The future ain’t what it used to be
Do you remember the future? It wasn’t that long ago.
It started on doorsteps and balconies, and sounded like thunderous applause and banging pots. Chatter spread across garden fences and online, and there appeared to be a consensus emerging about what a ‘better future’ may look like. One that provides safety and security through a strong welfare state. A better connection with, and appreciation of, nature. An economy that enhances, rather than degrades, our environment. A society that values the essential but less glamourous institutions and services we take for granted, such as schools, supermarkets and hospitals. Work that provides decent pay, security and self-esteem. A society where everyone has a home, and no one goes hungry.
The future of our past was more optimistic than our present. What happened?
In this article I explore a controversial explanation for the lack of imagination in our current politics. I think this is at the root cause of the the polycrisis we’re now experiencing. So it tries to explain why the status quo is as it is, and how we might change it.
The end of history
In 1989 the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and with it, the Soviet Union. The ideological argument between capitalism and communism was resolved. Western liberal democracy triumphed, triggering the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama to famously declare ‘the end of history’.
Fukuyama’s work builds on the Hegelian idea that human nature is constantly evolving. This evolution drives historical developments, whereby humans become ever more conscious of the rational principles that govern social development. Hegel argued that everything in human societies — particularly ideas — are in constant cycles of becoming and ceasing to be. Nothing is permanent. All human-made things contain contradictory elements, and these contradictions are the driving force of change which eventually transforms or dissolves them. Every idea (thesis) gives rise to a counter idea (antithesis) and the original idea and counter idea merge to give rise to a new idea (synthesis). It is a continuous cycle, as the synthesis itself acquires the status of a thesis and gives rise to its own antithesis. This is how history moves forward.
This is why Fukuyama declared the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of history. The antagonistic intellectualism and imagination that had characterized social development since the French Revolution had ended. Liberalism won, and there were no more ideological competitors for how to organize human societies. No further requirement to imagine alternative futures. Soon liberal democracies and market economies would spread everywhere.
With this convergence and consensus, Fukuyama argued that in future, any fundamental contradiction that arose in how we live (e.g. inequality) would be dealt with in the context of modern liberalism, and would not require imagining alternative realities or whole scale systems change (e.g. communism). The end of history meant that the alternative ideologies people vehemently championed and defended would be replaced with “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” Social, economic and environmental issues become technical problems to solve individually. There would be no more grand narratives, and no more antagonism to propel historical development.
For many years, he was right. Until now.
The end of the end of history
The period following the collapse of the Soviet Union has been described as ‘post-politics’. All the big questions about the type of world we want to live in had been resolved. In the book ‘The End of the End of History’, George Hoare and colleagues argue that this period lasted for several decades, up until 2016, when politics was largely characterised by consensus. This is perhaps best exemplified in the response of the UK’s two largest political parties to the 2008 recession. There was consensus on both the need for quantitative easing and then repaying the debt. The primary disagreements between them were about the technical implementation of those processes, not on whether or not they should fundamentally happen or if there were alternatives.
The growth of social enterprise is also an example of how this consensus has influenced civil society. Uniting the social values of the Left with the market logics of the Right, the concept has proven popular with both sides of the political spectrum. There has been consensus that business can address social and environmental issues, enabled and supported by the State. Again, any disagreements tend to be about the technical implementation of that support. The antagonism of ideas that had once existed in the twentieth century had been supplanted by convergence in the twenty-first.
This order remained intact until 2016, when Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the US sent shockwaves through the political establishment. Hoare argues that the political class have been unable to respond to such changes, because there hadn’t been any for so long.
What we’re experiencing politically now is the echo of that silence.
The echo of silence
Hoare contends we are now in a period of ‘anti-politics.’ Anti-politics is the reaction to post-politics. It takes two forms — anti-corruption (replacing one set of elites with a less corrupt set of elites) and populism (replacing elites with a strong leader). As part of this, he argued the Right is moving towards State Capitalism and the Left towards progressive technocracy. There’s an ‘escape from the nation’ too, with a reluctance to deal with national issues. So policy either escapes upwards to the global level or downwards into local politics.
The way these policies are implemented remains the same. Problems are ‘solved’ at a policy level, detached from the people who experience them. Rather than investigate and tackle the root causes of our collective malaise, Hoare argues that the prevailing liberal order seeks to put economic decisions beyond the reach of democratic decision-making. As Fukuyama predicted, politics is now the endless solving of technical problems. Hoare extends this further, highlighting how nowadays, there’s no overarching logic or narrative — politics is now just a series of events. Even a seismic event such a Brexit is characterised by this. There is no theory of change or vision of the future we are moving towards. No forces like dark flow pulling us forward. This is why it feels like there is no way out of the current polycrisis.
New Labour were perhaps the epitome of post-politics, and so it is logical one of its key architects will have ideas about how to re-establish this status quo. Via his institute, Tony Blair has recently re-emerged with proposals for breaking through this deadlock.
I attended his Future of Britain conference in June 2022, where there was a lot of talk about the need to overcome the bipartisan nature of contemporary politics and build broad based consensus and support for evidence backed policies. Which reminded me of something Bill Clinton once said:
Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.
Every problem has a technical solution. This was perhaps best illustrated in the enthusiastic musings at the conference about the potential of technology to solve many of the challenges we currently face. In one way, it really exposed the lack of vision, strategy and consideration regarding the applications of tech in the policies of most political parties. But it also didn’t go quite far enough. This was New Labour with AI. There was no discussion around how to rebalance the structures and ownership models that have contributed to the concentration of power and wealth we currently experience in this country. No acknowledgement or ideas for dealing with such fundamental contradictions.
The future we remember
We need new ideas but we also need to challenge underlying structures. The challenges we currently face — a continuing cost of living crisis with rising inflation and energy prices, low trust in government, entrenched inequalities as well as the climate crisis — are not going to be solved with the same thinking that created them. As David Edgerton recently highlighted, we’ve got this far into the twenty-first century and growth still means “more cars on the road, more flights, more concrete roads and runways, more plastic and more greenhouse gas emissions.”
Changing how we imagine the future and bring it into being is going to require more than small tweaks at the edges. As the RSA argue, this is likely to involve “a fundamental rethink and reconfiguration of our economic and social systems, business models and behaviours.”
In order to create the change needed, we need to harness our collective imaginations. As Polly Mackenzie highlighted at the Future of Britain conference, people feel alienated from our current systems because democracy is something you do only every four to five years. Democracy needs to be every day. Imagining and building a better future needs to be every day. Only then will we overcome polarisation and build consensus.
So imagine an economy where you could practice democracy every day, tackle social inequalities and climate change, and redistribute power and wealth? The tools for this already exist, including cooperatives, community businesses and social enterprises. Others may point to the potential of citizens assemblies. But these things need nurturing and curation.
We already have many of the tools and ideas we need to create the better future we all remember. The one with a strong welfare state, where we are better connected to nature and an economy that enhances our environment. A society that values essential services and where work provides decent pay, security and self-esteem. A society where everyone has a home, and no one goes hungry.
Let’s go build it.
