Out of Our Minds. Robinson Ken

more sensitive than adult rates to economic turbulence, and the recovery of the job market for young men and women tends to lag behind that of adults. For millions of young people, the future seems bleak and despairing. They have no work and see no prospect of it. The International Labor Organization consistently argues that creating jobs for the millions of young women and men entering the labor market every year is a critical component in the path towards wealthier economies. It is not only the quantity but also the quality of jobs that matters. In a world of headlong change, where lifelong employment in the same job is a thing of the past, creativity and innovation are not luxuries, they are essential for personal security and the health of communities.

      Thomas Friedman, author of the World is Flat, argues that, “Those who have the ability to imagine new services and new opportunities and new ways to recruit work … are the new Untouchables. Those with the imagination to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies will thrive.” The solution is better education and training. Here, too, the future cannot be business as usual. “We not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college – more education – but we need more of them with the right education. Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity. We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.”5

      “The challenge now is to transform education systems into something better suited to the real needs of the twenty-first century. At the heart of this transformation there has to be a radically different view of human intelligence and of creativity.”

      One of the reasons the old systems of education are not working now is that real life is not linear or standardized: it is organic, creative and diverse and always has been.

      Some weeks before our son started at university in Los Angeles, we went along for an orientation day. At one point, the students were taken away for a separate briefing on program options and the parents were taken to the finance department for a form of grief counseling. We then had a presentation from one of the professors about our roles as parents during our children’s student days. He advised us to step out of their way and spare them too much of our career advice. His own son had been a student at the university some years before and had originally wanted to study the classics. The professor and his wife were not optimistic about his job prospects. They were relieved when, at the end of the freshman year, he said he’d decided to major in something “more useful.” They asked what he had in mind, and he said philosophy. His father pointed out that none of the big philosophy firms were hiring at the time. His son took some philosophy courses anyway and eventually majored in art history. After college he found a job in an international auction house. He traveled, made a good living, loved the work and the life. He got the job because of his knowledge of ancient cultures, his intellectual training in philosophy and his love of art history. Neither he nor his parents could have predicted that path when he started his college studies.

      The principle is the same for everyone. Life is not linear. As you live your life you take or avoid opportunities, meet different people, have unexpected experiences and create a unique biography along the way. What we become in the future is deeply influenced by our experiences here and now. Education is not a straight line to the future: it is also about cultivating the talents and sensibilities through which we can live our best lives in the present.

      BEYOND IMAGINING

      In December 1862, Abraham Lincoln gave his second annual address to Congress. He was writing one month before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and in his message he urged Congress to see the situation they faced with fresh eyes. He said this: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”6

      I love the word “disenthrall.” We all live our lives guided by ideas to which we are devoted but which may no longer be true or relevant. We are hypnotized or enthralled by them. To move forward we have to shake free of them. Over the past few centuries of industrialism, more and more people have moved off the land into cities and seem to believe that they can live apart from the rest of nature. The climate crisis reminds us that we cannot. In most respects, we are like most other organisms on earth. Our lives are brief; we pass through the same cycle of mortality from conception to birth to death; we have the same physical needs as other species and we depend on nutrients that the earth supplies.

      “We may not be able to predict the future but we can help to shape it.”

      Biologically, we are probably evolving at the same rate as other species, culturally, we are evolving at a uniquely furious rate. The cultural lives of dogs and cats are not changing that much. They seem to do pretty much what they’ve always done. There’s no need to keep checking in with them to see what’s new. In human life, there is always something new and the pace of change is quickening every day. The reason is that, in one respect at least, we human beings are different from the rest of life on earth. We have powerful imaginations and unlimited powers of creativity. In imagination we can visit the past, and not just a single view of the past. We can review and reinterpret the past. We can enhance our sense of the present by seeing with other people’s eyes. We can anticipate possible futures and we can act creatively to bring them about. We may not be able to predict the future, but we can help to shape it.

      It may be that some of the challenges we are creating, in the natural environment, in politics and in our conflicting beliefs, will overcome us, and maybe sooner rather than later. If so, it will not be because we have made too much use of our imaginations but too little. Now, more than ever, we need to exercise these unique creative powers that make us human in the first place. The challenges we face are global and personal. As this is my book, let’s start with me.

      2

      FACING THE REVOLUTION

      “By about 2040, there will be a backup of our brains in a computer somewhere, so that when you die it won’t be a major career problem.”

Ian Pearson7

      OUT AND ABOUT

      MY FATHER WAS BORN IN 1914 in Liverpool, England. He lived his whole life in Liverpool and rarely traveled more than 30 miles from the city. My mother was born in 1919, also in Liverpool. It was only later in her life that she traveled out of the country for holidays. I was born in Liverpool in 1950. Even then, people didn’t really go anywhere. A visit to the nearest town was a day’s outing. In some regions, dialects were so distinct that it was possible to tell which village or part of town someone came from. I have five brothers and a sister, all born in Liverpool. My brother John has been piecing together our family tree. He found out that in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, seven of our eight great grandparents grew up in Liverpool too, all within a couple of miles of each other, in some cases in adjacent streets. That is how they met. For most of human history, people lived, worked and married locally and expected to live the sorts of lives their parents had led. They were not besieged with media images of celeb- rities and reality stars that made them hesitate about settling for the person they’d just met at the pub.

      I now travel so much for my work that I sometimes cannot remember where I have been or when. A few years ago I went to Oslo in Norway to speak at a conference. I flew overnight from Los Angeles via New York. The plane was delayed and I arrived in Oslo five hours late and tired but looking forward to the event. As I was getting ready to go on stage, one of the organizers asked me whether I had been in Oslo before. I told her that I had not but that the city seemed fascinating. A few hours later, I remembered that I had been in Oslo before. For a week! Admittedly it was about 15 years earlier, but even so. You don’t usually wander into Norway without noticing. In a week, you do all kinds of things: eat, shower, meet people and talk and think about Norwegian things. I had been to the National Art Gallery and spent time looking at paintings by Edvard Munch, including The

5

Friedman, T. L. (2007).

6

Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

7

Ian Pearson, British Telecom, interviewed in The Sunday Times, 4 June 2000.