The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics

Forging the Future

Jenny Andersson, Egl? Rindzevi?i?t?

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317511441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book reconsiders the power of the idea of the future. Bringing together perspectives from cultural history, environmental history, political history and the history of science, it investigates how the future became a specific field of action in liberal democratic, state socialist and post-colonial regimes after the Second World War. It highlights the emergence of new forms of predictive scientific expertise in this period, and shows how such forms of expertise interacted with political systems of the Cold War world order, as the future became the prism for dealing with post-industrialisation, technoscientific progress, changing social values, Cold War tensions and an emerging Third World. A forgotten problem of cultural history, the future re-emerges in this volume as a fundamentally contested field in which forms of control and central forms of resistance met, as different actors set out to colonise and control and others to liberate. The individual studies of this book show how the West European, African, Romanian and Czechoslovak "long term" was constructed through forms of expertise, computer simulations and models, and they reveal how such constructions both opened up new realities but also imposed limits on possible futures.

1 Midwives of the Future

Futurism, Futures Studies and the Shaping of the Global Imagination

Jenny Andersson

DOI: 10.4324/9781315717920-1

This chapter traces the rise of futurism in the immediate post war period in the ideas of a number of intellectuals central to its making: the American urbanist Lewis Mumford; the Dutch sociologist Fred Polak; the economist Kenneth Boulding and his equally prominent wife, peace activist Elise Boulding; the German journalist Robert Jungk; the Norwegian international relations theorist Johan Galtung; and the former RANDian, systems theorist Hazan Ozbekhan. In this chapter, I argue that through the ideas of these intellectuals and scientists, the future reemerged as a utopian category.

As a set of utopian (and dystopian) reflections, futurism made use of the notion of the future as an organizing concept for a reflection on what it meant to be human and act with humanity in what futurists perceived as a dangerous, inhumane and irrational world.¹ Futurists understood the future as an imperative for the active reinvention of human civilization; a re-forging, as it were, of “Mankind.” They constituted futurism through a range of assumptions and descriptions of human behavior, many of which were in fact continuations of key elements from interwar philosophy and social science. Whereas futurists rejected post-war definitions of rationality as applied, calculable, or predictable, they relied, instead, on fundamental notions of subjectivity, reflexivity and the human imagination. In many ways these notions can be traced back to interwar conceptions of human reason as a question of normative, situated human experience and being.² These notions ranged, in the thinking of futurists, from romantic and conservative reenactments of a Kulturkritik central to liberalism in the interwar period, to emerging forms of radicality that would become associated with the new social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s.

I want to propose that the reemergence of the idea of the future in the immediate post-war decades is indicative of two things: first, prevailing understandings, after 1945, of a fundamental crisis of liberalism; and second, the idea that such crisis could only be escaped through a reinvention of humanity and the human capacity to reimagine the world. The idea, concept and category of the future in this sense embodied a reinvention of utopian energy and structured key debates about the malleability of the world and the scope of human agency. In this specific sense, utopian thinking was an integral element in 1960s and 1970s social movements, fundamentally committed to the possibility of radical system change, and often appealing to interests beyond nation, projected on a universal or global scale.³ It is in its wider meaning as a signifier of the potential of human action and of the possibilities of reshaping world order that the future gains its relevance in these decades.

The intellectual historian Samuel Moyn has argued that utopianism changed focus after 1945, as World War Two had seemed to fundamentally discredit historical utopias of liberalism and communism. To Moyn, the struggle for human rights is a substitute utopia, a conversion of previous dreams of model societies. By utopia, he means the project of human rights, in other words the conception of human rights as a “covenant” of humanity.⁴ Many of the “global” social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s entertained ideas of universalism, global unity and common destiny; futurism is a case in point here. The utopianism of futurism consisted, however, not only in the idea of the future as a possibly better place, but also and specifically, in the active process of imagining possibility.⁵ They saw this process as one of radical deconstruction, a process that had two steps for futurists. First, the reimagining of the future of the world as something unbound from any form of determinism, including the projections and predictions emanating from the post-war (social) sciences. Second, the use of such imaginings as imperatives for the making of a different world through new forms of activism that mobilized the post-war social sciences and their obsession with modeling, simulation and prediction. These activities, to futurists, were tools for the active imagination.

The world, to futurists, was a system, a holistic entity fraught by a series of antagonistic relationships, between man and nature, between human bodies and technology, between nations and blocs. How could this conflicted system be recreated as a question of balance and harmony? How could man himself be made whole, indeed cured of his pathological drive for destruction? These questions preoccupied intellectuals from a wide range of currents, straddling liberalism, realism and Marxism in the post-war decades and it is not an accident that the idea of the future would bring them together.

The first section of this chapter accounts for how futurists used the idea of the future as a way of addressing these questions. The second part shows how futurists not only imagined a different world future, but invented forms of interrogation capable of conjuring different futures of the world system. Futurism gave rise to a repertoire of forms of knowledge and counterknowledge—construed to undo what futurists understood as hegemonic forms of expertise that contained world futures, and replace these with forms of future consciousness that they saw emanating from an emergent global public. This idea of counterexpertise was central as futurism radicalized into a particular subfield of social science, so-called futures studies, from the late 1960s on. The final part of the chapter discusses how the ambition to create a radical form of expertise for the world future evolved over time, as futurists, willingly or unwillingly, became increasingly caught up in world politics, in particular after 1989. In so doing, futurists abandoned some of the utopian potential embodied in the idea of the future, and they replaced this, I propose, with forms of professionalization and marketization that were not less futuristic but were much less concerned with the utopian activity of opening up alternative worlds.

A Cold War Science?

Seen from within the context of the established intellectual history of the post-war period, futurism and futures studies can seem as oddities or ephemeral projects without lasting consequence to the world. Futurism did not really put a mark on political history, although it concentrated a lot of intellectual focus at a particular point in time. Futures studies never quite entered the canon of the social sciences. I want to argue, however, that futurism and futures studies are of great historical interest, and that they were in fact the site of a key reflection on what Hannah Arendt called the human condition and the role of humankind in a surrounding, socially constituted world.⁶ As such, they are also an example of a particular 1960s form of activism that not only straddled the divide between the scientific and the political, but also mobilized religious and eschatological notions alongside arguments derived from social science.

I also want to take futurism and futures studies out of a burgeoning literature that has begun to address it as a particular form of “Cold War science.”⁷ In a growing body of literature, the origins of new epistemological approaches to prediction, such as modeling, gaming and simulation, in the immediate post-war decades have been interpreted as constituting a particular Cold War knowledge, fundamentally tainted by a governmental, militaristic obsession with foreseeability and predictability.⁸ This is clearly true for some aspects of prediction, but futurism, futures research, and futures studies, complicated and interconnected terms, were also fields in which the many tensions and contradictions embedded in “Cold War science” were played out most clearly.⁹ Futurism was in many ways dependent on the predictive techniques that postulates of rationality and experiments with modeling and simulation had enabled. But these techniques displayed a great variety of future rationalities, indicative of the radically different imaginaries that forms of prediction could embody. Some of these future shaping techniques projected single futures, as in the case of one move games, whereas some projected multiple, plural futures, as for instance, in games with open outcomes or scenarios that allowed for the projection of standard and alternative worlds. For some futurists, such techniques were tools to contain troubling future developments, but for others, they were aids to the imagination, as they seemed to allow for near visual images of alternative roads ahead.¹⁰ Futures research contained a deeply utopian and romantic strand that would express itself in the rejection of the idea that scientists could postulate and predict rational human behavior and hence foretell the future.¹¹ The future, futurists argued, was not a question of extrapolation of current trends, nor was it a derivative of the actions of a rational and liberal Cold War subject. The future was an active human construct, a question of normative desires and values. As such, futurism was a central form of protest against the Cold War world order, as well as a fundamental reflection on the disembodied postulates of science, technology and progress.

The problem of the future began, according to futurists, within Man himself, as Man was himself the architect of the great series of unfolding future catastrophes. This Man had to be reformed. Futurism began, therefore, with a fundamental reflection on the human subject, and as such it is directly related to a multitude of existential interrogations in the 1940s and 1950s, many of which were triggered by the use of nuclear weapons. Whereas Lewis Mumford remains the central character in the first generation of post-war futurists, such reflections were constitutive to a much larger field of thinking ranging from Ronald Niebuhr to Herbert Marcuse.¹²

The red thread of futurism was the appeal to the human imagination and the rejection of the idea of science as something distinct from, and superior to, the human imagination. As argued recently by Paul Erickson and others, it was this claim to a disembodied form of rationality that informed the applied and mechanistic turn in the post-war social sciences.¹³ This radical claim was much contested, and arguably much less hegemonic than the Cold War science literature has made it out to be. Futurists, some of whom were eminent social scientists, entertained long discussions of whether futures studies were a science or an art, discussions that focused on questions such as disembodied facts versus questions of values, morality and imagination. One of the first terms describing the field of futures research came in the early 1940s from the Jewish émigré Ossip Flechtheim, who used the term futurology to describe a new philosophical approach to the field of the future.¹⁴ He would be criticized by other futurists for the use of such a scientific label.¹⁵ But Flechtheim’s use of the term had nothing in common with scientific approaches to prediction; it should be put in the context, rather, of earlier nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy. The term futurology was the result of his attempts to develop the theories of history of Marx and Hegel; the phenomenology of Husserl, with whom he had studied; and the thoughts on the necessity of utopia as opposed to ideology that were put forward in the 1930s by his fellow in exile Karl Mannheim. Flechtheim was also fundamentally inspired by the social psychologist Erich Fromm.¹⁶ This shows the complex connections between futurism and an interwar world of both liberal and Marxist thought that engaged actively with utopia and did not make post-war distinctions between rationality and normativity, observation and subjectivity. Flechtheim’s 1940s reflections on humanity’s need for a peaceful theory of history developed in the 1960s, drawing extensively on Mannheim, Fromm, and the Marxist revisionist Lezlek Kolakowski, into his idea of futurology as the thorough analysis of societal objectives such as growth or freedom, and the always value laden and normative choice of ideological goals. This activity of scrutiny, deconstruction and construction of alternatives could be performed, Flechtheim proposed, with scientific rigor and reflexivity, but had to retain a fundamentally utopian dimension of the possible construction of alternative societal objectives.¹⁷

Flechtheim was throughout his life a convinced Marxist whose aversion to Soviet led him instead to a never-folding belief in the possibility of world federation.¹⁸ Other futurists, such as the federalist Denis de Rougemont, or the French political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel, were conservatives or liberals. Nevertheless, they could also gather around these postulates of the future as the quintessential social construct, the result not of predetermined trends but of the human imagination. De Jouvenel was a deeply conservative thinker, an enigmatic character who travelled, through his life, from an interwar past in fascism to post-war membership in Friedrich Hayek’s Mount Pelerin Society, and eventually, into political ecology. His ideas of the future were remarkably adaptive to all of these political strands, to the point of being situated beyond ideology and in the domain of neutral expertise. Futures research was, de Jouvenel proposed, an art, distinguished from other social sciences by the awareness of the self-fulfilling prophecy, in other words the constant risk that projections might act performatively on the object of study.¹⁹ This led to a principle of reflexivity (indeed, of social responsibility), shared by many futurists: the idea that because the purpose of futures studies was to conjure better social futures, futurism had to be thought of as a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Introduction Toward a New History of the Future
• 1 Midwives of the Future Futurism, Futures Studies and the Shaping of the Global Imagination
• 2 Expertise for the Future The Emergence of Environmental Prediction c. 1920–1970
• 3 Energy Futures from the Social Market Economy to the Energiewende The Politicization of West German Energy Debates, 1950–1990
• 4 Technoscientific Cornucopian Futures versus Doomsday Futures The World Models and The Limits to Growth
• 5 Toward a Joint Future beyond the Iron Curtain East–West Politics of Global Modelling
• 6 Forecasting the Post-Socialist Future Prognostika in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1970–1989
• 7 Official and Unofficial Futures of the Communism System Romanian Futures Studies between Control and Dissidence
• 8 Virtually Nigeria USAID, Simulated Futures, and the Politics of Postcolonial Expertise, 1964–1980
• 9 Pan-Africanism, Socialism and the Future Development Planning in Ghana, 1951–1966
• List of Contributors
• Index