We’re at a pivotal moment in time for humanity. Are we doomed to repeat past mistakes or can Global Futures help to better shape our tomorrow?
We’re at a pivotal moment in time for humanity. Are we doomed to repeat past mistakes or can Global Futures help to better shape our collective tomorrow?
In this insightful episode, special host Matthew Sykes is joined by Professor Joe Siracusa, veteran historian and Inaugural Professor of Global Futures in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. They explore how Global Futures can help us to understand history as a dynamic, non-linear journey that shapes our present and future possibilities, and empower us to make informed decisions for a brighter future.
• Defining Global Futures [01:18]
• Unpacking critical realist ontology [02:20]
• The role of philosophy and science fiction [16:35]
• Turning foresight into actionable insight [11:20]
• Lessons on the past: meeting Martin Luther King [24:26]
Future tense? Global Futures uncovers what the past can tell us about tomorrow
Leading political expert named Dean of Global Futures at Curtin
Joe Siracusa
Professor of Global Futures, Curtin University
President Emeritus of Australia’s Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Siracusa has also authored and co-authored over 30 books including America and the Cold War, 1941-1991: A Realist Interpretation, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Professor Siracusa is also a regular media commentator on international diplomacy, nuclear weapons and American foreign policy.
This podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au
Host and researcher: Matthew Sykes
Producer: Emilia Jolakoska
Editor: Zoe Taylor
Executive Producers: Anita Shore and Matthew Sykes
Curtin University acknowledges all First Nations of this place we call Australia and the First Nations peoples connected with our global campuses. We are committed to working in partnership with all Custodians and Owners to strengthen and embed First Nations’ voices and perspectives in our decision-making, now and into the future.
OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of Curtin University.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:09:11
Sarah Taillier
This is The Future Of where experts share their vision of the future, and how they work is helping shape it for the better.
00:00:09:13 - 00:00:36:01
Matthew Sykes
Hello, I'm Matthew Sykes. Today we're diving into the global forces that shape history, politics and the future, with Professor Joe Siracusa – veteran historian and Curtin's inaugural Professor of Global Futures in the Faculty of Humanities. Born and raised in Chicago, Professor Siracusa has spent his career examining the global intersection of history, politics and the future, challenging how we think about time, decision making and global challenges.
00:00:36:03 - 00:00:58:08
Matthew Sykes
He's written extensively on everything from nuclear weapons to the evolution of human security and global governance. But his focus today is on something even bigger – how we should think about the future, not just as a passive outcome of past events, but as something we can actively shape. So, what can history teach us about the future? How do we navigate uncertainty in a world of rapid change?
00:00:58:11 - 00:01:18:06
Matthew Sykes
And how can Global Futures help us turn foresight into actionable insights? Let's find out. Professor Siracusa, the school of thought represented by Global Futures feels tricky to pin down. There are competing definitions, differences of opinion regarding scope, methods and provenance. I want to start with your definition of Global Futures, please.
00:01:18:08 - 00:01:41:06
Joe Siracusa
Thank you, Matthew. Well, in a nutshell, Global Futures is about the study of anticipating future possibilities, including stories and different scales of time about most likely catastrophes and jump points, creating new horizons of possibility. Perhaps even paradigm shifts, co-determining further action. The future in this sense, is seen as a product of intended and unintended consequences.
00:01:41:08 - 00:01:51:09
Joe Siracusa
The latter I call “the iron law of history”, if you will, and condition circumstances. At the same time, the way the future turns out, determines in part, the meaning of the past.
00:01:51:11 - 00:01:56:20
Matthew Sykes
So just in this iron law idea is that, drawn from Goethe? Is it probably.
00:01:56:20 - 00:02:10:02
Joe Siracusa
I mean, it's about how things turn out just the opposite of what you thought they would. For example, the three empires of Europe went to war in 1914. They all disappeared at the end of it. I mean, what could be truer than that?
00:02:10:04 - 00:02:20:00
Matthew Sykes
Absolutely. So fascinating. So, you talk in your definition of Global Futures about a, a “critical realist ontology”. What precisely do you mean by that?
00:02:20:02 - 00:02:45:06
Joe Siracusa
Before we get to critical realist ontology, first you need to get across the idea that history is not linear. It's not a straight line. The meaning of historical events is not fixed at the moment they happen. It changes depending on how the future unfolds. Social, political and scientific developments interact in unpredictable ways, creating feedback loops, disruptions, and new possibilities rather than a straightforward progression, and grasping the true significance of any of it might take years to unpack.
00:02:45:08 - 00:02:48:24
Matthew Sykes
Wow. So okay, if the past itself isn't linear, then what should the future be?
00:02:49:01 - 00:03:06:10
Joe Siracusa
That's correct. The past is only the past if you believe that time is linear, a straight line if you will. It's not. If you believe the past is cyclical or concurrent, then the past is still occurring or will even happen again, whether you can observe it or not. I'm reminded of William Faulkner's wonderful line from Requiem for a Nun.
00:03:06:16 - 00:03:29:21
Joe Siracusa
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Similarly, there's nothing remotely linear about the future, the mirror image of the past. The only constant here is human nature, which is not changed in thousands of years. A critical realist ontology – a combination of realism, a school of thought that knows there's a real world independent of our perceptions and critical analysis, which examines the structures and mechanism that shape events.
00:03:29:23 - 00:03:54:23
Joe Siracusa
Ontology is broadly the study of being, but I have to look it up all the time. Helps us explain why there are always multiple possible futures. The real world isn't just made up what actually happens. It also includes possibilities that never come to life, and the untapped potential of existing systems and structures that still have an impact. Emergence is also real, and that it is always possible that new power structures and mechanisms emerge and existing ones disappear.
00:03:55:00 - 00:04:24:13
Joe Siracusa
Critical realism. In essence, a philosophical approach to understanding science, especially social science is a branch of philosophy distinguishes between the real world and the observable. The real cannot be observed and exists independent from human perceptions. The world as we know and understand it is constructed from our perspective and experiences. So, what is observable? Bottom line here is the unobservable structures cause observable events, and a social world can be understood only if people understand the structures that generate events.
00:04:24:15 - 00:04:48:09
Joe Siracusa
Put another way, critical realist ontology explains why there are multiple possible futures. Actual is only part of the real world, which also consists of non-actualised possibilities and the unexercised power of the already existing structures and mechanisms that are transactionally effective in open spaces. Emergence is also real. It's possible that new power structures and mechanisms emerge and existing ones may disappear.
00:04:48:12 - 00:05:08:20
Matthew Sykes
Thats. I'm sorry to cut you off, Joe. That is fascinating simply because I think that immediately about, the work of Derrida. I think about Mark Fisher and I think about the idea of hauntology and this idea that there are, there are echoes of the past that we find in the future. And those echoes are the way things could have gone.
00:05:08:22 - 00:05:15:02
Matthew Sykes
Is that what Global Futures is looking for? That sort of sense of, how things could be different or should be different?
00:05:15:04 - 00:05:32:04
Joe Siracusa
It's about how things will be different. I mean, you're right, it's about all those things and we get this sense or this hauntingness of we're looking at the future, but we can't, can't quite see it. Global Futures looks at, sort of frameworks about how we can determine what the future might be. But you're quite right –
00:05:32:06 - 00:05:43:11
Joe Siracusa
It's, it's in philosophy. It's in science fiction. It's it's it's it's in the Bible. It's in the Talmud. It's everywhere. Yeah. You know, it ain't what you see. Exactly. Yeah. So something's coming. Something's quite different.
00:05:43:11 - 00:05:52:07
Matthew Sykes
Does, I think it starts with the, well, for me at least, eschatology. You know, that idea of the study of the end, which is sort of a close cousin, I guess, of Global Futures.
00:05:52:08 - 00:06:13:15
Joe Siracusa
Critical realist ontology has, deep roots and great parentage. Goes way, way back. As long as people think about the, the universe and, and and of course, we don't teach philosophy or even history in universities anymore. I don't know what we do. We we lost all these things in the last 30 years due to, cuts and things like that.
00:06:13:15 - 00:06:17:09
Joe Siracusa
So this is sort of putting people back on the rails again.
00:06:17:11 - 00:06:35:05
Matthew Sykes
And you, you talked there about science fiction. I think, you know, for me, speculative fiction certainly is such a, well, I think of it as a kind of torch that sometimes lights of the dark. You, you've mentioned, science fiction. Do you think about any specific science fiction authors or what kind of role they play?
00:06:35:06 - 00:07:06:04
Joe Siracusa
I'm thinking of, Arthur Clarke and HG Wells, the great, 19th and 20th century writer. I'm thinking here [inaudible] and these these people who just even Bradbury, people like that. They just think about the future. You know what? When I get a kick out of is that people will queue up around the theatre in the middle of winter to see a great science fiction movie or a great historical saga.
00:07:06:06 - 00:07:22:20
Joe Siracusa
They're not going to line up for anything else, as a matter of fact. And people are kind of driven by that. I think it's it's kind of latent in our minds that, there are different possibilities out there. And I think in recent years, I mean, many people saw Sliding doors and all the possibilities. That is incredibly clever movie.
00:07:23:00 - 00:07:37:20
Joe Siracusa
And about how things changed and, you know, of course, that we have a great poem about, “For the lack of a nail, a shoe was lost, and the horse was lost and the battle was lost”, and all the rest of it. That's exactly correct. And that that happens all the time.
00:07:37:20 - 00:07:41:02
Matthew Sykes
Is that a quote from Gwyneth Paltrow?
00:07:41:04 - 00:08:04:07
Joe Siracusa
I don't think so, but, you know, the meaning of the past ultimately depends on how the future turns out. Now, science. Science has talked the language of possibilities and probabilities. Nonetheless, they can also forecast many practically important things - even if only with imperfect accuracy - within the confines and categories of significance to us and limited space times. In some other sciences, predictions can be fairly accurate for a long time.
00:08:04:09 - 00:08:28:08
Joe Siracusa
While similar considerations apply in social sciences as well, the temporality of the human condition, how is it that time shapes human experience? Opens a series of concerns pertaining to ethics, politics, and the relativity of historical time. Global Futures, then, is the study of that reflexive problematic in the context of the planetary problems of the 21st century. It isn't just about predicting trends.
00:08:28:08 - 00:08:50:23
Joe Siracusa
It's an acknowledgment of our need to constantly reevaluate how our current actions shape future possibilities and, in turn, how these futures reshape our understanding of the past and the future. To this end, Global Futures integrates natural sciences, philosophy, and social sciences in a novel and innovative way by stepping into the domain of natural sciences but from a critical, philosophical and social scientific point of view.
00:08:51:00 - 00:09:00:18
Joe Siracusa
Simultaneously, it develops sensibilities and social and political theory by taking decisions about the temporal or the human condition further than most existing courses.
00:09:00:20 - 00:09:18:05
Matthew Sykes
So you just said there, Joe, that all actors are necessarily lay historians, which I take to mean that we're all, in the process of our day to day lives, interpreting the past. And, you know, for so many different reasons. Do you see it as the role of Global Futures to bring together that knowledge of everyday historians and bring that together in some way?
00:09:18:07 - 00:09:48:13
Joe Siracusa
Yes. It's the imperative of universities to integrate the role of Global Futures into the curriculum, both systematising the formal study and principles of Global Futures while raising awareness. As president of the Australian Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, I lobbied at length for the government appointment of a chief social scientist alongside the chief scientist, to scrutinise the socially and politically significant implications of long-term physical, ecological and economic trends and their underlying mechanisms and processes.
00:09:48:15 - 00:10:12:24
Joe Siracusa
Scenario construction that follows can be seen as a self-reflexive exercise and cultural studies, moral philosophy and creative ability. In the same way that research and development or the arts are creative. From a Wellsian in point of view, it can even be argued that unless we destroy ourselves at this critical, self-made moment of history, the cosmic setting, the drama playing out on Earth and increasingly elsewhere in the solar system and beyond, humans still have time to think.
00:10:12:24 - 00:10:38:04
Joe Siracusa
The great thoughts, create magnificent projects and open up extraordinary possibilities. Urban planners will be asked to review re visualize cities as climate change does its worst, and globalisation 2.0 takes off. Intellectuals and social engineers will be busy reimagining what people think and think about. New universities are cropping up in Africa and Asia to enable people to compete on the global stage, that kind of thing.
00:10:38:06 - 00:10:59:21
Joe Siracusa
Arguably, the Global Futures adventure is part of the cosmic evolution. It's about the process of the cosmos becoming conscious of itself. The future is relatively open and the meaning of the past is not fully determined either. What could possibly go wrong? Global Futures knows that often the best people place to see what's coming down the track are people who are making the present.
00:10:59:23 - 00:11:20:11
Joe Siracusa
Policymakers know that conflict is inherently inappropriate, while looking to formulate grand strategy on the big systemic issues, which are planetary scientists know what doesn't work anymore. Farmers know what's happening in their yields. Teachers know what the students are thinking. The remit of our studies is, in part, to piece together those fragments of the future so that we can be prepared for what's coming next.
00:11:20:13 - 00:11:27:04
Joe Siracusa
So in this sense that our studies complement every discipline within the academy, producing actionable information.
00:11:27:06 - 00:11:35:09
Matthew Sykes
Fantastic. Yes. That concepts of, actionable information. Can we perhaps unpack that a little bit? Any examples that you've got to share?
00:11:35:11 - 00:11:54:12
Joe Siracusa
Okay. Well, we need people who can we can see beyond the horizon, which is seven miles, by the way. And we have to know that the horizon is always changing. Global Futures encourages that sort of a medium to long term thinking, helping us to arrive at actionable information, really intelligence we can know that can nudge us towards the places we want to go in the future.
00:11:54:14 - 00:12:14:23
Joe Siracusa
As a young historian attending a conference in New York, I had the privilege a meeting Thomas Kuhn, an American historian and philosopher whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, took the academy by storm in a scientific revolution, Kuhn observed, the current scientific paradigm is replaced by a new one and offers a different conceptual model of how nature functions.
00:12:15:00 - 00:12:40:23
Joe Siracusa
At some point, scientists cannot proceed with business as usual. This is where Newton had to yield to Einstein, forcing to look, to look for new ways to interpret the data. The Global Futures insight, with its enormous yet elegant message, deeply affected the academy's scientific and business worlds. It's ultimately an empowering mission; since the future isn’t set, Global Futures pushes us to think about the kind of future we want and what actions are needed to achieve it.
00:12:40:23 - 00:12:50:13
Joe Siracusa
It isn't just predicting what happen. You can flip a coin for that. Global Futures helps create frameworks for making better decisions today based on possible futures.
00:12:50:15 - 00:13:11:08
Matthew Sykes
Get a look that feels quite optimistic to me. Really quite pleasingly optimistic. And, you know, I'm brought to mind and, apologies. I'm a bleeding heart cultural studies student. But it brings to mind, Foucault and what we could learn from Foucault in terms of thinking about, the genealogy of knowledge. Episteme. Do you see any sort of role for that kind of thinking within Global Futures?
00:13:11:14 - 00:13:34:02
Joe Siracusa
Yeah. I mean, Global Futures, people started when when Thomas Kuhn was thinking about paradigm shifts. It's about the same time that Foucault's writing books and people are reading his work and taking them very serious at universities. And the idea of being interested in, knowledge and how knowledge is shaped, how it shapes our institutions and how we in turn, you know, punch our tickets to continue to do these things.
00:13:34:05 - 00:13:51:03
Joe Siracusa
And then we get into a world where things don't work. You know, if you try to go through a wall six times, you're going to think about going to wall seven times. It just doesn't work. And what Foucault did was, as well as Sartre and I grew up in the 60s reading those people, and the science fiction and the rest of it, is they challenge you to think new ways, but the new ways of thinking are really always there. You know, they're they're 17th, 18th century, they are about the, the zeitgeist. They are about the climate of opinion. You know, you use a certain way of doing things. You know, they say that people, governments, planning departments of war, ministries of war always plan for the last war.
00:14:14:18 - 00:14:33:17
Joe Siracusa
It's kind of what we're talking about here and how you can see the future. When I was a kid, I heard stories about a very, brave young, sailor named Billy Mitchell who argued that the, the day of the the great war hips is over. The aircraft carrier was going to wipe them off the sea, and he was absolutely right.
00:14:33:17 - 00:14:49:20
Joe Siracusa
He got court martialled for his insubordination by the way. He had this vision that, you know, nations like Japan could just go to the sea and take care of the aircraft carriers without even seeing them by using the planes on top of their ships. So, you know, people can can see these things, but when when you can't explain what's going on.
00:14:49:22 - 00:15:10:15
Joe Siracusa
And my great concern is, unless we take this on seriously and, you know, when Curtin started developing Global Futures, I thought, oh, this is pretty good because it matches my own background now in the history of the future, it's important work because people who get it wrong and people get things wrong all the time, they tend to double down on what they did wrong.
00:15:10:20 - 00:15:28:20
Joe Siracusa
You know, even if it cost people their lives and cost a lot of money. And, we don't have all the time in the world, we got some time, but we don't have all the time in the world. And, you know, when I hear that the Japanese and the Indians and others are making soft landing on the Moon, you can think they're thinking about their future and see what's going to work.
00:15:28:20 - 00:15:42:17
Joe Siracusa
You mean you wonder what the hell they're doing about putting these soft landings? I know what they're doing, their planning for the next world. And I'll tell you what, we're going to miss the, the opportunity unless we start to think like they do. And this kind of thinking obtains right across the world.
00:15:42:19 - 00:16:06:20
Matthew Sykes
As, Yeah. Because when I look, when I think about Foucault. Certainly. And, to some extent, Thomas Kuhn as well, I think about trying to sketch what is knowable, trying to understand what is knowable within any kind of regime of knowledge, and then trying to go beyond that. And I think that that's for me, it looks like what the mission of Global Futures is, you know, is to try and get through that kind of boundary of the knowable and in.
00:16:06:22 - 00:16:37:17
Joe Siracusa
You know, universities is, [inaudible] university in Hanoi, and there's a new liberal arts university 20 years old, in, in, in Morocco. And they both have Foucault and others on the, on the reading list. And they understand that, they're going to miss out on something if they don't look at what these people are saying. And I think these new universities, are just a breath of fresh air, you know, they're not going back to the old things in a sense of, 19th century.
00:16:37:17 - 00:16:55:18
Joe Siracusa
They're going back to those things that caused people to think. The 60s was a very special time, you know, it produced, a lot of people around the world who, that new generation, they were trying to get their heads out of the sand and think about everything. And so what they did was they turned to philosophy, they turned over to moral politics.
00:16:55:20 - 00:17:04:05
Joe Siracusa
They turned to action. You know, I mean, maybe the French should have read a little more instead of throwing rocks at the police in the 1960s. But, I.
00:17:04:05 - 00:17:07:08
Matthew Sykes
Think you could argue that's because they read so much that they threw rocks at police.
00:17:07:11 - 00:17:09:11
Joe Siracusa
That's exactly right.
00:17:09:13 - 00:17:23:17
Matthew Sykes
Well, look, I love this idea that the study of Global Futures will empower students and researchers themselves as well, to create magnificent projects that open up extraordinary possibilities. Certainly sounds exciting, Joe. So do you have any current examples of what that might look like in practice?
00:17:23:19 - 00:17:49:12
Joe Siracusa
Well, I mentioned these universities, but here at Curtin, I, I, I'm a humanities consultant over at St Cats, and we have a student there who's just won a Fulbright. Now, a lot of my students have won Fulbright over the years, about six of them. And, he's going to America to study, engineering and its policy implications for future planning.
00:17:49:14 - 00:18:09:18
Joe Siracusa
So he's combined these two fields by hanging out with people like me. And he likes the future, and he likes, like, you know, like science. And so he's going to combine the two of them together. I think this is a great example of what we can do. Also, I hang out with the, a lot of the urban planners on this campus and they've got some wonderful ideas.
00:18:09:18 - 00:18:31:21
Joe Siracusa
And, you know, every time there is an Olympics and they knock something down, they build something really quite beautiful in its place that could become low cost housing later on. I mean, you know, it's no accident that a lot of the brightest people in universities today are in architecture departments, urban planning departments. They have a very fresh view of what the world looks like and should look like in the past.
00:18:31:21 - 00:18:52:14
Joe Siracusa
You know, when I started university, all your, all your, your vice chancellors and presidents for university were physicists because they looked like, what they'd captured the the sun, the power of the sun, through nuclear weapons and nuclear energy and that kind of thing. And then we moved on to other things. And today, I think a lot of the best, planning in the humanities was that kind of urban planning.
00:18:52:14 - 00:19:09:15
Joe Siracusa
It's got a lot of bright thinkers, people who think, broadly. The thing is, is that they, they don't have the opportunity. I was asked the other day if I would, go into one of the urban planning classes this semester for a couple of lectures and talk about how Global Futures pertains to their work for their students.
00:19:09:17 - 00:19:29:06
Joe Siracusa
So what we don't have yet, we get a lot of people talk about Global Futures as just future with a plural with an S is we don't have a systematic way of looking at what we're doing. You know, weall know how to get there, but we're, we're not quite sure what it means yet. So, you know, we we're all sort of intuitive.
00:19:29:11 - 00:19:37:21
Joe Siracusa
And the nice thing about philosophy is it's intuitive. It's in everybody's head, and all you got to do is just drag it out of it.
00:19:37:23 - 00:20:01:03
Matthew Sykes
Well that's fascinating. Look, I want to ask you, specifically about the current context and, specifically about, those two letters that I think are on everyone's lips at some point, AI. So what can we learn in your view, Joe? Perhaps, from past similar moments of technological upheaval, something that may offer us portents of how this whole thing around AI might play out.
00:20:01:05 - 00:20:20:21
Joe Siracusa
Yeah, well, AI has the same, I think has the same kind of as the internet. You know, it looks like it's going to take everything by storm. It looks like, sort of a substitute for thinking, the way the internet does. You know, the internet has, taught an entire generation of people, how to become a literate.
00:20:20:23 - 00:20:41:17
Joe Siracusa
It's just mastering the mechanics of the internet. Now, they're not unintelligent. They just arrive in that knowledge in a very different way. So, you know, they don’t have to look at something for years and years, like they kind of piece things and, and AI is the same thing. And I mean, they say that I will make, ethical choices in warfare and that kind of thing.
00:20:41:19 - 00:21:04:03
Joe Siracusa
I believe that as long as we understand Global Futures is that we can control the future and the technology that powers it. These are ancillary. These are our friends. They're going to do exactly what we tell them to do, or we're going to take the plug out of the wall. Okay? You know, exist without these people who say that AI and the internet, they've they've overpowered us.
00:21:04:05 - 00:21:26:07
Joe Siracusa
Not not quite yet. We're we're still in charge. And what Global Futures does and I think, I think you hit on the word. It empowers us just to be part of these frameworks that decides that AI will play this role or won't play that role, but it's never going to replace ethics, moral philosophy or human choice. I don't care what you say about these things.
00:21:26:10 - 00:21:48:23
Joe Siracusa
They may become killing machines and the rest of it. But, I think, AI is important. You know, if it, it can look at, millions of pieces of, knowledge and give you ten sentences about something you're in a hurry for. The trouble is, it doesn't tell you how you arrived at it. And it seems to me that with Global Futures, it puts thinking back into, university life.
00:21:49:04 - 00:21:59:23
Joe Siracusa
You know, this isn't just, some, wall chart or or PowerPoints. You know, it teaches people how to think about the future in terms of, frameworks and that kind of thing.
00:22:00:00 - 00:22:18:06
Matthew Sykes
Yeah. For sure. Look, and I think, I would be, I wonder if you were excited about AI from the perspective of how, how much it will help with things like interpretative reasoning, you know, having a look within datasets and, and finding, perhaps some, well, it's not conclusions, but clues about what's coming next.
00:22:18:08 - 00:22:40:12
Joe Siracusa
I've just written, a very important book about the lessons of the First World War. It's called Revisiting the First World War. It's going to be put up by Exeter University Press. And I, wrote it with one of my former students. And so we have about eight chapters. And as an exercise the other day, we just asked AI to name the chapters.
00:22:40:16 - 00:23:05:05
Joe Siracusa
After looking at them. And it had eight brilliant names. You know, I'm pretty good at chapter headings and chapter titles and titles of books, and I thought it's like someone in the room with you, you know, it was it had this intimate knowledge of what was going on, it had the chapters had perfectly framed, and while it was pitch perfect, the titles, there was something surrealistic about it.
00:23:05:05 - 00:23:27:05
Joe Siracusa
You know, a machine could arrive at at those titles. But, you know, you still got to ask human beings to read it. There is no replacing human play. Arthur Clarke makes it very clear and and Wells and everybody else. You can't replace human beings choice. And it is our choice to use these things properly. I mean, we could screw up, we could have bad people in charge of these things.
00:23:27:09 - 00:23:50:04
Joe Siracusa
We could have drones over Washington or London tomorrow. We've all seen the movies, you know, London's down, Washington's down with drones and all of it. But I think ultimately we have choices. And I think things like global future, which connect us to philosophy in the past, philosophers empowers us to have some confidence in what we're doing. Otherwise we're just buffeted by the winds, you know?
00:23:50:04 - 00:24:08:18
Joe Siracusa
And, you know, Donald Trump said the other day that he's got common sense. Well, I don't know about that. But, you know, the one thing I know about common sense is it's not very common. And common sense comes from reading, writing, thinking, and living a life. And I think Global Futures gives us that opportunity.
00:24:08:22 - 00:24:26:19
Matthew Sykes
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So, Joe, your life and your career have taken you right across the world, putting you in front of some of the most important names in 20th and 21st century history. What lessons either drawn from the lives of those you met or from your own experience, would you want to give a student of Global Futures?
00:24:26:21 - 00:24:48:06
Joe Siracusa
Well, I was lucky. I was born and raised in Chicago. I went out west to Colorado on the eastern slope of the Rockies. I studied in Boulder in Denver, and I wanted to enter for a couple of years, and I, I met all the great intellectuals in the world who were on the circuit and before the internet, people like Arnold Toynbee, Hans Cohen, the father of nationalism and Karl Popper and Martin Luther King and everybody else who was doing anything.
00:24:48:06 - 00:25:08:04
Joe Siracusa
They'd go to universities and they'd go to university to talk to students, tell them what they were doing. They didn't try to recruit people, or they would just get confirmation about what they were doing, etc.. And so all these brilliant people used to come to us. I mean, today, these people would never come to you again. You'd have to go through their agents to even get a look at them.
00:25:08:07 - 00:25:30:22
Joe Siracusa
But back before the internet, this is what people had to do. They trusted universities and universities trusted them. And I got to see a great number of, men and women and, who thought for a living. And I was always struck by them, that their extraordinary ability, to, to be understood, they never use big words.
00:25:30:24 - 00:25:52:06
Joe Siracusa
And they understood what any university students or senior student in high school could. So they were very, eloquent. And, there are a great theories, whether it was Karl Popper, the history, the poverty of historicism or whatever it is [inaudible] challenge. As always, very simple things to understand. You know, they they didn't have a big message.
00:25:52:08 - 00:25:59:05
Joe Siracusa
They had an elegant message which then had a big framework. You know, they weren't trying to bowl you over kind of thing.
00:25:59:07 - 00:26:03:07
Matthew Sykes
I wonder, actually, can you tell me a little bit more about meeting Martin Luther King?
00:26:03:09 - 00:26:31:19
Joe Siracusa
Well, it was, April 1967. I was a graduate student at the University of Denver, Colorado. I was in the Josef Korbel School of Graduate Studies. He was Madeleine Albright's father. I didn't know that time though. And, King came and he’d had just given a talk at Riverside Church in New York where he talked about the Vietnam War had superseded the concerns of the civil rights movement.
00:26:31:21 - 00:26:50:06
Joe Siracusa
He argued that, it's not it was impossible to move forward civil rights unless we ended the violence in Vietnam. And, of course, the violence in Vietnam gave the Black Panthers and the Black Power people ammunition over him because he said, you know, how could you ask them to put down their guns when America tries to do everything at the end of a gun, kind of thing?
00:26:50:08 - 00:27:06:08
Joe Siracusa
And so he was, he sort of depressed, and he and he began with Victor Hugo. He says to us, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. And that was civil rights. But he didn't realise that the Vietnam War was going to come and that was completely unanticipated, as far as he was concerned.
00:27:06:10 - 00:27:27:17
Joe Siracusa
And it. And since most of the recruits, 19% of the recruits who are drafted into the armed forces were black kids, and they were sent to Vietnam and they wound up in the, the grinder, they were the disproportionate number of people killed, along with brown people and white people from Appalachia. You know, the, we had 27 million men of, draft age in those days.
00:27:27:17 - 00:27:48:00
Joe Siracusa
And those who, couldn't think of a university to go to or get into or couldn't think of some profession to get into or didn't join the Marines or the Air Force got drafted. And when you got drafted, you were sent to Vietnam and to the machine. And that machine killed 59,000 of my, my, my colleagues, wounded 300,000 and killed two million.
00:27:48:01 - 00:28:08:13
Joe Siracusa
They watched 2 million Vietnamese killed at the same time. You know, people always say to me, gee, you know, one of these mass killings that happened in America, when did they start? They started in the 60s, when a young man climbed the Tower of Texas, a Vietnam veteran, and opened fire on kids and men and women on the campus.
00:28:08:15 - 00:28:34:03
Joe Siracusa
And, it all began in 1966 because Americans are watching the war on television in real time, and they're watching people blown up. They're watching, watching Americans incinerate forests and all the rest of it. It was a very violent time. And so King says that we can't move forward unless we get rid of this. And of course, he became, an arch enemy of Lyndon Johnson.
00:28:34:05 - 00:29:01:05
Joe Siracusa
And Johnson started having him followed, discovering all his secrets. Everybody had secrets, and they made his life miserable for him and he was murdered a year later. But when he came to that classroom and we were all expecting to hear how the civil rights movement would play out in legislation, and he said he'd given up. Here's a Nobel laureate in civil rights who'd given up because the war in Vietnam had overtaken how Americans think about the world.
00:29:01:07 - 00:29:16:01
Joe Siracusa
And so they told me what the future would be. The future would be the post-Vietnam world and civil rights would have to fit in later on. And it did, as a matter of fact. So, that that's the kind of opportunities we had at university that people don't have today.
00:29:16:03 - 00:29:28:04
Matthew Sykes
And so is that I suppose the lesson from that, is that something about if you it's the moment for your idea hasn't yet arrived, that patience is somehow morally part of Global Futures?
00:29:28:06 - 00:29:46:10
Joe Siracusa
Yeah. I mean, moral futures futures includes ethics, moral philosophy and maybe even thinking a little more about the future than you want to. That's right. Maybe your idea has not come, or maybe your idea’s come and it got trashed along the way or got caught up with something else. So, you know, a lot of good people get caught between the, the cracks.
00:29:46:12 - 00:30:09:20
Joe Siracusa
Yeah, kind of thing. And, he he taught us that no matter how powerful you were and that, if you thought about the future long enough, you might even realise that it's not your future. It's somebody else's future. But he could see that the world was turning on a dime when we didn't see it. You know, we were just sort of, into the social movement, activism kind of thing.
00:30:09:22 - 00:30:31:06
Joe Siracusa
And he realised unless you saw one problem you can't solve the next three. And, that was all kind of new thinking for me because I was linear, you know, I thought the future had a straight line. Well, with people like King and with the. You know, what we learn from people like Popper and Hans Cohn and others is that, the future is not linear, nor is the past.
00:30:31:06 - 00:30:34:24
Joe Siracusa
So it's kind of like you know, as Hemingway says, a moveable feast.
00:30:35:01 - 00:30:49:20
Matthew Sykes
What's it? And it calls to mind for me as well. One of my favourite quotes by science fiction author, one who I believe, ran away from the draft up to Canada, William Gibson. And he said that the, the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.
00:30:49:22 - 00:31:15:09
Joe Siracusa
That's that's exactly right. That's. In fact, I think that line was quoted once in the Rocky Mountain News when it was just a terrible newspaper in Denver. I think I saw it there for the first time. Yeah, that's exactly right, the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. That's exactly correct. But anyway, I think this university decision to move along this road of Global Futures is a great idea.
00:31:15:15 - 00:31:42:01
Joe Siracusa
I'm not sure that we we have in place a systematic way of thinking about what we're talking about. You know, people are just sort of imagine what they're doing. But it isn't just about the future of. It's the futures of, you know many possibilities and how we are in control of these things. And frankly, without thinking, I’ve always said to students for the past 50 years, if you don't think about your history, you're not going to have any.
00:31:42:03 - 00:31:46:18
Joe Siracusa
And I'll say the same thing today. If you don't think about your future, you're not going to have one.
00:31:46:20 - 00:31:52:02
Matthew Sykes
Beautiful Professor Siracusa, thank you so much for joining us today. That was, fascinating insight.
00:31:52:03 - 00:31:53:21
Joe Siracusa
Thank you. Thank you.
00:31:53:23 - 00:32:09:12
Speaker 1
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