From: Sohail Inayatullah and Paul Wildman, Futures Studies: Methods, Emerging Issues and Civilisational Visions CD-ROM, Prosperity Press, 1998.

I come to writing about the future from a deep and abiding interest in the history of wrong ideas. I am interested in the question of just what makes an idea a wrong idea. Once it was probably a 'right' idea which contributed to the way people understood their world, the world of `what is'. Then it becomes an idea which no longer describes `what is' but instead describes `what can't be'. In similar vein, the knowledge base of futures studies might be taken as constituted by ideas, yet to be labelled right or wrong, about 'what might be'.

If I make use of the past to speculate upon the future, I do so in a spirit of fun. Sometimes I write short stories with a science fiction or fantasy twist, stories which take off from a 'what if?' premise and play with taking a metaphor literally. This is where the history of wrong ideas comes in handy. Both the history of ideas and speculative fiction tell stories of `what is, what might be, what can't be', whether in the extrapolative, the cautionary, or the alternate world mode.

Here are some thoughts on how I've come to do what I do.

One theme I've explored in a variety of ways has been the theme of women and science. In 1982 I wrote a study guide for Deakin University on Darwin and Social Darwinism. From its origins in 1859, Darwin's theory of evolution totally transformed our understanding of our origins, our relationships to each other, to other animals, to society and to the environment. The theory of evolution, or gradual change by means of the mechanism of natural selection, is one of those great `right ideas' nestling as the kernel of truth amid all kinds of fantastic `wrong ideas'. To talk about `right' and `wrong' here might seem a bit peculiar, for historians would rightly argue that all ideas, including our own, are more properly understood in their social context. It is way ideas work in practice in context that matters, rather than retrospective judgment.

Consider the rich variety of ways in which the idea of evolution was exploited in the years following the acceptance of the broad features of Darwin's theory. Social Darwinism is the term used to label various social prescriptions and descriptions on the relation of the natural to the social world, writing which claimed the authority of science, even though different social Darwinists used this authority to come to different, sometimes contradictory conclusions. One school of thought claimed co-operation was a social consequence of our biological origins, while another took ruthless competition between people as 'natural' and hence necessary for the advance of civilisation. What struck me in the various histories of social Darwinist thought was that the social Darwinists seemed to be all men. Where were the views of women? In the Victorian Age and after in Britain, America and Australia, surely there must have been some women who adapted evolutionary thought to their political advantage. When I went looking for these women in history, I found them (as one does).

I enjoyed reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, and Louisa Macdonald, but I wanted more. These late nineteenth and early twentieth century women relished manipulating scientific theories of women's place to their own ends. Each chose the values of social co-operation over those of social competition. Each wanted evolutionary science to justify the vote, education, and full participation in public life for women. Each turned upside down the words of those who gave a biological rationale for keeping women as unpaid wives and mothers. They made magnificent use of their own interpretation of Darwinism, creating a social biology which they used as a basis for social reform, though their version of evolutionary biology fits squarely in the category of the history of wrong ideas. Both Gilman and Schreiner wrote best sellers for their times, Gilman on Women and Economics (1898) and Schreiner on Woman and Labour (1911).

I said I wanted more from Gilman and Schreiner. I wanted them, from their perspective at the end of the nineteenth century, to have been right in their predictions for the future of women. It hasn't happened, yet, not the egalitarian outcomes they yearned for. Still, this disjunction comes in handy for something. It provides fuel for the satirist. As both a feminist and a satirist of feminism, I was inspired to write a short story 'Evolution Annie'. What if it wasn't man the aggressive hunter who led humans along the path to evolutionary progress, but women the gardener and camp-site maker? I had fun writing the story. The science was fanciful, the anthropology highly suspect, but then, so it is in 'man the hunter' stories. I was doing a Charlotte Perkins Gilman, taking the bits that pleased me and shaping them to my own ends.

The story begins:

You know all those stories of origins, those myths of our beginnings. `A group of animals lived in the trees', they start, and continue with the saga of how one day, down we came, we discovered the plains and the joys of upright posture we stood up, looked around, and decided to stay.

That wasn't how it happened, not how it happened at all . . .

Call me Annie, Evolution Annie. Let me tell you the story of our beginnings.

We didn't decide to come down from the trees as an act of free choice. We fell out of the trees, and had to make the best of our new circumstances. It wasn't Father whom the boys killed and ate one day in the (alleged) first act of ritual communion. It was Mother who decided someone had to go, so she ... but that is getting ahead of my story...

Satire swings in when exasperation with the status quo gets too much. Laughter helps when nothing else seems to.

In my work I also explore current issues in science and technology, again with particular reference to women. From 1980-1990 women were invited to contribute, both as panel members and participants, to the nascent public consultation process in Australia. At last there seemed to be a place where the voices of concerned citizens could feed constructively into government decision-making on large science and technology projects. I studied inquiries where women were active as observers, recipients and critics of science, for still today there are comparatively few women working as scientific professionals. I wanted to explore women's visions of `what might be' in Australia.

Public consultation processes were set up in the Powerline Review Panel of 1985, and the 1990 inquiry by the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology into the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment. The 1980s were an exciting time in experiments in public consultation. At last there was recognition of the fact that no professional ever has full knowledge, that the local knowledge of a community might add to expert knowledge to mutually productive ends. The virtue of consultation is that it lessens the partial view of the world that is an essential part of the explosion in scientific specialisms, and at last it seems as if that aspect of the information explosion was being formally recognised. With the trend towards a more democratic system of technical decision making, it appeared as if women might at last enter the public life of science as 'community experts' working towards a safer future.

My guiding image was of a country woman hanging out clothes to dry on the line. She may use one of the environmentally friendly detergents, so labelled, and the washing may be clean enough, at least to start with, but as she hangs it out, the pesticide drift descends from the aerial spraying of crops. She sees the spots on her washing, and wonders about what else is happening in her community. Disease clusters, of leukemia, or cleft palate malformations in babies, have occurred in country Australia, in Emerald, Coffs Harbour and Wangaratta. The connection between aerial crop spraying and disease clusters is hotly contested, and not easily made in one conceptual leap from the washing on the line. Yet these incidents lead to important questions about present technological practices more broadly, whether in agriculture or energy use, or the consumption of non-renewable resources. Alongside general environmental concerns, the public perception that there are risks associated with pesticides lends itself to a grass roots epidemiology, which should no longer be discounted as `radical fringe'.

It could be argued, what would a woman hanging out the clothes know about health risks, compared with the established knowledge of medicine, statistics, and chemistry? Yet there is something in the common sense intuitive reaction, that what is bad news for pests is likely to be bad news for other non-target species, including humans. It has proved a short step for some women from hanging out the washing, to full scale environmental activism.

There were some victories in the 1980's. The powerline was re-routed, for example, so that it would no longer pass over a school yard. But with the changes in government in Australia, both state and federally, the policy of public consultation was put on hold. Consultation is a herky-jerky process, says James Masters, who was invited to Australia to provide advice, as Director of the Center for Community Futures at Berkeley, California, just before the 1992 change of government in Victoria. He was right. In this case, it was one step forward, then two back. Still, the vision of community futures which include the public consultation process and the multi-disciplinary panel of review remains, and gives an idea of how technocratic decision making might one day become a more radically democratic process. There will be new ways of theorising the nature of science and technology and their interactions with other human institutions, and with that great non-human institution, nature.

I finished my article on `Doing the herky-jerky' with a few paragraphs on 'imagining the future for women', words which rose from frustration at the way I could see the consultation process grinding to a halt, at least where I live. I find release in satire. Satire, I believe, can rise above the charge often levelled at it, that it uses mockery in defence of a conservative status quo. It's not the conservative status quo I want. That is what I send up. Rather, satire in its fantastic guises builds on subjunctivities, the notion that `things could be otherwise'. To know what is the case often means to know very well what is not the case, what or who the present way of doing things is excluding. Often policy processes exclude the voices of women. Fantasy helps here, adding a `negative subjunctivity'. Fantasy is fantasy because it contravenes the real. Yet it's still there, the actual world, still constantly implicit in fantasy, by negation.

In writing fantasy I like to spin off from 'what is' to all the possibilities the real world excludes. Women do not really become 'old bats' as they age, but what if they did? In what ways might metamorphosis provide new energy for the older, discarded woman? The world is everything we can imagine, and imagining metamorphosis from old woman to bat can make us laugh at women, men and bats.

I want to help create a future world in which there will be more possibility for laughter.

References

Samuel L. Delany 1971, About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words, in Thomas D. Clareson (ed) SF: The Other Side of Realism, Bowling Green University Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, pp. 130-46.

Rosaleen Love 1983, Darwinism and Feminism: The `Woman Question' in the Life and Work of Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in D. Oldroyd and I Langham (eds) , D. Reidel Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp. 113-131.

Rosaleen Love 1992 The public perception of risk, Prometheus, Vol. 10, pp. 17-29.

Rosaleen Love 1993, Doing the Herky-Jerky: Women in the Public Life of Science, in Farley Kelly (ed) On the Edge of Discovery. Australian Women in Science, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, pp. 179-198

© Rosaleen Love 1998