FUTURESTRANSFORMED.doc

FUTURES TRANSFORMED Introduction In this chapter I am concerned to understand modernity and the industrial way of life and seek to illuminate some of the key features of attendant approaches to the future. In particular I am interested in the deeply contradictory and paradoxical characteristics of contemporary futurity, a feature that did not escape Karl Marx when he famously suggested: In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary… The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want… At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx 1977/1956: 338) Wherever we focus our attention, we are confronted with such contradictions: we find that efforts to control, manage and engineer the future produce unprecedented uncertainties. Our insatiable appetite for growth and progress seems to produce as an almost inevitable by-product, environmental degradation and pollution as well as irreparable long-term damage to the health of all reproductive life forms. As the future is progressively emptied of content and approached as an abstract, generalised future, open for the possibilities that we might create, we find that non-intended consequences mushroom and planned outcomes prove ever more elusive. Moreover, with increase in individual freedom rises not certainty but indeterminacy and, as Friedrich Nietzsche recognized over one hundred years ago, the new open-ended potential produces a paradoxical yearning for binding values. Not surprisingly therefore, key thinkers associated with early modernity were wrestling with its ambiguities and tensions. In his discussions of those paradoxes, Marshall Berman goes so far as to suggest,