We have two visions of the future, and both are terrifying.

“There are quiet times, which seem to contain that which will last forever,” philosopher Karl Jaspers once wrote.

“And there are moments of change, where there are disturbances which, in extreme cases, seem to reach the roots of humanity”.

It is clear that ours is a time of turmoil. As war rages across Europe and the world faces the cost of the deadliest pandemic in living memory, a threatening environment reigns on earth.

After years of economic turmoil, social unrest and political instability, there is a widespread sense that the world is adrift, like a ship without a rudder in a terrible storm.

Right.

Humanity is now faced with confluence of challenges unprecedented in its history.

Climate change is rapidly altering living conditions on our planet.

The tensions around Ukraine and Taiwan they re-proposed the possibility of a conflict between nuclear superpowers.

And the dizzying progress in artificial intelligence are raising serious concerns about the risk of a global catastrophe caused by artificial intelligence.

This troubling situation calls for new perspectives to make sense of a rapidly changing world and where we are headed.

Instead, we are presented with two familiar but very different visions of the future:

A disaster storywhere the apocalypse is everywhere, ea story of progresswhere this is the best of all possible worlds.

Both viewpoints are strong in their claims and misleading in their analyses.

The truth is, no one knows what will happen.

The crisis of our time has opened up the future.

Doomsayers may disagree.

In his view, humanity stands on the brink of catastrophic changes that will inevitably culminate in the collapse of modern civilization and the end of the world as we know it.

It’s a vision reflected in the growing number of people preparing for the apocalypse, multi-million pound bunkers and post-apocalyptic television series.

While it may be tempting to dismiss such cultural phenomena as lighthearted, they reflect important aspects of the mentality of the time and reveal deeply rooted anxieties about the fragility of the existing order.

Today, those fears can no longer be confined to a fringe of gun-toting survivor fanatics.

The relentless avalanche of crises shaking the Earth, set against a backdrop of flash floods and wildfires, has been pervasive in doomsday sentiment.

When even the UN chief warns that rising sea levels could trigger “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it’s hard to remain optimistic about the state of the world.

A survey found that more than half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and that “the future is terrifying”.

At the same time, a very different kind of storytelling has re-emerged in recent years.

Exemplified by a series of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay current challenges and insists on the inexorable march of human progress.

If prophets of doom worry endlessly about things getting worse, prophets of progress argue that things have only gotten better and may continue to do so in the future.

He panglossian world proposed by these new optimists naturally attracts the defenders of the “status quo”.

If things are indeed better, then clearly there is no need for transformative change to address the most pressing issues of our time.

As long as we stick to the script and keep our faith in the redeeming qualities of human ingenuity and technological innovation, all of our problems will eventually be solved.

These two visions, at first glance, seem diametrically opposed.

But in reality they are two sides of the same coin.

Both perspectives highlight one set of trends rather than another.

Optimists, for example, often point misleading statistics on poverty reduction as proof that the world is becoming a better place.

Pessimists, by contrast, tend to imagine worst-case scenarios. climate or financial collapse and present them as inevitable facts.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of these one-sided accounts.

As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear narratives and linear to a chaotic and unpredictable reality; it is much more difficult to live with ambiguity and contradiction.

However, this selective emphasis leads to fundamentally wrong descriptions of the world.

To understand the complex nature of our time, we must first accept its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental openness.

It is precisely this radical uncertainty – not knowing where we are or what awaits us – that causes so much existential anxiety.

Anthropologists have a name for this kind of eerie experience:

liminality. It sounds technical, but it captures an essential aspect of the human condition.

Derived from the Latin word for threshold, liminality originally referred to the feeling of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage.

In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for example, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but not yet recognized as an adult: in the middle, neither here nor there.

Any teenager knows: that state of Suspension It can be a very nerve-racking time to be living.

We are in the middle of a painful passagea sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist defined it Antonio Gramscibetween an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born.

These epochal changes are inevitably fraught with dangers.

However, despite their destructive potential, they are also full of possibilities.

As the historian of the XIX century Jacob Burckhardt He noted, the great upheavals of world history can be seen “as real signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions.

“The crisis must be seen as a new growth nexus,” he wrote.

When we accept this terrifying and generative nature of our time, a very different vision of the future emerges.

We no longer conceive of history as a straight line trending upward towards gradual improvement, or downward towards inevitable collapse.

On the contrary, we see stages of relative calm punctuated from time to time by periods of great turmoil.

These crises can be devastating, but they are also the engine of history. Progress and catastrophe, those binary opposites, are indeed joined at the hip.

Together they engage in an endless dance of creative destruction, always blazing new trails and plummeting into the unknown.

Our age of upheaval can lead to global catastrophe or even the collapse of modern civilization, but it can also open up possibilities for transformative change.

We can already observe these contradictory dynamics around us.

A pandemic that has killed millions and nearly caused economic collapse has also empowered working people and increased public spending on developing vaccines, which may soon give us a cure for cancer.

Similarly, a major European land war is looming that has displaced millions and triggered a global energy crisis.accelerating inadvertently switch to renewable energies, helping us in the fight against climate change.

The solutions we seek today – about world peace, the clean energy transition and the regulation of artificial intelligence – will one day form the basis of a new world order.

Of course, it is impossible to predict where these events will lead us. You

All we know is that our rite of passage of civilization opens a door to the future.

It’s up to us to go the other way.

c.2023 The New York Times Society