concerned citizens’ to pool their efforts and personal choices to evolve a new, democratic, global normality that gives ‘freedom to diverse human civilizations, communities and cultures to bloom.’ Sardar may look at the issues of our time from the vantage point of the West. But he is surely right to insist there is no way the rest of the world can avoid or insulate themselves from problems in a world without borders, with global scope which emanate from the follies of the West. Nor is it clear that the rising powers and emerging markets are free from and intent on avoiding, obviating or not imitating those follies as they claim their place in the sun. And Sardar most certainly stresses the imperative for the freedom of diversity in tackling the issues he identifies as postnormality. So, once again, whether one calls the new dispensation postnormality or a new normality there is agreement that without ‘collective application of ethics and creative imagination, the future could be bleak’, as Kapoor puts it. Sardar’s argument effortlessly accommodates Kapoor’s conclusions of what would comprise ‘new normality’. Indeed, Sardar’s values and virtues would make no sense unless their objective was to fulfil Kapoor’s requirements. So as Kapoor says ‘do we have any other option but to apply ourselves to the co-creation of this new normality?’ even if some would call it postnormality. Whether we are all postnormalists now or indeed in postnormal times is clearly a matter of debate. Where there is agreement is on the need for an ethical framework of values and virtues within which to find answers to human problems and construct alternative futures. There is also agreement that in pursuit of alternative futures imagination and creativity will be needed and these are the subject of Montuori’s response to Sardar. Far from taking issue with Sardar’s argument Montuori is concerned to get on with the business in hand by considering the prospects for the creative imagination, whether it is fit for purpose to come to our aid in these troubling times, whatever we call them. He points to the ways in which creativity in the West is changing from the model of the tortured individual genius encountering lightening bolts of inspiration to a ‘more collaborative, contextual, and indeed ecological perspective’ becoming an ‘everyone, everyday, everywhere’ process. The lone genius was often mythologised as self destructive just as the atomistic creative process could be ‘decontextualised’ seen in isolation from its effects on the social or natural world in which it occurred and on which it impacted. However, dramatic changes are occurring in the way creativity is being conceptualised and experienced. Evidences of participatory culture, from karaoke to Wikipedia and video games are turning attention to ‘everyday creativity’. This participatory culture, a return ‘to an earlier form of creativity’ when amateurs provided their own creative undertakings at home is now turning the pacified/passive consumers of the tv age into creative agents in the cyberamplified, networking, distance no object internet age. A consonant point is made by Kapoor, who argues that the rapid spread of the mobile phone in India and across the Third World is exponentially increasing the number and empowering the capacities of ‘change agents’ making bottom up initiatives of personal choice a vital part of realising alternative futures. However, Montouri then considers a serious problem: the failure of imagination, the difficulty the average person has in answering the ‘where do we go from here?’ question as images of the future have turned into dystopian scenarios fraught with doubt of whether a better future is attainable, even if one could conceive of what would constitute ‘better’. This failure of imagination is traced to the loss of faith in metanarratives – in religion as much as in science – and its resolution, he argues, lies in Lyotard’s postmodern construction of petits recits, or little narratives. One wonders whether Sardar, a trenchant critic of postmodernism [20] as but another face of the same old gaze of western exceptionalism and continued dominance, will thank Montouri for this particular addition to his argument. However, it is clear that Montouri sees the shift to ‘everyday, every(wo)man creativity’ and from ‘universal to local creativity’ as a means to operate within the ethical framework Sardar advocates. Montouri calls for ‘grass-roots philosophical futurism’ as a means to a ‘new, contextual, collaborative, emergent, networked, participatory creativity’. And this must involve ‘above all the development of a new sense of responsibility for our creative actions, a responsibility informed by both an awareness of the extent to which creativity is already operative in our daily lives and choices, and the extent to which it assists us in moving towards a vision of a more collaborative, ecological, diverse world.’ I suspect that ‘postnormal times’ will go the same way as ‘postnormal science’. It will have, and should have, its critics and detractors. Its theoretical underpinning can only emerge stronger and more refined from trenchant testing. It should be borne in mind that even if we have arrived already in postnormal times we keep on travelling and our destination ought to be better futures. In which case, it is Sardar’s mode of travel, whatever the times that are of overarching importance. The values and virtues of the ethical framework he insists upon are not new, the ‘better’ in better futures derives from applying them more imaginatively, intelligently and above all with unwavering consistent, appropriate commitment to sustainable,
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humane solutions to the plethora of human and natural problems for all. If we arrive at that collective conclusion we can withstand the worst the challenges of postnormal times portend. References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]
Z. Sardar, Welcome to postnormal times, Futures 42 (June) (5) (2010) 435–444. S. Cubitt, R. Hassan, I. Volkmer, Postnormal network futures: a rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar, Futures 42 (August) (6) (2010) 617–624. J.M. Gidley, Postformal priorities for postnormal times: a rejoinder to Ziauddin Sardar, Futures 42 (August) (6) (2010) 625–632. G. Ringland, Frameworks for coping with postnormal times: a response to Ziauddin Sardar, Futures 42 (August) (6) (2010) 633–639. J.R. Ravetz, The Merger of Knowledge with Power: Essays in Critical Science, Cassell, London, 1990. J.R. Ravetz, Astronomy and Cosmology in the Achievement of Nicolaus Copernicus, Ossolineum, Warsaw, 1965. J.R. Ravetz, I. Grattan-Guinness, J. Fourier, 1768–1830: An Account of his Life and Work, Based on a Critical Edition of his Monograph on the Propagation of Heat, Presented to the Institut de France in 1807, M.I.T. Press, Massachusetts, 1971. J.R. Ravetz, The Acceptability of Risks, Council for Science and Society, London, 1977. J.R. Ravetz, Genetically Engineered Organisms: Benefits and Risks, John Wiley, Chichester, 1991. J.R. Ravetz, On the regulation of technology: examining the linear model, Futures 16 (June) (3) (1984) 217–232 (with Harry Otway). J.R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1971 (several editions). J.R. Ravetz, S.O. Fontowicz, Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy, Dordrech, Kluwer, 1990. Z. Sardar, J.R. Ravetz (Eds.), Cyberfutures: Politics and Economy on the Information Superhighway, Pluto Press, London, 1996 (numerous editions). Z. Sardar, J.R. Ravetz, Introducing Mathematics, Icon Books, London, 1999. T. Morton, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2010. V.A. Brown, J.A. Harris, J.Y. Russell, Tackling Wicked Problems: Through Transdisciplinary Imagination, Earthscan, London, 2010. M. Pennar (Ed.), The Black Book of Carmarthen, Llanerch Press, Burnham-on-Sea, 1989 (in Welsh). Z. Sardar, Colonising the future: the ‘Other’ dimension of future studies, Futures 25 (2) (1993) 179–187. Z. Sardar, Other futures: non-western cultures in futures studies, in: R.A. Slaughter (Ed.), The Knowledge Base of Future Studies: Directions and Outlook, vol. 3, DDM Media Group/Futures Study Centre, Hawthorn, Victoria, 1996. Z. Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture, Pluto Press, London, 1998.
Merryl Wyn Davies 30 The Walk, Merthyr Tydfil CF47 8RS, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 7 October 2010