From Critique to Cultural Recovery
AUSTRALIAN FORESIGHT INSTITUTE
MONOGRAPH SERIES 2003
Series Editor: Richard A. Slaughter
Other titles in the Series:
Foresight in Everyday Life
Peter Hayward
Wider and Deeper: Review and critique of science
and technology foresight in the 1990s
Andrew Wynberg
Reframing Environmental Scanning
Dr Joseph Voros (ed)
Acknowledgment
This monograph forms part of the AFI Research Program into
‘Creating and Sustaining Social Foresight’, which is supported by the Pratt Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUSTRALIAN FORESIGHT INSTITUTE
The Australian Foresight Institute (AFI) is situated in Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne, Australia. AFI is a specialised research and postgraduate teaching unit. It was
established in 1999 to develop an innovative set of postgraduate programs and research in the
area of applied foresight. Apart from supporting the University in developing its own forwardlooking strategies, its main aims are:
•
provide a global resource centre for strategic foresight
•
create and deliver world class professional programs
•
carry out original research into the nature and uses of foresight
•
focus on the implementation of foresight in organisations
•
work toward the emergence of social foresight in Australia.
AFI is intensively networked around the world with leading futures/foresight organisations and
practitioners. These include World Future Society and the World Futures Studies Federation.
In 2001, the Director of AFI was elected as President, World Futures Studies Federation. AFI
therefore, has access to leading international expertise in the field.
AFI also offers a nested suite of postgraduate programs. Based on coursework, the programs
are offered through the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship at the University.
The specific focus of AFI however is not merely on the creation and dissemination of standard
academic knowledge. It is primarily concerned with the implementation of foresight across
the board i.e. government, business, education and in the third sector (civil and non-government
organisations).
Thus the work of AFI covers a very wide territory. It is therefore vital that those working in
this context are comfortable with the breadth and the depth of this type of work and willing
to utilise knowledge and skills from widely distributed sources.
Overall AFI aims to set new standards internationally and to facilitate the emergence of a new
generation of foresight practitioners in Australia. It offers a challenging, stimulating and innovative
work environment and exceptionally productive programs for its students who come from many
different types of organisations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
José Maria Ramos was born in Oakland, California in 1971 from Mexican ancestry. As a child
he grew up in Los Angeles and was deeply influenced by the city’s profound multiculturalism
and eclectic philosophies, while as the same time deeply disillusioned with its materialism
and unsustainability. He studied comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine,
specialising in Spanish, Japanese and Chinese literature and philosophy, receiving his B.A. in
1995. Living in Japan, Europe and Taiwan between 1995 –2000 awakened his interest in world
politics, cultures and futures studies. He has studied futures in Houston, Taipei and Melbourne,
and has recently conducted research for the Australia Foresight Institute. He is committed to
creating local and global communities of foresight through participatory action research and
‘action foresight’. He now lives with his wife, DeChantal, in Melbourne Australia.
From Critique to Cultural Recovery:
Critical futures studies
and Causal Layered Analysis
Monograph Series 2003
No. 2
By José M. Ramos
Australian Foresight Institute
Swinburne University
First published 2003
Australian Foresight Institute
Swinburne University
John Street Hawthorn
VIC 3122 Australia
ISBN 0 85590 791 6
©Australian Foresight Institute
This monograph is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private
study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968,
no part shall be reproduced by any process without written permission.
Editor: Rowena Morrow
Design: Swinburne University of Technology, Press Art Department
Printed in Melbourne by Mercury Print Team
Disclaimer
The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the Australian
Foresight Institute, Swinburne University of Technology or the Pratt Foundation.
CONTENTS
Two portraits of critical futures in action
1
1 The emergence of critical futures
3
Introduction
3
Beginnings
4
A Breakdown of Meaning
5
Re-conceptualisation: the raw material
11
Cultural Recovery: new philosophic ground
15
Conflict and Negotiation: from England to Australia
19
Selective Legitimation
23
The convergence of critical futures practice
26
Conclusion
30
2 Transcendence of a method: the story of Causal Layered Analysis
Introduction
Background
Horizontal and Vertical
Layers of Reality
33
33
34
35
36
Litany
38
Social Causes
39
Worldview and Episteme
41
Myth/Metaphor
43
Post-structural influences
45
Insight: ‘Probing beneath the Surface’: Budapest 1990
47
Intuitive action research
47
Publication
49
Conclusion
49
Afterword
51
Endnotes
55
TWO PORTRAITS OF CRITICAL FUTURES IN ACTION
The ‘emancipatory tradition’ in futures studies, if broadly defined, spans the work of
many scholars, writers and peace minded individuals the world over. To name a few would
do insult to the many that have made contributions. Critical futures studies, as an intellectual
practice that aims to critique reified and oppressive social structures and destructive cultural
traits, also fits within this emancipatory tradition. Again, the list of those who call themselves
critical futurists is long, and naming a few would mean ignoring the rest. At any rate,
critical futures and the emancipatory tradition has never been about names, but rather
about the nameless, those many whose voices and visions have been ignored at the point
of a gun, drowned out by the sound of falling bombs and otherwise dehumanised by
‘modernising’ forces and structural violence. Critical futures is not about the careers of
a few scholars, rather it is about projects that transcend the narrow boundaries of the
self. These projects range from creating a sustainable society and sustainable world for
future generations, to creating futures of gender equality, to addressing the ‘civilisational
challenge’, envisioning a peaceful ‘Gaia of civilisations’, and otherwise opening up spaces
for popular participation in creating alternative futures.
The following monograph examines two such projects, those of Richard Slaughter and
Sohail Inayatullah, and their respective contributions to critical futures studies. And while
they represent the work of only two in the rich emancipatory tradition in futures, their
contributions are particularly important. The reader may detect a tone of admiration
throughout this monograph, which some academics might find embarrassing. Instead of
apologising, however, there is a justification. The ‘devotion’ expressed here is not to these
men specifically, but to what they represent, a rich world beyond the narrow confines
of instrumental rationality and the biased assumptions of the West. While there is unapologetic admiration of both men, they have also made foundational contributions to
understanding the social construction of the future; and they have laid new ground for
a generation of futures thinkers. It would be dishonest to say that this is an objective
account of their work, but ‘objective’ no longer holds up under scrutiny anymore, given
our understanding of how the ‘object’ of our examination changes according to our vantage
point in the socio-political spectrum. A claim to objectivity would be presumptuous. The
author shares their emancipatory ethos.
This monograph is by necessity biographical. We live within contextual fields of
consciousness and action, and are expressions of our time and place. To deny these structures
is to somehow make ourselves omniscient observers above the influence of the world.
People and their ideas are naturally expressions of their context: the culture and era they
live in. To make the claim that a writer’s ideas are somehow separate from their historical
and cultural environment is to intimate the universality and everlasting truth of their
claims. Far from this, the position taken here is much humbler. The work of these men
will some day be looked at as products of their time, critiqued, and with different and
unforeseen futures thinking emerging – ‘transcending and including’. This is an attempt
to ‘situate’ the ideas of these two men in the context of their life journey, to weave a
narrative of individual exploration and social innovation. Far from muddying the waters
with anecdotal facts, a ‘contextual analysis’ highlights the relevance of their ideas to their
historical situation and their experiences as actors in the making of history.
The true objective of this monograph is two-fold. Firstly, to highlight and explore the
ideas and methods these individuals innovated; thus, the background and core ideas of
many of the thinkers that influenced Slaughter and Inayatullah are unearthed and
characterised. And, secondly, to situate the ideas and methodology in their cultural and
historical contexts, or in the words of Inayatullah, to ‘locate methodology in epistemology
– focused on the person, the situation and the episteme’.1 By extension, there is complicity
on the part of the writer, with one’s personal values and interests expressed through this
text. This monograph is thus not the true story of critical futures, but rather a labour
of interpretation with emancipatory intent.
1 The emergence of critical futures
INTRODUCTION
This is the story of the emergence of critical futures studies, as developed by Richard
Slaughter. Critical futures studies can be understood as studies of futures that take as a
primary consideration the analysis and reformulation of the way we know our world
(epistemology), worldview and the social construction of reality. To put this in another
context, however, critical futures arose as a response to the tremendous 20th century
crisis that has come to face human civilisation. This crisis arose out of the Western industrial
worldview that ‘put our civilisation in peril from its own expansion and success’.2 Thus,
this story reflects the commitment of many in creating ‘futures beyond dystopia’ and
moving past ‘limited prevailing cultural assumptions’ – primarily the assumptions of the
West. It relates directly to the quality of our shared futures, a race for survival in which
humans will either: inhabit a world compromised by over-consumption, atomic warfare,
and dysfunctional social systems; or open up brighter futures by re-examining the ‘inner’
dimension of the world – perception and worldview assumptions – and act in qualitatively
new ways. In his words:
the central point is this: we face a civilisational challenge. The challenge is to
grasp our destiny on this small planet and to work toward consciously chosen
futures, rather than drift further into crisis and devastation.3
4
FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Slaughter spent some twenty-five years taking critical futures studies from an idea he
had as a student, researcher and professor, to a focus practiced by many in the field. As
such, critical futures studies can be seen as a particular social innovation, and has experienced
and undergone many of the various stages, challenges and obstacles in the innovation
process. Richard Slaughter’s own ‘transformation cycle’ (T-cycle), an ideational
(consciousness based) framework for understanding social innovation and legitimation
processes, helps explain his development of critical futures studies.4 Slaughter’s
development of critical futures goes through four general stages:
1. Breakdown of meaning – From Slaughter’s travels and readings, he realised that
prevailing assumptions within the Western worldview (and American futures studies
in particular) no longer worked in the face of prevailing future-oriented challenges.
These challenges compelled Slaughter to search for new and innovative responses; this
brought him into deep inquiry and research.
2. Re-conceptualisation – Slaughter created the conceptual framework for critical futures
studies and critical futures education as a response to this ‘breakdown of meaning’,
this is encapsulated in his 1982 PhD dissertation.
3. Conflict and negotiation – Slaughter tried to work within the English system to make
critical futures studies a social reality. Although he met with some success, Slaughter
was repeatedly stymied in his efforts to implement it. Negotiation came when he intuited
better conditions for critical futures in Australia, and moved there upon an invitation.
This coincided with linking up and networking with other scholars and writers around
the world who had similar orientations; a community of practice was born.
4. Selective legitimation – Efforts to implement critical futures fared better in Australia.
Publications also went well, and teaching opportunities open up; Slaughter was finally
given an opportunity to found the Australian Foresight Institute at Swinburne University
of Technology, Melbourne.
BEGINNINGS
Richard Slaughter grew up in a working class terrace in Southsea, Portsmouth, England.
His parents had experienced the Second World War, and married toward its end. Since
his father worked such long hours, his mother ran the household. Although money was
always short, it was a peaceful home. His mother would take him on outings and treated
him well. Despite the fact that they weren’t educated in a bookish, academic sense his
parents did not accept the limitations of working class life and did much to give Slaughter
a broad base of experiences. They took him on numerous local excursions and to exhibitions
and other events in London.5 Encouraged to join the library as soon as he was old enough,
he had developed a taste for fiction, in particular science/future fiction.
The emergence of critical futures 5
By the time he was a teenager his interest in the future was firmly established. But it
was accompanied by a slowly dawning realisation that something was wrong. Disastrous
futures, dystopias, the predominance of technology, and de-humanised characters
disturbed him, and created the beginnings of a profound uncertainty about the future.
Notable many years later was Brian Stableford’s statement that ‘the future was a disaster
that had already happened’.6 The cultural shift toward dystopian visions, noted by many
scholars throughout the 20th century, would later inform his understanding of what he
would call ‘the civilisational challenge’. He would not, however, take these dark futures
at face value. By contrast, there were also sources of optimism. For example, Frank
Hampson’s Dan Dare series in the 1950s boy’s comic, The Eagle, depicted a world of
danger in the shape of the evil Mekon, a small green figure with an overgrown head and
an army of Phants and war machines. Yet somehow humane characters, both male and
female, always defeated the Mekon and his forces. Hampson created a world of
fascination and possibility, with optimistic and human values, where well rounded characters
responded to the challenges they faced.
Richard Slaughter’s immersion in future-oriented literature was an important catalyst.
For example, the appealing future that Hampson created, with its emotive, spiritual or
aesthetic power could have been that ‘Other’ transcendent world that Fred Polak spoke
of as a dynamic force in influencing behaviour.7 The tension between this utopian literature,
and the dystopian catastrophe literature are among the beginnings of ‘foresight’. Research
has shown that when a desired future is juxtaposed with impending reality, a commitment
to act may ensue.8 Slaughter began to see that the future was not an abstraction, but that
there were many alternatives and challenges, perhaps the beginnings of Polak’s ‘influenceoptimism’, an outlook suggesting that the future is not pre-determined, and that we do
have influence. This imaginative world of futuristic literature provided an inspirational
foundation for later life. As William Law once wrote, ‘perpetual inspiration is as necessary
to the life of goodness, holiness and happiness as perpetual respiration is necessary to
animal life’.9
So while Slaughter was unexceptional in school, with report cards coming home to his
family saying ‘could do better’, ‘talks too much’, and even ‘disgraceful result’,10 his inner
world was rich in colour and life and his fascination with the world, and the future, was
steadily growing.
A BREAKDOWN OF MEANING
What Slaughter began to unmask in the following years, was a deep pathology lying at
the heart of Western Civilisation. It was out of this realisation of the extensive
dysfunction in the Western worldview, and the subsequent breakdown in the legitimacy
6
FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
and validity of Western ways, that his concept of critical futures studies emerged. While
the nature of this breakdown is still a matter of fierce debate today, Slaughter uncovered
a long list of indicators. These led to a process of steady disillusionment and a progressive
unmasking of the status quo.
Science fiction may have laid a foundation for foresight, and inculcated the openness of
the many alternative futures humans can choose, with subsequent transcendent visions.
However, it was his discovery of the history of the Southsea Common, in the area where
he grew up, and the awakening of his historical awareness that created the beginnings
of a sense of crisis.
Slaughter became aware that Portsmouth and the Southsea Common had been much
different in the past, in fact filled with ecological richness. He saw the contrast around
him, its sterility through human development, and realised that what was around him
did not exist in static continuity, but had come to be through a long process of change.
The fate of the Southsea Common would be put into context by his subsequent experiences
and reading. He would find that it was simply one part of a larger phenomenon.
While studying to be a teacher in college in the 1960’s, he came across Edmund Leach’s,
A Runaway World.11 It described irreversible environmental damage on a planetary scale
and showed societies heading toward anarchy, war, starvation and ecocide. Slaughter found
that his own education as a teacher in training did little to address these issues. He began
to wonder why the educational curriculum was so static, given that most of the children
he was being trained to teach would spend at least half their lives in the twenty-first century.12
If Slaughter’s understanding of the global challenges facing humankind was gradually
awakening in England, his experience living in Bermuda between 1969 –1975 became a
catalysing force and a major turning point in his life. He and his wife moved to the island
of Bermuda so he could begin work as a teacher. He was at first impressed by the beautiful
sub tropical chain of islands a complete change from the cloudy skies of Britain. Slaughter
had a strong desire to be close to nature, and in fact wrote (and photographed) his first
book there called Birds in Bermuda.13 But, looking below the surface, a tragic story began
to emerge. Like Portsmouth, what was once an ecologically rich environment had been
decimated by human development. The colonies of seabirds famous in earlier times;
mentioned, for example, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, were all but gone. The thick cedar
and palmetto forests had been cut back or had died of imported cedar blight. To have
such a strong love of nature, and to see it being compromised, was heartbreaking. The
six years Slaughter and his family spent in Bermuda had a powerful effect on him. Distinctions
between layers of reality, life as a process of historical change, and the gulf between image
and substance were highlighted and became increasingly real. On the surface, Bermuda
appeared to be a tropical paradise. But below the surface were underlying socio-economic
The emergence of critical futures 7
conditions that suggested a very different reality: one that was excessively materialistic,
overdeveloped, and hostage to a ‘diminished ethic of consumerism’.
Slaughter saw that the very things that made the island interesting and unique were being
destroyed by what he termed ‘a cynical economic machine’.14 The underlying dysfunction
of the place and the contradictions in the conventional wisdom of a materialistic consumer
culture, were all too clear. Bermuda existed for most as a fantasy island. The reality below
the illusion suggested that it was ‘one version of dystopia’.15 In substance, the tourist
dream had already shown itself to be breaking down, socially, ecologically and spiritually
unsustainable.16
An encounter with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, illustrated even more concretely the
destructive effects of the commercial-industrial system on every aspect of the environment.17
In her book, she showed how industrially created chemicals were systematically wiping
out whole species of wildlife and degrading the quality of human life – often inducing
sickness and premature death. Carson highlighted the interrelated nature of the
ecological system humans were part of, and pointed towards the need for human sensitivity
and new knowledge about ecosystems and the environment.18
Man has lost the ability to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the
earth.19
In the face of such widespread ecological challenges, Slaughter began to see more clearly
the contradictions and obsolescence that characterised the British educational system.
Upon returning to university in England, and with Bermuda still very much in mind,
it was apparent that current education practice was out of touch with the new realities
that he had recently read about and experienced first hand. Instead of preparing students
to deal with the challenges facing their society and future generations, education was
backward looking, working one-sidedly from knowledge of the past.
This was highlighted in a geography course that presented the subject without an
understanding of how the land had changed, without any historical awareness, as though
the landscape was merely a ‘static’ feature of reality. He realised that in England and
elsewhere ‘schooling assumes a broadly static frame of reference. That is partly why it
finds it hard to look ahead’.20 The educational establishment’s claim to ‘objective’ and
‘value-free’ knowledge also became suspect.21 This led to a greater understanding of his
dissatisfaction with his own education as a youth and teacher in training: there was a
very wide gap between a static education assuming an unchanging world and the need
for a dynamic education incorporating a futures context.
Slaughter began to question the style of teaching that was being offered. Everywhere
he looked education was prescriptive, students had no opportunity to decide their learning
8
FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
path and objectives. From this point on, as a student and educator, he would take a
facilitative approach to education.
Living in Bermuda was more instructive than many years spent in formal education
because while the latter exists to promulgate the dominant myths and stories
of a culture, the former showed that such myths and stories (about progress,
standards of living, growth) often serve limited or irrational interests which do
not readily yield up their secrets and hidden agendas.22
Slaughter decided to study at the University of Lancaster, in a new School of Independent
Studies (SIS) in which he developed a program called ‘Science, Technology and the Human
Future’. SIS welcomed mature aged students who had focussed ideas on what they wanted
to study. Here, he began to explore many of the areas that had become urgent, and which
would inform his later work: environmental studies, alternative futures and the sociology
of science. The freedom to design his own course of study, and degree program, was
another breakthrough in his education. Indeed, the intimacy he gained with his subject
matter would be a light of inspiration for many years to come.
During the Bermuda years, American historian Lewis Mumford had started to inform
Slaughter’s understanding of the crisis facing modern societies. In The Pentagon of Power,
Mumford uncovered the dehumanising effects of large scale technologically driven societies,
from as far back as ancient Egypt to the modern ‘megamachine’ of the US militaryindustrial-technological complex. Mumford showed how the centralisation of power in
modern society, accompanied by absolutism, militarism and mechanisation, gives rise to
technological obsession, giantism, the return of Divine Kingship (hero worship) and the
immortalisation of idols. This system, the ‘automation of automation’, is kept in place
by an autocratic technocracy that alienates large numbers of people. The end result
is frequently homicide, biocide and even genocide.23 Mumford also revealed the
technological bias and obsession in our language and conception of history showing how
our conceptions of historical eras have highlighted technological factors: be that in an
agrarian era, an industrial era or a so-called information era. Modern societies continue
to be biased towards framing much of social reality in technological and/or economic
terms. By extension, notions of progress couched in absolute technological terms, become
problematic if one accepts that technology is not the only measure of change or progress.
In fact, Mumford showed that technology is not a neutral force, but is used for particular
ends by political and social interest groups.24
After achieving a first class Bachelor of Arts Honours degree, he took a scholarship in the
Department of Educational Research at Lancaster. His supervisor, John Reynolds, became
a mentor and tutor who taught him the meaning of ‘critical’ and led him through the social,
psychological, and epistemological frameworks and theories he would need to develop the
The emergence of critical futures 9
notion of ‘critical futures’. Slaughter relates that without Reynold’s help, he would never
have been able to develop critical futures studies, and all that has stemmed from it.25 Thus
aided by a ‘critical’ perspective and with a newfound interest in, and commitment to futures
studies, Slaughter began to review and critique the wide body of available futures work.
While working on his PhD, from 1978 to 1982, Slaughter began to see futures studies as
a mixed bag of elements and ideological interests, many of which were non-reflexive; that
is, epistemologically blind to their own grounding and their own framing assumptions.
Futures work emerging from the US seemed particularly blinkered by its own way of seeing
the world and its ‘situated-ness’. In short, despite their frequent grounding in empirical
observations, he found that futures researchers’ ways of knowing were largely assumed and
had not been examined from other cultural or epistemological viewpoints.
At the top of this list were hyper-optimists, researchers and writers such as Herman Kahn
and others from the Hudson Institute in the US who took a ‘technocratic/managerial’
approach. Kahn’s, The Year 2000, set out roughly deterministic ‘multi-fold trends’ projecting:
•
continuous economic growth
•
the adoption of Western economic system by the developing world
•
the continuous rise of a bourgeois/bureaucratic/meritocratic elite
•
continuous increases in scientific and technical knowledge
•
continuous institutionalisation of technological change
•
steadily increasing military capacity
•
continuous Westernisation/modernisation/industrialisation of the world
•
increasing affluence and urbanisation
•
the emergence of a ‘knowledge industry’
•
increasingly rationalistic, innovative and manipulative social/cultural/political
engineering
•
population growth
•
the increasing centralisation/concentration of economic and political power
•
the universalisation and increasing tempo of all of these changes.26
In short, this vision forecast the universal maintenance of the status quo. Problems with
this projection of the future, according to Slaughter, included its naïve assumptions regarding:
•
the capacity of the world’s environment to sustain such growth
•
the desirability of the Western model of development and ‘progress’ from the
perspective of the non-West
•
its under-valuation and systematic distortion of ‘counter-culture’ social movements
10 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
•
its elitist approach
•
its failure ‘to deal with the ideological aspects of innovation or its inherent
ambiguities’.27
In some respects, the optimistic ‘The Year 2000’ mirrored Mumford’s pessimistic ‘The
Pentagon of Power’ in content but with a positive, albeit dehumanised, face.
In Slaughter’s view technology, like education, could no longer be viewed as ‘value free’
and neutral. World War One, which saw millions needlessly killed through such
innovations in technology as biological warfare, the machine gun, and accurate long range
artillery, transformed writers such as H.G. Wells from optimists to pessimists who now
saw human history as ‘more a race between education and catastrophe’.28 In 1909,
E.M. Forster wrote a fictional satire The Machine Stops, depicting a dark future in which
human societies had become so dependent on technology that people had deteriorated
mentally and physically. When the technological systems that sustain them break down,
only those that are outside the system survive.29 While technology had once been seen
as a liberating force, with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
‘technology had the power to end civilisation’.30 It also became increasingly clear how
technical power was outstripping people’s sense of meaning and purpose.31 ‘This contrast
between destructive power and liberating potential altered the whole aspect of the future’.32
According to Barry Commoner in The Closing Circle,33 the very success of technology, its
proliferation and efficiency, coupled with widespread ecological ignorance, was what underlay
the widespread environmental destruction of the twentieth century. But instead of
abandoning technology, Commoner advocated a view that technology should be brought
into a closer balance with ecological principles. In examining environmentalist perspectives
on the future, Slaughter found that Commoner failed ‘to develop a proper critique of science
and technology’. ‘What Commoner was struggling to say cannot be properly articulated
from within the positivistic tradition in which most of his work was carried out’.34
Work such as Jay Forrester’s systems dynamics, Dennis and Donella Meadows and the
Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth articulation of a ‘global problematique’, made the
breakdown of human technological advance and the assumptions of endless growth, in
future oriented terms, even more absurd. They concluded, through their computer models,
that no finite system could sustain exponential growth and that the current trajectory
of industrial growth and population growth would lead to an ecological breakdown of
global scale. By challenging the ‘expansionary ethos of the technological civilisation’,
systems theory, computer modelling and simulation, helped to articulate the need for
‘limits’. Again Slaughter found, that systems theory had its own limits by way of its
dependence on over generalisations, aggregated data, its legitimacy partly derived from
The emergence of critical futures 11
the prestige of using computers (veiled scientism), and reliance on quantitative data that
can obscure underlying assumptions.
In his PhD work, Slaughter also examined the Interfutures study, Facing the Future, which
looked at aspects of the world economic system through the lens of a futures oriented
approach. The study showed the dysfunctional nature of the modern economic system.
World economic and developmental perspectives and future outlooks were becoming
problematic, as decades of post-World War Two aid to the ‘Third World’, saw the number
of people in poverty around the world increase. It depicted a world moving into ‘a radically
new stage of history, with its institutions, governing elites and populations ill prepared
for the stresses and strains of the transitions’.35
It became clear to Slaughter, that the world economic system was maintaining extreme
inequalities and might well be headed for political and economic disaster. Yet while he
found a development-focused approach to futures valuable, with its emphasis on the interconnectedness of phenomena from local to global, much of this work in his view was
reliant on partial economic frameworks that again ignored social, political and geographic
contexts. Further factors included the use of statistics that obscure human welfare; confusion
around models of economic growth, and the way the framework ‘accepted as
unproblematic, a neutral screen through which to view the world’.36
Ecological and decentralist movements, as portrayed in books like Blueprint for
Survival,37 offered visions of sustainable futures often involving ‘small self reliant
communities based on agriculture and craft industries…interlinked in global awareness’.38
While these movements emphasised the breakdown of large dehumanising state systems,
and critiqued current social structures and relations, ‘implicit in their view was is the
belief that society can be regarded as a collection of “things”, that can be re-arranged
at will. In addition, “power relationships”, ideologies and “social life-worlds” are either
reified or ignored’.39
On a very personal note, his father’s death from an industrially induced disease only
re-enforced his disillusionment with the industrial system.40 His father had neither smoked,
nor drank, and had led a hardworking life. To see his life taken away prematurely was
sad, disturbing and Slaughter was filled with a sense of outrage.
RE-CONCEPTUALISATION: THE RAW MATERIAL
Futures studies, in the broader sense of the discipline, had begun to deal with the challenges
of the modern world in ways that most other disciplines were not prepared or willing
to do, and that the industrial age educational system could not even begin to
12 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
comprehend. It seemed to be a discipline particularly willing to deal with the very rupture
in people’s faith in the future and to respond to this. Indeed, the emergence of futures
studies may have marked the obsolescence of spatial and temporal provincialism – the
belief in a static and uniform reality – calling upon a new need for ‘an unprecedented
extension of human concern and imagination’.41
Yet, Slaughter found the field rife with contradictions, distortions and confusion. In much
of the futures literature he found mystification, an un-necessary complication of
meaning, the ‘obscuring [of] questions of power, value and purpose’.42 Likewise he found
the distortion of meaning emanating from covert or non-reflexive interests and
ideologies.43 Much American work was ‘marred by exaggeration’ and an ‘over-optimism
about the potential for social change’44 both emanating from an instrumental mode of
communication for ‘transmitting messages at a distance for the purpose of control’.45
Much of the work made grand claims about ‘THE’ future and ‘THE’ state of the world,
but was ignorant of context and ‘out of sync’ with perceptions and worldviews from
other cultures. Furthermore, claims of objective and value free knowledge in the field,
counter-intuitively, undermined the very credibility of this ‘knowledge’.46
Phenomena not amenable to direct observation gain their meaning only in relation
to other theories, making such a claim about the future that much more
dependent on a theoretical and inter-subjective context.47
Through gradual familiarisation with the field, Slaughter began to see how knowledge about
the future was particularly ‘situated’ in cultural contexts. Most were not consciously situated,
but ‘operating out of unexamined worldviews’. Furthermore he found that ‘far from imagining
a universe of alternatives, futurism in general – and forecasting in particular – has in the
past appeared to play a significant part in the support of the status quo’. This rendered
much futures work ineffective.48 The bulk of futures literature came out of the US and
was shaped by American culture, and reflected the ideological interests of the knowledge
communities there.
This pointed to problems associated with standard notions of scientific knowledge, especially
in dealing with the new challenges associated with technology, society and the future.
In this respect, sociology of knowledge and science was another key element that became
a keystone in the formulation of critical futures.
Michael Mulkay, an English philosopher, and one of the leading historians of knowledge,
considered how the notion of knowledge and science had been defined and redefined
through time. Mulkay’s work critiqued ‘standard science’, the notion of empirical, objective
and value free knowledge, showing in essence how much of what we call scientific is
actually a product of a social life-world (a particular ‘inter-subjective’ cultural domain),
The emergence of critical futures 13
influenced by a knowledge producing community’s political, economic and cultural context
and interests.49 Mulkay uncovered assumptions of a ‘standard science’ within the scientific
communities that appeared to be false. While scientific communities assumed:
•
a uniformity of nature (that universal laws could be derived), Mulkay found
disjuncture between the various scientific disciplines and their incommensurability
(for example the paradigmatic differences between the physical, biological and
social sciences)
•
a separation of fact and theory (that speculation is independent of language and
observation), Mulkay found that facts take on significance only in relation to an
observer and his or her intentions/perception
•
that observation is independent from the creation of meaning (that cultural
resources are not used), Mulkay found that scientific observation is an extension
of cultural resources
•
that the scientific enterprise is uniform, what is called scientific (and is broadly
defined across many domains), he found to be different from knowledge
community to knowledge community.50
John Goldthorpe, in a seminal article called ‘Theories of Industrial Society: Reflection
on the Recrudescence of Historicism and the Future of Futurology’, unmasked what he
terms ‘crypto-historicist’ characteristics in futures studies, long thought vanquished
by Karl Popper’s masterpiece The Poverty of Historicism.51 In reference to historicism
Popper stated:
It will be enough, if I say here that I mean by “historicism” an approach to
the social science which assumes that historical prediction is their principle aim,
and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the “rhythms” or
the “patterns” the “laws” or the “trends” that underlie the evolution of history.52
Objections to historicism included:
•
the ethnocentric and ‘deliberate restriction of the imagination’
•
the negation and invalidation of alternative futures
•
poor and incomplete explanations of causal mechanisms in history, and
•
assumptions regarding the ability to extrapolate from past to future (the ability
to see the future as a simple extension of the past).53
The ‘technocratic historicism’ Goldthorpe detected in some futures research at that time,
instead of ‘envisaging what the future could be’, attempted to forecast ‘what the future
will be’ and made ‘talk of ‘alternative futures’ and of ‘enlarging the range of choice’ empty
rhetoric’.54 Not only did this work against the spirit of democratising the future by making
14 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
futures studies about a determinable future with an evolutionary trajectory, it also
undermined the legitimacy of the discipline.
Already claims are to be heard that future studies are merely an instrument
whereby powerful groups, states or nations seek to impose their own image of
the future, to create self fulfilling predictions in their own interests, and to
undermine the hopes and confidence of those attracted to different visions of
what the world might be.55
Ian Miles carried this argument further, accusing futures studies of ethnocentrism, scientism,
technological determinism, mystification and elitism. He saw futures studies as being in
danger of ideologically supporting powerful political and economic interests through
the propagation of ethnocentric images of the future.
Futures researchers have so far largely failed to challenge the dominant
interpretation of world economic relationships as being mutually rewarding to
rich and poor countries alike…The scale of human misery involved in
underdevelopment is so vast that any contribution, material or ideological, made
to it by futurology requires careful scrutiny.56
These ‘dominant interpretations’ (serving powerful interests and bureaucracies) were
supported by ‘scientism’, the use of science through systems analysis, computer
modelling, mathematics, or the ‘mystique of flow charts and complex arguments’, in
order to give added weight and legitimacy to the research. Often the outcome of futures
research would lead, by extension, to recommendations for technological development.
This technological development, would serve the interests of existing vested interests,
rather than a consideration for the ‘mass of people whose lives are to be reshuffled in
this [technological] change’.57 Finally, Miles found that much of futures research discouraged
popular participation and sometimes created the false impression of open-ness through
pseudo-participation.58
In Slaughter’s view, it was the ‘critical and eclectic’ futures research that began to show
the way out of this trap by revealing assumptions within the Western worldview that
underpinned much of how empirical, developmental, environmental and other futures
work was framed. The ‘critical/eclectic’ strand of futures work revealed the larger historical
patterns at work, as well as the inter-subjective conditions that shape our perceptions
of and action upon the observable world. For example, in Small is Beautiful,
E.F. Schumacher 59 pointed to the impoverishment of the Western view of reality and
aspects of Western culture such as: ‘materialism, scientific reductionism, dualism,
organisational gigantism and prevailing conceptions of economic rationality’.60 Hazel
Henderson, in contrast, revealed a Western civilisation in transition through a growing
The emergence of critical futures 15
counter-culture movement challenging assumptions regarding gender, ethnicity,
economics, ecology and science.61
Dissonances in cultural assumptions, disciplinary understanding and conflicting perspectives
regarding the future (the various types of alternative futures research covered in the PhD)
and the problematic nature of much of this work, represented a core source of a ‘breakdown
of meaning’ within future studies itself. An integrated perspective regarding the human
future was simply unavailable. On the other hand, critical futures studies held out the
possibility of navigating through this sea of contentions and claims. Yet Slaughter also
recognised that this wide range of eclectic influences in the alternative futures debate pointed
to ‘implicit or explicit criticisms of aspects Western industrial culture’.62
Western people have, on the whole, become alienated from the Earth which
supports them, to the waste and destruction associated with the expansion of
the industrial system and to alternative values, ideas, and ideologies regarding
what may be considered ‘desirable’, ‘good’, or ‘progressive’…[eclectic
influences] challenges prevailing notions of ‘progress’, and rescues the debate
from ethnocentricity and technological determinism…By challenging cultural
assumptions and paradigms it also helps to shift discussion toward the
metatheoretical level and thus serves to link it with other approaches – critical
theory and hermeneutics…63
CULTURAL RECOVERY: NEW PHILOSOPHIC GROUND
During this time Slaughter and his wife were also raising two children. As leaving the
workforce and returning to study made money scarcer, it was a challenging period. He
felt so overwhelmed at times that his studies would stall for long periods. Over a summer,
as Slaughter recalls, his wife took the children to Bermuda for several months during
which time he was able to finish a whole section of his PhD. The rest of the time, he
would simply have to put in time here and there, just trying to keep the research and
the PhD moving forward little by little and piece by piece, though it often seemed to
crawl forward at a snail’s pace. However, over time the ideas began to take shape.
The renewal of educational curricula was a centrepiece in Slaughter’s own attempts at
re-conceptualisation. In his mind the implications for education were clear. Education
had to begin to embrace the futures dimension, not as a simple continuation of the past,
but as ‘a dynamic field of potentials compounded of chance, existing structures and human
intentionality’.64 Education needed to move from short term, instrumental modes of
education to a longer view in which people’s intentions and decisions could be put in
a broader context. Education should not treat technology as if it were ‘value free, inevitable
or necessarily desirable’ and education should actively help open up a wider range of
16 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
futures than the dominant ‘technological optimism’ then prevalent.65
While much education focussed on enabling technical competence in dealing with isolated
problems, new understandings of the interrelationships between man and nature, local
and global, and the complexity and interconnectedness of modern problems and pathologies
necessitated education that ‘move[s] away from considering problems in isolation, to a
more global, holistic emphasis’.66 The increasing alienation of the public in decision making,
meant participation in the debate on the future of society also needed to be widened to
a greater number of people, and futures education could help do this. Finally education,
currently dominated by empirically oriented study, needed ‘to shift emphasis away from
dramatic external events to a more critical appraisal of belief systems, values and paradigm
assumptions that underlie them’.67
Like John Goldthorpe, Slaughter saw how an overemphasis on technical futures
methods such as systems modelling and forecasting in the field had tended to obscure
underlying biases and presuppositions. The need for data, and an obsession for
quantifying through numerical and statistical approaches, ignored a good part of what
was worth looking at and overlooked much of the potential for cultural renewal. This
would begin a life long process of evaluating and developing a wide range of foresight
methods. It began with ‘speculative story telling’, ‘the Transformation cycle’ and Boulding’s
‘200 year present’. It continued with Futures Tools and Techniques 68 and other methods
through to the present with ‘Integral Mapping’ and a new approach to environmental
scanning based on Ken Wilber’s four-quadrant model.
The West’s impoverished view of reality needed to be enriched, and Slaughter would
later proclaim; ‘We need grounded visions, designs, if you will, of a world that has
experienced a recovery of vision, meaning and purpose’.69 Speculative imagination, not
reductive science, would help individuals in ‘imaginative constructions [to] take the human
mind out beyond the boundaries of currently constituted reality – beyond trends, forecasts
and the like – and feed our capacities for speculation, imagination and social innovation’.70
Slaughter found that the need for an epistemology for foresight dovetailed with the critical
theory of Jurgen Habermas. Habermas, a German philosopher and a second-generation
member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, was a student of Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno. While grounded in a Marxist tradition of critique, he broke away
from strict empirical notion of knowledge and incorporated wide-ranging influences from
modernity and antiquity. The theory of cognitive interests is one of Habermas’ most
enduring contributions, and a central piece in Slaughter’s conception of critical futures.
Habermas, like others before him from the Frankfurt school, critiqued positivism,
instrumental rationality and industrial society’s one dimensionality.71 He did not,
The emergence of critical futures 17
however, entirely reject instrumental rationality, but rather located it in the broader
production of knowledge that arises through different types of rationality, or ‘cognitive
interests’. He identified three, a technical interest, a practical interest, and an emancipatory
interest, each necessary for human well being.
The technical interest, which is the first and most basic, creates a ‘capacity for purposive
– rational control of the conditions of existence’ and is ‘acquired and exercised in a
cumulative learning process’.72 Habermas was basically situating the technically oriented
sciences that allow for large-scale capacities for control and production, and also any scale
of production and control capacities within a given group as a necessary precursor for
survival. Empirical-analytic knowledge formation processes are systematically exploited
for their ‘technical control over objectified processes’. Habermas argued, however, that
this form of knowledge was only one of three.73 In fact, he argued that the technical
interest relied upon a more fundamental form of cognition – the practical interest, i.e.
intersubjective meaning making and sense making through communication.
The practical interest is distinguished from the technical interest because it involves the
‘interpretation of intentions and meanings, goals, values and reason’, and is not concerned
with knowledge created through ‘empirical-analytic inquiry’.74 In other words, the life context
in which we all live in can be understood through ‘cultural sciences’, and cannot simply
be reduced to instrumental action. This domain is primarily linguistic, hermeneutic, and
phenomenological – semiotic interpretation and communication – even including the
meanings of peoples’ actions, facial expressions, intonations etc. This involves an examination
of the symbols and their meanings that populate our lives.
The cultural disciplines did not develop out of the crafts and other professions
in which technical knowledge is required but rather out of the professionalised
realms of action that require practical wisdom.75
Finally Habermas articulated a third interest – an emancipatory cognitive interest. This
can also be termed ‘critical’ consciousness, a consciousness that strives for self-formation
through stages of reflection, energised by historical self-understanding, and generating
new attitudes through insight. Central here is the reflection upon, and repudiation of,
dogmatism and the ‘form of false consciousness and reified social relations’ that inhibits
us from a fuller realisation of a good society.76 Critique is a vital tool in challenging the
dogmatism expressed through ideology. Thus Habermas, drawing on Freud’s concept of
illusion (religion, worldviews, ideals, art, ideology and value systems that uphold existing
orders that create suffering, dysfunction, oppression and inequality), saw systematic
distortions that required critique.
18 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
In the interest in the independence of the ego, reason realises itself in the same
measure as the act of reason as such produces freedom. Self-reflection is at once
intuition and emancipation, comprehension and liberation from dogmatic
dependence. The dogmatism that reason undoes both analytically and practically
is false consciousness: error and unfree existence.77
Slaughter had recognised, of course, that although futures research was good at
outlooks on the future, it was very poor at ‘inlooks’ on the future, i.e. approaches that
examined both the intersubjective/communicative aspects of foresight, and the need to
critique existing reified social arrangements. In fact futures studies, as an interdisciplinary
domain with Time as a guiding theme (history, evolution, macrohistory, development,
progress, and other temporal notions), provided a fine disciplinary platform for historical
self-awareness and the critique of reified social relations. In Towards a Rational Society 78,
as Slaughter discovered, Habermas even ‘specifically argues for an interdisciplinary, futureoriented research capable of looking beyond the status quo’.79 Applied to foresight Habermas’
three cognitive interests might read:
•
Instrumental – what is a future oriented problem, and how can we solve it?
•
Practical – how can we achieve communication and understanding regarding
the future(s)?
•
Emancipatory – how has our future(s) been colonized, communication
systematically distorted and how can we liberate ourselves? 80
Becoming ‘critical’ therefore suggested a pathway toward emancipatory futures thinking.
In general, ‘critical’ would come to work in two ways. First, it would be used as critique
in the generic sense of the word providing a way of, in Slaughter’s words, ‘clearing the
fog’. That is, a ‘ground clearing, diagnostic phase, a prelude to the exploration of new
territory…[it is] also about standards and quality control, both of which are vital to an
emerging discipline’.81
Second, ‘critical’ would be understood in terms of critical theory – a way out of the trap
of a ‘monological’ and ‘technical-instrumental’ approach to the future – one capable of
breaking people out of the perpetual slumber of the status quo. Critical was a way of
renegotiating meaning at a deep philosophic level, opening to the possibility of exploring
other paradigms, epistemes, and culturally situated ways of knowing. Critique could be
seen as the praxis of problematising existing social arrangements and assumptions
regarding the future. ‘Critical’ would be a way of breaking the mould of historically reified
ways of being, to open up alternatives futures otherwise obscured.
In short it would be the basis for emancipatory social innovations and creativity for
cultural renewal.
The emergence of critical futures 19
The best (i.e. most positively useful) critique operates self-consciously out of
these deeper layers of Critical Futures work. That is, the writer or speaker functions
as a human agent who is fully conscious of his /her immersion in, and debt to,
particular sets of cultural resources. Embedded cultural assumptions cannot be
objective, are not provable and never final. We are all and always complicit in
non-objective ways of knowing. Moreover, different ways of knowing reveal
different inner worlds. One conclusion is that there is never any final
interpretation. Radical uncertainty lies at the heart of everything because
everything is socially constructed.82
The early stages of this work ultimately culminated in Slaughter’s PhD dissertation on
critical futures education. It was an exhausting process, but Slaughter felt he had expressed
something significant. In terms of critical futures, he had articulated a vision of futures
studies that could be self critical in examining embedded ideologies, worldviews and other
commitments. The same vision might also bring self-reflective futures thinking into
education, where students would be enabled to deal critically about the images and
statements being thrown at them about the future, as well as articulate their own views
and participate in worthwhile conversations about the future. Working out a basis for
critical futures studies, its implementation in education, and being awarded a PhD for
it, was a consummate accomplishment for Slaughter. He had articulated a vision for
transforming education to meet the needs of the future, and future generations. He had
developed a vision for critical futures studies that would support human emancipation
from dehumanising and reified social forms. These, in turn, would support social innovation
and wider participation in creating viable futures.
CONFLICT AND NEGOTIATION: FROM ENGLAND TO AUSTRALIA
While Slaughter was the first to articulate an outline for critical futures, there were already
many at work in varying capacities on this project. Ashis Nandy, Zia Sardar, Johan Galtung
and the Manoa School of Futures in Hawaii, to name a few, were all in the process of
developing their varied aspects and approaches to critical futures. This simultaneity of
perspective, an intellectual-historical wave, and the historical context that all of these thinkers
and writers shared, would help carry critical futures studies forward. But before
Slaughter could experience this, he would have to endure more challenging times, including
intellectual isolation, and undertake the move from England to Australia.
The next few years were difficult. Even with his PhD, he found it impossible to find work
in Britain and even went on the dole for a while. It was a bitter pill to swallow. He and
his family had sacrificed for some years, and now he found being on the dole demeaning.
There was little reward for his hard work and there were no jobs for ‘futurists’ available
20 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
anywhere. But a strong sense of purpose had steadily developed over the years, particularly
after Bermuda and during the latter period of study.
Though some see a PhD as a purely academic exercise, for me it was also intensely
personal. For it had allowed me to discover why my own experience of schooling
had been so unsatisfactory and, furthermore, to sketch out a program which
opened out new options.83
Thus he continued to work at it, despite feeling a real sense of isolation. One bright
spot was the publication of an extract from his PhD dissertation entitled ‘An Outline of
Critical Futures Studies’.84 This twenty-five-page paper encapsulated many of the core
ideas that emerged from the PhD. Its publication in the World Futures Society Bulletin
gave a glimmer of hope that these ideas might gain wider attention.
The low point for me was when I had finished all this foundational work and
felt this tremendous sense of relief, delight in having actually explained why I
had found my schooling so arid, and knew I’d done something significant –
and was unemployed, because there was no work. That was a major contrast,
feeling so good, so satisfied, productively pleased with what I’d done – and
then having no-where to go with it. Just completely stymied at the level of work,
jobs, income. And my family, I wouldn’t say suffered, but we certainly didn’t
have a lot of money at the time. It had been pretty damn hard, and having
finished it, to get no answering recognition or income was really hard, and going
on the dole: it was not exactly what I had planned. So that was really tough.
But like other tough experiences, you find that that is when you learn what
you need to know. Out of the suffering of being on the dole, with a newly
minted PhD in critical futures studies, I really started to learn some of the practical
applications of what Huxley and Wilber and others had been writing about –
which was that you had to adopt some practices your our own life to cope with
and transcend the living circumstances in which you found yourself. That was
incredibly powerful. So it was really tough going, but it led to a very
productive outcome.85
It was during this time that one of the most profound spiritual experiences of his life
occurred. At a personal development retreat he had a healing experience that cannot
really be related through words. Suffice to say that the experience changed the course
of his life, and opened up a new dimension of understanding for him. The experience
could not be explained by anything he knew at that time, and so he began a search.
It was after Slaughter came across Ken Wilber’s book, No Boundary, that the penny
dropped. In this book, Wilber explored the nature of consciousness, including the kind
The emergence of critical futures 21
of experience that Slaughter had undergone. The book dealt with identity and the
boundaries that constitute our identities – including the dualistic thinking involved in
such consciousness. It also articulated a path for human development focussed on expanded
consciousness.86 It was important for Slaughter, in that Wilber showed that an inner journey
and inner growth was a vital but neglected aspect of modern life. While the futures Slaughter
had critiqued focussed almost exclusively on the outer dimension of reality, brain enhancing
drugs, the technological society, next wave infrastructure and so on, the inner dimension
of the individual – consciousness – had been treated as something to be ignored, repressed
or looked down upon. But Slaughter saw that an individual’s sense of self/other, moral
training, ethical learning, meaning/purpose, perception, unconscious desires, and the
individual’s need for an expansion of consciousness were of no less importance in the
search to create a better society and world.
This began a long association with Wilber’s work partly, through which Slaughter began
to create practices that helped him deal with the challenging circumstances in his own
life. In this way he began to seek a balance between the wisdom of the ‘inner’ world of
the human heart and consciousness, essential to his own happiness and fulfilment through
daily practice, and the more conventional outer forms of knowledge taught in all the
schools throughout the West.
Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy would also be a major source of wisdom and
insight that complemented this evolving and developing understanding of consciousness
and an ‘inner’ dimension of life.87 In this book, Huxley assembled the lessons and words
from mystics of many traditions, Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu and other traditions.
Huxley’s book proved to him that there existed a deep source of collective wisdom that
could provide part of the basis for inspiring futures beyond despair. Referring to the
aforementioned experience he said:
I realised that such experiences can yield new interpretations of personal and
social futures. That is, paths of development which lead up and away from the
abyss: away from disaster, meaninglessness, and despair. Here are the sources not
merely of sustainable economies, but of truly wise cultures. That is, cultures
which may be founded not on the instrumentalities of politics, economics or
science and technology, but on the evolving perennial wisdom of humankind.
From these sources I began to draw a deep stream of inspiration…88 (emphasis
added)
As Slaughter acknowledges, this was a turning point in his life and, as if to confirm his
newly grounded sense of being, new opportunities began to appear. He would later reflect
that he needed to undergo the hardship that he did, to learn the lessons that would allow
him to move forward. Hence the post PhD hardships and explorations were catalytic
22 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
and brought him in contact with the ‘perennial wisdom’ that would later have many
beneficial and lasting effects.89
Soon after this he received a three-year fellowship with the University of Lancaster in
which he began to apply some of the conclusions in the Doctorate. He developed and
taught a master’s option their called ‘Futures Studies and Curriculum Design’, that received
excellent feedback from students, proving that there was, and is, a ‘latent’ demand for
this work. At the time, however, it was also looked at suspiciously by other staff members.
He was able to publish materials that became foundational to his later work, design
workshops and explore the practical implementation of other futures methods.90
In many respects, the three years Slaughter spent teaching at the University of Lancaster
proved successful. He managed to publish several papers, ‘What do we do now that the
future is here?’ and ‘Future vision in the Nuclear Age’. In addition, he produced the
first edition of Futures Across the Curriculum: A Handbook of Tools and Techniques (later
called Futures Tools and Techniques). This was a compilation of simple futures tools
embracing many areas including perennial wisdom and critical social and environmental
issues. The beginnings, in fact, of pluralistic critical/social foresight methods, as had been
called for earlier by Goldthorpe and Miles. With the years at Lancaster coming to a close
however, Slaughter felt more and more that England would not be the place where critical
futures studies would be adopted.91
It was on the way to Australia, during a 1986 stopover in Hawaii, that Slaughter first
met Sohail Inayatullah. Up until that point, Slaughter had been languishing in nearobscurity, a classic intellectual outsider. The years had worn on him, but had not diminished
his spirit.
What Slaughter found in Hawaii was in marked difference to the mainland USA. The
faculty in the futures program were neo-Marxist or post-structuralist in orientation, and
for a ‘futurist’ (not a term they universally admired) to make any money at all could
almost be said to ‘betray the cause’.92 Perhaps because Hawaii remained a colonial outpost,
or because of the geographic distance of several thousand kilometres, there was a marked
difference from other centres of futures enquiry.93 In brief, Slaughter’s ideas resonated
there. In fact, many at the Manoa School of Futures Studies had for some time been
developing similar approaches. They included Wendy Shultz, Chris Jones, Rick Scarce,
Phil McNally, Anna Wilson-Yue, Wayne Yasutomi, and others. Shultz had employed
the work of Baudrillard to explore and move ‘beyond orthodox and hererodox, i.e. the
doxa’.94 Inayatullah had been developing a typology for futures studies using three
epistemological categories, predictive, interpretive, and critical, based on the work of
Michael Foucault.
The emergence of critical futures 23
The positive response he got from Inayatullah, and others in Hawaii came after many
years of feeling isolated from the academic community. It was a powerful confirmation
of years of work.
[the response] was very positive, it was like an answering echo from another
milieu – that I had hit upon something that discriminating others also thought
was valuable. It was really encouraging to me, because up to that time I’d worked
pretty much in isolation. As H.G. Wells and others in the UK had complained
before, ‘there ain’t much support for futures work in Britain’.95
Building a community and network of like-minded writers also proved to be a major
step in the legitimation of critical futures studies. Slaughter would later reflect upon how
it was essential for developing scholars and writers in critical futures to surround themselves
with a community that could support innovative work and provide some of the peer
critique necessary in an emerging way of thinking. The emergence of a community of
critical futures was a key ‘negotiation’ step for the emergence and legitimation of its ideas
and innovations.
Networks that contributed to a critical futures community had existed since the 1970’s
through the work of many of the original founders and pioneers associated with World
Futures Studies Federation. This included such writers as Eleonora Masini, Ashis Nandy,
Johan Galtung, Robert Jungk, Hazel Henderson and many others, who had for some
time been developing ‘emancipatory’ approaches to futures thinking. A new wave of critical
futures scholars, such as Sohail Inayatullah, Chris Jones, David Hicks and others, added
to the former group of futures scholars and combined talents and resources to form a
larger and more dynamic community of critical foresight. In this respect the World Futures
Studies Federation, an International Non-Governmental Organisation of future-oriented
academics and practitioners with affiliations with the UN/UNESCO, was an important
catalyst. It brought together scholars and thinkers who were inclusive of the non-West,
and also engendered an activist/socially critical orientation.
SELECTIVE LEGITIMATION
Slaughter’s move to Australia was another step toward the legitimation and acceptance
of critical futures studies. Australia, for many reasons, provided more opportunities to
bring critical futures into the social world. For example, a ‘Commission for the Future’
had recently been created by the federal government in Australia to address emerging
issues. In late 1986, Slaughter was invited to give a keynote address for its first conference
on ‘Futures in Education’. This provided a unique opportunity to work directly with
the kind of social innovation he had envisioned for many years.96
24 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Barry Jones, a prominent Australian scholar and political activist, had launched the
Commission for the Future in 1985. It existed for 12 years before being privatised and
vanishing into obscurity. Slaughter worked in various advisory roles with the Commission
and its four directors over its lifetime. He viewed it as ‘one expression of an increasingly
universal attempt to come to grips with the near future context and to spread awareness
of our many options and choices for the early 21st century’.97 He believed that Institutions
of Foresight (IOFs) such as the Commission, could play a critical role in helping people
society wide deal with the ‘tsunami’s of change’ facing societies in the twenty-first century.
IOFs became even more critical if one considered the prevalence of short term thinking
in governments, education systems and businesses. In his view, societies without the
capacities provided by IOFs were more likely to be overwhelmed by the ‘on-rushing waves
of social, economic, technical and environmental change’, and would have little chance
of dealing adequately with the ‘civilisational challenge’.98
The Commission for the Future was both successful and problematic. The most notable
success was The Greenhouse Project, which made the concept of the greenhouse effect
a household word. The Bicentennial Futures Education Project was able to create some
awareness about futures education, but ran out of time, funding and support. The journal,
21C, emerged as one of the ‘most existing and original publications ever produced in
Australia’,99 which filled the niche for high quality and culturally hip future oriented literature.
In Slaughter’s view, however, the Commission was poorly designed, inappropriately staffed
and at times, mismanaged. It was a disappointment to see it shut down in 1997. But
rather than seeing this as confirmation that IOFs were not viable, he would later make
a detailed analysis of the Commission’s strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures.
In so doing, he attempted to help codify some of the institutional knowledge that would
form the groundwork for a new generation of IOFs. Slaughter was convinced that, no
matter how challenging IOFs were to get off the ground, they were nonetheless an idea
whose time had come. This bit of foresight would eventually lead him to the founding
and directorship of the Australian Foresight Institute.100
Slaughter met Frank Fisher in 1987, when they began working together at Monash
University in a new Masters program in environmental science. The program had just
recently been established, and sought to address the new and growing concern over
environmental deterioration and ecological conservation. Fisher was an unorthodox teacher
who essentially wanted to challenge his students in two ways. First, through living systems
theory, to begin to challenge the view that the environment and the self live in isolation,
rather than in a web of interconnection and interaction. Human separation from nature
was a ‘social construct’ he challenged, and living systems theories helped explain how
humans are ‘nested’ within Earth’s ecological systems. Secondly, through his main
contribution, to take on sustainability issues via an epistemological approach.
The emergence of critical futures 25
Fisher examined how humans socially construct unsustainable worlds, putting in place
‘structures’ that systematically put the ecosystem on which we depend in peril. The social
construction of reality was the meta-perspective that allowed him to challenge ‘reified’
social constructions that destroy the livelihood of future generations. For him,
environmental science was meta-science that led to ‘meta-responsibility’. Social
constructions were not abstract things that could only be explored through intellectual
work, but were simply the norms, standards and structures that we take for granted day
to day. He would challenge his students to explore and understand these social
constructions, taking them out to the middle of highway intersections to inhale some
fumes and noise pollution from passing cars and trucks. He challenged his students to
stop taking showers or stop using deodorant, to take public transport, to stop using cars,
to unobtrusively clean up litter, to carry out a water usage inventory for one’s sink, and
to question other practices that put students face to face with the lifestyle/cultural context
they existed in. In short, to consider environmental impacts, and to understand the ‘metastructures’ that maintain these social constructions.101
[Social constructions] constitute the intellectual and political air we breathe.
They enable our very humanity. Once we are conscious of them, to the point
of enabling action, they expose a new domain of responsibility we might call
meta-responsibility.102
The social construction of reality also became an important theme in Richard Slaughter’s
critical futures thinking. Written in 1967 by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, The
Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge explored how, rather
than having a predisposed nature, humans construct their own natures. An understanding
of human plasticity, how behaviour is habitualised and directed in activity toward the
creation of social orders/institutions, and the legitimation of institutions through symbolic
interaction, tradition and ‘sedimentation’, would provide Slaughter the intellectual tools
to problematise the unquestioned ‘natural-ness’ of a social order. While the day-to-day
world carries with it a reality that is almost impossible to resist, this seemingly natural
existence is really a product of complex, hidden, forces and actors.
Whilst this naturalisation or ‘sedimentation’ is necessary for human interaction, role-playing
and the development of society with its institutions, it is also constraining, limiting and
largely unexamined. The social order may have been a product of social forces necessary
at the time, but while it directs human action, it limits it as well. A social order may in
fact be dissonant, destructive or harmful to its members, or others outside it, or in an
unsustainable relationship with the environment and other cultures. If such is the case,
renegotiating the social order becomes a vital key to creating a sustainable society. Such
renegotiation will have to take place at a deep level, such as symbolic interaction/
intersubjective meaning making, tradition making/breaking, de-naturalising, at the level
26 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
of institutions and processes of legitimation. In contrast to modernist thinking, which
places the modern at the end of history, Berger and Luckman might argue that ‘modernity’
is really a particular construction of social reality, one that is buttressed through ideology
and institutions that can be re-negotiated.
Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that
is, in non-human [facts/objects] or possible supra-human [divine/natural law]
terms. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship
of the human world.103
THE CONVERGENCE OF CRITICAL FUTURES PRACTICE
To describe part of the social order that Frank Fisher uncovered, he coined the term
‘litany’. This refers to the endless steam of clichés, sound bites, media fragments,
exaggerations, outlandish statements, disinformation, advertisement and other distortions
that we live with every day. Because of its ubiquity, the litany is at first invisible. It overwhelms
us with disconnected ideas and images that are usually accepted without thought. In
this view, however, litany is simply the surface layer of a deeper, more substantial reality,
which cannot be discerned as it stands, operating mainly as a distraction from deeper
understanding. The concept was eventually taken up by Slaughter to describe the focus
of pop futurism, and then passed on to Inayatullah where it became the first level in his
Causal Layered Analysis, a methodological application of critical futures.
Slaughter would influence Inayatullah’s development of Causal Layered Analysis in other
ways. Prolonged exposure in the futures field, along with Slaughter’s critically trained
thinking, and his experience in Bermuda revealing image vs. substance, began to show
him certain patterns within the field – ‘hidden structures’. He began to see how futures
work ranged from popular hype with very little substance, all the way to a deeper work
where researchers looked at and evaluated the worldviews and epistemic ground from
which images of the future, or statements about the future, derived. Slaughter maintained
respect for the practically oriented futures work, but felt that this went too quickly ‘from
analysis to global predicament to solution, but speaking and acting out of un-regarded
worldviews and with little understanding for the social constructions that had been
naturalised in other cultures’.104 So while much of the practical, later to be called ‘problemoriented’, work sounded and worked fine in one cultural context, in another it might
well appear inappropriate or absurd. He realised that there was trite work, full of empty
clichés and wild statements which he would later term litany, and there was problemoriented work, often quantitative and good at examining general trends and issues, with
good intentioned yet lacking an understanding of cultural worldviews and assumptions.
Finally, at the deepest level, there was futures work that took worldview and epistemic
considerations into account. This last category he deemed the most fruitful area of research,
The emergence of critical futures 27
as it had not only been largely neglected by most researchers, but he saw many of the
futures issues and activity we take for granted actually arising from worldview assumptions.
Rethinking epistemic and cultural assumptions could lead to more fruitful answers to
pressing problems, and open up new spaces for creativity and action.
It was at a World Futures Studies Federation conference in Budapest in 1990, during a
session organised by Allan Tough called ‘Cutting Edge Ideas’, where Slaughter first
presented his layered typology of futures studies and research. Abstracted from an earlier
piece he had published in Futures called Probing Beneath the Surface, it was a short
presentation, only ten or so minutes from Slaughter’s recollection, but it essentially laid
out a typology from the litany level to that of epistemology. The response was very positive.
By 1989, Slaughter had been hired full-time by the University of Melbourne’s Institute
of Education. This represented a good opportunity to integrate the critical futures approach
into the curriculum of university students studying education. There he designed three
course units for the Diploma of Education Program, and two for the Masters of Education.
He began teaching these by 1990, and was pleased that most of the students found the
focus on future studies in education valuable. While students tended to be a bit disoriented
in the initial first weeks, by the middle and end of the unit they would feel more at home
and would begin developing their own themes and interests. During these years he coauthored a book with Hedley Beare called Education for the 21st Century.105 Yet, in spite
of excellent evaluations and a growing reputation, he realised toward the end of his fiveyear contract that his time at Melbourne University was coming to an end. Those running
the Institute for Education did not see the connections between future studies and education
that Slaughter did. Despite his evident success, an attempt at promotion failed. It became
clear that certain paradigmatic differences were simply too great to surmount.106
Like most universities, [Melbourne] had a history department and some other
innovative courses focusing on the present. But not only was there no department
of FS (future studies), there was not even a research presence devoted to the area.
In fact, I was the only individual on campus explicitly teaching FS. Later, when
I left, these course units were discontinued. It is a familiar story: on the one hand
clear evidence from students, colleagues and others that FS had ‘come of age’
and could contribute in many ways to personal and educational goals and, on
the other hand, professional jealousy and bureaucratic indifference.107
Yet one of the insights he had during this time was that futures concepts were key building
material with which to think about and teach futures. This provided the impetus for him
to begin collecting and refining key futures concepts that he would also seek to amplify
through graphic representation. He later put together a resource pack of these called
Futures Concepts and Powerful Ideas,108 so that this symbolic resource could have a lasting
28 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
and permanent influence. This resource pack became a companion volume to Futures
Tools and Techniques, both of which ended up being widely used around the world. Both
volumes carried forward humanistic understandings of the future and put into question
many of the assumptions and contradictions we live with on a day to day basis. In their
own ways they carried critical futures forward another step.
Despite the setback at Melbourne University, Slaughter found new ways to move the
project forward. Around this time he revived a business name that he’d earlier set up
called The Futures Studies Centre. Working in this capacity gave Slaughter new time
and vigour to pursue writing and research. Several concerns in the future studies field
came to his attention and he began to address them in his literature. Thus, after the
demoralising experience at Melbourne University, came the publication of several books
that further explored aspects of critical futures studies. This rebound and resilience comprised
a definitive victory in the road to legitimation, as literature is one of the main forms that
legitimation may be gained. Three publications stand out in particular: The Foresight
Principle, Futures for the Third Millennium and the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies.
The Foresight Principle set forth core principles such as the innate human capacity for
foresight, and the need for future-oriented wisdom in modern day institutions and societywide. Slaughter examines tools, concepts, ideas and methods critical in developing this
social foresight that not only makes clear the challenges ahead, but that it can help people
take a more healthy and human route into the future. He also explores key aspects of
the defective Western worldview, and the seeds of a renewed worldview that can lead to
more sane futures.109
The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (KBFS), which ultimately became a four-volume
CD-ROM collection of essays by foresight practitioners and futurists from around the
world, began as a special issue of Futures published in 1993. This issue provided the first
attempt to bring together wide-ranging perspectives. Slaughter himself identified several
core aspects of futures studies:
•
concepts and metaphors
•
theories and ideas
•
images and imaging processes
•
literature
•
organisations and networks
•
methodologies and tools
•
social movements and innovations.110
The feedback on this special issue was good, so he tried to get a larger compilation published
through a mainstream publisher. While he wasn’t able to get broad support for this, he
The emergence of critical futures 29
was able to get a single volume anthology published called New Thinking for a New
Millennium, where some of the papers intended for a KBFS ended up. From this he
embarked on a long consultation process with colleagues around the world to put together
the foundations of what would become the KBFS. Finally, he linked up with a local media
group. Fifty or so manuscripts were finally edited into a high quality and ‘coherent series
without extinguishing the unique voice of each author’.111
First, its emphasis is more on FS (future studies) as a process of scholarly work
which attempts to create ‘interpretative’ or ‘surrogate’ knowledge about the
future, than on the methodologies through which part of this knowledge may
be derived. Second, it contains within it a notion of critique and of the
provisionality of all knowledge that is informed by, but not founded upon, postmodern insights. (It therefore lacks the overconfident prescriptive tendencies
and culture-bound rhetoric that afflicted some earlier works). Third, it is truly
multi-cultural in emphasis and content. Thus it aspires to be the first truly global
statement about the state of FS in the early 21st century.112
Finally, in 1999, Futures for the Third Millennium laid out the basic elements of a critical
futures studies and education. This book focused on case studies, such as Australia’s
Commission for the Future, The Futurescan process, a critique of Megatrends 2000,
and examples of futures in education, futures images and popular literature. Outlines
and frameworks of key critical futures theories are given, such as the Transformation Cycle,
critical futures, environmental scanning, and individual to social foresight processes, as
well as ‘Transcending Flatland’, his incorporation and adaptation to foresight of Ken
Wilber’s ‘epistemological rescue operation’.113
Back in 1994 Slaughter had written an initial paper about the possibility of an ‘Australian
Foresight Institute’. Over the next several years he began meeting regularly with Adolph
Hanich, then a consultant with Deloittes, discussing how foresight and strategy might
be integrated. The two had proposed some seminars for the Australian Institute of
Management, when it transpired that Swinburne University of Technology was seeking
an innovative millennium project. The two were commissioned to write a ‘feasibility study’
for a foresight program or entity at the University. They spent a considerable part of
1998 working on the project.
In 1999, when Slaughter was emotionally finished with Melbourne and academia, and
after a brief time in Brisbane, the Vice Chancellor of Swinburne offered Slaughter a
‘professorial fellowship’ to initiate an Australian Foresight Institute at the University. He
couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ‘implement, embed, (and) institutionalise the foresight
work I’d spent most of the last 20 years working on’.114 So, despite the irony of having
recently left Melbourne, he returned in July 1999 to begin work on creating the first
30 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Australian Foresight Institute (AFI). A ‘second generation Institute of Foresight’ had
emerged through vision and determination.
Slaughter had learned many lessons in his experience with the Commission for the Future
and took these into the creation of AFI. The sweat and work to make AFI a world class
Institution of Foresight, and to open up spaces for sustainable social paths continues to
this day. In terms of the legitimation of critical futures studies, AFI, and what it may
accomplish during the life of the institution, represents a capstone achievement, forming
a platform for critical futures oriented education and research that can contribute and
pioneer human and social foresight for many for years to come.
CONCLUSION
The contribution of literary criticism and ‘post-Saussurean’ writers,115 the critical theory
of Jurgen Habermas, the meta-theory of G. Radnitsky and the sociology of science/
knowledge from writers like Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckman, and Michael Mulkay
were major contextualising influences in the development of critical futures. Slaughter’s
PhD dissertation on critical futures in education drew on many of the ideas in this
epistemological revolution. These writers would help provide the theoretical and
philosophical foundations for Slaughter’s later conception of critical futures. As Slaughter
acknowledges, critical futures could not have been developed without the revolution in
thinking that was already under way. Therefore, while his initiative in articulating a radical
agenda for education was central, this took place in a intellectual-historical context. The
latter may be said to be a post-World War Two nuclear age where technology not only
was being used to overdevelop and systematically destroy nature, but could obliterate
everything in a matter of minutes – an age out of balance and fundamentally
unsustainable. The intellectual context might be said to be a wholesale/seismic critique
of the Western worldview, logical positivism and the technical instrumentality that
underpinned Western civilisation and its characteristic ways of knowing, which had given
rise to this context. Furthermore, Slaughter saw how current education blindly furthered
the same static thinking about the nature of the world and the status quo. Slaughter’s
experience in Bermuda, coupled with his realisation that he had experienced a kind of
education that would not enable future generations to deal effectively with future oriented
issues, fuelled him with a tremendous sense of urgency and vision for a critical and future
oriented educational system.
Slaughter’s critical futures is not about ‘blueprints’ for the future, but about opening
up spaces to alternative epistemes, cultural worldviews, discourses and hence about opening
up pathways to substantively alternative futures beyond what’s currently offered through
mainstream ‘pop’ and ‘problem oriented’ futures work, scenarios and the like. Critical
The emergence of critical futures 31
futures moves us away from ‘the future of the world’ – as a future narrowly defined,
predictive and culturally reductive – to enabling ‘world futures’, an approach to
foresight that is inclusive (and critical) of many futures, from many cultural contexts and
perspectives.116 Critical futures points away from reductive visions of futures, also away
from predictive and epistemologically idiosyncratic and/or naïve approaches. It points
toward holistic and integral visions that are interpretative, emancipatory, epistemologically
pluralistic and inclusive – indeed a pathway to planetary thinking and planetary
civilisation. Critical futures becomes meaningful in the context of creating world futures
and planetary civilisation beyond the hegemony of an out-of-control economic, military
and scientific order that threatens the very existence of human life. By incorporating
traditions of human wisdom as the sustaining core of futures studies it opens the future
to culturally diverse possibilities – a radical yet much needed human and social foresight
– one more step toward a ‘wisdom culture.’
32 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
2 Transcendence of a method:
The story of Causal Layered Analysis
INTRODUCTION
Causal Layered Analysis, or CLA, is a future oriented methodology created by Sohail
Inayatullah. This methodology is post-structural in so far as it seeks to problematise
existing future oriented thinking; exploring the assumptions, ideologies, worldviews,
epistemes, myths and metaphors that already are embedded in images, statements or
policy oriented research about the future. It has also developed as a way of opening
up spaces for alternative futures. These alternative futures are not based on extrapolating
trends or tweaking the assumptions in a systems model, as is common in scenario building,
but through deconstructing/reconstructing critical assumption about the way we
constitute the world. The articulation of alternatives is a product of this method, not
a primary focus of the method.
While the theoretical underpinning of CLA is based on post-structuralism, the approach
is layered, that is, it is a method of analysis which is inclusive of accounting for various
streams of causality operating in unison upon an issue. CLA is a way of ‘integrating levels
of reality, science, social science, philosophy and religion, if you will’.117 Only then can we
see and act beyond our idiosyncratic notions and traditions, creating truly alternative futures.
34 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
The development of CLA will be explored through a narrative, and in part as an example
of intuitive action research – a heuristic approach to theory, experimentation and
development. A basic sketch of the particular influences important in his conception of
horizontal and vertical, and through each vertical layer, will allow us to gain a deeper
understanding of contextualising influences.
Background
The son of a diplomat for the United Nations, Sohail Inayatullah was born in Lahore,
Pakistan, yet was raised in places such as Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York;
and in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition, his mother is a Sufi, and his father a social scientist
and human rights activist. Inayatullah himself has come to follow and champion the work
of P. R. Sarkar, the late Indian mystic. Thus, from an early age and through adulthood,
he never belonged to a category, be it nation, ethnicity, religion, caste or philosophy.
As he writes in ‘Why I hate passports and visas’, he was always in the ‘middle’, between
categories. For example, while applying for American citizenship while in Hawaii, the
examiner did not accept his writing in the citizenship form that his complexion was brown.
It had to be fair, medium or dark. Inayatullah did not consider his complexion medium
– it was brown. They jostled for the categorical higher ground. In the category for his
profession he had written ‘political scientist’ (he didn’t bother writing futurist), but
immigration didn’t accept that either.118 In short, he never fit well into a pre-existing
category, a stereotype or classification people could easily identify with. Nor would he
want to fit into the current systems of categories, given their often limiting and even
dehumanising effects.
Having traversed the world of categories and never being comfortable in one, he has
come to a ‘vision of the future, as one might expect, committed to cultural diversity and
civilisational integrity in the context of a creation of a planetary society’.119 ‘Transcending
and including’ the categories that have seemed so limiting, trivial or superficial to him
these many years, the only thing left might be for him to receive an honorary planetary
passport. In short, these categories are the outward expression, through institutional form,
of the social construction of reality; reified social arrangements that, instead of leading
to a future that he wants, leads to a world he abhors. For him then, these categories
were not only problematic, but also temporary.120
Inayatullah’s history, as one who could not and did not want to fit into what he deemed
archaic categories and identities such as a particular nationalism or ethnicity, contributed
to the development of his thinking, and may have influenced the development of his Causal
Layered Analysis. He was always his own object of de-construction – the self and its identity
dissolving before the gaze of post-structural analysis, or vanishing at the presence of spiritual
insight. The Indian episteme, and the teachings of P.R. Sarkar, revealed the social construction
of individual identity, and the pathways to transcending narrow boundaries.
Transcendence of a method 35
At the same time, his experiences revealed deep structures from the individual and social,
from the local to the global levels. While he may be romantic about the nights he spent
on the rooftop of his childhood home in Pakistan, under the stars and waking with the
whole community at sunrise, the impoverishment of the land-less, the limitations to freedom
and gender inequality that many in his own family had to endure, did not escape him.121
Growing up in Indiana, and the other places in which he was subject to racism, taught
him to be ashamed for having dark skin – a later to see racial and ethnic categories as
superficial and dangerous. The post-colonial status of Malaysia and Pakistan and the
dominated status of Hawaii may have introduced him to aspects of imperialism and
colonialism otherwise hidden or naturalised.
Generally speaking, deep immersion in various cultures and contexts revealed to him
worldviews beyond textbook codifications. Before he was introduced to the concept
‘cosmology’, he was probably already speaking different culturally set languages of reality,
of how the world appears from particular cultural standpoints. His ability with languages
(Urdu, English and French – now entirely English) might have been a window into these
‘cosmologies’. Finally, his experiences and conversations with and within Islamic,
Indian, Western, and Polynesian civilisations may have laid a foundation for understanding
and articulating myth and metaphor from a civilisational perspective. He has been both
an insider and an outsider, and perhaps within his own visionary future, a planetary citizen.
HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL
His experiences revealed both ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ elements. Horizontal refers to plurality
of discourse/worldview/episteme that give rise to the categories we live in day to day (often
the expression of power/ideological interests). This is ‘the post-modern turn’ that reveals
how reality is mediated by cultural inter-subjective factors. The vertical, on the other hand,
refers to depth, the existence of structures and layers that underlie one’s social and cultural
existence. These two patterns are in tension and challenge each other.
A totally horizontal approach sees reality as being completely mediated by inter-subjective
discourse factors (those historically still active and power). Because ‘reality’ is all socially
constructed, with every culture and every tradition seemingly impermanent and lacking
an essential core, culture is not seen as anything really. Only the post-modern analysis
remains real, and even this is socially constructed (largely a product of the West) and
can be deconstructed.122 Inayatullah rejects this extreme position, with the support of
Zia Sardar’s critique of postmodernism. The vertical challenges the extreme position, as
while there are a plurality of epistemes and worldviews, as there are a plurality of cultures
and discourses in the world. There are still real structural layers within each bandwidth
of the horizontal spectrum, despite the fact that we can no longer call each structural
layer a universal category. One might say that this approach is beyond structural universals,
36 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
as well as beyond extreme post-modern relativism, existing somewhere between the
structuralism of Jung, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Lacan, and the poststructuralism of Foucault and Derrida. These contrasting patterns existed for Inayatullah
to digest while growing up, and later became conceptual elements of his Causal Layered
Analysis. CLA thus incorporates elements that facilitate the understanding and analysis
of the horizontal and the vertical. While ‘we assume universalities even as we speak from
our own narrow tradition’, unpacking the layers, ‘ how we mythologise the future’, is
the beginning.123
Inayatullah’s conception of the Vertical, the general concept of layers, was most influenced
by Oswald Spengler, P. R. Sarkar, and his own practise of meditation. However, Slaughter’s
typology of pop, problem and worldview levels of futures research was an important catalyst.
Vertical causes are expressed as four layers that are nested, and linked from top to bottom.
Thus litany is ultimately an expression of myth/metaphor, but not visa versa. Richard Slaughter,
who in turn, derived the term from Frank Fisher, influenced Inayatullah’s thinking around
Litany. However, his and Slaughter’s understanding of the term are now different. Social
Causes was influenced by Galtung’s analysis of imperialism (centre/periphery theory), the
World Systems thinking of Immanuel Wallerstein, and the dominance of ‘technical’
explanations of social reality throughout academia. Worldview/Episteme may have come from
Johan Galtung’s analysis of cosmology and Michael Foucault’s work with historical
episteme. Myth/Metaphor was primarily influenced by William Irvin Thompson’s concept
of mytho-poetics, and perhaps also by Galtung’s CMT (Chosen-ness, myth, trauma) theory.
Finally, the understanding around his conception of the Horizontal; shifting assumptions
into alternative myths, metaphors, episteme and worldviews, came from Michael Shapiro,
other post-structuralist influences, multi-culturalism and the epistemological breadth implicit
in his work with macrohistorians.124
LAYERS OF REALITY
There was a certain fatigue with post-modernism. While post-modernism was a clear
break from the empiricist and expressive realist position,125 Inayatullah found that
‘postmodernism assumes no levels of reality, just alternative realities. Behind discourse
are just alternative discourses’.126 This has been best expressed through Zia Sardar’s
Postmodernism and the Other. Sardar, one of the driving forces behind multi-cultural futures
and Islamic futures in particular, showed how postmodernism, instead of critiquing Western
cultural and economic universalism/imperialism, had become a way to justify it. The
hollowed out values of the West that now primarily embrace material life, and reject
traditions with their ‘superstitious’ ethical and mythic elements, is projected upon the
rest of the world, such that traditions of the non-West are de-valued and trivialised, mimicked
and used for commercial and cultural exploitation. This disrespect for the diversity of
traditions threatens the world with a homogenisation of culture that can only embrace
Transcendence of a method 37
material values. But, irrespective of the West’s material relativism, the cultures of the
world retain true difference, unique identities, histories and traditions that are as necessary
and important in significance, if not more, than Western material culture.127
This re-valuation of culture and tradition was central to the concept of layers, as it made
a culture a legitimate focus of inquiry, where insight, perspective and indeed wisdom
could be derived. Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Tradition comes to mind. In contrast to
a technical science that created ‘universal’ ‘laws’ of ‘nature’ beyond cultural and
individual subjectivity, culture is where we all exist, and how we know the world. An
analysis and understanding of the particular patterns that exist within human communities
made sense. Layered analysis would become one method through which to derive a depth
understanding of culture.
The primacy of culture and tradition was a theme that ran through Inayatullah’s life.
While not overly idealistic about traditions that imply inequality and oppression, as a
son of a Sufi and a social scientist and himself a champion of the work of PR Sarkar,
tradition was all around him, yet not in a simple fashion. It was tradition, but by choice.
And his tradition by choice, his own personal and community journey became
foundational to his perspective that there are layers of reality. Meditation was central for
him, and helped him see from many perspectives and ‘peel off the layers of the onion’,
and also to see that superficial and deeper layers exist simultaneously.
To the partial disapproval of Jim Dator, director of the futures program at the University
of Hawaii, Inayatullah decided to do his dissertation on the work of twentieth century
Indian guru P. R. Sarkar. While Dator wanted his students to focus on political and
technological themes, they were veering into vastly different realms of inquiry, much to
his dismay. It is to Dator’s credit, however, that he created spaces for his students to
pursue their research agendas. Dator’s authentic pluralism remains among the reasons
he is admired and loved by Inayatullah and other former students.
Inayatullah’s pioneering of the work of P. R. Sarkar may have contributed to his
understanding of layers of reality. Corresponding to the classic Indian episteme, there
are six levels of the mind:
1. Annamaya Kosa – that of the body, glands, blood, cells, etc. and controlled
through Yoga
2. Kammamaya Kosa – that of instinct and physical desire, controlled through breath
3. Manomaya Kosa – that of reason and emotion and including memory, thinking,
dreaming and the experience of pain and pleasure, controlled through concentration
4. Atminasa Kosa – that of the transpersonal mind (corresponding to the Jungian
collective unconscious) connecting every individual and allowing collective action
38 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
5. Vijinanmaya Kosa – cosmic mind where will and historical purposes are the same
6. Hiranamaya Kosa – near union with pure consciousness.128
The grammar of the ‘blissful’ again is central in Sarkar’s cosmology, for it is that state of
mind that is the end of all existence. It is not the accumulation of wealth, beauty, knowledge
or wisdom, rather it is a state of unity wherein distinctions between subject-object no
longer exist, where the mind moves in a continuous flow of unconditional love.129
Other influences also existed. Inayatullah had begun to delve into the domain of macrohistory, the ‘study of the histories of social systems along separate trajectories through
space and time in search of patterns, or laws, of social change’.130 The work of Oswald
Spengler, whose famous The Decline of the West created a stir in a climate of overconfidence,
and laid bare Euro-centric notions of progress and history, expressed a much different
approach to understanding historical reality. For one, he was a cultural relativist at a time
when the West was supreme, asserting that each culture and civilisation has its own lifecycle.
Each civilisation, moreover, could only be understood through its own internal laws,
customs, origin, and context and thus he rejected a positivistic notion of a ‘science’ of
history. Most importantly, yet in a similar vein, he also rejected the notion that understanding
history ‘could be based on truth or falsity’:
True science reaches just as far as the notion of truth and falsity have
validity…But real historical vision belongs to the domain of significances, in
which the crucial words are not ‘correct’ and ‘erroneous’, but ‘deep’ and
‘shallow’…Nature is to be handled scientifically. History poetically.131
Litany
Inayatullah borrowed the word ‘litany’ from Richard Slaughter, who in turn had borrowed
the term from Frank Fisher. Fisher worked at the epistemological level, exploring the
social constructions of reality involving our relationship with nature, how we have historically
come to reified social forms of existence that are threatening to destroy the human
environment and the possibility of sustainable futures.132 Litany expressed the most apparent,
observable form of the social construction of reality. Because of its ubiquity, it
overwhelms us with disconnected ideas and images, yet it is the reality that most live
and think in. The concept of litany was eventually taken from Fisher and applied by Slaughter
as a characteristic of what he termed ‘pop futurism’. It passed to Inayatullah where it
became a level in CLA.
The understanding of litany between Slaughter and Inayatullah differs, in that Slaughter
may see litany as the most superficial and trite expression of the field, sometimes involving
the exploitation of futures thinking towards political and commercial ends. For Slaughter,
Transcendence of a method 39
the move away from litany and toward worldview reflexive ‘critical’ futures moves us
toward his ‘wisdom culture’. While Inayatullah originally saw litany in this way, considering
it to simply be ‘moronic’, expressions of crude and absurd culture, he has come to see
litany rather as the most superficial expression of deeper layers of reality, not as something
that can be bypassed. Thus while litany is just the surface, the empirical, it is also the
passageway to a deeper understanding.
Social Causes
Inayatullah had begun studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoa as an undergraduate
in the early 80’s, taking a Bachelor of Arts in inter-disciplinary studies and a Masters of
Arts in Political Science, with a specialisation in future studies. He later went on to a
PhD, focussed on comparative philosophy and macrohistory. Johan Galtung, who was
a Visiting Professor of Peace Studies in the political science department, became a strong
influence on Inayatullah’s thinking, and a mentor in some respects.133 Galtung was a
Right Livelihood Award Winner and also a prolific writer in many fields such as
macrohistory, as well as a pioneer in the area of peace research and conflict resolution.
He also founded the Journal of Peace Research, the International Peace Research
Organisation and most recently Transcend, a peace research institute that offers
professional training in the field.134
In addition to a cosmological analysis of culture and civilisation, which is examined later,
Galtung also articulated a theory of imperialism that adds a critical political and structural
dimension to Inayatullah’s conception of the political problematique. In ‘A Structural
Theory of Imperialism’, Galtung reveals how the relationship between centre and periphery,
imperial states and dominated states, operates. Borrowing from the work of Lenin, Galtung
analysed how imperialistic relations systematically create harmony of interests and conflict
of interests, to the benefit of elites of a ‘centre’ and the detriment of peoples in a ‘periphery’.
The centre of the Centre (the capital decision making bodies in the dominant nations
– in our time corporate/military/political USA) creates a bridgehead, forming a kind
of unity, with the centre of the Periphery (the principle decision making and power base
of the dominated country). For example, elites in the first world with elites in the third
world, thereby creating a harmony of interest between the two centres, to the benefit
of both, but to the detriment of the periphery. This can be seen in historical geo-political
terms through European colonial structures, how the various European empires
managed their colonies by educating an indigenous elite there, making them dependent
on aid, finished/manufactured goods, and helping to maintain their power. In modern
terms this can be seen through the US’s support for puppet or friendly regimes around
the world, often through financial and military aid (but not excluding military or paramilitary
intervention) that support US trade, investment and industry.
40 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
The periphery of the periphery (which is the majority of the population – for example
rural Mexico/Indonesia/Zaire etc.) is systematically exploited for resources, labour etc.
So by way of the centre of the periphery (third world elites) being linked to the centre
of the Centre (Washington DC/Wall Street), the periphery of the periphery (rural third
world) is essentially disenfranchised politically and in other ways – thus setting up a conflict
of interest between the two.135
The periphery within the imperialistic nation, for example suburban America, is kept satisfied
with bread and circuses. This pathology extends into economic, political, military,
communications, and cultural forms of imperialism. ‘Only imperfect, amateurish
imperialism needs weapons; professional imperialism is based on structural rather than
direct violence’.136
Galtung’s understanding of imperialism may have added a ‘culture invariant’ aspect to
Inayatullah’s analysis. While cosmologies may mediate different centre/periphery
relationships, the problem of dealing with this dynamic, and the human suffering and
impoverishment that it produces, must be dealt with historically and into the future. It
is a geo-political imperative. At the same time, this analysis is a way of coming to grips
with the totalising and hegemonic domination of the West in its many aspects, in particular
the ‘superior’ cultural artefacts emerging from it. Allowing effective critique, problematising
its legitimacy, and making the case for alternatives.
Immanuel Wallerstein, creator of the World Systems Theory, also influenced Inayatullah’s
structural/political analysis. World Systems Theory uses a core/periphery perspective,
distinct but related to Galtung’s centre/periphery distinction. A student of C. Wright Mills,
Wallerstein was deeply influenced by the Annales group of historians in Paris, and the
third-world intellectual radicalism of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Fieldwork in Africa brought
him face to face with the realities of poverty and oppressive capitalist structures. Praxis,
the interweaving of theory and practice, was his methodological thrust, a way to ‘uncover
hidden structures and allow oneself to act upon the world and change it’.137 Wallerstein’s
World Systems Theory was in part a critique of modernisation theory, and a revision of
Marxism. As such the theory challenges the notion of the nation state as the fundamental
unit of analysis, instead taking a historical and planetary approach. He explains the history
and emergence of a world capitalist system through four stages: from the end of a feudal
era in Europe, to British hegemony, world industrial development and finally the emergence
of US hegemony.
This long-term approach (la longue durée) comes by way of Braudel and emphasises geoecological change. Marx’s influence is seen in his emphasis of class struggle and materially
based social conflict, as well as dialectical historical transformation. Dependency theory
underpins his explanation of core-periphery relations, the exploitation of certain peripheries
Transcendence of a method 41
(labour intensive) classes/races/nations by a core (capital intensive) militaries, cadres, the
wealthy and technology. Like critical futurists in many places, a single evolutionary trajectory
for the world is also rejected.138 While Inayatullah had studied other systems theories,
in his opinion, Wallerstein’s worked for the very reason that other systems theories didn’t
work, it wasn’t a-political, the question of power is successfully addressed.139
Other social causes that may have influenced Inayatullah’s thinking are too numerous to
detail. Suffice to say that social causes are rationalistic discourses that emerge from worldviews.
In this respect Galtung sees both Western Marxism and Liberalism being variants of each
other – the Western predilection toward creating ideological or religious synthesis that are
incommensurate with any other totalising scheme, counter-posed to the ‘Oriental’
tendency to straddle multiple schools at once.140 Far from a rejection of social analysis, it
is clear that ‘emancipatory’ social analysis is an important aspect of Inayatullah’s overall
project, and he believes that many important insights and understanding are to be gained
here. CLA is, however, a way of nesting social analysis into a cosmological framework.
Worldview and Episteme
In Galtung’s analysis, the actions of nations were symptomatic of deeper historical causes
and civilisational cosmologies. An understanding of ‘deep civilisational codes’ could allow
one to get past the confusing day-to-day affairs (litany) and official national positions/policy
(social analysis) to understand larger patterns. Cosmology, which roughly refers to a totalising
understanding of the universe from particular cultural and historical positions, expressed
through totalising relationships within that culture’s life-world, is a central unit of analysis
in Galtung’s research. In Structure, Culture and Intellectual Style, Galtung showed how
intellectual productions differ from culture to culture, and civilisation to civilisation, based
on the greater inter-subjective variables involved – histories, cultural dispositions and
worldviews. What Galtung uncovered were cultural and civilisational structures lurking beneath
the facade of a legitimation process for intellectual production. On the one hand, this
exposition is an extension of centre/periphery dynamics, as he reveals how much of intellectual
production is simply the aping of dominant (centre) intellectual cultures within certain
intellectual ‘geo’ cosmologies (Latin America’s dependence on the French intellectual tradition,
for example). On the other hand, each intellectual cosmology differs considerably, which
is worth exploring.
For example, Galtung describes the ‘Saxonic’ tradition (UK, US, Australia and dependents)
as very weak in paradigmatic analysis and theory formation, focussing instead on empirical
investigations and developing elementary proposition productions. Pluralism and debate
is a dominant value, with an emphasis on team spirit and ‘convergence’. In the ‘Teutonic’
tradition (Germany, Austria and peripheries) pluralism will not be so valued, and team
spirit gives way to somewhat brutal critique. In contrast to the Saxonic, the Teutonic is
42 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
strong on paradigmatic analysis and very strong on theory formation (as well as deduction
from basic principles – small number of premises to high number of conclusions), but
weak on empirical description and proposition production. By extension, the Teutonic
works within ‘schools’ of thought (such as the Frankfurt school or Vienna circle), their
very vertical hierarchies and their respective intellectual projects. In the US this may be
perceived to be too partial to authority and a blind rejection of empirical ‘facts’.
The ‘Gallic’ (France and its intellectual dependents) on the other hand, puts considerable
emphasis on style and the poetic force of an argument. While the Gallic is, like the Teutonic,
strong is theory formation and paradigmatic analysis, it is also dialectic (multi-polar/
dualistic), unlike the Teutonic. Instead of arriving at an underlying structure and its
principles, the Gallic strives to elucidate a balance and harmony between competing forces.
In the Gallic ‘the totality cannot be shown through rigorous deduction. It has to be
hinted at, one has to dance around it and view it from many angles until in the end it
rests suspended between two poles’.141 This analysis of intellectual production can also
be extended into civilisational cosmologies. From this vantage point, it can clearly be
seen that the intellectual culture we belong to will mediate the knowledge produced,
not simply in method but also in content.
In Michael Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archeology of the human sciences, a book
that had a significant influence on Inayatullah’s thinking and development of CLA, Foucault
examined how knowledge had been ordered through different historical periods in differing
ways. In effect, he revealed that what may be considered universal structure, is actually
the particular expression of a researcher, writer, or thinker’s historical and cultural context,
what he termed episteme. Foucault showed that during the Renaissance, knowledge was
based on the principle of similitude and resemblance, that is, knowledge was likeness.
During the Classical period knowledge became representational, the signifier was the
signified, language was transparent and revealed the true nature of things. In the Modern
period knowledge became an understanding of abstract forces and internal/organic
structures – history and psychology respectively. Thus, knowledge structures in the human
sciences can be said to be particular and situated in history, among other factors.142
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme
that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed
in theory or silently invested in a practice.143
Inayatullah credits Foucault: ‘his epistemes, or historical frames of knowledge, are primary
in understanding how particular nominations of reality become naturalised’.144 By
‘archeology’, Foucault meant the study of the archive – the discourses and documents
present and historical that continue to function and transform through history. In addition,
archival study is by definition not limited to authoritative texts, but opens the research
Transcendence of a method 43
domain to the entire context we live within, no matter how trivial or marginal that may
seem to be. This may cast a light on the discontinuity and ruptures in the way the world
is realised.145 Archaeology is a search for ‘the underlying knowledge (savoir) that makes
[practices, institutions and theories] possible…implicit knowledge (savoir) special to this
society’.146 Finally, Foucault influenced Inayatullah’s concept of ‘geneology’. For Foucault,
geneology was about uncovering the marginalised discourses, ignored theories, dissenting
opinions and local knowledge that has not been institutionalised as valid knowledge. It
was to make apparent the historical and political struggles that have occurred in the
valorisation of knowledge. For Inayatullah’s future-oriented CLA, this means an inquiry
into the genealogies of the future(s); what knowledge is privileged and what knowledge
is silenced, what discourses have been successful in constituting the present and what
are alternative discourses for alternative futures.147
Myth/Metaphor
In the 1980s, Inayatullah found ‘instant rapport’ with the work of William Irwin Thompson
and spent a considerable amount of time with him. Darkness and Scattered Light, The
Pacific Shift, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light and At the Edge of History were some
of Thompson’s more influential works on the spirit of Inayatullah.148 A cultural historian
with a mytho-poetic perspective, Thompson was the son of working class Irish Roman
Catholics. However, he said that by the time nuns started to try and teach him Roman
Catholicism in primary school, he had already discovered yoga through mystic experiences
at an early age. He went on to champion a planetary culture, through the cross fusion
of art, science and religion, working with people such as James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis
and Gregory Bateson, who were also articulating ‘Gaian’ ways of thinking and knowing,
part of the new thinking in complex living systems and processes.149 He eventually founded
the Lindisfarne fellowship, which brought together creative people, artists, writers and
mystics from around the world who were creating the ideas, art, science and mythos for
a planetary culture. It was a rejection of his academic life and the ‘MIT internationalism’,
that he felt was shallow and simply Americans colonising the world.150 Thompson essentially
saw the primacy of myth as giving rise to science, and as underlying science.151
Levi-Strauss has said that “myth is an act of faith in a science yet unborn”, but
that point of view is still too close to Frazer; it sees myth as a foreshadowing
of something which will be truly known through science. You could just as well
say that science is an act of faith in a mythology yet unborn, and that when we
truly know the universe of which we are a part, we will see that the way DNA
spirals in our cells and the way nebulae turn in space are all related to a particular
dance of idea and pattern.152
44 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Thompson shows how narrations and expressions of Time are given by ‘unconscious systems
of ordering’.153 From Darwinian/evolutionary thought, through to the classical Greek history
of Thucydides, he shows how narration is based on pre-existing cultural assumptions, myths
or hidden needs. ‘All narratives, artistic, historical, or scientific, are connected to certain
unconscious principles of ordering both our perceptions and our descriptions’.154
Thus, ideology and rationality is a form of ‘false consciousness’, including the ideas of
Marx, Habermas, Mohammed and E.O. Wilson. Ideology is the ‘excrement’ of the mind.155
Thompson saw myth as the memory of the history of the universe. Myth is the grand
narrative, the wisdom and story of the universe, while history is simply the most recent
superficial headline in the nine o’clock news.
…history is written by elites which are the ego of a civilization. If it’s written
by men in England, it’s not about women and slaves in Athens or Semites with
hooked noses who created the alphabet and the Mediterranean trading culture.
The kind of history you learned in classics was a white, male, patriarchal narrative.
That’s the history of the ego. The history of the soul is always the history of
the voiceless, the oppressed, the repressed: the marginal people, the artists, the
women, the African.156
Thomson occupied himself with uncovering a mythos for the universe, a history of the
soul and an ethos for the emergence of life. He has compared the metaphor of the Eucharist
‘take and eat for this is my body and my blood’ as describing the explosion of a supernova
that scatters heavy metals necessary for life on the planets. The story of St Michael, who
forces demons down into the underworld, describes the anaerobic crisis several billion
years ago in which cynobacteria forced anaerobic bacteria down into the bottom of lakes.
And he has said that ‘Gaia, the whole biosphere, is really our collective body politic’.157
He has fused new understandings of the Earth and biology with a mythic and poetic
understanding of reality.
Thompson’s thrust is toward the creation of a new myth of humanity, one incorporating
the new understanding of Gaia, living systems and complexity. But if myth can be translated
across cultures, in a planetary story of evolution, how does Inayatullah arrive at the horizontal
spectrum of epistemes? How particular myth underpins and gives rise to a particular
worldview, can also be understood through Inayatullah’s description of identity:
trauma creates identity, since it creates the foundational experience of inclusion/
exclusion, separation and unity, which of course is about our descent from God,
and on and on…The transformation from identity is transcendence, both in
the evolutionary sense but as well in the spiritual sense.158
Transcendence of a method 45
Trauma arises through the interaction with the environment, ‘the Other’, giving rise to
myths that capture a culture’s or civilisation’s separation or ‘descent from God’. Thus
myths are produced in some archaic point of origin, different in each place, and reflecting
the distinctive features of that civilisations form of identification. Galtung’s ‘CTM syndrome’
(chosen-ness, trauma, myth), another influential element in Inayatullah’s conception of
CLA, exposed how cultures often identify themselves with transcendental forces, thereby
creating a belief or sentiment that they have been ‘anointed’ with the right to show others
‘the Other’ the true way, to the point of justifying conquest and the right to control and
govern. This ‘chosen-ness’ is built into myths of a great past, a heroic age, inducing ‘collective
sentiments of grandeur’, to be recreated in a great future. The present is a halfway point
between a great past and great future. Trauma represents the suffering, real or imagined,
that a culture underwent that may have led to a fall, and the path that that culture must
travail to return to greatness. People can be galvanized and made cohesive through the
memory of a particular trauma/glory, regardless of its historical truth, and as this historical
memory crosses generations, the trauma has been embedded into the identity of the group.
This clarifies how mythic trauma may help create the distinction of self/Other, cohesion
and separation – and give rise to civilisational/cultural identity.
This understanding of civilisational cosmologies, that maintain self/Other boundaries,
is also reflected in Johan Galtung’s article Western Civilisation, Anatomy and Pathology.
It is invoked through a civilisation’s distinction between centre and periphery – the identity
boundary of that civilisation. What gives rise to this self/Other dynamic, different in
each civilisation from the Western, Indic, Sinic to Nipponic etc are the invariant aspects
of that civilisation’s cosmology, which is ‘so normal and so natural that they become
like the air around us, un-noticed’.159 In a passage that illuminates how metaphor works
within Inayatullah’s CLA, Galtung writes; ‘ideally, one should be able to invoke a cosmology
by one figure alone, an image so powerful that the essence of that civilisation is carried
in that image alone’.160
Thompson also invokes a similar understanding of metaphor in describing a cosmology
and forms of rationality, that a mythic image communicates the essential quality of the
‘unconscious ordering’, and the worldview and rationality it gives rise to.161
POST-STRUCTURAL INFLUENCES
Michael Shapiro, also a professor in the Political Science Department at the University
of Hawaii argued to Inayatullah ‘for futures studies to move forward it must engage
with post-structuralism’.162 In Reading the Post-Modern Polity, Shapiro argued for a
‘geneological’ approach to political theory, one that situates a political discourse spatially
and temporally in order to open a potential for alternative discourses. As such, Shapiro
46 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
critiques Habermas for assuming that the subjects of which he speaks, and of which he
articulates an inter-subjective communicative process capable of transcending their living
circumstances, have ‘intentional control’ regarding the meanings that they use to
communicate.163 Shapiro argues, in the same vein as Jacques Derrida, that this amounts
to blindness in the face of a speaker’s historical tradition, the tradition that gives rise to
their communication and the immediate requirements (perhaps power/ legitimation)
that exist for that speaker now.164 In other words, the denial of the ‘situated-ness’ in
discourse amounts to a loss of control in the face of such discourse. On the other hand
the acknowledgment of our situated-ness in a discourse allows for freedom and
alternatives to arise. In a similar vein, while a discourse creates intelligibility, allowing
for rational communication and understanding, it also sidelines and ignores other discourses
and thus other alternatives.
…genealogists remain suspicious of all conversations, because they recognize
that systems of intelligibility exist at the expense of alternatives. Therefore to
strive to deepen intelligibility and provide more access within available
conversations is to consolidate the power arrangements that the persistence of
such conversations helps to maintain.165
This is why Shapiro saw post-structuralism as essential for futures studies to move forward.
The futures program in Hawaii was supposedly about ‘alternative futures’, yet there could
be no alternatives, in Shapiro’s view, if one remained blind to one’s own discourse, one’s
temporal (historic) and spatial (cultural/structural/power) situated-ness. One could spin
out a hundred alternatives that, because they existed within the same epistemic
boundaries, would simply be versions of each other. Alternatives could only arise through
an understanding of how discourse and contextualising influences frame issues.
By 1990, Inayatullah had articulated this approach applied to foresight, through a paper
published in Futures called ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Future: Predictive,
Cultural and Critical Epistemologies’.166 This piece was influenced by Inayatullah’s work
in the Hawaii court system. In it, he looked at how epistemic assumptions were ‘embedded
in planning and futures studies’. He found that futures research could be grouped into
three categories.
1. Futures research that focused on prediction worked for the purpose of control and
extending power and assumed a deterministic universe, with the future a place to colonise
(Predictive Futures).
2. Futures research that focused on culture worked toward insight, examining cultural
images, myth, and ‘universal narratives that ensure basic human values’, plus the analysis
of class, gender, ethnic and other categories (Interpretive Futures).
Transcendence of a method 47
3. Futures research that tried to ‘undefine’ the future, to make existing categories and
discourses problematic. This approach sees the present as ‘fragile’, as the victory of
‘one particular discourse’, and analyses forms of power that underpin these discourses
(Critical Futures).167
CLA exists within this last category, but can also be a form of cultural research. CLA
‘searches for power so that it has no where to hide and [is] futures oriented, creating
alternative futures’.168
INSIGHT: ‘PROBING BENEATH THE SURFACE’: BUDAPEST 1990
Richard Slaughter had been the first to articulate a theoretical framework for critical futures
studies. A systematic critical analysis of the futures field showed him ‘hidden structures’
within futures work and literature. It was at a World Futures Studies Federation conference
in Budapest in 1990, in a session organised by Allan Tough around innovative futures
thinking called ‘Cutting Edge Ideas’, where Slaughter first presented a critical futures
typology of futures research. Abstracted from an earlier piece, it essentially laid out a
typology of futures research from litany to the epistemological.
Inayatullah was in the audience and he immediately saw that this was more than a typology,
but could be worked into a method.169 It gelled with Inayatullah’s own understanding
of layers and made intuitive sense. It was this flash of insight that would begin the process
of developing the CLA framework and testing it through practice.
INTUITIVE ACTION RESEARCH
CLA was first tested at two conferences in Bangkok together with Tony Stevenson, a Brisbane
based futurist and former president of the World Futures Studies Federation, and who
also worked with a critical futures focus. The first, in 1991, at a futures conference dealing
with pollution and overcrowding, and later, in 1992, on a futures of ecology conference.
Many students took part in this conference and helped Inayatullah develop CLA. Tony
Stevenson lent Inayatullah a practice orientation, and was indeed one of the people who
influenced him toward incorporating action research/learning into foresight.
Figure 1 shows the outcome of one testing session. It is important to note that this period
of testing and refining spanned at least six years, and continues in 2002. It was not simply
a theory created through a small pool of academics in a particular field. It used the feedback
of many individuals from all walks of life. Other testing grounds were the Andorra World
Futures Studies Federation futures studies course, Visioning workshops at Southern Cross
University, Queensland and Queensland Advocacy Incorporated on disability futures
(1994 – 95), to name a few. Through the first part of this period, Inayatullah did not tell
48 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Level
Litany
Social causes
Issue
Solutions
•
gridlock
pollution
• waiting time
•
•
•
hyper urbanisation
• rapid development and
economic growth
creating overpasses
switching from an industrial
to an information economy
• telecommuting and mobile
phone use
• using transportation
modelling software etc
international
agencies and
corporations
transform the development
model
• create deep decentralisation
and localism (‘where local
people control their economy
and feel they do not have to
leave their life and lifestyle’)170
• focus on agricultural reform
and the dignity of work and
valuing local customs
public
intellectuals
and social
movements
focus on indigenous
metaphors, and return to
pre-modern ways of knowing
Mystics and fringe artists
mystics and
fringe artists
•
Worldview
development model
• assumptions about the
idiocy of rural people,
that one should leave
the farm and seek
wealth in the city
Myth
•
•
Bangkok, ‘city of gold’
– the image of the good
life in the city, the story
of making it big in a
Western like setting
hire consultants
transportation planners both
local and international
•
•
•
•
Agency
Government
and contractors
Figure 1: Key Transport Issues in Bangkok using CLA
people he was doing CLA he just used it. They would talk and he would organise the
information based on the level. But this became too difficult after a while so he began
explaining the method to people.171 The method then evolved through working with
others. While working for NRMA, Inayatullah and Gary Saliba, an Australian futurist,
saw that there were similarities between their two approaches. Gary Saliba used the idea
of switching assumptions to arrive at alternative scenarios. While Saliba applied this to
Transcendence of a method 49
strategic scenario building based on soft systems/complexity mapping, Inayatullah learned
to apply this to worldview, episteme, myth or metaphor, switching these ‘horizontally’
to arrive at alternative solutions or renditions of issues.172
…theory, approach and methodology are deeply interwoven in post-structuralism,
as opposed to empiricism or interpretive discourse, where there are clear
differences between theory, values and data. In CLA and post-structuralism,
they are all nested.173
PUBLICATION
The Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change first rejected the paper on
CLA: ‘the referees could not understand a word of it’. Although Inayatullah asked the
editor for his opinion, he refused to engage him. When he finally sent it to Futures, it
was accepted and given a good response. This was in 1998.
CONCLUSION
Sohail Inayatullah’s journey as a child began his inquiry into the nature of reality. Crosscultural/cross-civilisational experience may have imprinted in him the existence of many
ways of knowing, the horizontal dimension. His following and championing of P. R. Sarkar,
and meditation may have been primary in revealing kosas, or layers of mind – and providing
him direction. Academic research in Hawaii, and experience in their court system gave him
post-structural influences, as well as structural influences, and a futures oriented/planning
approach to policy (1989). Slaughter’s typology provided the catalyst for the development
of a method (1990). But Inayatullah was practice oriented, perhaps something he picked
up from his father’s interest in action research,174 so he quickly began testing the method
with people at futures conferences and workshops (1991– 92). Upon moving to Australia,
he continued testing the method (1994 +). It was seven years after conceiving of the idea
for a layered method, and testing it in numerous places across the world that his paper on
CLA was finally published in Futures (1998).
A proposition that one might make is that CLA is not about a methodology, but about
opening up spaces to alternative epistemes, cultural worldview, discourses and hence opening
up pathways to substantively alternative futures from what is currently offered through
mainstream ‘pop’ and ‘problem oriented’ scenarios and the like. The proposition, in other
words, is that CLA is about getting distance from ‘the future of the world’ (as narrowly
defined, predictive and a culturally reductive), and enabling ‘world futures’, an approach
to foresight inclusive (and critical) of many futures, from many cultural perspectives.175
This is in part rejected by Inayatullah, and in part accepted. In rejecting this proposition
he writes that:
50 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
[CLA is about] rethinking the nature of inquiry, from either/or to both/and,
and ensure that the inquiry does not lose a vertical gaze, the notion of ethics.
Move people to understand that long lasting change means being focused on
myth and metaphor as well as worldview and policy. In that sense, CLA is about
CLA, it is about the method.176
In accepting this proposition he writes:
(CLA methodology) is the litany level. At the policy level, CLA is about changing
how government policy is done. At the worldview, it is about an integrated
planetary civilisation, post West and post East. At the myth, it is the mode from
which a new story can arrive.177
Inayatullah’s practice orientation, with his commitment to interrogating worldviews, myths
and metaphors at workshops and conferences around the world, has helped CLA to move
beyond the confines of academic circles, and to move into the lived experiences of individuals,
groups, communities and organisations. Many of these with little or no knowledge of the
futures field. CLA has also been used and adopted by many in the futures field, and by
a few outside of it, for its practicality in surfacing hidden assumptions that limit the options
of groups and individuals. Its ability to reframe issues in unique ways has allowed groups
and individuals to imagine truly alternative futures that not only inspire, but which can
be more humane, sustainable and one step in the emergence of a ‘Gaia of civilisations’.
Afterword 51
AFTERWORD
We can derive several lessons from Richard Slaughter and Sohail Inayatullah’s respective
journeys. A primary lesson is how their thinking partly emerged through facilitated
education. In the case of Slaughter, his own travels and independent university study
allowed him to develop intimacy with the world he lived in. This intimacy grew out of
an inner voice and life experiences that contradicted the standard approach to education.
For him this culminated in a meaningful and unprecedented PhD in futures studies
education in 1982. In the case of Inayatullah, it was his own practice of meditation and
the study of the teachings of P. R. Sarkar, which culminated in his PhD dissertation on
P. R. Sarkar and macrohistory. Where would these two be if they had not been allowed
to follow an independent path of study and develop their own unique insights and
inspiration? Perhaps they would have worked outside the academy, more marginalised.
As it stands, they both learned to listen to and trust this inner voice. Along the way mentors
and ‘mystics’ aided them. John Reynolds became a mentor for Slaughter, teaching him
the value of a critical orientation. Later, Ken Wilber provided inspiration for him,
illuminating the inner path of development. For Inayatullah, Johan Galtung and
William Irwin Thompson were inspirational thinkers that provided academic guidance,
with P. R. Sarkar the primary spiritual guide. Jim Dator, of course, gave him the space to
explore new paths. The respective stories of Slaughter and Inayatullah challenge a
prescriptive approach to education and argue for an inner sensitive, future-oriented and
experiential pedagogy.
Their respective relationship with agency is also important. While Slaughter has made
institutional and social foresight a primary way of addressing the ‘civilisational challenge’
and enabling consciously chosen futures, Inayatullah has preferred working at a local
level with local stakeholders incorporating the praxis of action research – theory has emerged
through participation. The different approaches have yielded qualitatively different results.
For Slaughter, the result has so far been his work to develop other IOFs, culminating
in the creation of AFI. For Inayatullah, it has been the development of a method (CLA)
accessible to and used by many. Writing, editing and publishing critical futures literature,
of course, has also been an important form of agency for both.
The importance of the inner dimension for both men is also relevant. For Slaughter,
Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Tradition and Ken Wilber’s writings (among many other
influences) provide a ground for cultural recovery and the development of a ‘Wisdom
Culture’. For Inayatullah, the inner world, revealed through meditation, is primary. The
52 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Indian episteme, and Kosa (layers of mind) provide a pathway for transcending narrow
boundaries of self and ethnicity. For both men inner exploration and development is a
precondition for the healthy development of the ‘outer’ world.
The importance of examining culture, identity, worldview and the critique of knowledge
producing communities is also apparent. For Slaughter the distinction between image
and substance slowly morphed into his typology of futures research. For him, no futures
work is complete without an examination of possible distortions, bias, mystification,
embedded interests and the cultural frame of reference from which such work emerges.
For Inayatullah an examination of worldviews, cosmology and episteme allows for
alternatives to be explored and imagined. This has been more in the tradition of participatory
self-analysis. In general, epistemic re-conceptualisation is seen by both as a valuable, if
not central, method of creating change.
Challenging the reified nature of the status quo runs through the work of both men.
The ‘civilisational challenge’ has been Slaughter’s way of articulating a forward view that
challenges the ‘taken-for-granted-ness’ of modern society and the Western worldview.
Slaughter’s historical orientation makes many of the assumptions we un-consciously live
with problematic. Slaughter has ‘dialectically’ critiqued the US futures tradition for this
very same taken-for-granted-ness. Inayatullah, on the other hand, has been more focused
on critique that situates futures thinking within its particular cultural/civilisational context.
While Inayatullah has also added to the critique of the West, this has been more in line
with multi-culturalism. What is considered ‘global’ or ‘universal’ or ‘law’ may simply
be the expression of a culture’s orientation. An exploration of a multiplicity of cultures
way of knowing is the primary critical thrust that highlights the idiosyncratic nature of
each tradition.
Both have worked on integrating layers and domains of reality and have approached futures
work incorporating eclectic influences. ‘A la’ Habermas, cognitive interests range, depending
on the situation. While not rejecting a technical-instrumental futures research, Slaughter
(via Habermas) opens the field to communicative and emancipatory domains. His
incorporation of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory has been the most recent thrust in this
labour of integration. Inayatullah has primarily used his distinction of predictive,
interpretive and critical as well as CLA as ways of integrating and explaining futures work.
Empirical and instrumental futures work is not rejected, but there is an attempt to put
them in their place, and to open up valuable and overlooked spaces of inquiry. For both,
there is no one totalising angle, perspective, discourse, or theory in which to view the
future and futures work. At the same time, all perspectives are not equal and relative,
because the question of power, sustainable futures and human emancipation remain of
major importance.
Afterword 53
Most importantly, the importance of the emergence of a community of practice cannot
be over-emphasised; their work has coincided with the emergence of a critical futures
community across the world and across many domains. Slaughter and Inayatullah’s particular
critiques of the status quo and the futures field have been part of a mass critique from
thinkers, writers and actors beginning in the 19th and carrying into the 20th century.
In such a historical project there is no final statement about the future, but rather a
multifaceted critique of the dysfunction around us (much of which we have learned to
take for granted) evolving dialectically and heuristically, and an opening of the field to
culturally and philosophically different visions, interpretations, influences and opportunities.
This historical project is partly the possibility of a planetary culture and global identity.
Addressing the threat of world nuclear war, and successfully addressing global scale
environmental devastation is also part of this. This historical project actively critiques
the ‘monological’ Western worldview, seeking knowledge beyond empiricism and
instrumental rationality. It has examined and critiqued the materialist and consumerist
mindsets that have blossomed of late, and explored the causes of ethnocentrism, war
and genocide. Much of this project has been a critique of US and Western hegemony,
their cultural artifacts, and other form of imperialism. In my opinion this historical project
points toward an epistemologically diverse world community equipped to deal with its
many challenges and able to create a socially and ecologically sustainable world for futures
generations – rich in tradition, human wisdom, health and human rights. Finally, this
historical project is inclusive and open to the participation of many, it is up to us to continue,
expand and create.
54 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
Endnotes 55
ENDNOTES
1
Email transmission from Zia Sardar with Sohail Inayatullah quoted.
Friday, 1 November 2002 11:54:58.
2
Slaughter, R, Critical Futures Studies and Curriculum Renewal, PhD dissertation,
University of Lancaster, Britain, 1982.
3
Slaughter, R, ‘The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Series Introduction’,
KBFS, Futures Study Centre, Melbourne 1996, p1.
4
Slaughter, R, Futures for the Third Millennium, Prospect, New South Wales,
1999, p231.
5
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002 at:
www.foresightinternational.com.au/05slaughter/Making_of_a_Futurist.pdf, p2.
6
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June 2002.
7
Polak, F, The Image of the Future, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1973.
8
Hayward, P. & Krishnan, P, ‘The Uses of Foresight in Everyday Life’, Australian
Foresight Institute, 2002, p8.
9
Huxley, A, The Perennial Philosophy, Chatto & Windus, London 1947, p193.
10
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p2.
11
Leach, E, A Runaway World, [Text of his Reith Lectures] BBC Publications.
London, 1968.
12
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002 at:
www.foresightinternational.com.au/05slaughter/Making_of_a_Futurist.pdf, p4.
13
Slaughter, R, Birds in Bermuda, Bermuda Bookstores, Hamilton, Bermuda, 1975.
14
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June 2002.
15
Slaughter, R, 2002, at:
www.foresightinternational.com.au/05slaughter/Making_of_a_Futurist.pdf, p5.
16
To punctuate his six years there, the governor, Sir Richard Sharples, was shot dead
by a man with a grudge, only six weeks after Slaughter has personally met him.
17
Slaughter, R, 2002, at:
www.foresightinternational.com.au/05slaughter/Making_of_a_Futurist.pdf, p5.
56 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
18
Carson, R, Silent Spring, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1962.
19
Albert Schweitzer, quoted in Carson, R, Silent Spring, Hamish Hamilton,
London, 1962.
20
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p4.
21
Slaughter, R, 2002, p6.
22
Slaughter, R, 2002, p5.
23
Mumford, L, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, Secker & Warburg,
London, 1964.
24
Slaughter, R, 2002, p5.
25
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June, 2002.
26
Kahn, H. & Bruce-Briggs, B, ‘The Multifold Trend in the Seventies and Eighties –
The Macro-historical perspective’ Things to come: Thinking about the seventies and
eighties. New York McMillan, 1972, p8 –9.
27
Slaughter, R, Critical Futures Studies and Curriculum Renewal, PhD dissertation,
University of Lancaster, Britain, 1982, p57.
28
Slaughter, R, 1982, p44.
29
Slaughter, R, 1982, p45.
30
Slaughter, R, 1982, p46.
31
Slaughter, R, ‘Futures Beyond Dystopia’, Futures, Vol. 30, No. 10, Pergamon,
1998, p995.
32
Slaughter, R, 1982, p46.
33
Commoner, B, The Closing Circle, Bantam Books, 1980.
34
Slaughter, R, 1982, p55.
35
Slaughter, R, 1982, p65–68.
36
Slaughter, R, 1982 p65–68.
37
Goldsmith, E, et al, Blueprint for Survival, Signet, London, 1972.
38
Slaughter, R, 1982, p62.
39
Slaughter, R, 1982, p62.
40
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p8.
Endnotes 57
41
Slaughter, R, 1982, p68.
42
Slaughter, R, 1999, p211.
43
Slaughter, R, 1999, p203.
44
Slaughter, R, 1999, p206.
45
Slaughter, R, 1999, p207.
46
Slaughter, R, 1999, p209.
47
Slaughter, R, 1999, p210.
48
Slaughter, R, 1999, p216.
49
Mulkay, M, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge, Allen & Unwin, 1979.
50
Slaughter, R, ‘An out line of critical futures’, Futures for the Third Millennium,
Prospect, New South Wales, 1999, p213–214.
51
Popper, K, The Poverty of Historicism, Basic Books, New York, 1957.
52
Goldthorpe, John H, ‘Theories of Industrial Society: Reflections on the
Recrudescence of Historicism and the Future of Futurology’, European Journal
of Sociology, vol. 12, 1971, p264.
53
Goldthorpe, John H, 1971, p275 –277.
54
Goldthorpe, John H, 1971, p280 –281.
55
Goldthorpe, John H, 1971, p285.
56
Miles, I, ‘The Ideologies of Futurists’, in J. Fowles (ed) The Handbook of Futures
Research, Greenwood, 1978, p73.
57
Miles, I, in J. Fowles (ed), 1978, p78.
58
Miles, I, in J. Fowles (ed), 1978, p81.
59
Schumacher, E.F, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Abacus,
London, 1974.
60
Slaughter, R, 1982, p69.
61
Slaughter, R, 1982, p72.
62
Slaughter, R, 1982, p49.
63
Slaughter, R, 1982, p49.
64
Slaughter, R, 1982, p73.
58 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
65
Slaughter, R, 1982, p75.
66
Slaughter, R, 1982, p75.
67
Slaughter, R, 1982, p76.
68
Slaughter, R, Futures Tools and Techniques, DDM/Futures Study Centre,
Melbourne, 1995.
69
Slaughter, R, ‘Futures Beyond Dystopia’, Futures, Vol. 30, No. 10, Pergamon,
1998, p1000.
70
Slaughter, R, 1998, p1001.
71
Bottomore, T, The Frankfurt School, Ellis Horwood & Tavistock Pub., England,
1984.
72
McCarthy, T, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas, Polity Press, Cambridge,
1984, p63.
73
Marx might contend that these technical interests need be put under the control
of a socialist agenda, hence the concept of socialist science. However, in Habermas’
view, scientific interests and socialist interests were of different natures, one a
general necessity for control and production and the other a need for emancipatory
transcendence of certain oppressive constraints of one’s social world.
74
McCarthy, T, 1984, p69.
75
McCarthy, T, 1984, p72.
76
McCarthy, T, 1984, p81.
77
McCarthy, T, 1984, p79.
78
Habermas, J, Towards a Rational Society, Heinemann, London, 1971.
79
Slaughter, R, The Foresight Principle: Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century,
Praeger, Westport, CT/Adamantine, London, 1995, (Bibliography).
80
Slaughter, R, Futures for the Third Millennium: Enabling the Forward View,
Prospect, New South Wales, 1999, p217.
81
Slaughter, R, The Role of Critique in Futures Work, WFSF Bulletin, 2002, p4.
82
Slaughter, R, WFSF Bulletin, 2002, p4.
83
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p8.
84
Slaughter, R, Futures for the Third Millennium: Enabling the Forward View,
Prospect, New South Wales, 1999.
Endnotes 59
85
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June 2002
86
Wilber, K, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth,
Shambhala, Colorado, 1979.
87
Huxley, A, The Perennial Philosophy, Chatto & Windus, London, 1946.
88
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p9.
89
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June, 2002.
90
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p11.
91
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p10.
92
Sohail Inayatullah interviewed by José Ramos, Melbourne, May, 2002.
93
Galtung argues in Structure, Culture and Intellectual Style, (Sage, London, 1981,
p817– 856) that while colonial academic peripheries tend to simply mimic imperial
academic thinking, provincial centres are more innovative than the pinnacles of
academia itself. This might also explain the relatively greater openness in Australia
to such things as foresight and action research that have made little headway in
Mainland, USA.
94
Email Transmission, Sohail Inayatullah to José Ramos, 4 July 2002.
95
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June 2002.
96
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002.
97
Slaughter, R, ‘Lessons from the Australian Commission for the Future:
1986 –1998’ Futures for the Third Millennium, Prospect, New South Wales,
1999, p166.
98
Slaughter, R, ‘Lessons from the Australian Commission for the Future:
1986 –1998’ Futures for the Third Millennium, Prospect, New South Wales,
1999, p166.
99
Slaughter, R, ‘Lessons from the Australian Commission for the Future:
1986 –1998’ Futures for the Third Millennium, Prospect, New South Wales,
1999, p168.
100
Slaughter, R, ‘Lessons from the Australian Commission for the Future:
1986 –1998’ Futures for the Third Millennium, Prospect, New South Wales, 1999.
60 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
101
Course notes for the M.S. in Environmental Science at Monash University –
Australia.
102
Fisher, F, ‘Environmental Science for the Third Millennium: Development of
a Metascience’, Fingana, November, 2000, p4.
103
Berger, P.L & Luckman, T, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in
the Sociology of Knowledge, Penguin, 1967, p108.
104
Richard Slaughter Interviewed by José Ramos, Australian Foresight Institute,
June 2002.
105
Beare, H & Slaughter, R, Education for the 21st Century, Routledge, London,
1993.
106
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p13.
107
Slaughter, R, ‘Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Series Introduction’, KBFS,
Futures Study Centre, Melbourne, 1996, p2.
108
Slaughter, R, Futures Concepts and Powerful Ideas, DDM/Futures Study Centre,
Melbourne, 1996.
109
Slaughter, R, The Foresight Principle: Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century,
Praeger, Westport, CT/Adamantine, London, 1995.
110
Slaughter, R, ‘The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies as an Evolving Process’,
KBFS, Futures Study Centre, Melbourne, 1996, p3–5.
111
Slaughter, R, ‘The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies as an Evolving Process’,
KBFS, Futures Study Centre, Melbourne 1996, p5.
112
From Slaughter, R, The Foresight Principle: Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century,
Praeger, Westport, CT/Adamantine, London, 1995 (Bibliography).
113
Slaughter, R, Futures for the Third Millennium, Prospect, New South Wales, 1999.
114
Slaughter, R, The Making of a Futurist: An Autobiographical Sketch, 2002, p16.
115
Belsey, C, Critical Practise, Methuen & Co. Ltd., NY, 1980.
116
This is reflected in The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, which is a strong
attempt to see through the eyes of future oriented thinkers from many different
cultures and background, instead of an attempt to define one ‘correct’ particular
approach to the future, or the articulation of an idiosyncratic vision of a preferred
or extrapolated future.
117
Inayatullah, S, Email interviewed by J. Ramos, July 2002.
Endnotes 61
118
Inayatullah, S, ‘Why I hate passports and visas’ (Unpublished).
119
Inayatullah, S, ‘Macrohistory and layers of reality’, KBFS, Futures Study Centre,
Melbourne, 1996.
120
This attitude toward categories extends into the method of CLA itself. As
Inayatullah writes: ‘CLA can be located within futures studies... but as well within
the larger development of the social sciences, the post modern turn. I see it far
more than merely a futures method’. From email communication 4 July 2002
from: Sohail Inayatullah to: José Ramos. In addition to this, CLA can be seen as a
method of content analysis within the communications discipline – as Inayatullah
writes: ‘CLA is well received...because of the conflicting levels of information we
receive. CLA helps sort out these levels. I guess, it is timely because of increased
information and a bit of fatigue with postmodernism’ Email transmission 15 June
2002 from: Sohail Inayatullah to: José Ramos.
121
Inayatullah, S, ‘Macrohistory and layers of reality, KBFS, Futures Study Centre,
Melbourne, 1996, p1.
122
This point is taken up in Zia Sardar’s Postmodernism and the Other and is
challenged and rejected as yet another example of the de-legitimation/invalidation
of any peripheral structures. Inayatullah also uses this position to challenge extreme
postmodernist relativism.
123
Email transmission from: Sohail Inayatullah to: José Ramos July 2002.
124
Some of this thinking began with the inquiry into the tension between agency
and structure, two patterns that continuously emerged in the field. On one side
were the Americans saying that it is all just a matter of doing it – like the Nike
slogan. The individual has the power to create anything. Then there were the
Marxists, who saw structure as primary, that people were locked into structures
of oppression. There also existed a Jungian influence (supported by Campbell’s
work) at the myth level. But most of this level’s influence was from Thompson.
125
Belsey, C, Critical Practice, Methuen and Co., London, 1980.
126
Sohail Inayatullah interviewed via email by José Ramos or 6/15/02.
127
Sardar, Z, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture,
Pluto, London, 1998.
128
Inayatullah, S, Understanding Sarkar, Brill, Boston, 2002.
129
Inayatullah, S, 2002.
62 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
130
Inayatullah, S, ‘The Weight of History and the Pull of the Future’, KBFS, Futures
Study Centre, Melbourne, 1996.
131
Oswald Spengler quoted in Galtung, J & Inayatullah, S, ed. Macrohistory and
Macrohistorians, Praeger, Westport CT, 1997, p99.
132
Systems I course at Monash University, Melbourne Australia, w/Professor Frank
Fisher, February 2001.
133
Email transmission from: Inayatullah, S, to Ramos, J, October 2002.
134
Galtung, J. & Inayatullah, S, ed. Macrohistory and Macrohistorians, Praeger,
Westport CT, 1997 (biographical appendix).
135
It is amazing to see how well this framework works in our time. How many puppet
dictators has the West supported to the detriment of that other nation’s peoples?
136
Galtung, J, ‘A Structural Theory of Imperialism’, Journal of Peace Research,
1971, p91.
137
At http://web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/notebook/WorldSystem.pdf, p1,
16 December 2002.
138
At http://web.mit.edu/esd.83/www/notebook/WorldSystem.pdf, p4,
16 December 2002.
139
J. Ramos Phone interview w/Sohail Inayatullah on 15 January 2003.
140
Galtung, J, ‘Western Civilisation, Anatomy and Pathology’, Alternatives VII,
1981, p150.
141
Galtung, J, Structure, Culture and Intellectual Style, from Social Science Formation,
Sage, London, 1981.
142
Foucault, M, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the human sciences, Routledge,
New York, 1970.
143
Foucault, M, 1970, p168.
144
Inayatullah, S, ‘Layered methodology: meanings, epistemes and the politics of
knowledge’, Futures 34, Elsevier, 2002.
145
Foucault, M, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961-1984, Semiotex(e), NY,
1996, p57–58.
146
Foucault, M, 1996, p13–14.
147
Inayatullah, S, ‘Causal Layered Analysis: Post structuralism as method’, KBFS,
Futures Study Centre, Melbourne, 1996.
Endnotes 63
148
Email transmission from: Sohail Inayatullah to: José Ramos 14 July 2002.
149
http://www.levity.com/mavericks/thomson.htm, 23 July 2002.
150
In relation to this distinction between internationalism and planetary culture
Thompson says: ‘Planetary culture isn’t a mono-culture. Planetary culture is
basically saying that in internationalism, the governing science is economics. A
planetary culture suggests a shift to ecology as the governing science. It energizes
diversity, it requires a larger gene pool and it deals with the new sciences of
complexity rather than linear reductionism. We’re not all becoming one. We might
be going in hyperspace to a level of integration in which we all participate in this
multi-dimensionality, but it’s high in individuation’.
151
Thompson, W.I, ‘The Cultural Implications of the New Biology’ from Gaia:
A Way of Knowing, Lindisfarne Ass., 1987.
152
From William Irwin Thompson’s book Darkness and Scattered Light quoted at:
http://www.levity.com/mavericks/thomson.htm
153
Thompson, W.I, ‘The Cultural Implications of the New Biology’ from Gaia:
A Way of Knowing, Lindisfarne Association, 1987, p13.
154
Thompson, W.I, 1987, p13
155
Thompson, W.I, ‘Nine theses for A Gaia Politique’, In Context, Fall 1986.
156
http://www.levity.com/mavericks/thomson.htm, 23 July 2002.
157
http://www.levity.com/mavericks/thomson.htm, 23 July 2002.
158
Sohail Inayatullah Email interviewed by José Ramos, 14 July 2002.
159
Galtung, J, ‘Western Civilisation, Anatomy and Pathology’, Alternatives VII,
1981, p147.
160
Galtung, J, ‘Western Civilisation, Anatomy and Pathology’, Alternatives VII,
1981, p147.
161
Thompson, W.I, ‘The Cultural Implications of the New Biology’, Gaia: A Way
of Knowing, Lindisfarne Ass. 1987.
162
S. Inayatullah Email Interviewed by José Ramos, 14/06/02.
163
Shapiro, M, Reading the Postmodern Polity, University of Minnesota Press,
1992, p9.
164
Shapiro, M, 1992, p9.
165
Shapiro, M, 1992, p15.
64 FROM CRITIQUE TO CULTURAL RECOVERY
166
Futures, Vol.22, No. 2 March 1990, 115–141.
167
Inayatullah, S, ‘Methods and Epistemologies in Futures Studies’, KBFS,
Futures Study Centre, Melbourne 1996.
168
S. Inayatullah Email Interviewed by José Ramos, 14/06/02.
169
Inayatullah, S, ‘Causal layered analysis: post structuralism as method’, from
Questioning the future, Tamkang University, Taipei, 2002 (notes).
170
Inayatullah, S, Questioning the future, Tamkang University, Taipei, 2002.
171
S. Inayatullah Email transmission to José Ramos, 26 June 2002.
172
Saliba’s talent was to include in these models intangible human issues, values,
interests, and perceptions and see their relevance within organisational contexts.
Upon mapping a ‘system’ (more of a ‘context’ in Saliba’s usage), he would change
the assumptions underlying that system, thereby creating the starting point for
an alternative future, scenarios that could be normative, extrapolative or strategic.
Inayatullah saw how this shifting of core assumptions could be used within an
analysis of layered causality. As litany and problem-oriented levels were nested
in more intangible but more profound levels of worldview/episteme and myth/
metaphor, Inayatullah saw that one could work down from superficial levels to
deeper levels and access culturally based worldviews and epistemes, then switch
worldviews/epistemes or myths and metaphors, and give rise to radically different
framings of issues, scenarios, and spaces for action. CLA could then be a method
for switching assumptions. Instead of just a method of analysis to uncover cultural
assumptions, perception, worldview, episteme, myth and metaphor, it could also
be used as a way of breaking out of staid and constraining ways of knowing and
discovering new ways of knowing that offered more.
173
S. Inayatullah Email transmission to José Ramos 18 July 2002.
174
J. Ramos phone conversation w/S. Inayatullah in May 2002.
175
This is reflected in The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, which is a strong attempt
to see through the eyes of future oriented thinkers from many different cultures
and background, instead of an attempt to define one ‘correct’ particular approach
to the future, or the articulation of an idiosyncratic vision of a preferred or
extrapolated future.
176
Email transmission from: S. Inayatullah to: J. Ramos, 14/07/02.
177
Email transmission from: S. Inayatullah to: J. Ramos, 14/07/02.