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I’ve been interested in the work of the Capita Foundation for a few years, in part because they’re pretty utopian in their thinking. I want to highlight their work on creatively imagining different ways we might flourish in the future. In their Forecast Foundations for Flourishing Futures, Capita provides several “artifacts from the future” to illustrate how we might reorganize our lives for the better in response to some of the intense challenges we face (e.g., economic limits, climate change).
I love the idea of providing artifacts from the future. This is exactly the kind of utopian thinking I’ve been craving, because it takes seriously the need to 1) question fundamental assumptions about what it means to live well, and 2) provide concrete scenarios for what it might be like to live differently.
One artifact I’m particularly interested in is the “Co-parenting Agreement: The New Blended Family.” This agreement is a contract between a married same-sex couple, a cohabiting heterosexual couple, and a friend. They all enter into a contractual agreement to raise two children together. Two households, five adults, and four children become a family that is legally recognized as such.
This artifact gave me space for imagining a future where the nuclear family of two adults caring for some number of children within one household is assumed as the default. It’s an interesting example of the idea of a “chosen family” going a few steps further to become something with another layer of legal consequence and responsibility, as well as reward. It’s also potentially a way forward at a time when 44% of adults under 50 report that they are unlikely to have kids. Not having kids doesn’t mean that these adults might not want to be involved in children’s lives.
Of course, all of this probably gets very complicated very quickly. Negotiating child rearing between two parents is hard enough. I can only imagine that binding more adults together to try to make shared decisions about what is best for their collective children is all the more challenging.
However, there’s so much in our lives that we already do together with other adults that often requires negotiation of roles, responsibilities, and authority. For example, work. Why couldn’t family be more similar to these other adult cooperative activities? The advantage here is that parenting then becomes this more public activity we do with other adults, rather than something that feels fairly private and removed from the challenges but also fun of getting shit done with friends.
Whether or not you agree with the specifics of Capita’s proposal, I find its attempt to put forward a concrete artifact from the future inspiring. It lets us take seriously the reality of different ways of living that have yet to come. This kind of reverse archeology may be key to helping us excavate a flourishing future civilization yet to come.