articulates this idea of an inter-generational global commons, most famously in the ... organised industrial working cla
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Why establish an Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster? Present, past and future Futures are emerging more quickly than ever before, without people and organisations realising they have already ‘arrived’. Moore’s Law means that world computing power doubles every two years. Thus today’s smart phones possess the computing power once found with large mainframe computers. Relatedly, financial ‘products’ are increasingly based upon computerised high frequency trading taking place in less than a second. Actions happening beyond the speed of thought involve the movement of sums of money or information which are ungrasp-able by the human mind. In such an accelerating world, futures can arrive before they have been conceptualised or even talked about by relevant actors. Futures are now incredibly contested and saturated with different interests. Over two centuries ago Edmund Burke argued that a society is a ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are [yet] to be born’. Burke points to the interests possessed by the dead and unborn members of a society, and how they need a powerful ‘voice’ without which societies and lives will be organised around interests located within the present. Contemporary environmentalism articulates this idea of an inter-generational global commons, most famously in the 1987 Brundtland Commission’s Report on Our Common Future. Environmentalism often deploys generational rhetoric to argue in favour of the interests of children or grandchildren or those who are not yet born, as in James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandchildren. Some versions also argue for ‘cultural ecology’, and the importance of allowing past wisdoms to influence the future. By default, most processes within societies now involve moulding futures to the interests of the current generation. All societies comprise generations with conflicting ‘interests’ in different futures but the current generation normally ensures that its interests dominate. Those dead and those yet to be born often have no voice in the ‘parliament of generations’ although there may be intense contestation over this and occasional efforts to form ‘imagined communities’ which effectively stretch across generations. Rejecting the future Mostly social science has been reluctant to enter this futures world and has made little contribution to futures thinking. This limited role partly stems from how the most significant social scientist of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, failed in his fateful prediction that capitalism would engender worldwide revolution led by the industrial proletariat. Marx expected that steam-powered factories, large industrial cities, capitalist commodification, railways and worker immiseration would lead the industrial proletariat to develop into a ‘class-for-itself’ and ‘change’ the capitalist world. But it transpired that this analysis of revolutionary change was ‘mistaken’ in that worldwide social revolution did not start in societies with the most advanced capitalist political economies. Instead it commenced in Tsarist Russia in 1917, it did not initially involve a large organised industrial working class and it resulted not in communism or socialism in one country but on most accounts a new barbarism. Marx’s ‘failure’ to get the future right led most subsequent social science to reject the idea that it should be making predictions and laying down blueprints for the future, although some were developed around the end of the Second World War leading to post-war welfare states. But mostly utopian imagining and the imposition of alternative worlds were heavily criticised during the Cold War period in the west by Karl
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Popper and colleagues. Social science turned its back on developing and analysing possible futures even though utopias can hold up a mirror to existing societies and demonstrate their profound limitations. In general, studies of the future developed outside social science per se. Future studies became a specialised discipline with its own journals, key books, iconic figures and founding texts. Many of these reflected Cold War debates and issues, so much so that the founding figure of Hermann Kahn was said to be the model for Dr Strangelove in the 1964 movie. Much futures thinking was tied into military and corporate agendas and funded from outside the academy and developed within private thinktanks, such as those established by Alvin Toffler, Jeremy Rifkin and Al Gore. Social and human sciences and the future Given the fatefulness of different futures the ISF seeks to reclaim the terrain of such studies. There is much theory and research in social sciences relevant to developing future studies. This Institute seeks to ‘mainstream’ the future which is too important to be left to states, corporations or technologists to develop. It seeks to reclaim relevant knowledge from the past, and shape futures in human ways. Future visions have powerful consequences. Analyses of ‘social institutions, practices and lives’ should be central to examining potential futures, to developing relevant theories and methods of the future. The future is here and we should not miss it. Barbara Adam and colleagues show that there are varied forms of time and that different societies and social institutions are built around contrasting time regimes. A theory of time is significant in elaborating how time is socially variable and temporal regimes matter a great deal to people’s experiences within different societies. There is in fact no single future as such but multiple futures in part related to different time regimes. Varied possible futures are, according to Adam and Groves, told, tamed, traded, transformed, traversed, thought, tended and transcended. More generally Zygmunt Bauman maintains that the capacity to think of futures is emancipatory, enabling people to break with the overwhelming dominance of the currently routine and normal. Utopias relativize the present; Bauman maintains that the: ‘presence of a utopia, the ability to think of alternative solutions to the festering problems of the present, may be seen therefore as a necessary condition of historical change’. The future is rarely a simple extrapolation from the present. In order to know the future it is almost certain than one also has to know the past. Some futures are built into contemporary societies, such as the idea of developing ‘smart cities’ which can have the effect of bringing them into being. Other futures may be in effect ‘owned’ by private interests rather than being a ‘commons’ that is shared by all members of a given society, as argued by digital entrepreneur Jaron Lanier. Such variations in the nature of time and futures stem from how social systems are characterised by change and unpredictability. Ilya Prigogine famously argues from the perspective of complexity science that futures are populated with various unstable, complex adaptive systems. It is necessary to explore the implications of dynamic, multiple systems for thinking through futures, as interestingly examined in Al Gore’s The Future. Economic and social innovations occurring in the future are rarely the outcome of linear processes. Rather according to complexity economist Brian Arthur they are combinatory, non-linear, and often unpredictable.
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The future seems to be characterised by ‘wicked problems’. There are multiple ‘causes’ and ‘solutions’; there are long-term lock-ins and complex interdependencies between processes; the effort to solve one problem reveals or creates other problems; solutions depend on how each issue is framed and vice-versa; different stakeholders have radically different frames for understanding what actually is the problem and the solution; the constraints that the problem is subject to and the resources needed to solve it change over time; and each problem is never definitively solved but returns albeit in different ways in different places - there is no ‘stopping rule’ (see Michael Thompson and Bruce Beck’s 2014 Foresight Paper). The agenda of global challenges and ‘wicked problems’ is vast, and there is no limit to those that the ISF may examine and intervene within. The focus and themes will be set by colleagues at Lancaster, who will be able to set the agenda of the Institute in terms of their own futures interests. Probable areas and their interdependencies include climate change, energy production/consumption, food and water supplies, new and old forms of violence, age, health and wellbeing, economic and social inequalities and injustice, migration and diversity, education and values, government and power sharing, religion, culture and ideologies, sustainable cities, countryside and commons. ISF and the future The ISF is thus concerned first, to identify and chart the numerous ways in which writers, futurists, technologists and thinkers have tried to anticipate and implement futures. Second, it will examine just what futures might develop within various domains of human/material activity. And third, the ISF will develop some robust theoretical and methodological resources for examining futures. It will link science, social science and humanities, and will look to the past as well as present and future. So the ISF is necessary because thinking futures is now widespread, fateful and problematic. Yet much futures research neglects the insights that social science, the arts and humanities, can offer. The new Institute will be fully interdisciplinary. It will seek to overcome the Scylla of determinism and the Charybdis of complete openness to possible futures. Steering the midpoint between them will prove to be a major task for the theory and methods of futures thinking. As well as considering highly imaginative new futures, the Institute will pay attention to contemporary and past solutions which may provide clues to better presents. It will examine distinctions between the probable, the possible and the preferable. There is no guarantee that what is best is what actually emerges, even if there is widespread agreement that it is desirable. There are many unintended, perverse and wicked problems arising in the foggy world of futures. But we need the best possible arts, tools and resources to approach it.
