Yesterday, Scientific American published a story called Back to the Future: How the Brain "Sees" the Future. The article leads off with the following observation:
Neuroscientists for the first time have identified regions of the brain involved in envisioning future events. Using brain imaging, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that the human mind taps into the same parts of the brain while imagining the future as it does when recollecting the past. This means that the brain apparently predicts the course of future events by imagining them taking place much like similar past ones.
Several things hit me as I read this article.
First, a future orientation is one of the key distinguishing variables of cultures and individuals who achieve sustained prosperity. For example, I recently read Anthony Giddens Runaway world: How Globalizations is Reshaping our Lives. Giddens devotes the second essay in this book to the concept of risk. The modern idea of risk fully emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as explorers began to fan out worldwide. (It should also be noted that this was precisely when modern science and the scientific method were also born.) Apart from some marginal exploration of the idea in the Middle Ages, risk was a new concept. Up until this time in human history, the future was determined by fate, luck, or the will of the gods.
Giddens writes, "Risk refers to hazards that are actively assessed in relation to future possibilities." It presumes the ability to discern a series of causes and effects, and to evaluate the likely outcome of a series of choices. Double-entry bookkeeping emerged in Europe in the fifteenth century, greatly expanding the human capability to measure the precise financial consequences of economic decisions and then weigh them against each other. The sizeable expense of investing in ocean-going expeditions starting in the fifteenth century created a great demand for precise risk-calculating abilities. As Giddens notes, the modern notion of risk is at the very core of capitalism. Capitalism created prosperity in the West and is now prospering those cultures and individuals that embrace its risk-assessing future orientation.
Second, the ability to assess risks ultimately leads to another quality: hope. One commonality among those mired in perpetual poverty is the inability to envision an alternate future. Without evidence of how things can change and the belief that making an extended series of decisions will ultimately lead to an intended outcome, people can't develop the institutions and values that lead to prosperity. Fate, luck, and capricious gods do not contribute to the development of future orientation. They do not create hope.
On the contrary, they tend to create an aversion to change and distrust toward innovation. Traditionalism is still one factor that opposes a risk assessing future orientation, but other obstacles also exist. Some are blocked from being able to see alternative futures because they live in totalitarian societies where change seems unimaginable. Others, living in more free and developed societies, grow up in dysfunctional subcultures where future-oriented thinking models are absent. Life is experienced as one long series of chaotic uncontrollable events after another. This leads to a third point.
Third, the ability to assess the future is linked to the ability to assess the past. We can only begin to anticipate the cause-and-effect relationships in the future by reflecting on the cause-and-effect relationships of the past. For the vast majority of Westerners, this connection between past and future is so obvious as to be self-evident, and yet it is precisely this skill that is either horribly corrupted or absent from most of the chronic poor in Western societies. Because of the chaos in people's lives, their actions often lead to different consequences than the rest of us experience with the same actions. The potential outcomes of a given action are significantly more variable. Without a consistent cause-and-effect correlation in experience, one cannot make cause-and-effect correlations about the future. It becomes impossible to abstract out the essential elements of our life experiences to see what is determinative.
For instance, when a police officer responds to a call about a car accident, most people who witnessed the event will report, "The guy in the SUV ran the red light and broadsided the car." When a person from chronic generational poverty is asked what happened, they will often offer a lengthy, non-chronological, often emotionally charged series of observations mixed with important and irrelevant information. The ability to discriminate between the central and peripheral details is largely absent. Without this past/future linkage and the discernment of cause and effect, qualities like planning, risk-taking, and deferred gratification are unthinkable.
Fourth, the fact that the brain uses precisely the same regions for contemplating past and future events makes perfect sense to me. Seeing into the future and seeing into the past are inextricable activities. Yet surely, the human capacity for "futuring" predates the sixteenth century. Why its recent advent? It occurs to me that the biblical narrative holds the answer.
Human beings were created in the image of God. God is a creative being who sees into the future and anticipates cause-and-effect relationships as God creates. God created humanity to reflect this creative quality as they "fill the earth" and harness nature toward a more fruitful and bountiful condition (rule and subdue.) The Genesis creation accounts have within them the idea of progression from nothing to a universe, to an earth, to a garden, and then to the "tending of the garden" toward some more complete end as God fills the Earth with His stewards.
With the rebellion against God came estrangement. Estrangement from God meant separation from the narrative of God's unfolding story. Cut off from God, cause and effect in the world become arbitrary and unpredictable. Humanity is left to conform to the rhythms and patterns of nature, conforming to them so as not to "anger the gods" or "tempt fate." As Thomas Cahill so eloquently pointed out in his book Gift of the Jews, the Old Testament's story introduced a radical departure from this cyclical thinking into the world. It gave a gift in the form of the concept of linear time. The biblical narrative teaches that time is moving from a beginning point toward some particular end. It is not just a series of endless cycles.
As Rodney Stark points out in The Victory of Reason, Christianity expanded on this time orientation revolution. Judaism introduced linear time to the world and the idea that we are processing toward a conclusion. The orientation of Judaism is predominately toward conforming to past dictates given by God as the people of God await the coming messianic age. But Jesus came speaking of a coming "Kingdom of God" that had begun in the present. He gives a vision of the coming Kingdom and then sends his followers out to invite people into the Kingdom. His followers were to live in the present as if the future already exists. Furthermore, unlike Judaism with Moses and Islam with Mohammed, we cannot go back and read what Jesus wrote because Jesus didn't write anything down. In the New Testament, we have four authoritative witnesses to the life and ministry of Jesus and a collection of authoritative documents about how the first-century Jesus followers sought to work out the Kingdom vision in their context.
The story of Christianity radically refocuses human existence away from conformity with the past (although it incorporates the past into its story with affirmation) and orients our focus toward the future. Furthermore, the way the biblical story was handed to us compels us to reason our way, with the guidance of the Spirit, to discerning Kingdom living in a New Creation. We use our minds to reflect on the past aspects of the biblical story and our stories, discern cause and effect, apply that discernment toward achieving a future vision, and then are instructed to act according to that discernment and vision. The Old Testament story leads us out of a cyclical hole into the idea of a procession through time. The New Testament leads us from a procession through time to a progression through time until Christ returns and consummates the redemption of creation and humanity.
Finally, what all of this highlights to me is the power of the biblical narrative and the importance of the way it has been given to us by God. During the past two or three centuries in the West, Enlightenment and Modernist thinkers have successfully portrayed themselves as the harbingers of a new autonomous humanity grounded in scientific rationalism and economic advancement, which they instituted by rising above the backward influences of Christianity. They wrote God, and God's revealed Word, out of the narrative and inserted themselves as the gods who had delivered humanity. Regrettably, instead of standing by the narrative model God revealed, Christianity splintered into camps of foundational thinking.
One camp believed it could discern a universal religious experience behind all human religions, of which Christianity was only a high expression. The quest focused on discovering this foundational experience shared by all. Another camp believed the Christian faith could be preserved by reducing Christianity to a system of doctrines and behaviors that would serve as the foundation upon which all else could be built. This is not to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with looking for commonalities between religious experiences or systematically evaluating doctrine and practice. However, engaging in these tasks is not the central call of Jesus' disciples. Coming under the authority of the narrative and being defined by it are the central tasks of Jesus' disciples. The biblical narrative of how the world works needs to inform our narrative. At the personal level, individual spiritual formation is largely about the unique pieces of our personal stories being recast and rewoven into the fabric of God's unfolding story.
As we live into a postmodern era, I am encouraged to see many in the Church rediscovering the concept of a biblical narrative and trying to recover it. This is the journey I am on as well. However, I also must confess my frustration. Many who talk about recovering the narrative seem to have bought the Modernist fiction that ideas like reason, science, and economic freedom are creations of the Enlightenment. In fact, the Enlightenment cannibalized these concepts, removed God from the equation, and placed autonomous humanity at the helm. These concepts are gifts God gives us through interaction with His revealed narrative. Yet, many are ready to dispense with them as biblically antithetical concepts because of how the Modernist era has perverted them. If the Church is to have any hope of truly recapturing the biblical narrative, we must instead embrace these intellectual gifts and restore them to their proper place in service of the narrative God is unfolding in history. Only then will our brains be able to take full advantage of the ability God has given us to connect the past and the future in pursuit of, and in anticipation of, the New Creation.
Leave a Reply