I was asked to talk about resilience during an event last month organized by the architects Perkins & Will, and I decided to talk about the idea of ”a policy of the future”, which seems more and more important if we want to sail in a world of climate disturbance and mental loss – apart from the practices of disarbonization of our societies. This is a slightly widely widely extended version of my remarks there.
I drawn quite strongly on a paper last year by Julian White, at LSE, called ‘The future as a democratic resource‘. He asks, rhetorically,
What is getting lost when the future is lost?
Imagined future
The rather clear answer is democratic policy. The reason is that the elections within a democracy are supposed to be a competition between different parties offering different imaginary future. (This is similar to the argument of Jens Beckert in Imagined future that in companies, senior executives compete for the visions of the future of the organization.)
But there is a large hole where these imagined assets should be. The law tends to offer a vision of an imaginary past, while the central parties, whether they are left or center-right, intend to manage the present. They focus on politics, not on politics. I will come back to this distinction.
Research suggests that this lack of alternative affects the level of voting because people are starting to refrain from voting and the most disadvantaged are the first to abandon.
Better life
And maybe there are some results of the search for survey which are relevant here.
The first is that people are likely to believe that other people are less concerned with climate change than them, which reduces public pressure for political action. You must wonder if the technocratic way that climate change and related policies are discussed in the public influence this perception.
At the other end of the political spectrum, people who voted for Trump in 2016 and Brexit in 2017 are more likely to answer “no” to a question of whether their children will have a better life than them. They believe that the future closes over them.
Three CS, or four
White maintains in his article that there are three advantages of a policy of the future. These are:
- Critical perspective
- Collective agency, and
- Commitment.
By widening a little, critical perspective Creates a distance between the present and a possible future, which facilitates the imagination of a different future. Significant alternatives also allow a travel direction, rather than simply reacting to events.
Creation of collective– or maybe create A Collective – consists in building a shared idea of ”us”. This is something that politics, widely described, can do, but politics cannot do. Party policy will always be a form of coalition construction in the conventional sense of creating collections of interest around questions. But the element of the future imagination creates more consistency.
Political prophecy
White quotes Roberto Unger as saying
Politicians must speak in two languages - both calculations of interest and political prophecy.
The third element here, commitmentconsists in giving this coalition a coherence when things become turbulent. Because, if you want to change anything, you will also find yourself in the “transitional hollow”: things will become more difficult and more jumped before improving. A policy of the future allows you to set up these rapids.
So maybe there is also a fourth “C” here, for cohesion.
The “abundance” thing
Part of this recalls the recent book Abundanceby Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I didn’t read it, but it was impossible to miss it. It was n ° 1 on the New York Times The list of bestsellers, and almost all male politicians in America felt the need to write something about it.
One of these messages City two sentences Of the introduction they felt summed up the thesis of the book:
“This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we must build and invent more what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.”
Build and invent, in general, more houses, more rails (at high speed), more green technologies and cleaner technology. It should be noted that the We In this quote, does a lot of work, and for my money, it’s pretty thin. Indeed, it is a call for more public goods. (Nothing with that: we generally need more public goods, but we need a lot more than that.)
Feeling structures
The reason Abundance is interesting for me, it is not because of what it is, but because all this interest in this represents.
(Raymond Williams: Structures of Feeling. Photo: Gwydion Madawc Williams, Public domain.)
Raymond Williams cultural criticism developed the idea of Feeling structures– to which I should return here to another occasion – to describe the changes you could feel or feel before you can measure them.
Sometimes they first appear in culture: for example, Williams describes how the evolution of debt attitudes in England in the 19th century was seen first in the writings of Dickens and Emily Bronte. In other words, feeling structures point out a possible cultural hypothesis.
Test the hypothesis
It should also be noted that Abundance is one of the books of us who are almost the same problem: Blockedby Yoni Appelbaum, and Why nothing worksBy Marc Dunkelman, are in the same political space.
In this case, part of the hypothesis of Abundance has been tested. The Biden Administration spent 1 Billion of dollars by investing in public goods under the law on the reduction of inflation, and as far as we can say, given how things turned out, almost no one has noticed.
And the goal here is not to spend time on a review of AbundanceBut just to note that it is a book on policyNo politics. And Ezra Klein has said as much about his podcastWhen he spoke to the criticisms of his book on the American left. (He also admitted to having been surprised by these criticisms, who concerned the lack of politics and the political economy, in the book.) Of my notes:
We have to start the political results we want and work back.
Cancel the future
Because: a policy of the future must involve more than construction. Part of this reminds me of the work of another cultural criticism, the late Mark Fisher, who wrote in two different books on the cultural and political impact of neoliberalism.
In his collection Ghosts of my lifeHe writes on “The slow cancellation of the future», Based on the work of Franco Berardi. The way I summed up this on my blog was that
The combination of neoliberal ethics that has dominated since the 1980s and the emergence of omnipresent ICT had closed our ideas for the future.
The “three real”
In The main test In the book, Fisher in particular looked at the cultural sense of stasis:
While the experimental culture of the 20th century was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which gave the impression that the novelty was available infinitely, the 21st century is oppressed by an overwhelming feeling of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t look like the future.
In his previous book, Capitalist realismFisher wrote on the crisis of the “three real” of capitalism: the ecological crisis, generalized mental distress and proliferating bureaucracy. (Dan Davies returned to the last of these more recently in his book The non -recognized machine.)
The policy of a book like Abundance Seems to try to address the first of them, but not in a way that is completely convincing – there are a lot of buildings involved, and which will involve materials, etc., but it does not start to approach the psychological crisis or the feeling of an outsourced bureaucracy which seems designed to ensure that we have no control over our lives.
Reproductive crises
I wrote On this subject in a chapter It must now be released this year. The underlying argument of this chapter is that the current extractive economic model of the city has reached its limits. It is no longer able to reproduce, economically, socially or culturally. This reproduction crisis is one of the reasons why we do not have a policy of the future.
(Source: Andrew Curry)
In all of this, the ecological city is a factor of hygiene. A significant policy of the future will face the psychological crisis. This could therefore also involve a policy different from time – and we already see it in innovations around the four -day week. And it will need a different care policy, and we are not yet close. My suggestion here is that a policy of the future that could make a difference would be to reinvent our relationships, between them and with nature.