'Un-inventing' a better future
The value of pausing and reflecting
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We frequently wax lyrical about inventing a better future. We tell ourselves that we are obliged, through our four billion years of evolution, to create increasingly sophisticated value-laden solutions that will address current environmental, social and political mishaps/shortcomings. We hold sacred the notion that future inventions across the arts and sciences will solve or at least dilute the problems that continue to plague humanity. But in doing so, we remain curiously blind to the real culprits in history, the seemingly innocuous habitual practices, ingrained modes of thinking and legacy creations, that continue to unabatedly dictate how the present and future unfold.
While I appreciate the value of innovation, I’ve often struggled to appreciate our insatiable desire to unequivocally equate ‘the new’ with progress.
For every social dilemma, there’s a spanking new one-size-fits all policy waiting to be unleashed by a desperate vote-clamouring politician. For every technological obstacle, there’s another more refined piece of technical wizardry ready to take its place. For every environmental concern, there’s yet another ‘ingenious’ and hopeful redesign of carbon emission regulations.
But what if the solution for a better future lay in ‘un-inventing’ ideas and concepts that were once thought of as novel but have now somehow expired their worth, or worse, proved destructive to the very cause it was meant to champion?
The formula for ‘un-invention’ is disarmingly simple. It involves the ruthless ability to recognise and discard past inventions and perceptions that have become counterproductive and hence toxic to our progression as a human species. It is about going backwards to go forward. It is about making honest admissions in the present to address misguided decisions in the past.
All inventions start with a noble promise (and maybe even with an inkling of sincerity) to rectify a specific deficiency or fault. They are products of our primal impulse to correct what we deem inconsistent to presiding expectations. We want answers that come prefaced with assurances of progress - a fact that politicians have masterfully exploited for centuries. This longing for the new has cut us off from the capacity for reflective response and to learn from history in a proactive rather than prescriptive way.
The very fabric of our waking lives is now inundated with so-called inventions that claim to offer refinement either in how we address challenges or obliterate them. Technology corporations for example have positioned themselves as the benevolent frontrunners in building devices, platforms and apps that guarantee a refreshed future - one that has severed all its dated connections to a flawed past, or at least until the time arrives for another strategic revitalisation, deftly communicated through a scripted boardroom announcement or official tweet.
This approach is laced with the rhetoric of constant movement - from one framework to the next, with little time or energy directed towards retrospective contemplation.
John Dewey wrote in his increasingly timely 1910 meditation on how to cultivate reflective curiosity in an age of instant opinions and reactive action. He noted that the mechanisms by which we seek to ‘correct’ perceived flaws in the present are too often singularly focused on breaking away from the past, to create something that is perceivably different from anything we’ve known or experienced before. However, in doing so, we curtail rather than expand curiosity, settling on superficial answers that assuage present anxieties but are likely to wilt over time. He contends that our desire to create elaborate watershed moments ultimately render us incapable of rejecting deeply embedded practices, habits and creations that contribute to our present challenges and troubling predicaments.
We could be better of devoting some time towards un-inventing elements in the past, that have for some reason or another remained outside the purview of critical appraisal. While innovation and creation are rightfully hallmarks of an intellectually and economically advanced society, they also serve as key retrospective data points that allow us to pause and reflect on how ideas, events, things of the bygone era colonise our present choices and actions. These inventions are after all part of the same chain of consequence and deserve to be interrogated.
Only through an honest audit of past creations are we able to brush up against one of the most quintessential human flaws — our tendency to construct our beliefs based on insufficient knowledge and understanding. Our shiny new-fangled innovations are often not based on addressing these pressure points. They function on crippling cognitive shortcuts driven by humanities' desperation to usher in new generations and eras either for commercial gain or pride. The irony of course is that these supposed new inventions are strongly rooted to preconceived assumptions and entrenched biases of the past that have rather surreptitiously become part of our way of thinking in the present.
Dewey writes:
Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief. They are picked up — we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into acceptance and become unconsciously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, imitation — all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion — are responsible for them. Such thoughts are prejudices, that is, prejudgments, not judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence.
To truly harness the value of history, Dewey argues, we ought to consider the origin of our beliefs, their deep-seated relevance in the past and how they affect our current actions, which they inevitably do.
But beyond the above, I believe there needs to be a sense of emboldened urgency and courage to learn from past experiments; instances that have since been relegated as part of a distant past, overawed and overshadowed by the allure of upcoming trends in creativity and innovation. The relentless and maddening search for the ‘next golden age’ should instead begin in reverse, from the annals of history.
We need to penetrate the bottomless pit of past innovations because it is our capacity for depth that determines the richness and fruitfulness of our future.
‘Un-inventing’ is perhaps the first step to taking that deep dive.