Acorns to Oak Trees: A Metaphor for Better Times Ahead
A good metaphor can change how you see the world.
This one is from a meteorologist, who used it to illustrate how far data modeling tools have come. He said that a few decades ago if you asked meteorologists what an acorn would look like sometime in the future, “their answer would essentially be a much bigger acorn...
“Today, they would show you an oak tree.”
I find that metaphor helpful because, with a couple tweaks, it applies to another kind of data modeling tool: the human imagination. It’s one way humans “predict” the future. First we imagine it and then, if possible, create it. And while theoretically we could imagine any number of possible futures for our species, what we often end up with are just bigger acorns. A few examples:
Gas cars become electric cars, become self-driving cars, become flying cars (?). Interesting, but it’s a future in which we’re still transporting ourselves in cars, doing the damage that cars do — and it’s far more than just emitting CO2. Bigger acorns.
Oil energy becomes solar and wind energy, becomes cold fusion energy (?). Helpful, sure. But whatever the source, we’re still using that energy to fuel an economic system that undermines nature’s life support system. In that sense, bigger acorns.
Weapons that kill hundreds become weapons that kill thousands, become weapons that kill millions, become weapons that kill billions. (Meanwhile, soldiers become AI robots?). Needless to say, bigger acorns.
So what data is missing from our “imagination modeling tool” that we can’t break out of this pattern? Why are we just imagining bigger acorns when the power is in our hands to imagine something entirely different, something more life affirming?
The answer, I suggest, is that our imagination model does not adequately account for our ability to evolve beyond our tribal mentality and our rapacious and militaristic instincts. And as long as we deny that possibility for ourselves, we’ll keep imagining and creating bigger acorns, rather than beautiful, life-nurturing oak trees.
Now, some people — perhaps a lot of people — believe such an evolutionary step for humanity is impossible. But holding that view requires two things:
Excusing from our data set those who have taken that step, declaring them extraordinary in some way.
Ignoring what we’re discovering in the fields of neuropsychology and neurobiology about the human brain and our innate capacity for change. (Discoveries that, by the way, find striking alignment with wisdom teachings stretching back 3,000 years and codified in almost all spiritual traditions.)
In upcoming posts I’ll explore some of these discoveries in more detail and how we might apply them to our own growth process. Because if we can validate for ourselves that our future can look a lot more like oak trees, we can begin in earnest to imagine the tools, institutions and customs that will support it.
Until then, two inspiring media recommendations that highlight our capacity for change and the promising future it can produce:
Stranger at the Gate: A powerful 30 minute documentary about a former Marine suffering from post traumatic stress, and how his plan to attack a community of Muslims in Indiana became a journey of self-healing and forgiveness.
A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Forgotten Teachings: The latest podcast from Ezra Klein. His guest is Harvard University professor Brandon Terry, co-editor of “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.” It’s a rich, thoughtful, and provocative interview. An excerpt:
“What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that …the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.
“And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time…”
Thanks for reading, and best wishes to you and yours for a healthy and joyous 2023.