Abstract
Jim Dator’s recent book is a kind of autobiographical and self-reflexive cognitive travelogue. He calls for the flexibility of identities in every situation. In other words, flexible identities and changing identities are necessary regardless of the context. They could help avoid the traditional conflicts that have plagued human communities for ages (or perhaps since the beginning of the agricultural era). Dator launches the concept of ‘weirding worlds’. These weirding worlds form the post-normal period which is normal. So, weirdness is normal. Weird worlds (which are not weird) and transforming identities make the core idea of the book. At the same time, the focus of identities shifts from being to becoming.
1
This book by Jim Dator, a former University of Hawaii Department Director and Professor ‘Beyond Identities: Human Becomings in Weirding Worlds’ has been published by Trento University Professor Roberto Poli in the Springer Nature Anticipation Series.
Dator describes the ethos of his book: Representatives of Homo sapiens sapiens are now and have always been dynamic “human beings” and not the “people” of the established fashion. He tells stories about people - and a lot about himself - who adopt identities that they consider to be more suitable for themselves than identities that the others are showing for them - woman, man, queer, straight, black, white, Hispanic, trans or post-gender. The list of identities from reflection continues: disabled, prisoner, migrant and a refugee. The book is divided into fourteen chapters and contains a comprehensive coverage of the thematic bibliographical references as well as poems.
The book has sparked international debate including the Journal of Futures Studies Community of Practice, led by Nur Anisah from Tamkang University in Taiwan. The Book Club 2 distributed chapter by chapter reflections during the summer of 2023 by critically examining the identity and strangeness at different levels, English language norms, adaptation, living as a foreigner, colonialism and world views. The club was even in correspondence directly with Dator. He clarified different questions raised by the book and opened up ideas, especially in relation to identity and how he had distanced himself from fiction and science fiction. Participants found the correspondence interesting and as a source of profound ideas and a momentous experience. The debate also generated disagreements, which contributed to prompting participants to reflect on their own their identities as individuals and futurists.
Jim Dator is a futures studies pioneer and a major authority in the field with a recognised stance of avant-garde and non-conventional thinking. He has lived and taught in Hawaii for 50 years.
Dator developed in Hawaii University, at its Department of Political Studies, a research group on futures studies whose thinking and outputs make up the so-called Manoa school (Dator, 2009). Dator is fundamentally a cultural nomad who has visited and lived in 75 countries. He has spoken keynotes a few times in Finland 3 as well. For example, the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) organised its conference on ‘Chaos and Coherence’ in 1993 and in 2012 he was invited to speak at the seminar organised by the Finnish Society for Futures Studies (FSFS) in memory of his close friend in the field - Mika Mannermaa. More recently, he was awarded Honorary Doctorate in 2017 by the Turku School of Economics. Dator is known for introducing the so-called Second Law of Dator claiming ‘that every useful idea for the future should first look ridiculous’. 4 In addition, he has outlined a typology of four futures archetypes: growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. All scenarios and future scenarios, that have been and are being made, fit in his view more or less into one of these categories. Although in general Dator requires thinking about the future as plural - alternative futures - in this book he paints a singular future. That future will emerge from the current processes he addresses. This future is not a glorious utopia. It can be a challenging eutopia, but not the terminal dystopia that many now see when we start to identify and create intelligence beyond the human intelligence. According to Dator, we should thank those pioneers who are learning to live in new futures testing new ways of becoming something. We should encourage our continued development as a homo sapiens sapiens in our relationship with many forms of intelligences - in machines, animals, plants and fungi on Earth and throughout the cosmos. To facilitate these transitions, we should create forward-looking transitional frameworks. Rather than continuing to teach young people about the fears of the past - based on customs and legends - we need ceremonies that encourage every person to leave, perhaps with other seekers, on an endless journey to explore and discover always new ways to become something. Dator was particularly influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s declaration: ‘I am not a human being; I am a human becoming’. So, human being is a verb, not a noun!
Forward-Looking Transformations as a Process
Culture and kinship create identities. Dator has lived and worked in numerous cultures, including several formidable years in Japan teaching political research at the University of Rikkyo in Tokyo - feeling left out and strange. 5 The concept of strangeness is further explained by Dator not earlier than on page 96 of his work. Hunter Lovins, one of the founders of the Institute of Rocky Mountain, has originally used the term and concept of ‘global weirding’. John Sweeney (2014; see also 2019) has adopted this concept to refer to the Anthropocene post-normal times. This means that the things we take for granted are transformed in uncertain ways, our understanding of things is lost, and long-held norms are broken. Such as global weirdness gives way to difficult phenomena, which changes our sense of being here in this world. 6 Dator also raises the issue of ‘dismodernism’ - a concept that refers, among other things, to all bodies as being atypical, as well as autonomic and independent rather than dependent. This stance takes into account both disabled persons and the experience of identities as part of the norm.
According to Dator, identity is created through interaction with other people, and also with the past, present and future. Furthermore, we cannot exclude the possibility or desirability of humans’ conversion to posthumans or transhumans species. The Oxford English Dictionary defines identity as the ‘identity of a person or thing at all times in all circumstances’. The whole concept did not exist in encyclopaedias earlier. Dator raises the issue of identity by William Glasser in his work on the Identity Society (1972) and Erik Erikson, who launched the concept of identity crisis (1968). Dator interprets Alvin Toffler’s (1970) 7 idea of the future as a way of life and interestingly also as a source of identity. The core message of Dator is that all human beings have many identities according to their role and everyone should be allowed to define oneself from within one’s own their identity. However, in order to achieve fair futures, we should transcend identities and shift the focus from being to becoming. Moreover, future generations are always only just becoming.
Dator cites another futurist as an example of someone who - with an astonishing way of ‘becoming’ is at home in many different cultures, languages and identities - Sohail Inayatullah. Authenticity is in Inayatullah's (1999) thinking the most important thing. A person can be many things–he or she can travel, get married and learn about others through episodes of life and cultures and then incorporate them into their own, creating the pluralistic self. 8 Dator, who spent his youth constantly and rootlessly on the move, had to invent himself again and again in new places. After years in US southern parts, Canada and Japan, he settled in Hawaii. It was a paradise not only in terms of climate but also in terms of cultural diversity and strange ideas enabled by tolerance. He actively contributed to the development of Hawaii’s future and forward-looking thinking by the judiciary (e.g., Dator, 1981).
Dator (see pp. 53–55) makes a tantalising argument why futures studies still has not been universally accepted as a science. In his view - to put it bluntly in other words – futures studies could be every in every university’s curriculum if from the start the field of futures studies would have talked about ‘future theory’, as for example, environmental and feminist studies have done by talking about the theory of their field and have thus established themselves. 9 Of the various groups, Dator is particularly fascinated by the identity of refugees, which is built on mobility “Futures and the Sel(ves): How We Can Use the Future for Inner Transformation?”, which explored the strategy of finding common narratives through transformative identities and the metaphors that describe them typically through disruptions 10 This differs from the identity of migrants based on voluntary. He also deals largely with environmental refugees and reflects on the nation-state mentality replacing new units of analysis: the family, local community, biosphere, Earth, the inner part of our solar system, Milky Way or galaxies or the cosmos between the galaxies? Or the units of the microcosm: DNA, cells, microbes, fungi and viruses that have power within all of us, not to mention molecules, atoms and quarks.
People as Evolving Cyborg Organisms
Dator points out that people have always been cyborgs - organisms that transform themselves physically, chemically and genetically for their own purposes. This is nothing new, unnatural, abnormal or strange. No part of the human body, inside or outside, has escaped voluntary or involuntary modification or mutilation, and our ability to shape ourselves according to our preferences is increasing, in good and bad. At the same time, people have moulded thoroughly the Earth’s environment into which we evolved (the Holocene epoch). We live now in a new era - an uncertain, human driven period called the Anthropocene. What was adaptation 15,000 or even 100 years ago may now be pure suicide. ‘Human becoming’ as depicted by Dator can therefore be seen both as a continuous emergence of individual identity and as the evolution of human beings beyond the usual limits of humanity. Dator reminds the reader that futures studies to a lesser extent explore the future but images of the future – that is hopes, fears, beliefs of futures. Fred Polak (1973) showed how the weight given to the futures images will affect the fate of each culture. Polak believes that cultures need explicitly positive visions of the future in order to flourish. The same applies to individuals. Dator calls for children to be consulted and included in the debates on the futures. 11 As a barrier to positive visions of the future, Dator sees especially two phenomena, commercial advertising and science fiction, both of which colonise our visions of the future.
Dator highlights the human relationship with space and non-terrestrial environments (Not Earth) in the past, present and in the future. He describes meticulously technology for space travel development ever since Leonardo Da Vinci’s plans for a flying ship to the plans in the Cold War power struggle. He further ponders how similar types of people (mainly white male) have been in space, and no general conclusions can be drawn from this sample how a person acts or changes when he or she is in a non-terrestrial space. Such potential impacts from non-terrestrial environments are of interest to Dator. He wonders how the human body and the identity may change when they operate in a non-earth environment, and how this human being evolves into something that lives and acts without those social and physical constraints that concern today’s human beings.
Concluding Remarks
In his work, Dator also reflects on his own identity and opens up its formation, especially through the etymology of his surname - Dator. Throughout the book, Dator describes his changes of location and the experience of rootlessness while he has always sought a sense of belonging through his name. The meaning of the surname Dator is concerned with computers, machine learning and artificial intelligence - human creation but also technologies that challenge the human intelligence.
Dator also describes technological developments as opening up new opportunities for identities, when the need to work is reduced. Besides demographic characteristics, the identities are therefore strongly influenced by the link to the meanings that we create for ourselves through work. Dator describes how the new technologies challenge the shaping of our identity and lead us to reflect not only on our own identity, but on the definition of the whole of humanity. The book offers, in particular, futurists a tantalising reading experience not only for its contents of reflective on identities in weird worlds, but also as pondering interestingly on a cavalcade of genealogical persons, events and conceptual developments in terms of narrative history. The writing does not purely fit into any traditional genre, such as scientific writing, autobiography, poetry, but builds a fluid hybrid as a stream of consciousness and as a metaphor for a plate of different tastes of sushi bites. Dator strongly describes the formation of identities to be based on demographic characteristics and the meanings from outside the individual. The book leaves the reader wanting more reflection on how the traits that emerge from the individual - temperament, personality, emotions - influence one’s perception of oneself. The book deals extensively with humanity and its place in our environment. The desired flexibility of identities based on demographic characteristics can, however, be conceived as largely in line with the liberal ideal of identity. Independence from place and culture – trans-identity - is the privilege of the very few.
