Futures Illiteracy and the Reproduction of War

Paper by Riel Miller: “War recurs not because leaders fail but because the human capacity to imagine the future has been systematically narrowed to a single mode: anticipation-for-the-future (AfF), the colonising drive to design, control, and win tomorrow. This article argues that this narrowing – what the Futures Literacy Framework calls futures illiteracy – is not a deficit correctable by better planning or wider access to foresight tools, but an ontological condition: a way of being in time that reproduces the delusional agency at the root of war. Drawing on the Theory of Anticipation, Whitehead’s concept of concrescence, Bergson’s proposition that the real creates the possible, and feminist critiques of the master’s tools from Lorde and Feukeu, the article develops the distinction between AfF and anticipation-for-emergence (AfE) as a practical way of distinguishing the simultaneity of the closed and open present. It proposes that cultivating futures literacy – understood as the meta-cognitive capacity to hold both anticipatory frames simultaneously – could change the conditions of change: not a remedy for war, but as fundamental shift in the anticipatory contexts from which war draws its so far inescapable necessity…(More)”.