Will the future have a future?

The repoliticization of the future, the appropriate dose of uncertainty and responsibility is an eminently political matter subject to collective deliberation

Dear reader, look around you and take a good look at the international environment that surrounds us, think for a moment about what the future holds for us.

Consider, for example, intergenerational justice. Intergenerational justice is in trouble, those who are absent have no one to represent them. We are exporting additional hardships to our own descendants.

This impunity of the present in the face of the future is a true expropriation: pollution, nuclear waste, public debt, low wages, low pensions, insecurity, poor quality public services, etc.

Here are some arguments for reflection taken from reading the Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity*.

1. We socially mortgage future time and exercise a true temporal expropriation over future generations.

2. It is not enough to read reality only backwards, as a projection of the past, it is also necessary to read it as an anticipation of the future, through expectations, predictions and scenarios.
By making this double movement of reading reality, we not only get closer to reality but also broaden the field of possibilities for the future.

3. If each of us does not have a cultivated and serene relationship with the future, the entire process of socialization may be at risk.
A true erosion of character. Today, any society must have a theory of social time and of the use we want to make of the future.
Furthermore, the crisis of politics is closely linked to the crisis of the future, to its growing illegibility. This is the task that Max Weber attributed to politics: to manage the future and take responsibility for it.
This requires ways of thinking that are open to the long term and that do so rationally, beyond simple projections or implausible scenarios.

4. Time passes before our eyes without any structural references and we occupy it with cynical opportunism or with a depressive attitude, compensating for our inefficiency with superficial agitation. We live at the expense of the future, completely disregarding its responsibility.
The logic of just in time and in the short term it manifests itself in many phenomena, such as the hegemony of financial markets, media pressure, sensationalism and the spectacular, and the pressure of electoral deadlines and voters.

5. This temporal myopia is damaging our relationship with the future and preventing us from building future projects. We live in a logic of survival, not a logic of hope.
Imagination about the future gave way to the defense of acquired rights and corporate struggles.

6. Much of the rhetoric of innovation, for example, constitutes a trivialization of the future, when it is not inserted in a social context of change. An unproductive acceleration and false starts, a false mobility, precisely because it ignores the complexity of the long term. We have come to have more process and procedure than project and prospection.
More prevention and precaution than planning and foresight. We need a policy that makes the future its fundamental task, a policy committed to preventing action from becoming meaningless reaction and planning from degrading into utopian idealism.
The enemies of the future are the rhetoric of innovation associated with mercantilism and technology and, therefore, the trivialization of time, the acceleration of time, the certainties and determinism of realists.

7. The future of politics depends closely on the politics of the future, that is, the greater or lesser relevance of current media democracies depends on the reintegration of the horizon of the future into the framework of public policies.
The acceleration of social time makes it difficult to perceive the future. Electoral periods compartmentalize the time of representative democracy and voters are largely to blame for this because they do not demand a longer period.
The general interest is reduced to electoral interest, we do not know the future and we prefer the certainties of the present.
The electorate is getting older and the future for them is getting shorter and shorter. The pressure groups are focused on the present and not the future, the interests of the absent count for little.

8. After all, what is our time horizon, how many periods does time have? How do we periodize time so that we can act on it in the best way in the form of a public policy program?
How are the near and the distant structured in time? What humanity are we programming? Can we say that there are generational nations, that is, generations that deserve their own specific justice?
The paradox of intergenerational respect, decisions today that increase the freedom to decide for future generations.
A policy of the future, but the future has no political weight!! We are subject to the tyranny of small decisions, those that are immediately projected into the media and have electoral consequences.

9. Some procedures that look to the more distant future: white papers, expert groups, observatories, agendas, charters of principles. Common goods in particular require coordination between the short, medium and long term.
What is the most appropriate time frame for each problem? The uncertainty of the future prevents us from having a judicious periodization of time.
The future is our biggest problem today, but perhaps the only way to reformulate politics today. Linking knowledge, legitimacy, action and responsibility in the face of the complexity of the future.

10. The repoliticization of the future, the appropriate dose of uncertainty and responsibility is an eminently political issue subject to collective deliberation. All this calls for great institutional innovation, reflection and collective learning.

 

• I recommend reading the works of the Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity, Democratic freedom (2024), Water Clock, A theory of complex democracy (2021), Reading Ideas, The future and its enemies (2011), Theorem.

 

 

Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve

 

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