These Times Ask More of Us

(Illustration by Vicki Turner) 

“Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.”— Václav Havel

In these times of cascading crises, the logic of the world as we know it is crumbling, and yet a new logic has yet to emerge. The educator Zachary Stein calls this a “time between worlds.” It throws up complex feelings, often pulling us in different directions. We hold conflicting accounts of the world in which we find ourselves, but we are wired to resist the possibility that something new is needed. As Frantz Fanon argued in his work on the concept of cognitive dissonance, when we are presented with evidence that works against our sense of what reality “should be,” we rationalize, ignore, or even deny what doesn’t comport with that worldview.

And yet, there is more to these times, even if a sense of hopelessness, powerlessness, and confusion is our day-to-day experience. Rebecca Solnit has written about how crises can become powerful calls to action, offering moments of opportunity and fresh perspective. The therapist and author Prentis Hemphill has spoken about how chaos doesn’t only destabilize norms but also holds possibility. It can be destructive and it can be generative. In a period of disorganization, a space opens for something new to settle in. Crisis and chaos can help us see what was unseeable before, revealing the hidden wiring and patterns in which we’ve been enmeshed and enabling us to disentangle ourselves sufficiently to regard those systems as objects of inquiry and the webs in which we exist.

So while the polycrisis brings fatalism and dissonance, it is also possible in this time between worlds to discern more clearly the blurry outlines of the operating systems and ontologies that have shaped our collective lives, leading us to new forms of inquiry. Crises can help us understand these systems less as the water we swim in and more as things we have constructed and internalized. We believe that across a wide range of human systems, innovators and visionaries are beginning to show us what might lie beyond the logic of modernity, with its focus on “progress” and Western Enlightenment, its dualistic thinking, rationalism, and materialism; and what can exist beyond late-stage capitalism, with its emphasis on growth, consumption, and accumulation.

In this time between worlds, there is “the glint of water through the trees,” as Laura Blakeman and Julian Norris describe in their contribution to this supplement. These glints can be seen in fields as diverse as bioregionalism, transformational investment, renewable energy, regenerative economic thinking, civic education, and innovations in the coding of our organizations, legal and governance practices, tax systems, and models of ownership. Much of this work is in its early stages, representing pockets of change that are not always connected to other activity. It is often made fragile by inhospitable political and economic environments. While difficult to grasp, these glints of change undeniably exist and represent a prefigurative future that lives in the present.

This commitment to exploring the deeper changes needed in human systems and shifts in consciousness that are required was the starting point of the Emerging Futures program at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). It’s been a rare privilege to have the space to ask what’s really needed at this time and have access to resources to explore that question.

In some ways, it is a challenge to nurture this program from “inside” philanthropy, given its embeddedness in extractive economic and financial systems and the colonial origins of much of its wealth. As we shaped the program, we have held two things very tightly. First, the original vision of Joseph Rowntree, who wrote 120 years ago: “I feel that much of the current philanthropic effort is directed to remedying the more superficial manifestations of weakness or evil, while little thought or effort is directed to search out their underlying causes.” Even the phrase “underlying causes,” which is typically understood as the “root of a problem,” needs a conceptual shift. We’re learning from our work that the greatest “underlying cause” of today’s challenges is the Western worldview.

Second, we felt a deep personal commitment to ensuring that the work holds integrity for our times. While facing economic, ecological, epistemic, and spiritual crises, we see a call to action and new possibilities, not a collapse into fatalism. Even as the cracks begin to show, we want to nurture and sustain the budding moss and lichen, which teems with new life and possibilities. In these times of transition and turmoil, can we see ourselves as the hinge generation linking two eras? Where our job is to use what we can of the old world to build the new, and work to deconstruct and say goodbye to the beliefs, structures, and practices that hold us back?

In every moment, glimmers of alternative futures appear. The present is made up not only of the knowable and measurable, but also of what is latent or hidden: the stuff of our hopes, imaginations, and spiritual existence. What might happen if we treated those as real, too? How might they shape different choices and priorities?

Margaret Mead wrote of “prefigurative cultures” in which the past is no guide to the future. In this context, we love how liberatory artist incubator MAIA frames their work as “a rehearsal of the world we want to be.” What exists that prefigures the futures of which we dream? What might happen if we became better at noticing those glimmers or fragments of hope that offer clues about how we might need to reorder our world? What is already here, hiding in the soil, perhaps only recognizable when we look in new ways? What might we start to notice if we take off the blinkers created by the harmful, extractive logic of our current economic systems?

We focus much more on strategic intentions than strategic planning and ground ourselves in the philosophy so beautifully described in adrienne maree brown’s work: that “what we pay attention to, grows.” In Vanessa Reid’s closing piece for this supplement, we’re invited to pay “exquisite attention” to the guidance hiding in plain view. Our work confronts the uncomfortable truth that the future cannot be predicted, but we believe that the future will be shaped in part by what we choose to pay attention to in the present. If we hope to speed up the transition to more liberatory and flourishing futures, and to mature into a new era, what and who is here in the present that can guide us toward change? What visions can be articulated to compel and propel people to take courageous action in this moment?

Our work at JRF is constantly evolving as we stay alive to the wider context and pay attention to what’s both in front of us and at the edges, on the horizon and in the anomalies. We are respectful of the unknowable. Our work also requires us to be situated in multiple worlds and times—past, present, and future, the status quo and the arising quo, the dominant system and the emerging one—and in the liminal spaces between.

It’s from these places that we’ve conceived of what our work in the present might be. We must pay attention to hospicing what is no longer of this time to seed and steward what needs to emerge—whether new, old, or alternative patterns—and to ensure that resources and wealth move in the right directions.

We have curated this publication to emphasize the practices we pay attention to, as individuals and collectives, and that sustain us in moments of change or during transitions. This issue is divided into four interlinked sections. For each section, we have invited a field perspective and deep dives into the people, places, and initiatives practicing in these fields.

The first section, which explores hospicing and stewarding loss, launches us into a conversation between Vanessa Andreotti and Habiba Nabatu, from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, and Lankelly Chase. For alternatives and new patterns and systems to emerge, we must recognize what is already dying or needs to die. The ways we collectively steward dying can contribute to healing, but also to the creation of what we call “good compost,” a rich, complex soil from which new futures can emerge.

The second section on collective imagination focuses on how building social imagination can unsettle the status quo and make the current system more implausible while opening us to new possible worlds. It gives us something different to long for and bring into being. Elissa Sloan Perry, who leads Change Elemental’s Prefiguring Futures Lab, invites us into these themes with an important query: Who gets to imagine? What conditions make it possible to take risks, especially for marginalized individuals? How we grow this capacity, the range of practices we have at our disposal, and who gets to practice are critical as we seek a different orientation through imagination.

The third section on capacities and capabilities begins with a provocation from Laura Blakeman and Julian Norris from the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning, in which they define what they call complexity consciousness. How do we equip people to lead through these times? What skills, capabilities, and competencies are needed, and how can they be embodied and enacted?

The fourth section focuses on the Great Wealth Transfer and acknowledges that so much of the work reflected in this supplement is not possible unless we predistribute wealth using different instruments and a different approach. Denise Hearn and Anastasia Mourogova-Millin illuminate how concentrated corporate power and excessive wealth accumulation persist and outline the rewiring work that we need further upstream from philanthropic giving.

Our final piece by Vanessa Reid, the founder of the studio of the extraordinary, asks what we tether to when the navigation systems we’ve relied on begin to unravel. Reid offers a story about unusual guidance and strange waymarkers for these apocalyptic times.

We hope this supplement touches your hearts, calls to your souls, and stretches your sense of what’s possible, but also what these times require of us: how we can bring more of ourselves into the world to answer calls for something different and new. We believe that this supplement also offers ideas that are deeply practical. There are practices to go away with, others to implement, initiatives to resource, and projects and programs to try.

Read more stories by Cassie Robinson & Sophia Parker.