Foresighting the Philippine future

It is the twilight of 2020 before Christmas and the New Year, and we tend to look back at the year that was, rather than the year that is to be. The year 2021 is the eve of the May 2022 elections, the results of which could reasonably be expected to change the fortunes of this country.

Filipinos are so uninformed of our collective future, yet we do not devote enough time to generate information about our future through systematic foresighting. We often hear that the only way to predict the future is to make it. Indeed, there is a systematic way of generating information about the future in order to gain perspective and information on what we need to do at present to shape the days and years ahead.

When the United States was blindsided by events that led to 9/11, the science of forecasting and foresighting got a tremendous boost. Defining and anticipating the “probable” have become too chancy; “plausible” must be the new standard. Murphy the pessimist appears to have been right all along—if it can happen, it will happen.

9/11 was not the first time the United States was caught by surprise. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, seemed impossible, but it happened. Actually, the attack on Davao, Baguio, and Clark Field in the Philippines was a more incredulous debacle, because the attack on Pearl Harbor happened a full nine hours before the Japanese attack on the planes on the ground in the Philippines. The US aircraft losses were comparable to those sustained in Oahu, Hawaii.

When the specter of the Millennium Bug, or Y2K, reared its head at the twilight of the 20th century, the whole world was not at all blindsided. But it was blinded by an illusion of tragedy that did not happen. Because computers controlled so many systems life depended on, imagined catastrophic events included widespread blackouts, emergency room equipment failing, planes falling out of the sky, and even a nuclear holocaust being inadvertently set off.

But tremendous remedial and anticipatory actions were undertaken by governments, information and communication technology industries, and national security establishments to meet the Y2K bug. It helped that this problem had been identified as early as the 1970s, and by 1985 it was already written about in books as the “Year 2000 Problem.”

The year 2020 was the year the people on the planet should have been most confident about, event-wise. After all, as numeronyms go, 20-20 means perfect eyesight. Countries like Malaysia had, as early as 1991, used 2020 as the horizon of their long-term development plans (e.g., Wawasan 2020 or Vision 2020).

As I write this column, the Future Earth Philippines, a coalition of advocates of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, is holding a national workshop attended by 140 participants from government, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, academe, and local communities to share knowledge, skills, and perspectives on science-based pathways and scenario-building in preparation for identifying and implementing knowledge-into-action problem-solving initiatives in cities and communities.

As the workshops have progressed, it has dawned on the participants that there are indeed so many things that need to be identified, evaluated, and shared about the key drivers that may or may not change over the course of decades or longer, and what the implications these make on the political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal, and ecological conditions that are forming. The poverty of the country is not so much in scenarios, as in systematic conversations by all stakeholders about the future of local government units and communities. Government is certainly important, but imagining our future should not be left to government.

We must not forget: The most significant foresighting offered to the Philippines ever was done by our national hero, Jose Rizal. Let us celebrate and emulate how he boldly wrote his four-part essay, “Filipinas dentro de cien años” (The Philippines a century hence), in the magazine La Solidaridad. It was a single individual foresighting the interplay of large global forces on a Philippines then on the verge of making its own destiny. It is time we realized that the Philippines has been too much of a country without a windshield to see the future, but with a surfeit of rear-view mirrors to review the past.

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Erratum: I was born 1950, not 1945 as my last column suggested.

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