Richard Eckersley is an independent researcher and writer on progress, sustainability, culture, health and wellbeing. He ranges across many fields of knowledge to develop new, common frameworks of understanding. In essence, he explores the question: Is life getting better or worse?
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Richard
All Richard's work, including the reports and papers mentioned in this talk, are available on his website:
The essay in Salon is at:
https://www.salon.com/2022/01/16/americas-deep-and-divide-isnt-between-democrats-and/
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Hello, and welcome to Futurepod. I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field of Futures and Foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field, and the emerging leaders share their stories, tools, and experiences. Please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Richard Eckersley.
Richard is an independent researcher and writer on progress, sustainability, culture, health, and wellbeing. He ranges across many fields of knowledge to develop new common frameworks of understanding. Synthesis strives for coherence in the overall conceptual picture, rather than precision in the empirical detail.
In essence, he explores the question, "Is life getting better or worse?" Richard has published about 190 journal papers, books, chapters, monographs, and specialist magazine articles, and written many articles for leading Australian newspapers and for broadcast on national radio. Much of his work was brought together in a book Well and Good: Morality, Meaning and Happiness, and he has also edited or co-edited and contributed to three other books.
Welcome to Futurepod, Richard.
Richard Eckersley: Thanks very much Peter.
Peter Hayward: Great to have you. So we like to start with the story question. So what is the Richard Eckersley story?
Richard Eckersley: It's a pretty convoluted story with a lot of stops and starts and zigzags and forward steps and backwards steps. I came to Futures research from science and although I don't use the think of myself as a futurist. Much of my work has a futures orientation. Science wasn't part of my family background. My mother's parents were Presbyterian missionaries in India and she was born there. My father's father was a Melbourne businessmen and a pioneer in commercial refrigeration. Most people probably don't know that in summer Australia used to ship ice from the frozen lakes in North America, deep in their winter, to use in their ice boxes. A lot it melted coming through the tropics. So that's progress.
I was born in 1947 in Tokyo where my father was involved as a diplomat in war crimes trials. I grew up in Canberra. Not knowing what I wanted to do after finishing school,I worked as a deck hand on a trawler for a year. And then I did an Honors degree in Zoology at the Australian National University. Decades later, I took part in a panel discussion on democratizing culture at a national conference on the Art of Dissent. As in opposing, not descending. One of the other speakers commented that his dissent went back to his student days when he was taking psychedelic drugs and reading Marx. And we were about the same age and I said, when it came to my turn, when he was doing drugs and Marx I was in the laboratory studying the endocrinology of thermal tolerance in goldfish, which was my Honours topic. Same thing, same thing he interjected.
I was at university in the mid to late 1960s, the early years of the modern environmental movement, which tied in with Futures Thinking. And much of that thinking was grounded in biology or at least science. For example Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and less well known, but influential to me was Nobel laureate Sir MacFarlane Burnett's Dominant Mammal: the Biology of Human Destiny. Somewhere along the line I picked up a copy of philosopher Bertrand Russell's Has Man a Future?, first published in 1961 and much reprinted. And of course there was Alvin Toffler's bestseller Future Shock, which came out in 1970.
In my honors year, I wrote an essay review of another best seller Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Not so much about the future, but a very broad take on the biology of our species which appealed to me. Now, I didn't necessarily read all these books at the time, but they were changing the public culture and influenced my thinking.
And at the same time, part of that influence was that I began to rebel against the narrow, highly specialized, mechanical nature of so much scientific inquiry. Science often struggles with those aspects of life that are intangible, tenuous, abstract, subjective. Yet these aspects make up a big part of the human condition, the part that increasingly interested me.
In a 1999 book Biology and the Riddle of Life, the Australian biologist, Charles Birch says there is an enormous gap between what science describes and what we experience between the mechanisms of life and what it is to be alive. There are two points of view, he says, the inside and the outside,the subjective and the objective, from within and from without. The solution to the riddle of life is only possible through the proper connection of the outer with the inner experience.
So after I finished my degree, not very brilliantly, and still uncertain of which way to go in life, I went fishing again. Then as an antithesis to science, I thought I'd try journalism and managed to get a cadetship at the Sydney Morning Herald. After four years of journalism, I quit to travel overseas. I spent two years traveling across the world: by truck with a group through Africa, from south to north; in a camper van, with a friend through Northern and Eastern Europe and Russia; on foot along most of the south coast of Crete; and by bus, truck, and train overland across Asia to India and Nepal.
In a way I hadn't anticipated, the experience allowed me to view my native culture from the outside. And in ways I hadn't appreciated before I became aware that ours was a flawed and harsh culture. I realized that the Western Worldview was not necessarily the truest or best as I've been brought up and educated to believe but just one of many, defined and supported by deeply ingrained beliefs and myths, like any other. We in the West tend to see material poverty as synonymous with misery and squalor. But I saw that only with the most abject poverty is this so. Mostly the poorest societies I traveled through had a social cohesion and spiritual richness that I felt the West lacked. We see others as crippled by ignorance and cowed by superstition. We don't see the extent to which we are in our own ways, weighed down by our rationalism and lack of superstition in a sort of spiritual sense.
The most difficult cultural adjustment I had to make was not to the cultures of other countries, but to my own on my return home to Australia. Many long-term Western travelers have had the same experience, shocked in particular by the West's extravagant consumerism. My initial response on flying into Sydney from Bangkok was one of wonder at the orderliness and cleanliness, the abundantly stocked shops,the clear eyed children seemingly so healthy and carefree. However, this initial celebration of the material comforts and individual freedoms soon gave way to a growing apprehension about our, the Western way of life.
There were other elements to my re-entry trauma as it's called, besides the experience of other cultures. My lifestyle, so open in some respects was closed or contained in others: the consequences of being on the road, the almost total absence of mass media in my life. And then there was the exposure to the counterculture of my fellow travellers, especially in Asia.
I turned 30 in the year of my return, 1977, and was very disturbed by the realization that I was no clearer about what I wanted to do than I was at 18. I sometimes advise young people if they don't know what to do in life, just to start somewhere and look for opportunities that will take them in the direction they think they want to go.
In my case, I enrolled in a Master of Science and Society degree at the University of New South Wales. It covered the history, philosophy and sociology of science and technology. So it lent itself to futures thinking. One essay I wrote was in the form of a submission to a major inquiry into technological change in Australia held to look into public concerns about the impacts of new technologies, especially computers on jobs. My submission was full of my travel inspired concerns for the future.
I was also back at the Sydney Morning Herald, part-time, and covered some of the inquiry hearings. I think I broke the story of the introduction of ATM's, automated teller machines, in Australia which the banks had not wanted to make public just then. How quaint, if that's the word, it all seems from today's perspective, coming from 40 years later, given the way that technology has utterly transformed every aspect of our lives for better or worse.
I became the Herald's science reporter, then in 1983, went to CSIRO in Canberra as head of its media group. I saw my main mission as encouraging CSIRO scientists to participate in public debate and discussion on issues within their expertise.
A few years later, I was lent to the new Commission for the Future for a couple of years at the request of its director Rhonda Galbally. I wrote two major reports. The first on public attitudes to science and technology and the future, drawing on all the existing survey and poll data or I could find. Two surveys of children's views of the future shocked me with the bleakness of their imagery.
As the father of three young children at the time, the studies made a deep impression on me. So I researched and wrote a second report, Casualties of Change: the Predicament of Youth in Australia, which explored the impact of young people's pessimism about the future on their wellbeing. The big issue in the 1980s was the risk of nuclear war. I also examined the impact of other social factors such as increasing child poverty, family breakdown, and youth unemployment. The report attracted a lot of media and politically attention.
I implied and later made more explicit in my work that we were seeing a generational shift in young people's wellbeing. That they were no longer the healthiest generation and the healthiest age group as is commonly believed, especially because of emerging issues of mental health. I use two metaphors to describe the social significance of the seriously troubled and suicidal. Were they an island of misery in an ocean of happiness, which was the orthodox view? or were they the tip of an iceberg of suffering, which was my argument? A few years later my elder daughter, then about to turn nine, mentioned to the family at dinner one night, that the school principal and told her class that scientists believed the world would end in 60 years, that is around 2050. It's obviously a significant date. After explaining that he was probably talking about global warming and that it did not mean the end of the world, I asked her what her reaction had been to what she'd heard. She replied I thought, "oh no, I'll only be 69!" Others in the class had reacted in much the same way, and it's a telling example of how personally children and adolescents relate to global threats and problems and often depict them in apocalyptic terms.
The increasing damage being done by climate change related events that we've seen in recent years, the COVID pandemic with not just fears of becoming ill, but also the lockdowns isolation and school closures, and now the war in Ukraine, have I'm sure made the situation much worse; and the early evidence suggests that that's the case.
After the stint with the Commission. I did a term of parliament from 1990 to 1993 on the staff of Simon Crean, when he was appointed Minister for Science and Technology, and then Primary Industries and Energy. Again, I was lent by CSIRO this time at the request of the Minister on the recommendation of a former Herald colleague.
Back at CSIRO I organized a conference and edited a book, Measuring Progress: is Life getting Better? The Australian Bureau of Statistics was a co-sponsor of the project and took the book to the OECD in Paris, where it helped to spark international interest in the topic.
I was retrenched from CSIRO in 1998; this sort of work was not considered its core business. And I went to the National Center for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University on a succession of short, unpaid or part-time appointments. There I continued my work on the social determinants of health and wellbeing and measures of progress, including my own book, Well and Good, which you've mentioned Peter.
At the time interest in measures of subjective wellbeing, more or less happiness and life satisfaction, was taking off. And I got into that area, co-developing with Bob Cummins at Deakin University, an index of subjective wellbeing, which is now measured regularly in Australia and widely used in international research. I was at the Center for almost 10 years before going it alone working from home, an independent researcher and writer and an early player in the gig economy.
So while I say that I may never have been a futurist in a professional or academic sense, formally trained in the theories and methodologies of future studies, a lot of my work had a futures orientation with a foundation in science.
Peter Hayward: That's a fascinating journey. I'm struck by the story of you returning to Australia and seeing Australia in somewhat fresh eyes and also your message about the health of young people in today. And so I'm interested in the second question. This is the question where I invite the guests to talk about a framework or an approach that's central to their work. And I'm also going to ask you that question with a bit of a leading question, which is, do you think the way that you frame and think about the world is actually part of what has helped you find a place and a role and a purpose in that world?
Richard Eckersley: Yeah, I think that's definitely the case Peter. I was totally at sea when I got back from overseas and I spent a year living in the garage flat under my parents' home, trying to nut out what it meant for me. And one of the things that struck me was neither journalism nor science helped me really understand my place in the world and what was going on. I think the interest in science was too narrowly focused, too technical, too fragmented and journalism likewise. Its treatment of things again is also fragmented, superficial; you weren't often allowed to get into things in any great depth. And so that was the thing that I think drew me personally and professionally towards what we would think in this conversation as future thinking, future studies.
Because for me, the main philosophy and methodology behind my work is transdisciplinary synthesis, which I think is seriously undervalued in science. While empirical research seeks to improve understanding of the world by creating new knowledge, synthesis creates new understandings by integrating existing knowledge from across a range of fields, disciplines and sciences. It aims, as you said in the intro, to develop new common frameworks of understanding, striving for coherence in the overall conceptual picture rather than precision in the empirical detail.
It dispenses with expectations of scientific certainty and exactness, including with respect to cause and effect. Everything is provisional and relationships are often reciprocal. For example pessimism about the future may contribute to making people depressed, but the depressed also look at the world and the future with bleakness. A warming world is melting more of the Arctic summer ice so that the dark sea absorbs more solar energy contributing to further warming.
Science favors depth of knowledge, but breadth also has its place. Synthesis offers many benefits. It adds value to existing specialized knowledge, reduces disciplinary biases, transcends inter-disciplinary tensions, improves researcher's knowledge outside their specialization, generates new research questions and enhances the application of knowledge. Synthesis is particularly appropriate for addressing the increasing scale, complexity and interconnectedness of human problems and suits the complex, diffused processes of social change. My work has focused especially on what I call the psychosocial dynamics of progress: the interrelationships between social conditions and individual behavior and wellbeing, including the role of perceptions, expectations, and emotions.
A feature of transdisciplinary synthesis is that empirical research tends to place the general in the context of the specific. I see this often in the empirical research work that I read as part of my own research. Because this favors or privileges the perspectives of researchers who were working on very specific problems or just one aspect of the much broader problem. Whereas synthesis, I argue, puts the specific in the context of the general, which I think is the truer way to look at things. Put a bit differently it may well be that science will never give us clear cut and objective recipes for making life better. Nevertheless, it's contributing to a growing willingness to question and discuss what all things considered makes a good life. For me, and this is a pretty radical view in science, it's preferable that we attain imperfect knowledge about the important issues of our times than precise answers to what are in the overall scheme of things trivial questions.
Peter Hayward: Richard I just want you to clarify, because I think I know the answer, but I want you to say it. When you talk about transdisciplinary synthesis and you talk about the drawing together, of parts of knowledge. You're not just framing that in terms of external world. Things in the world. You're also suggesting as part of the synthesis that we need to synthesize the internal, the cultural, the spiritual, the kind of, the reason for living kind of questions that has to be part of the synthesis as well?
Richard Eckersley: I think that's right. And I don't know how we weave this into things. I think for me, I'm in an odd position that the intensely personal and subjective is something that I also look at externally or objectively in the research that I'm covering. So as I said the earlier, I was drawn to that inner world, the subjective, the inner experience that Charles Birch talked about in his book. But I tended to externalize it. I read about issues around young people's wellbeing, the problems of mental health, suicide, this sort of thing, but it was always informed by, I guess my own responses, to the world around me, and how I reacted personally and intrinsically to what I saw going on outside me and the changes taking place. It was a very intimate connection.
I mean, when I worked on Casualties of Change, that report for the Commission for the Future, I had to use every trick I knew to stop myself getting very depressed about the prospects there. And people told me, journalists and others who tend to be quite hard bitten, that they found it a difficult report to read because what it was revealing about the sweeping changes that were taking place in the world of young people. And you can look back now and think well, maybe most of them have done all right; they're coping. But then you've got the reality coming out of research that the problems of young people's mental health are not improving despite increased expenditure on services and programs and everything. It's actually getting worse.
And I think this was a critical dimension that I want to make and that comes out of the breadth of the perspective I offer: that we are not going to solve these problems by simply funding more mental health programs for young people. In much the same way that I believe we're not going to solve the problems of Climate change by reducing emissions to net zero by 2050. It really does require something much deeper, much broader, much more transformational than we tend to examine at the political level.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Richard. So third question is the one where I encourage the guest to talk about the emerging future. But in your case I'm talking to a researcher who's been researching the emerging future for his professional life. So how do you want to tackle question three?
Richard Eckersley: Well, I thought I'd tackle this question by covering some of the research I've been involved in over the past decades and illustrating I suppose the extent to which we are now in that future, that people were concerned about. So personally, I agree with American futurist Jim Dator who once said that he would like to avoid the 21st century and move straight to the 22nd, for which he saw some hope. It would be a time when one way or another by choice or compulsion, humanity would have dealt with all the challenges that faces. Population pressures, environmental destruction, economic equity, global governance, technological change. Dator wrote in 1996 that the 21st century was not likely to be pleasant for anybody because we would pay the price for ignoring the future.
He said things may seem calm now. The West, the USA firmly in control, but that is not so. The eye of the hurricane is passing in the fury of the future getting back at us will be felt for some time to come. How true is that? It is not the way political and economic commentators saw things back then. At least in the West with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war and the dot com boom, promising limitless economic growth, hubris dominated as the emotion of the time.
In the 1990s, as part of a larger program by the Australian Science Technology and Engineering Council, a group of us carried out a series of future scenarios workshops with young people. We then use the results to conduct a poll of young people in 1995. The questions were repeated in the 2005 poll with people of all ages. The results are fascinating given how the 21st century has begun. I'll just give the results for all ages in 2005.
One question we asked was "Thinking about the world in the 21st century, which of the following statements most closely reflects your view?" One. By continuing on its current path of economic and technological development humanity will overcome the obstacles it faces and enter a new age of peace and prosperity. Two. More people, environmental destruction, new diseases, and ethnic or regional conflict mean the world is headed for a bad time of crisis and trouble. In 2005 only 23% chose the first optimistic scenario while 66% chose the second pessimistic scenario.
In another question, we ask people to read these two descriptions of possible futures for Australia in 2020. The first: A fast paced, internationally competitive society with the emphasis on the individual wealth creation, and enjoying the good life. Power has shifted to international organizations and business corporations. Technologically advanced with the focus on economic growth and efficiency and the development of new consumer products. The second: A greener more stable society where the emphasis is on cooperation, community and family. More equal distribution of wealth and greater economic self-sufficiency. An international outlook, but strong national and local orientation and control. Technologically advanced with the focus on building communities, living in harmony with the environment, including greater use of alternative and renewable resources.
We then asked which of the two descriptions described or came closer to the type of society that they expected Australia will be. And which of the two described or came close to the type of society that they would prefer Australia to be. In 2005 for all ages, 73% expected the first growth scenario and 27% expected the second green scenario, but only 7% preferred the first and 93% preferred the second. In other words, most people did not expect the future they preferred. The questions were worded, for example, by asking which ‘comes closer..’, to encourage people to make a choice, their actual views might well differ, but the questions capture something real, their deep concerns for the future and the way that what they want their preferred future differs from the official future, broadly speaking, the future governments promise and on which they base their policy.
Peter Hayward: I'm struck by that one Richard. If you had have asked a third scenario along the lines of the pessimistic, what would they have chosen?
Richard Eckersley: It's a good question Peter, because the actual workshops did come up with a predominantly pessimistic view of the future. But what we wanted to do in this question is leave out the pessimism which was covered in the first question we asked, and look at two relatively positive futures, which as I indicated represent the promised future or the official future as I've called it, and the preferred future. The point I want to make is that question was asked about Australia in 2020. 2020 is now behind us and I think it's interesting to think about which of the two scenarios, the expected or the preferred, better describes our society today?
Now more recently in 2013, I collaborated with Melanie Randle at Wollongong University in a study investigating the perceived probability of threats to humanity in four Western nations, the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. Overall, a majority, 54%, rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next hundred years at 50% or greater. And a quarter, that's 24%, rated the risk of humans being wiped out in that period of time at 50% or greater. Even I, though I'm steeped in this sort of stuff, found these odds shockingly high. Also surprising was that the responses were relatively uniform across the four countries, age groups, gender and education level, although statistically significant differences did come out.
The next bit of the study looked at how people react to the possibility of catastrophic futures, because this will also shape how effectively humanity deals with it. We need to keep in mind that people can respond very differently to the same perception of threat, including apocalyptic suspicions about this century. I'd previously proposed that responses included: nihilism; the loss of belief in a social or moral order, where decadence rules; fundamentalism; the retreat to certain belief, where dogma rules; and activism, the transformation of belief, where hope rules. The categories make sharp distinctions between responses to highlight their differences and significance. They're not mutually exclusive, but can overlap, co-exist and change over time with individuals and groups.
And in the 2013 study, we tested these views by asking people to agree or disagree with statements that reflected these categories. So almost 80% agreed we need to transform our worldview and way of life if we are to create a better future for the world, which represented activism. About a half agreed that the world's future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love, which was a statement of nihilism. And over a third that we are facing a final conflict between good and evil in the world and that's a fundamentalist response. Interestingly in the US almost a half, 47%, agreed with this fundamentalist response.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Richard
Fourth questions, the communication question, and so I'm very interested what you as a journalist and communicator and writer think about how you go about communicating your ideas to people who don't necessarily understand a integrationist, synthetic way of looking at the world. So how do you talk to people who don't necessarily understand the way that you see the world.
Richard Eckersley: That's also another difficult question to answer Peter. My children when they were young complained that they didn't know what toe say when trying to tell people what I did for a job. My son, when he was young, liked it best when I worked at Parliament House, drove to work, wore a suit and carried a briefcase. But mainly I tell people, as you've already indicated, I research and write about progress and wellbeing. The question that defines my work is, "is life getting better?"
And going back again to what I said earlier, I tend to focus on what I call the psychosocial dynamics of progress. And I think how we see the future is an important part of those dynamics. Visions of the future are woven into the stories we create to make sense and meaning of our lives. This storying is important in linking individuals to a broader social or collective narrative and affects both their own personal wellbeing by enhancing their sense of belonging, identity and agency, for example, and societal functioning by engaging people in the shared task of working for a better future.
In terms of how I go about my work professionally, I write scientific and scholarly papers, I give conference talks, well I used to, and I write for mainstream media and more specialized media, as well as doing interviews. I'm now mainly retired, but still do some writing to give my life some focus and wider purpose.
I've found the mainstream media are getting harder to crack. The quality media have gone more downmarket, populist, trivial, and probably my work has become more abstract. For example, I pitched my latest essay on US politics and the future of liberal democracy to many US media outlets during 2021 and never heard back. It was also rejected by eight scholarly journals over the year, before being published in January this year in the US magazine Salon.
Peter Hayward: So let's go into the last question cause I do want you to talk about that recent publication in Salon. Now, if people want to read it then there'll be links to it, but again what is the kind of deepest story that's going on in there? While its about the situation in America I suspect that you are writing to a much broader audience than just people in America?
Richard Eckersley: Yeah, and it was the first time I had delved into US politics in particular. By and large I don't get into the immediate political arena. I do the odd opinion piece for Australian newspapers but it was really Donald Trump's emergence that got me interested in applying my work to US politics. I wrote my first opinion piece on him in 2016, so before he won the presidential election. I saw that for all his faults and dangers he had his upsides. And this view put a real strain on some of my relationships. Most of my friends are on the progressive or left side of politics and loathed him, but two things about Trump attracted my attention. He acknowledged the deep disillusion and anxiety in a large part of the American population about their lives, their country and their future. And he rocked the American political establishment to its core.
My view was reinforced by 2020 study that showed that Trump's success was not fundamentally about racism or economic hardship, but a heightened anxiety and a lack of social attachment or belonging. This increased racial or national identification which was then politicized by Trump, and I'd argue Hillary Clinton as well, as racial prejudice and nationalism. So this is important and I think a really revealing dimension. The roots of Trump's success went far deeper than the racism and the nationalism that was the media focus.
Now Barack Obama didn't see life in that sort of light. For him progress was still progress, life was continuing to get better. Climate change and other environmental issues were being solved through pretty orthodox policy initiatives. As Obama often avowed the arc of history was long, but it bent towards justice. His faith in progress provided the foundation for his ideological commitment to incremental rather than radical political change. And this came out clearly in a 2016 interview on BBC which was part of a documentary on his years in the White House. And I'm quoting "My view of human progress has stayed surprisingly constant throughout my presidency. The world today with all its pain and all of sorrow is more just, more democratic, more free, more tolerant, healthier, wealthier, better educated, more connected, more empathetic than ever before. If you didn't know, he said ahead of time, what your social status would be, what your race was, what your gender was or your sexual orientation was what country you were living in, and you asked what moment in human history you would like to be born. You choose right now.”
Now the poll results I cited earlier,and many similar polls in America in Obama's time and before, show most people today don't see their lives in this very optimistic way. And the extent to which Obama's politics and policies reflected his worldview, his continuing belief in the official future, as I have called it, shows why we need to place these fundamental frameworks of how we understand the world at the center of political debate. This would be very different from today's emphasis on issue or identity politics. These elements are kept firmly within the conventional model of progress. The interconnected risks facing humanity cannot be solved by focusing only, or largely, on the discrete specific issues that characterize and define today's politics, however legitimate the concerns are in themselves.
In science, paradigms change when they're confronted by a growing body of anomalous and contradictory evidence that the paradigm cannot explain or resolve. So it is with politics which now also confronts a growing array of political failures, unsolvable problems, and bitter divisions, that it's struggling to understand or resolve. We' neeed a new paradigm that better acknowledges and addresses the emerging realities of planetary conditions and limits, and our better understanding of human needs and wellbeing.
So the core messages of the Salon piece are that, first, a dangerous gulf exists between the American public and the country's politics and news media. And this is, to varying extents, as you've also hinted, Peter, the predicament of other Western democracies. Secondly, our political and journalistic cultures are simply too shortsighted and narrow minded to address our challenges and problems. These are existential in that they both materially and physically threaten human existence, and also undermine people's sense of confidence and certainty about life. And finally political and public debate needs to encourage the conceptual space for a transformation in our worldview, beliefs and values as profound as any in human history.
So I think we face critical questions that go beyond specific issues, such as climate change or the role of the social media and what we do about them. Those questions that include: how is it that 20 to 30 years ago, the lay public showed more foresight about what lay ahead for the world than political leaders and many experts? How is it that they seem to know better than the people who think they know better? And what does this mean for the future of government? Is it the source, or at least part of it, of the deepening crisis that we see in liberal democracies today.
Peter Hayward: Richard, I've had a number of guests who increasingly working with youth and youth futures and youth perspectives. And without turning it into the generations after us are going to save us process. But is there anything in the research or in what your noticing that does suggest that younger people, the millennials, and even the ones coming after that. While they haven't got their foot in the door politically at the moment, they in fact have got a different emergent worldview that offers something that could well help transformation?
Richard Eckersley: I think that's right. I think what we've got at the moment is, on the one hand, the fairly grim news about mental health issues around young people. And in response to the factors that are contributing to those issues, we have this increased activism. So what we're seeing, at least amongst a section of young people today, is the activism that I spoke about in response to the external world we are seeing. And in fact, in something I wrote, I quoted Greta Thunberg, the climate change activist, saying that before she got into activism she felt that life was pretty meaningless and she didn't know what to do. So there you're seeing that downside of the world today but now that she's got into climate change activism she's feels that her life has a lot of meaning. So, there is that upside personally to getting more involved and that was the essence of that activist response I spoke about.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Richard. It's been a great honor to finally meet you and talk to you. Thank you for your work and your writing and your inspiration and your synthetic and transdisciplinary approach to looking at the world. So on behalf of the future pod community thanks for taking some time out to chat to us.
Richard Eckersley: Yeah. Thanks very much, Peter, and all the best with it.
Peter Hayward: Thanks mate.
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