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Memory walks backward (on Elise Boulding) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which is half a conversation. [pause] A review is the other half.
• 0:28
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, Elise Boulding’s futures remembering.
• 0:37
  Ground: There’s a hedge in front of the room. Dense enough to hide what’s beyond it. Somewhere in the leaves, an opening. [pause] The people in the room close their eyes. They pass through. The hedge closes behind them. [pause] On the other side, the world is peaceful. Not someday. It’s peaceful now. They walk its streets, enter its houses, watch people work, and ask how disagreements are handled. [pause] Then comes the strange instruction. Turn around and remember how this happened.
• 1:10
  Figure: Elise Boulding used that passage in workshops on a world without weapons. The destination usually stood about thirty years ahead. Far enough for institutions to change, near enough to remain within a life. [pause] Participants weren’t asked to forecast. They were asked to inhabit a preferred future as an accomplished fact, then become its historians. [pause] They recalled what had happened one year earlier, then five, ten, fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five years earlier. The sequence walked backward until it reached the actual present. [pause] Boulding called the pivotal passage “Remembering History.” [pause] The larger practice came to be known as futures remembering.
• 1:52
  Ground: Memory normally has evidence behind it. A room entered. A face seen. A mistake survived. Here, the evidence hasn’t happened.
• 2:04
  Figure: That’s the first puzzle. Why borrow the authority of memory for something invented?
• 2:10
  Ground: Because prediction leaves the body outside. It points toward a distant object and asks whether it’s coming. Remembering puts the body after the change. The peaceful world is underfoot, and the present has become the difficult thing that used to be true.
• 2:30
  Figure: The tense changes the exercise. Participants had to say what the future world “is,” not what it “will be” or “should be.” Their own time became the past.
• 2:42
  Ground: Grammar became a temporary shelter from disbelief.
• 2:45
  Figure: Boulding needed that shelter because she’d watched capable people fail at a basic task. In a 1963 seminar in Denmark, socialist and nonsocialist economists could explain how military production might be converted without ruin. They couldn’t describe how the disarmed society would function. [pause] Peace scholarship had become skilled at diagnosis. It could identify violence, calculate the cost of armaments, and describe ways to negotiate. Yet its desired destination was often made of two absences: no war, no weapons. [pause] Conventional forecasts offered little help. Select several trends from a militarized present and extend them forward, and the result tends to preserve the institutions already producing those trends. Weapons specialists foresee different weapons. [pause] The arithmetic may be sound while the premise remains untouched.
• 3:38
  Ground: Removing an army from a picture doesn’t show what keeps the picture standing. [pause] Someone still has to settle disputes, distribute food, teach children, repair damage, protect the vulnerable, and decide what belongs to whom. [pause] A blank where the barracks stood isn’t peace. It’s an unanswered institutional question. [pause] Boulding’s move was to begin inside the answer and make the unanswered parts show themselves.
• 4:09
  Figure: She didn’t arrive there alone. Fred Polak argued that publicly available images of the future shape present choices. Cultures that can picture compelling alternatives can act beyond the arrangements directly before them. [pause] Elise Boulding learned Dutch to translate Polak’s The Image of the Future. His claim gave her the premise: without a positive image, action can be confined as firmly as it is by a material barrier.
• 4:35
  Ground: But an image can command as well as release. A glorious future has justified plenty of damage.
• 4:44
  Figure: Polak also warned that images never act alone. They meet inherited institutions, present conditions, and unequal power. Boulding kept that friction, though her earliest workshops didn’t test it hard enough. [pause] Kenneth Boulding supplied another piece. People respond to the facts around them and to the inner picture that gives those facts meaning. Change that picture, and a different choice may become available. [pause] Warren Ziegler supplied the direct workshop structure. His “future invention” treated the future as a place for intentional action, not something owned by experts. By 1969, his futures-history work was already placing planners inside a desirable alternative and tracing possible routes back. [pause] Around 1980, Elise Boulding persuaded him to adapt that participatory structure to a world without weapons. The resulting form made the future-present bodily and tied it directly to peacebuilding.
• 5:45
  Ground: So the origin isn’t a lone flash. It’s an assembly: Polak’s public image, Kenneth Boulding’s inner image, Ziegler’s backward pathway, and Elise Boulding’s room full of people crossing the hedge.
• 6:00
  Figure: Robert Jungk belongs nearby, not inside that exact chain. His future workshops had moved from critique through fantasy to implementation since the early 1960s, opening decisions to people normally excluded from them. The resemblance is strong. There’s no established proof that Boulding borrowed her backward remembering from Jungk.
• 6:20
  Ground: Attribution matters here because the method itself argues against expert ownership. It would be an odd tribute to turn a collective form into a solitary invention.
• 6:33
  Ground: The workshop begins smaller than world peace. After listing what they most hoped to find in the preferred future, each person recalls a good memory. [pause] Not its lesson. Its texture. Who was there. What the light looked like. What could be heard, smelled, or touched. [pause] That exercise proves something modest: the mind already knows how to build an internally lived place from fragments. [pause] The same faculty is then aimed toward experience that hasn’t occurred. Hope is given furniture, weather, work, meals, voices, distance.
• 7:11
  Figure: After crossing the hedge, participants moved around the later world and questioned its imagined inhabitants. They took notes and made drawings. Private images were shared in pairs or trios, then combined by small groups into posters, diagrams, stories, and sometimes performances. [pause] The fragile image became public enough to inspect. What looked attractive to one person had to coexist with what another had seen.
• 7:38
  Ground: Coexistence is already a test. One peaceful street may depend on a form of ownership another person experiences as theft. One person’s quiet neighborhood may depend on someone else doing invisible work.
• 7:54
  Figure: The groups were pressed to describe family life, education, production, distribution, government, civic culture, and relations from the local scale to the planetary one. They had to say how conflict was handled without organized violence and whether nation-states still existed. [pause] This was the turn from scenery to structure. A green commons might be desirable. The workshop then asked who maintains it, how access is decided, how a dispute is heard, and what happens when agreement fails.
• 8:23
  Ground: Yet the image gets protected before it gets questioned. That seems dangerous. [pause] Pessimism is suspended. Expertise is asked to loosen its grip. The impossible gets a temporary visa. [pause] That can free invention. It can also free denial. A room may feel capable because it has postponed every person and institution able to say no. [pause] How does a peaceful future survive contact with an opponent who benefits from the present?
• 8:54
  Figure: The original practice answers only part of that. Boulding deliberately separated two phases. During entry, early objections were held back. After the image formed, the facilitator asked what arrangements sustained it, whom they affected, what new troubles they created, and whether the whole thing remained plausible. [pause] The backward history added dependencies. Economic conversion might require a coalition first. A new form of security might depend on conflict education begun years earlier. A law might follow pressure rather than cause it. [pause] But vested interests, coercion, land, capital, administrative power, and the ability to block change weren’t mapped with equal discipline. Boulding’s method opened strategic possibility more reliably than it proved feasibility. [pause] So the answer has to move. The protected image isn’t a plan. It’s a space for proposals that still needs opposition, cost, and power brought back into the room.
• 9:56
  Ground: Then hope isn’t the opposite of scrutiny. It comes before scrutiny because a possibility too weak to appear can’t yet be examined.
• 10:06
  Figure: Later experiments sharpened that distinction. An idealized positive fantasy could lower energy by itself. When people held a desired future against present obstacles, their effort was more closely tied to what they believed they could actually do.
• 10:21
  Ground: The pleasant picture can sedate. [pause] The obstacle gives it weight.
• 10:25
  Figure: Boulding’s sequence had reached a related conclusion through practice: image, institution, history, action. The protection against wishfulness comes after the first act of hope, not inside it.
• 10:39
  Ground: Then the central question shifts. Not what will happen, but what would have had to happen for peace to feel ordinary?
• 10:48
  Figure: At Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Norfolk, prisoners answered with far more than disarmament. They imagined open green places, useful work, public transport, housing, education, food distribution, rehabilitation, and a transformed international order. [pause] Their remembered pathway joined peace and environmental movements. It changed public budgets, rights claims, treaties, elections, expanded services, and turned prisons into rehabilitation centers. The imagined endpoint required a whole social history.
• 11:27
  Ground: Some of it strained belief. Time was compressed. Power struggles sometimes seemed to dissolve. Even extraterrestrial contact entered the remembered history.
• 11:39
  Figure: So the timeline can’t be treated as evidence. It was a hypothesis written in the future perfect.
• 11:45
  Ground: Still, the prison changes the meaning of agency. The people in that room had unusually little control over institutions, movement, or public decisions. [pause] Yet the backward path let them locate beginnings within reach: study, writing, nonviolence training, helping others, intervention when situations turned harmful, and reduced consumption. [pause] None of those acts abolishes a weapons economy. Each becomes legible as part of a longer passage, rather than an isolated gesture too small to matter.
• 12:20
  Figure: That’s the bridge Boulding wanted. After the remembered history, participants returned to families, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, shops, voluntary organizations, and local government. They chose a short-term objective, named allies and officials, shaped a project, and stated the commitment publicly. [pause] The method didn’t require anyone to command the whole transition. It required a first move connected to an account of how larger change might accumulate.
• 12:50
  Ground: The group authored that account. It can create ownership. It can also hide surrender.
• 12:56
  Figure: The pressure point is consensus.
• 12:59
  Ground: A shared poster looks generous from across the room. Up close, a minority image may have been softened until it fits. A quiet participant may have yielded to the confident one. A future can become common by losing the very conflict it needs to face. [pause] “Preferred” always belongs to someone. A peaceful world for a landowner may preserve an old taking. A clean city may move dirty work elsewhere. A universal plan may be one region’s habits enlarged until they look like humanity. [pause] Crossing the hedge doesn’t leave history behind. Everyone carries a place in it through the opening. [pause] If the room forgets that, harmony becomes another name for the strongest person’s comfort.
• 13:54
  Figure: Boulding came to press harder on this after the Gulf War. She argued that Northern societies could imagine better futures for themselves while projecting Western power and values onto Arab, African, and other Southern societies. [pause] Responsible imaging, she concluded, needed historical knowledge and attention to other peoples’ cultures and aspirations. A Northern image of peace couldn’t simply be exported. [pause] Even that correction remained incomplete. Translating the workshop or conducting it elsewhere doesn’t transfer control. The people bearing the costs need authority over the question, the categories, the facilitation, the record, and the use of the result. [pause] And the outcome may need to remain several futures, with stated conflicts between them, rather than one polished scene.
• 14:41
  Ground: So the method moves again. Shared imagination isn’t valuable because it manufactures agreement. It’s valuable because separate desires become visible enough to negotiate.
• 14:52
  Figure: One Swedish forest project preserved that difference by keeping four constituencies in separate workshops. Forty organizations took part, and one constituency retained two incompatible futures. The split remained in the result instead of being repaired for display.
• 15:10
  Ground: A disagreement carried forward can be more peaceful than a consensus obtained by erasure.
• 15:17
  Figure: John Robinson’s “energy backcasting” appeared in 1982 and approached the backward journey differently. It began with goals and limits, then built accounts of energy production, consumption, demand, supply, costs, and consequences. [pause] That version asked whether a set endpoint could be reached and what policies might get there. Boulding and Ziegler had already reversed time, but their practice was more experiential, cultural, and motivational.
• 15:47
  Ground: The two forms need each other. One can produce a route no one desires. The other can produce a destination the ground won’t support.
• 15:57
  Figure: Calling futures remembering an early participatory form of backcasting is fair. Calling it the source of everything later given that name isn’t.
• 16:07
  Ground: Calling it prediction misses the point entirely. A prediction tries to reduce uncertainty about arrival. This practice asks what kind of arrival deserves labor, then searches for the road in reverse.
• 16:21
  Figure: Its evidence remains limited. Workshops show that varied groups could produce vivid, socially structured images and state intentions afterward. They don’t show that those intentions reliably became lasting conduct or institutional change. [pause] At a Tufts workshop in 2001, 107 people submitted commitment slips. Forty-three named personal development, often alongside community action. The commitments ranged through simpler living, listening, teaching, restorative justice, local sustainability, and policy work. [pause] What happened next wasn’t verified. Boulding later recalled questionnaires suggesting lasting changes in how participants thought about the future, but not confirmed completion of the projects.
• 17:06
  Ground: A spoken promise at the end of an intense room can belong partly to the room. Once the chairs are stacked and ordinary pressure returns, the promise loses its witnesses. [pause] That doesn’t make the moment false. It makes follow-through a separate institution. [pause] Reunions, assigned roles, money, protected time, public answers from officials, and permission to revise the vision aren’t administrative leftovers. They’re what lets imagination survive its own ending.
• 17:40
  Figure: Later participatory work sometimes added parts of that bridge—action teams, assigned roles, implementation stages, monitoring, and formal links to policy. More durable designs would also provide budgets, prototypes, and scheduled returns.
• 17:57
  Ground: There’s another way Boulding brought the future near. She called it the 200-year present. [pause] One century reaches backward to the birth years of today’s oldest people. Another reaches forward to the hundredth birthdays of infants alive now. [pause] The span isn’t a prediction. It’s a room enlarged until inheritance and consequence sit inside it together. [pause] History stops looking like a warehouse of dead dates. The future stops looking like an empty country populated by abstractions.
• 18:30
  Figure: The window moves with time. It was never meant as a fixed period or a final horizon of responsibility. Its purpose was to make the span imaginable: decisions made among working-age adults also govern children and older people who usually hold less formal power. [pause] Kevin Clements later drew a principle of reversibility from this inheritance. Where possible, present choices should leave later generations able to adapt, repair, and choose differently.
• 18:59
  Ground: That doesn’t mean refusing commitment. A school still has to be built. Land still has to be governed. Harm still has to be stopped. [pause] It means distrusting choices that consume every exit. Killing, ecological destruction, and the removal of cultural inheritance don’t merely choose a direction. They take directions away.
• 19:22
  Figure: That ethical frame opens onto Boulding’s “hidden side of history.” Public history tends to count rulers, wars, treaties, and collapses. It gives less space to the daily work through which households, schools, faith communities, and voluntary associations keep difference from becoming injury. [pause] Boulding called the active capacity peaceableness: listening, negotiation, mediation, reciprocity, care, and repair. Peace wasn’t the disappearance of conflict. Conflict remains because people value and perceive differently, and it can expose injustice.
• 20:02
  Ground: A world without weapons still has slammed doors, contested land, unequal meals, grief, envy, and refusal. [pause] Its achievement isn’t innocence. It has built more ways through conflict than domination or killing. [pause] That makes the peaceful future quieter than the usual image. Its important institutions may be a household where authority can be challenged, a classroom where children help decide, a local group that knows how to mediate, or a correspondence kept alive long enough to become an association.
• 20:39
  Figure: The wider record supports that attention to offstage institutions. Across 83 peace agreements, those involving civic groups such as religious associations, women’s organizations, human-rights groups, and trade unions were linked to a 64 percent lower risk of peace breaking down between the signatories.
• 20:58
  Ground: The signed page mattered. So did the social fabric able to interpret it, monitor it, contest it, and keep it from becoming ceremonial.
• 21:08
  Figure: Boulding’s emphasis on women’s peace capacities needs the same care. Her strongest claim was historical: gendered labor and exclusion from official power forced many women to develop skill in survival, listening, care, informal organization, and cross-border cooperation. [pause] She denied that women were peaceful by nature and argued that nurturance couldn’t remain women’s private burden. [pause] Still, her language sometimes romanticized skills produced by inequality.
• 21:39
  Ground: A burden doesn’t become justice because it taught someone something valuable. The knowledge can be honored while the burden is redistributed.
• 21:49
  Figure: That correction belongs inside futures remembering. A desired world has to account for who performs its peace, who receives credit, and who is still expected to absorb the cost quietly.
• 22:03
  Ground: The hedge now looks less like escape. It’s a device for changing the direction of attention. [pause] Forecasting stands in the present and searches the distance for approaching events. Boulding stands in a peaceful future and searches the past for the work that must already have happened. [pause] The reversal makes institutions visible. It also exposes omissions. If no one can explain how food moves, how dissent survives, how care is shared, or how power yields, the imagined peace has scenery but no history.
• 22:43
  Figure: And if the reconstructed history names only personal virtue, it has hidden structural obstruction. If it names only laws and budgets, it has hidden the ordinary conduct that lets those arrangements live.
• 22:56
  Ground: The route needs both: public decisions large enough to change conditions, and daily practices able to keep the new conditions from reverting to force.
• 23:07
  Figure: Futures remembering doesn’t prove that the route will work. It gives desire a form that can be questioned, divided, tested, and connected to a present move.
• 23:17
  Ground: Its deepest restraint may be that the future remains provisional. The remembered history is revised when a dependency fails, when an excluded person speaks, when a cost appears, or when the destination itself turns out to carry an old injustice.
• 23:35
  Figure: A peaceful future becomes serious when it can remember the work that made it ordinary.
• 23:39
  Ground: If peace had already become ordinary, what part of its history would have to begin here?