The Hopeful Dinner: A Listening Experience
Tim co-curated and co-hosted this dinner on the eve of the Dubai Future Forum
by Tim Leberecht
Data, prediction markets, scenarios, foresight, strategic planning, speculative design, imagination, science fiction – there are countless ways to envision and plan for the future. Attending the Dubai Future Forum, the world’s largest gathering of futurists, this week, however, I couldn’t help but ponder a heretical question: Does the future get any better if we humans think we can anticipate or even create it? Isn’t it presumptuous to think so? Sometimes the future just shrugs its shoulders in light of our hubris.
On the eve of the Forum, the House of Beautiful Business wanted to explore a seemingly humbler source of futuring: hope. For “the hopeful expect the incalculable, possibilities beyond all likelihood,” as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes.
In close partnership with the DUBAI FUTURE FOUNDATION and the Jameel Arts Centre we hosted “The Hopeful Dinner,” gathering 75 guests under the stunning outdoor dome of the centre, designed by architect Adib Dada.
It wasn’t your typical dinner, rather, a “listening experience”: a journey through a lifetime of hope that took place over three delicious courses and three audio “acts” ranging from birth and other hopeful beginnings to “hope in the middle” and finally, the next frontier of hope (transhumanism, mars, aliens, AI, a new consciousness?).
We had curated, edited, or recorded from scratch a diverse set of voices of and on hope, featuring political and business leaders, artists, philosophers, scientists, social justice activists, from poems, speeches, interviews, movies, and songs, inserting and ultimately culminating in a composition of hope co-created by the guests and our musical director Mark Aanderud.
It was a moving experience to listen together, with our eyes closed – in this case to a playlist that was the very opposite of the usual podcast chatter.
We need to listen more, including to those we haven’t paid attention to or those we disagree with. Listening is a way of connecting with the world rather than trying to master it. It means acting without action and understanding through undivided attention.
