“From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues” — The Coming Insurrection (2009)
The future is back. Between the spate of post-apocalyptic TV shows du jour (The Last of Us, Paradise, Fallout, etc.) to the Silicon Valley technocrats’ feverish anticipation of the singularity, one cannot help but recognize this resurgent forward-looking tendency in our cultural outlook. Yet if the ceaseless plunge into the unknown has regained a foothold in the collective cultural imagination, the upshot of recent prognostication seems rather mired in belated visions of futures past. The technophilic dreams of Silicon Valley offer microwaved rehashes of 1960s’ utopianism, even as their products introduce social problems that immediately exceed the supposed circumscription of their atavistic guardrails. Meanwhile, cultural and political visions of futurity seem to rely increasingly on negative framing, offering images of worlds to come that either peculiarly resemble the supposedly disclaimed past or suggest a future so abominable as to be overcome with great urgency and haste. To some degree, these perspectives represent two sides of the same coin.
Last fall, the openly revanchist thrust of MAGA’s rhetorical charge met with an ultimately ineffectual rejoinder from Kamala Harris: “We will not go back.” Neither slogan, it should be said, suggests anything about the future as such – only its resemblance, positive or negative, to some unarticulated notion of the past. The future itself remains a subject of anxiety, as yet to be prefigured by anything but misplaced, ambiguous nostalgia on the one hand and abject terror on the other. The dystopian imaginary, a long source of grist for the mill of genre fiction and Hollywood blockbusters, has permeated the discourses of both the digital watercooler and the political stump speech. The future feels, from this vantage, closer than ever – and it doesn’t look good (even to that Pollyanna of globalization, Thomas Friedman)
This uneasy orientation toward the future is not unique to our historical moment, although it certainly feels that way. Indeed, the innately forestalled nature of the future – its failure to ever arrive, except through the momentary prism of the present – endows it with a deathless property, a propensity for revivification throughout the ages. Particularly at moments portending a great historical change, or deployed as part of the rhetorical arsenal of those who wish either to bring about or foreclose such change, the idea of the future returns with force. Ours is such a moment.
To this end, three new books attempt to give historical shape to our understanding of the future; each aiming to offer context for our future-haunted contemporary moment. Jonathan White’s In the Long Run examines the rhetorical deployment of the idea of the future from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century as a means of achieving political ends, showing how the future can be exploited in the service of divergent and even contradictory ideologies. Broader in temporal scope, but more limited in its thematic valence, Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go provides a cultural history of representations of “the end of the world,” a concept which, despite its note of existential finality, has yielded innumerable variations throughout the centuries. Our imagined sense of the end, Lynskey suggests, is constantly contingent on the material reality of the present. Somewhere between these lies Glenn Adamson’s A Century of Tomorrows, which limits itself to twentieth century America in an effort to demonstrate how more recent tendencies in prognostication have shaped our sense of the present.
What these books collectively reveal is that there is plenty of precedent for the current atmosphere of malaise, in kind if not necessarily in degree. The company of history, however, only offers a partial consolation, and despite their respective strengths, one emerges from reading these books with little sense of what the future will look like. Although this can hardly be called a failure and is in a certain sense something to be admired, what they more pointedly lack, in the aggregate, is a compelling articulation of what the future can and should look like.
For reasons that become clearer later, we take a rather strong stance on how we should view the future – a perspective derived from the historical materialist tradition. Not only can we adduce the intellectual armor of greats in the field, but also because understanding how “Past, Present and Future are linked in the endless chain of history,” as quoted by E.H. Carr, requires a philosophical foundation. As Perry Anderson once observed, historical materialism remains unsurpassed in providing one. We can only learn from the past if we can differentiate, evaluate, celebrate, and decry the events that we need to – and that necessitates an intertemporal analytical lens. Arguing that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, or that history is but one damn thing after another, are claims both about the past and the future, and evaluating them requires us to take a stance. Most importantly, this framework provides what these books cannot – an answer to the question of what to do about the future, and (although perhaps not quite as well) how to do it.
Jonathan White’s In the Long Run is a work of scholarly excellence, tracing the intellectual history of ideas of the future under modernity from the French Revolution ‘til the present. The book’s overarching message is an appeal to those of us who feel the “air of finality” that hangs over modern society, to consider the importance of visions of the future to the health of any democratic society. He writes to counter, as Fred Jameson once described the idea of a “society without a visible future, a society dazzled by the massive permanence of its own institutions in which no change seems possible and the idea of progress is dead.”
The book is divided into chapters marked by dichotomies, for instance those between futures “open and closed,” “public and secret,” “shared and apart.” White stakes out a clear, principled, stance, laid out in chapter one, that “democracy depends on a future that is malleable yet sufficiently structured as to retain some shape.” He discusses utopian visions from the literary-philosophical models of Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Thomas More, to the more concrete projects of the early socialists, but gives short shrift to their political utility. Utopian thinking is, in White’s estimation, at once too airy and detached – in other words, not political enough – and at the same time too limited in scope. White neglects to explore the seeming contradiction that he establishes between the conceptual distance of speculative utopian fiction and the apparently ineffectual modesty of its practical applications, as seen in the examples of Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier. Nevertheless, he recognizes to a certain degree the utility of utopian thought in conceptually leavening the idea of the future as such. As Fredric Jameson has argued, a utopian imagination is a necessary pretext for any “new and effective practical politics.” The will and ability to imagine a different and better future deserves credit for the political ramifications that follow such imagined ends, and we would do well to recover such a capacity in our time. As Jameson once wrote about the once-utopian ideal of full employment – “utopian circularity becomes both a political vision and programme, and a critical and diagnostic instrument.”
White then discusses the increasing calculation and quantification that underpin our theorizing of the future – the movement from what might be to what’s likely to be. From the teleological theories of history that emerged in the nineteenth century to the twentieth-century cottage industry of polling and statistical prognostication, which is our contemporary inheritance, White reveals an ironic determinism that emerges from putatively neutral, descriptive methods of accounting for the future. White perceptively observes that both capitalists and state authorities exploited new technocratic models oriented toward economic forecasting to shore up power for themselves, thereby limiting the imaginative scope of a popular view of what the future could be. The sense of fatalistic inevitability that emerges from our increasingly sophisticated predictive models chills the democratic organ. While our technocratic experts’ fail to anticipate the world-historical shocks of recent years may yet set the stage for a renewed conceptual boldness regarding the future, it will take practice to undo the effects of this collective psychic conditioning.
Although the book’s chapters are structured according to conceptual dichotomies, the book also proceeds chronologically. White briskly moves into the heady days of the ‘20s and ‘30s with a discussion of futures “rational and impulsive” – namely, the terrain of the ideological battlefield between socialism, liberalism, and fascism. Although he doesn’t quite focus on the “mass psychology” of fascism, White highlights the irrational impulse in fascist thought. He talks especially about fascists’ tendencies to promote chaos, violence, spontaneity, and action and their emphasis on decisively breaking with the past. White argues correctly that our current analyses of fascism often rely too heavily on analyzing their revanchist, fearful, traditionalist, and reactionary roots, rather than noting that fascists do in fact rely on important notions of futurity, whether moored in reality or not. However, the chapter remains light on the failure of liberal democracies that led to reaction. Fascism doesn’t just appeal to some exciting version of the future; rather, people are pushed into it by failures of the present. This also elides the complicity of both liberals and conservatives in the rise of fascism (both now and then)– White argues that “people have become dissatisfied with continuity,” rather than being exploited or oppressed by the status quo.
White’s chapter on the importance of foresight and prediction in resolving questions of the future discusses how the development of surveillance technologies (like the technologies of prediction created at the RAND corporation) are both caused by and bred a further need for secrecy, and how these advances make things more anti-democratic and develop a technocracy incentivized to keep power for itself. The more the state keeps from us, the less we can imagine collective futures, engage in public deliberation, and the greater the gap between those who possess advanced knowledge of the future and those who don’t. The analysis could do with a heady dose of political realism, however, and this is where this book’s separation of politics from economics reveals its weaknesses. Why would anyone share information that could be used for profit-making opportunities? After all, companies in “democratic” market societies aim to have a competitive market advantage, and this actively disincentivizes the public sharing of information, an incentive that wipes out any purportedly democratic gain from the obverse. White further argues that the rise of platform technologies and AI serves to trap people in their immediate present, with ceaseless reminders of their past in their digital footprints, preventing the imagining of anything except what White calls their own “micro-futures.”
The chapter on technology is an excellent, even dazzling, discussion of the issue of individual versus collective imaginings of the future. While the rise of consumer culture and its focus on superficial notions of personal betterment, he highlights that although capitalism has traditionally entailed the acceptance of private vices as a means of cultivating public virtue, its contemporary incarnation now eschews any concern with the supposedly prosocial achievement of that public future at all. His key contribution here is to argue that the individualization of the future actively shortens our temporal horizons. This can be seen most trenchantly, he highlights, in the case of climate change – something that should remind us of our common future, but instead remains beholden to the short-term plans of nation states, and the limited perspective of individual responsibility. In the next chapter he highlights the importance of the modern mass political party in bridging the gap between present and future, but he also points out the vital importance of the political manifesto in staking out political visions of the future. Even for the radical left, there is a great gulf between What is to be Done or The Communist Manifesto and anything put out by Podemos, Front de Gauche, Syriza, or any other organizations of the contemporary Western Left. As Alexander Cockburn once wrote about the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, “Surfeited with somewhat turgid paeans to the democratic gentility of the OWSers, I clamber up to the dusty top shelf, furtively haul down Vladimir Ilyich’s ‘April Theses’ of 1917 and dip in: end the war, confiscate the big estates, immediately merge all the banks into one general national bank . . . The blood flows back into my cheeks, my eyes sparkle.”
The fundamental problem with this book, however, lies in its historical understanding of the past and the present. White posits that democratic thought about the future in the twentieth century has gone through three stages – from the ideal of collective progress to one of individual advancement to finally a complete absence of a vision of the future. Each of these is contestable, and more importantly, requires explanation, especially of the role of the socialist left.
White correctly identifies the rise of mass political parties as the primary mechanism in modern history for bridging long-term political vision with short-term action. However, he overlooks the fact that these parties were predominantly socialist and working-class organizations, such as Germany’s SPD and England’s Labour Party, or, in the colonized world, nationalist movements like the Indian National Congress and the early Kuomintang. Their ideologies were decidedly collectivist, contra to their individualist contemporary interlocutors, like utilitarianism and classical liberalism, and almost always committed to some form of the socialist ideal. Even the shift from ‘public futures to private dreams, as Geoff Eley notes, was a response to—or a consequence of—socialist movements. As E. H. Carr once wrote, it would be a “serious error” to pit “an antithesis between this [sic] process of individualization and the growing strength of cohesion of society.” Eley further demonstrates that the democratic achievements of the post-war West were either driven by strong labor movements or designed to counter the communist threat, whether domestic or international.
Consequently, White misinterprets the present political moment – he fails to consider that the absence of future-oriented dreams stems from the organized left’s near-total collapse. After all, who is left to defend either the mass political party or write an inspired manifesto?
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In A Century of Tomorrows, Glenn Adamson correctly recognizes the long continuity of theorizing about the future, and the humility to confine his scope to the 20th century. The book’s most commendable feature is its coverage of the various cranks, visionaries, charlatans, and geniuses that made up the tapestry of American intellectual life in the period. The book is hampered, however, by its prose – frenetic and suffused with confusing analogies, cliché, and bathos. The aggressively pedestrian writing is matched only by the mediocrity of its theoretical insights.
Here are a few select (and representative) lines:
On the status of science fiction (in 1971, no less), “A kind of writing originally developed by teenagers, and for teenagers, had finally grown up”
On technology, “for a product to stop working because it can no longer keep up with technology, after just a few years? This is truly planned obsolescence.”
On futurologists, “Futurologists, by and large, are advocates of drastic change. …Generally, though, they encounter at least some resistance, and any history of the future has to account for that skepticism”.
In particular, his descriptions of individuals can only be described as both pompous and uninformative, though not without a degree of presumably unintended humor:
On Robert McNamara, “His biography is an Oedipus Rex for the late twentieth century: a tragedy with hubris at its heart.”
On Tina Turner, “Tina Turner spoke for many when she sang, in 1978, “night time is the right time.”
On Raymond Loewy, “so suave that he seemed like a Hollywood actor playing the part of himself.”
On Lewis Mumford, “Though he was from a humble background—born to a single mother, who was an immigrant from Germany—Mumford possessed natural authority.”
If Hobsbawm once wrote that historians should try to write publicly for the “intelligent layperson,” Adamson has his sights set rather strangely on the unintelligent academic.
Our problem, however, is that the book’s understanding of the future’s relationship to the past is perhaps the most emblematic of the confusion that we argue afflicts our ability to understand history. Adamson writes, in the more philosophically inclined introduction, these two plainly contradictory lines:
“We can tell stories about the past, but that doesn’t mean the past itself is a story: It is fundamentally shapeless, nondirectional, and continually up for reassessment. The future is its equally fractured mirror image.”
“History isn’t a Last Judgment, which elevates or condemns people from the past. Yet, without mistaking the benefit of hindsight for moral clarity, it’s still possible to draw some lessons from the prophetic tendencies of the early twentieth century.”
If the study of history can neither be constructed into a narrative, nor is it up for any moral evaluation whatsoever, it seems there is precious little for a historian to say. Adamson of course immediately contradicts this (as he must if only to continue writing his hackneyed personality profiles) by saying that “some lessons” can be gleaned.
What, then, can we draw from Adamson? First, in his eagerness to deny any affiliation with either Marxist or liberal ideas of progress, he has prevented himself from saying even what White says in so many fewer words – that it would be nice to have progressive, democratic, visions of the future in contemporary society.
Secondly, the virulence of his attacks on socialism, communism, and Marxism (and his continual conflation of the ideas of socialism with fascism) leads to historical errors and misunderstandings of the theoretical underpinnings of socialist thought of the future. Writing about the Soviet 5-year plans, a widely acknowledged successful industrialization programme, Adamson writes, “the regime would replicate it again and again, despite the chaos and destruction it had brought.” In another egregious aside, he argues that the mistakes of predicting the future could be seen in “the seductiveness that the Soviet Union had for American leftists, but also in Garvey’s grandiose but impractical schemes and Gilman’s disturbing views on race.”
This brings us to a genuine problem, however. Historical materialism as a guide to understanding the past and present remains unsurpassed, but the issue of socialist construction still needs to be addressed. Soviet central planning, in the years that it showed genuine promise, appealed as a beacon to other newly industrializing countries as the quickest way to catch up to the advanced capitalist countries. Furthermore, planning was also seen as a democratic alternative in the so-called Third World, both to the anarchy of the market, and to developmental paths dictated by the former colonial powers. Neoliberalism and the collapse of the socialist bloc have discredited planning in both these senses, as either more efficient or more democratic than the price mechanism. There is a possibility that the combination of the rapid rise to dominance of the Chinese economy, and the collapsing institutional structures of the Western economies will give rise finally to arguments about the virtues of planning. This, perhaps, is really the element of the future that socialist visionaries should think about most – how can we conceive of socialist planning in the future, with necessary qualifications being that planning methods must be more democratic and participatory than the Soviet experience whilst retaining sufficient control over economic structures.
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Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go offers a spirited, breathless, and often mordant history of how we’ve imagined the end of the world, across the globe and throughout the centuries. His archive is enormous and equal-opportunity; everything from pop music to arcane religious tracts, from the history of science to speculative science fiction is up for grabs. This range freights the book in a manner that is at times burdensome and scattershot; one waits in vain for something like a clarifying message or synthesis to emerge from such an agglomeration. At other times, though, the effect is fittingly almost sublime. Contrary to White’s suggestion that the dark side of futuristic speculation is an essentially modern purview, Lynskey reveals that we have been imagining our existential undoing for millennia and that apocalyptic thinking has shadowed seemingly every discourse we have developed. To the extent that it has increased in recent centuries, it is in large part a consequence of our increasing ability to actualize – inadvertently or otherwise – the imaginative underpinnings of our potential destruction, proleptic notions that have apparently haunted us since time immemorial.
A key insight that emerges from this sweeping, magpie-like assemblage is that, in the cultural imaginary, what has frequently passed for “the end of the world” is rarely used as a finality as this weighty phrase would suggest. What has preoccupied us from the ancient days of John of Patmos up through the Cold War and into our current era of renewed nuclear and climate-related anxieties is not “the end” as such but what comes after, the ways in which we might pick up and reorganize the fragments of a wrecked earth. At times, Lynskey reveals, the prospect of a post-apocalyptic new dawn has occasioned abhorrent fantasies, fascistic dreams of a renewal forged in blood, such as Jerry Ahern’s series The Survivalist and the white nationalist William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries. Such thinking, which the historian Mike Davis has called “armageddonist,” reflects a deep dissatisfaction with the state of the world as such, and a concomitant willingness or even desire for purgatorial fire. It’s the end of the world as we know it, as the R.E.M. song has it – and I feel fine. While armageddonist fantasies typically privilege the lone, often male and racially coded rugged individualist (or, in less ideologically single-minded iterations like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the family unit), other visions of post-apocalyptic rebuilding offer a more prosocial vision. Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven, for instance, refuses to accept as a foregone conclusion that organized society would be completely reduced to atomized survivalists in the wake of a deadly pandemic. Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction novels take seriously the question of how both real and speculative institutions would react to the critical threats posed by climate change. In 2020’s The Ministry of the Future, Lynskey observes, life and the bureaucracies with which humanity insists on organizing it, finds a way even under the inexorable conditions to which we have inadvertently submitted it. “Economies crash, governments fall, cities drown and villages die,” he writes, “but the world does move forward, slowly and painfully, towards what Robinson calls ‘the birth of a good Anthropocene.’”
This approach, which Robinson calls “anti-anti-utopian,” reflects something of a novel dialectical turn in the long arc of (post-)apocalyptic thinking, a swerve away from both the righteous, covertly indulgent pessimism of the armageddonists and the totalizing despair of more explicitly apocalyptic narratives. The evident appeal of such works, in which existential crisis is managed into something less than an extinction-level event by the heroic efforts of wonkish administrators, may reflect some wishful thinking. As the prospect of our own destruction looms ever larger, it can be comforting to indulge the idea that we might be collectively underestimating our ability to cope. After all, as Lynskey writes, “the signal fact about the end of the world is that it has not happened yet, despite numerous predictions.”
Prediction, however, is the purview of prophets and their contemporary descendants, who have substituted trend lines and polling analysis for the tea leaves and augury of the past. What we have received as the varied body of apocalyptic fiction – “the stories we tell about the end of the world,” per Lynskey’s subtitle – has indeed had its own second-order predictive function, particularly as science-fictional tropes worked to spur real technological development, even as their authors warned against the existential abuses they prefigured. Yet the narrative trap of the apocalyptic theme – the need for survivors in order for the story to go on – lends itself to a kind of measured existential optimism. Against Joan Didion’s aphorism – that we tell ourselves stories in order to live – the writer of apocalyptic fiction typically recognizes that something has to live in order for a story to be told.
Thus, even the foundational prose narrative of a secular apocalypse, which both Lynskey and White recognize as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), is framed in such a way as to at least suggest the possibility that its title might not be wholly truthful. The novel, set in 2073, describes a global pandemic that reveals both the heroic strivings of its idealistic protagonists and the brutality of their enemies as inconsequential forces against the resurgent power of nature’s pestilential handmaiden. Liberal reformers, atavistic monarchs, farsighted utopians, and men of Napoleonic ambition alike are destroyed in its wake; only the mild-mannered narrator survives to write the tale. And yet, we are made to understand that the novel at hand notionally represents the assembled fragments of an ancient Sibyl’s prophecy, recollected, translated, and edited – with plenty of self-conscious room for error – by a writer of Shelley’s own time. Distant past, present, and future are thus blended in the crucible of fictional ambiguity. In this way, The Last Man signally operates according to what Fredric Jameson has described as science fiction’s “strategy of indirection,” a means of defamiliarizing its present to reveal what an unmediated perspective can fail to apprehend. The conflicts that plague the novel (before the actual plague arrives in the second volume) seem, in light of this framing, all too familiar to those of 1826; society itself appears frozen in time. The Greeks, for whose independence Shelley’s friend Byron had died fighting for in 1824, are still fighting the Ottomans in the novel’s 2073. The proposed interventions of the novel’s progressive idealists are not necessarily inadequate to its socio-political problems; the issue is rather that the partisans have come too late.
Sadly, as Lynskey describes it, Shelley’s book itself arrived both too late and too early. By the time of its publication, the “last man” trope – although nowhere else handled with anything like Shelley’s deftness and complexity – had curdled into a sub-literary cliché. It would take more than another century for the novel to find its audience, when the trope returned to pop-cultural prominence in the miasmic shadow of the bomb, with books such as I Am Legend (1954), its loose film adaptation The Omega Man (1971), and the classic Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last” (1959). With two hundred years of hindsight now, however, Shelley’s halfway-consolatory message is clear: a radical change is necessary before the fact, if there is to be any hope for surviving an “extinction-level event” to come.
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These books have had the effect of helping us understand what seems now an almost trivial point. Whether the entity in question is an individual, a group, a community, or the totality we can call the social whole, one’s view of the future depends rather heavily on one’s view of the present. We often try not to make decisions about where to eat when we’re hungry, or unsuccessfully attempt to resist general despondence when taken ill, and seemingly, this is not the worst metaphor for society at large. As Hobbes put it, “of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.” This is evidenced by what Lynskey and E.H. Carr highlight in their work: the surest sign a society was braced by troubling uncertainty was when people started theorizing about the cyclical nature of human history and started seeing themselves as simply part of the recurring tragedy of human existence.
How then can we view the continuum of the future and the past with promise? We must first acknowledge what Raymond Geuss calls the fundamental Nietzschean insight, that “without God neither pessimism nor optimism as they are [sic] traditionally construed, namely as attitudes that are appropriate because grounded in a correct appreciation of the very nature of reality, makes much sense.” Since the Christian theological framework is no longer applicable, and all the authors would deny with vehemence the usage of any other overarching mythopoetic framework (whether of the liberal notion of progress or historical materialism), these books cannot quite answer the question of why exactly we should be hopeful about the future, or present, at all. For us, the authors, optimism necessitates taking a stance on how and why society transitions from past to present to future, and historical materialism provides this. As Alasdair MacIntyre once put it, “Liberals and Christians are too apt to forget that Marxism is the only systematic doctrine in the modern world that has been able to translate to any important degree the hopes men …could not but express in religious terms, into the secular project of understanding societies and expressions of human possibility and history as a means of liberating the present from the burdens of the past, and so constructing the future.”
The problem that these works highlight, then, is not so much the grievousness of the present situation, but our collective inability to understand it. How can we avoid the weltschmerz of contemporary life when we are unable to grasp the reasons for economic collapse, unable to have any effect on politics proper (say, for instance, on the ongoing genocide), or come to terms with the clear contradiction between knowledge and action regarding anthropogenic climate change? The liberal response, as evinced by the authors of these works, is to plead the case for democratic possibilities. The authors argue for a piecemeal response to these problems, without the totalizing worldview needed to counter the dread of overdetermination that haunts any singular policy response to global issues. For the nihilist, of which the contemporary fascist is but one type, the confused and contradictory directions of historical development are to be welcomed, or at least tolerated, so long as one can ensure their own place in the winners’ column. There is, of course, also the nihilism of the Billy Pilgrim type, which looks upon the destruction wrought from Dresden to Gaza with equanimity, to know that nothing can really be done about anything anyway. This response is hardly uncommon to those of us who have participated in the rallies, protests, and uprisings of the last decade, only to find that it had the power of a “custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” Why bother indeed?
It is up to us to answer not only “why not,” but to analyze our failures, organize ourselves, and agitate for a better future, and to maintain that the antidote to hopelessness is not just acknowledging that it’s better to feel hopeful than despairing, but that progressive historical transformations can, have, and will continue to occur, so long as we try. A Marxist’s response to “so it goes” has, and must continue to be – “and yet, it moves.”
