In the fifth of the Ideas, Thoughts, Experiments Alberta 2023 series, I talked with Alberta futurist Ruben Nelson the day after the 29 May provincial election results.
In this wide-ranging discussion, Dr. Nelson speaks eloquently about the problems faced by our modern industrial-technological society and the notion of societies being “future takers.”
And being a future taker means that you need to seriously understand the situation you’re in and with a good deal of humility come to terms with the forces that are shaping your future whether you like it or not. And it seems to me that Alberta, in those term, Alberta is not a humble place (emphasis added).
Role of Culture
According to Nelson, Alberta is culturally very different than other provinces because Europeans did not arrive in any large numbers till the 1880’s. Then life was very hard with the economic reality defined by hard physical labour for both men and women. And then when the Great Depression hit many labourers and farmers were either unemployed and/or faced serious financial duress. This experience still informs how Albertans see the world although the “trauma” of the National Energy Program is more fresh in Albertans’ consciousness.
Well before the discovery of oil and natural gas a third of the immigrants were from the United States. The American impact on the culture grew with the rapid development of oil and gas extraction as influx of American families came to settle temporarily or permanently.
Just in terms of when I went to school, the only new kids in my class were the oil kids. That Every spring, some of them left because their fathers had done their time in Calgary, and we’re now headed off to Oklahoma City or Dallas or wherever they were headed next. And the new kids were always the oil kids. Other than that class was the same class that had been there for grade four. And so, we just got used to having American oil kids as part of the culture.
Nelson also notes that Alberta has a male-dominated culture where men leave their emotions at home. At work and rationality, not humility, is a virtue.
Environmental challenges
Ruben sees those of us who are Modern to be firmly hooked on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the modern frame of reference is founded on growth and without growth there is societal collapse. On the other hand, economic growth requires that we have to continue to consume the planet, in which case we die of biophysical degradation. The only choice is, which path to death do we choose? The most careful research shows that all of the “solutions” now offered to deal with this dilemma are illusory. Greening the economy is not going to work. This strategy seriously underestimates the amount of materials needed for a green economy. It does not avoid ecological collapse. To Nelson, it is also a mistake to believe that companies can keep pumping our oil and gas; that some and technological salvation will permit the world to carry on as a successful modern techno-industrial venture. (This is the kind of false dichotomy presented by Smith in her claims a net zero electricity grid will cause chaos by 2035 -BA).
Institutional challenges
In lamenting the dearth of institutional capacity to carry on strategic foresight, he observed the importance of the emergence in the 1970s of policy development and structures to support it.
‘managemen’t as talked about in 1900, isn’t what we call management today. Management back then was simply logistics — the arrangement of work. It required operational planning. And so, Senior management in the C-suite today, which doesn’t do any (physical work)… they do nothing with their hands. They also do nothing with their right (brain). Senior decision-making today is a left-brain activity. But the C-suite doesn’t in a (physical) sense, do anything (emphasis added).
we need to think far wider and deeper about the challenges we’re in. well beyond policy work. Nobody in Canada is doing it in a way that’s at all serious; in a way that’s coherent enough that if, if there was such a group of people who were serious about it, that they could actually advise you . But the interesting thing is we thought that better policy work would shatter the inadequate cultural frameworks we inherited form the early 20th Century, except, as you and I both know, policy work doesn’t ever ask the question:- What are the frames of reference that we’re taking for granted? (emphasis added)
Alberta experiments
To avoid the accepted Modern cultural frame of reference that we have inherited and been formed by and to think out of these boxes, futurist Nelson proposes an experiment in smaller centres in Alberta (less than 15,000) to encourage citizens’ groups to submit applications
on a program that helps you start the transition from being an unconscious modern community that only aspires to being a better but still unconscious, modern community to a community that is learning to be conscious of its Modernity and the limitations thereof. Only a conscious community can see and begin to overcome the limitations of Modernity, including the dilemma of Modernity. The path Alberta is now on to becoming a bigger and better, but no more conscious, province leads to failure it the 21st Century. And notice that in the last election, there was no thought offered by anybody That actually becoming conscious of the world and who we are in it we’re in might actually be a good idea. Neither left, nor right, is willing to float, that idea in public.
The four person panel would include an indigenous man and women and settler man and woman.
Each successful community would receive $10-million a year for ten years and agree to abide by the rule of law. With ten towns selected, each would have their own approaches to “take seriously that we are in the process of learning to outgrow our own formation as modern men and women and as a modern town” (emphasis added).
To my objection- how do you measure “success?” Ruben countered the division of the world into objective and everything else is subjective, “is a modern fantasy that no pre-modern culture understands or plays with.”
The CBC did a 15-part series on the emergence of the concepts of public and private in the 16th and 17th Centuries. They basically said, you don’t get private space unless you also get public space. That before the private individual is invented, there’s no such thing as the public as we now know it. Whereas we tend to think that Romans had public space… but no individuals. And this series – by the time you’re finished, listening to all of them, realize that that’s a mistake that public and private go together. If you want one, you get the other. And objective and subjective. Go together. If you want one, you get the other and you don’t have to have either.
If in fact, you just set that aside and ask the question as a genuinely open question (emphasis added).
If what a culture is, a culture is a production line for certain kinds of persons -certain understandings of economics of families, of making love, of giving birth, falling I love. But being educated, being obedient, being disrespectful, being a maverick, all of that is up for grabs. If we think widely enough and historically enough and that’s what I’m trying to get to by saying, modernity itself is up for grabs.
To watch the full interview go to Youtibe
To read the full transcript see below.
Reproduction of any or all of the conversation is prohibited except with written permission of Abpolecon.ca
Series production by Brendan Ruddy- As the Crow Flies.
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0Transcript-Ruben-Nelson-edited-13-8-23.docx