Radically Change the Future
Friday, January 3
Today’s post is by guest author Heather Johnston. The text is an excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book Hope in the Dark.
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
This quote reminds me of a concept I see on the internet from time to time about influencing the future with small actions today. I don’t know whether it’s the original source, but the earliest version of it I found was this r/ShowerThoughts post from 2016 which says, "When people think about traveling to the past, they worry about accidentally changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future.”
Of course, a major limitation is uncertainty about the future. A common example of a hypothetical time traveler changing the future is by killing baby Hitler, but this only makes sense because we know what adult Hitler did. If a non-time traveler in 1889 had killed baby Hitler, they would rightfully be regarded as barbaric murderer. We don’t know how our actions today will impact the future. And when we contemplate the responsibility we bear to build the wold we want to live in, it can be a bit paralyzing to imagine all of the ways that the future might play out.
And yet, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that our choices will impact the future no matter what. Hope requires three parts: first to understand our own agency and ability to influence the future, second to make the best predictions we can about the possible impacts of our choices, and finally to carry out the actions most likely to create the future we want to see.
In the spirit of the season of giving (and at the risk of being a bit preachy), one of the choices I make that I believe is most likely to do the most good for the future is making a recurring donation to the GiveWell top charities fund. I encourage readers who have the financial means to consider doing the same.
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