Thinking Way, Way Ahead

Below is an excerpt from The Optimist’s Telescope, a book by former New America Fellow Bina Venkataraman. Please join Bina on September 24 for a conversation about her book at New America.

One summer morning several years ago, I went for a hike in the Hudson Valley, an idyllic landscape of wooded hills and wide pastures along the Hudson River just north of New York City. A trail took me through a meadow where I spotted a red-tailed hawk soaring overhead, and past a waterfall whose banks teemed with ferns. The next day, I re- turned to Washington, D.C., where I was living, and noticed a rash on the back of my leg. It was itchy and crimson, and a bump at the center looked like a spider bite.

I snapped a photo with my phone and made a mental note to get the rash checked by a doctor. At the time, I was working sixteen-hour days and rushing from deadline to deadline on little sleep: As silly as it might sound, the thought of taking an hour to go to a clinic seemed out of the question. Weeks went on, and the rash faded from my skin and my memory.

Eight months later, my knee swelled to the size of a grapefruit, and I discovered I had a bad case of Lyme disease that would take months to treat. I spent a brutal winter in Boston on crutches. I injected myself with a daily IV drip of medication until I finally got better. The tick that had bitten me that day in the woods had not left a telltale bull’s-eye—but I actually knew that this was common. Years before, as a science journalist, I had written articles about the spread of Lyme disease. I knew that the Hudson Valley counties had the highest infection rates in the country.

Why had I chosen to ignore the warning signs? As I recovered, the question haunted me. The minor inconvenience of seeing a doctor right after my hiking trip—to treat the infection before it spread—could have spared me months of pain, and what turned out to be permanent knee damage. Or I could have just taken the precaution of wearing bug repel- lent and protective clothing.

As much as I knew about the disease, however, I just couldn’t see myself ever getting it. I had gone on hundreds of hikes and had never had a tick bite, let alone any kind of infection. Outdoors, in my teens and twenties, I had been something of a daredevil—jumping off seaside cliffs, climbing trees, scaling steep rock faces. I suffered from delusions of invincibility.

I know I’m not alone in having made a mistake like this. Nor am I alone in feeling the subsequent regret. Anyone who has ever tried to warn a friend against dating someone bound to break her heart—or told a teenage driver not to speed—knows the pattern. It’s a curious glitch in human behavior: Smart people make reckless decisions, despite clear warnings.

This conundrum is something I have faced not just in my personal life but also in my work. In one way or the other, for the past fifteen years, I’ve tried to warn people about threats that lie ahead. When I was a journalist, I wrote articles that alerted the public to the coming dangers of pandemics and wildfires, of what would happen to farms when reservoirs dried up. I teach college students at MIT how to do what I do—share scientific information with wider audiences for the sake of helping them make better decisions about the future.

The stakes got especially high when I went to work in the White House in 2013, where my job was to convince mayors, business leaders, and homeowners that they should get ready for a future of rising seas and deadly heat waves, of persistent droughts and biblical floods.

As I did this work, I often found myself failing to persuade people to take action. I got stuck in the same place over and over, as if I were running into a traffic jam no matter the route I took: Like me, most people didn’t think much about distant consequences when making decisions. Families bought houses because the mortgage payments were low today, not weighing the downstream cost of flood damage. Food company executives boosted immediate profits for their shareholders rather than investing to protect farms from later droughts. Politicians, of course, spent far more energy plotting reelection that year than protecting their city or state for the next ten years.

I couldn’t really blame any of them, because their decisions made perfect sense to them at the time. And I knew I wasn’t any better at heeding warning signs myself.

For decades, I’ve watched communities learn about perils the hard way—by living through them. Only when severe droughts struck California and Cape Town, South Africa, and floods submerged Houston and Mumbai did residents and leaders in those places take the costs of such foreseeable disasters seriously. It was not just a matter of heeding warnings but of people, businesses, and communities being able to deeply consider the future consequences of the decisions they made every day.

We live in an era when, more than ever, we need to make smart choices for the future—for ourselves and for future generations. We are living far longer than our grandparents, our life spans waxing beyond our imaginations and retirement plans. We have tools to edit the traits of human embryos and to build intelligent machines—technologies that will redefine what it is to be human for coming generations. And we’re shaping the planet’s weather patterns for the next century in ways that may well destroy crops, drown coastal cities, and displace millions of people. To stave off deadly pandemics or stop the worst of climate change, we have to place a lot more value on what happens in our own future and that of people distant from us in time.

I call ours a reckless age—but not because we are somehow worse or weaker than our predecessors. Rather, the need has never been greater for a civilization to think ahead, because the stakes have never been higher. A world population of seven billion that has the power to put robots on Mars and invent new species can shape the future of humanity on an unprecedented scale, and with longer-lasting impact. At the same time, we have unparalleled knowledge—the ability to detect the warning signs of disaster more clearly than our forebears and to see the legacy of our choices—whether it’s the half-life of radioactive waste or how pollution today kills off coral reefs tomorrow. The people who died in ancient Pompeii, by contrast, were not much wiser to danger than the dinosaurs that were wiped out by the Chicxulub meteorite. When you don’t see catastrophe coming, you can’t be called reckless. That’s just misfortune.

In our lives, each of us has witnessed people making shortsighted decisions. A voter stays home on Election Day because his laundry seems more urgent than standing in line at the polls, then regrets not casting a ballot. A doctor prescribes painkillers to make a patient feel better right away, which soon leads to an opioid addiction. A married woman indulges in an affair that for decades afterward she wishes never happened. An executive slashes a research budget for new products and later finds the company failing. A family builds a dream house on a barrier beach, and in a few years, the home has been washed away.

What’s more troubling are the reckless decisions we make in society. Early-warning signs of calamity—take the world’s 2014 Ebola epidemic or the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States—go neglected until it’s too late. People in the richest countries save less for the future than those in poorer generations before them. Soaring stock market re- turns placate investors, masking trends likely to stall the global economy in the future. A person who tweets to forge foreign policy doctrine can be elected president of the United States, in part because what should be ephemeral insults command news cycles and our attention.

It is tempting to shrug this off as our doomed fate—to buy into the cynical view that such myopia is hopelessly ingrained in human nature, in our economy, and in society. But that view gravely underestimates our potential and conveniently excuses neglect of our obligations. It rests on the false assumption that it is impossible to think ahead. We know, however, that sometimes people, businesses, and communities do avert crisis and act for the sake of the future; they have throughout history, and they do even today. Civilizations have built pyramids and grand cathedrals, stopped ozone destruction and prevented nuclear Armageddon. Societies have educated generations of the poor, eradicated polio, and sent people to walk on the moon. What has made their foresight possible where others have failed?

My curiosity about that question led me to this book. For seven years and counting, I have been investigating what allows wisdom to prevail over recklessness; what role our biological programming, our environment, and our culture play; and what changes are possible in our communities, businesses, and society. I’ve taken my inquiry to dive bars, to city council meetings, to old-growth forests, to family reunions, and on foreign delegations around the world. I’ve visited Kansas farms, Wall Street firms, virtual reality labs in Silicon Valley, fishing villages in Mexico, and the nuclear fallout zone in Fukushima, Japan.

I’ve met people who have faced dilemmas similar to my own: A doc- tor trying to stop the rise of deadly superbugs. An investor proving his future prospects amid current losses. A community leader fighting a reckless real estate development. A police official warning of a looming terrorist attack. A farmer trying to prevent the next Dust Bowl. Each of them, like me, has tried to help others heed warnings before it’s too late. Most want to do something bigger than themselves, to make the future better for other people. Their failures and triumphs hold lessons for the rest of us.

Along the way, I have also mined research findings from a wide range of disciplines and tapped experts in fields as diverse as archaeology, land- use law, engineering, economics, and evolutionary biology—from a social movements guru to an artificial intelligence mastermind, from a clock- maker to the U.S. secretary of defense. I’ve sought to understand what today’s leading thinkers believe and what science and history tell us about how to better weigh future consequences.

What I have discovered is that the way I—and most people—have thought about our recklessness is wrong. What we believe is inevitable in human nature and society is rather a choice we face. As with the prisoners in Plato’s cave allegory, whose chains prevented them from perceiving the real source of the shadows they saw, our perch has constrained our view of the possible. It’s now time to find a path out of the cave.

I wrote this book to impart what I have learned about the untapped power we have, individually and collectively, to avoid the reckless decisions that put our future at stake.

From THE OPTIMIST’S TELESCOPE by Bina Venkataraman. Published by arrangement with Riverhead, a member of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Bina Venkataraman.