Imagine the impossible
Imagine the impossible
by Simon Wilson
Robyn Williams wants us to do some transformative thinking, about science, sex and a perfect future.
Robyn Williams thinks that buses and trains should be free. They should run so often that they don’t need timetables, and they should be clean, safe and aesthetically pleasant. He also thinks that pornography should be taught in schools. With practical classes.
An Australian, Williams is a famous science journalist – a rare breed anywhere in the world – doing his bit to shake up the way we think. It’s not easy, what with science being so out of fashion. “All those students at university now,” he says, “do they actually like commerce? Law? Science is real. It’s about what’s in your gut or out the window. I find that compelling.”
Science is also, he says, full of fascinating and valuable ideas, and necessary to democracy, safety and the creation of wealth. And – “personally, I’d put this category first” – it’s a lot of fun.
His new book Future Perfect is a sampler for all this, a short and very lively series of provocations on transport, cities, media, education, religion, innovation, work, the environment and, yes, sex.
Williams has been producing and presenting science programmes for the ABC since 1972. He’s a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales and a former visiting professor at Balliol College, Oxford. He’s so famous, he’s had a star named after him. He’s so famous, he’s appeared in Dr Who and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
His book is full of problems, of course. The world is in a mess. But it’s also full of solutions. Williams’s theme is that we already have so many of the ideas and even the resources to hold back climate change, sort out the traffic, make work more rewarding. What we lack is the will to put them into practice.
He’d like us to learn to think like David Attenborough, who reinvented natural world documentaries with Life on Earth. “They said, okay, let’s imagine the impossible. So they did. And they suddenly realised, about 85 percent of it could actually work. You can apply that to anything. Imagine the impossible, and then do it.”
Rather like John Lennon with a science degree? “Yes, I’ll take that. You know, lots of people sit around imagining their perfect house. So if you translate that thinking process to your village, to your town, to your school block, to the way that nature can be built into your city, well, dreaming about what it might be like in 20 or 30 years’ time, and then retrofitting it, is perfectly straightforward.”
Transformative thinking. First, the key question: what will make people stop driving their cars? Then, the big answer: make buses and trains free, frequent and flash. And then you work back from there.
He’s ready with statistics. Traffic jams cost Australia $13.8 billion a year. In some places, the price of public transport tickets pays for no more than the cost of issuing and collecting them.
Why are we stuck? “We need to invest, and people don’t like to pay taxes any more. They think that things come from the infrastructure fairy.”
But cutting taxes is now widely considered a mark of good government. How do you turn that perception around? “If you gave people a really exciting way of showing that you can invest money, in other words their money, in other words taxes, and that you could build things that would alleviate their problems, then I really do think people would accept that.”
In his own field, the media, Williams despairs that so many “documentaries” come from the “total bollocks school of science journalism”. Nonsensical ideas get treated far too seriously, and not just because they’re good for ratings and sales. He also blames “the knowledge supermarket”, where all ideas are intrinsically and equally valuable, and “the choice is up to the customer”.
“We need critical thinking to help us dispose of the dross. Our schools and universities should be the front lines of this, not dupes of snake-oil merchants.”
Williams was 13 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. It’s incredible, he says, that 50 years later “we are not living in the space age … but in Blade Runner’s LA, a mixture of flash gear and squalid dysfunction”.
“Why are our lives not transformed rather than tricked up?”
One part of the answer, he suggests, is that despite rapid technological change, industry has turned away from innovation aimed at improving our lives. What we get is an endless stream of slightly better things to buy, and we accept this because we have been turned from citizens into consumers.
“Twenty years ago, Margaret Thatcher denied there was something called society. We were a bunch of individuals, or families, awash in an ocean of uninterest in community.”
Is he angry? He likes to think of himself as “laconic, like my friend John Clarke”.
Pessimistic? “On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’m really optimistic. But then I look at the stupidity of our international institutions and I think, bloody hell.”
Despite this, he thinks industry is changing. Major insurance companies have declared they will not continue to do business “when the world is in havoc”. This, Williams suspects, will have a sobering effect on corporate minds.
So what about that porn? The logic goes like this. Some monkeys don’t seem to know how to have sex unless they see others doing it. Some researchers think porn may have a similar educational role for us. Now that we no longer sleep in groups crowded together in caves, we don’t see live sex any more. And yet we yearn to know more about it.
“Porn, in this analysis,” Williams says, “must therefore be seen as a modern cry for help … Young people need to know what their parts are for and what the fuss is about. Grown-ups need to build ways out of routine and repetition.”
And if these are legitimate needs, there must be better ways to fulfil them than the exploitative and joyless labourings of pornography. Which is why, he says, sex skills should be in the curriculum, taught by “attractive expert sex surrogates”.
“The chapter on sex is slightly whimsical,” he confesses, although it’s also a kind of intellectual cattle prod: Williams wants us to do some transformative thinking, about science as well as sex.
Because the future does work. He’s seen it. When the Olympics came to Sydney in 2000, he says, the whole city embraced the concept that it could be a vastly better place. They imagined the impossible, and set about creating it.
“You could see the spirits lift. People took public transport, which in many instances was free. A major city was transformed, and we welcomed people of all nationalities. It was an astonishing experience. It’s that kind of ambition, and goodwill, that I think can transform. It’s not just a pipe dream. It happened. I was there.”
So we put our cities on a project footing and watch them hum? “Yes.”
----------------- Jack of Nothing Master of www.insanity.co.nz -----------------