Will we need superpowers to get the future we want?

Today’s contribution to THE FUTURE WE WANT is by Paul Campion, CEO at TRL

We all want the same things: we want to live in comfort and security; we want our children to flourish; we want to be cherished in the bosom of our friends and/or family; we want the world to be fair and not to have people suffer. Blogs like this write themselves, don’t they? All I need to do now is to explain what policies will infallibly deliver the transport outcomes that underpin these wants and everything is sorted.

Possibly.

Economists have a phrase: “revealed preference”. It means, (roughly,) that you may get a better idea of what people value by watching what they do than by listening to what they say. A moment’s reflection will show us that what we “want” changes from time to time. I’m pretty sure my idea of a good life is different now then it was when I was, say, 16 years old and even the most philosophical and self-consciously moral of us will struggle to see the big picture when we are tired, cold, hungry or, God forbid, in physical danger; and yet, at any given moment large numbers of the world’s population are in exactly those situations.

In a subtler, but perhaps equally important way, what I “want” when I am earning my living is fundamentally influenced by how I earn that living, and may not align completely with what I “want” when I am acting as a consumer in a capitalist society, or voting. (As Upton Sinclair unimprovably observed in 1934 “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it”.)

Homo sapiens’ superpower is human society. We have become the dominant species on earth because we build societies that enable us to do things together that we could not do individually. No-one on earth knows how to make a mobile phone, a car or a megacity: they are just too complicated for one person to be able to master all the knowledge and skills required. It is probably several thousand years since any one person could reasonably expect to understand all the techniques and processes needed to sustain the lifestyle of the majority.

All of the good things we have achieved as a species have been the result of people working together (and, since the invention of language, working together over time.) Unfortunately, that is also true of the things we have done as a species which are not good for us, or for the other species we share the planet with. Science has revealed how fundamentally life has changed planet earth: the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, the soil and even some of the rocks underfoot are the result of billions of years of organic activity. But no other species has made a visible impact at planetary scale as quickly as humanity, and, unfortunately for the way we live now, that impact is changing all the assumptions we have been able to make up to now. The climate crisis is a testament to human society’s power…and to its limitations.

The complexity of the world we have built means that we struggle as individuals and as a society to know what to do to get the things we want. Over the next few decades, we are going to have to deal with the consequences of the climate change already locked in, and, just in case that doesn’t seem challenging enough, we will do so with demographic changes that will render all the assumptions underlying our economic and political science invalid. For the first time in modern history, we will have more old people than young.

The tool we have to negotiate agreement in society about what we want, and how we hope to get it, is politics. Politics is the job of helping people to make choices in this infinitely complicated world: no-one can understand the modern world well enough to know what the right answers to our problems are (even if the idea of a “right answer” is meaningful, which is doubtful) but we want to make the future better so we need to take action. As Winston Churchill pointed out “Democracy is the worst system of government apart from all the other forms which have been tried from time to time.”

Surveys suggest there are an increasing number of people turning away from the way they see politics being done to other models which, I suppose, hold out the promise of delivering better results, more quickly. Or, at least, that require less from each of us: give it to a “strong” leader, they say, and he (it’s usually a he) will get it done without us having to worry about the details. You will have your own views.

If you are still reading you are probably, by now, thinking “enough of the third-glass-of-wine philosophising: if it is all so doomy and complicated what should we DO?”

We need to reckon with world as it is. We have no alternative but to work with society. There can be no certainty in the complex systems of systems that enable our existences. But there are some principles that we can be confident about:

Let’s stay engaged.  We may have to learn from our failures but if we don’t try anything then we cannot get better.

Polarisation is not our friend. We know enough about how humans behave to know that confrontation entrenches disagreement and slows progress.

We need to have the optimism of the will. No-one could have predicted that we would have ended up here as a species and although science can help us predict what is going to happen to the climate,  how we will respond to it is not written: we can play a part in making the future better than it would otherwise be.

We need to follow the evidence.  Even if the complex system of systems that is society makes predicting all the consequences of our actions impossible, still we will do better if we act based on evidence and judge our successes based on observation and fact so as to adjust and improve at all times.

We all have a role to play in politics. Politics is the job of agreeing, as a society, what we want to do.  For those of us in the transport industries, for instance, helping, our fellow citizens understand the importance of transport to flourishing lives, and the implications of what we do and don’t do to societal outcomes is our job. It seems little enough, I know, but our species has done wonderful (and terrible things) by working together and our future cannot be built any other way.

Paul was a keynote speaker at THE TABULA PROJECT Roundtable Discussion Clearing Obstructions.  A full write up of the roundtable discussion series can be found here.