The Battle of Ideas - shaping the future through debate

by Dolan Cummings, co-convenor, Battle of Ideas

 

There is today a pervasive sense of uncertainty about the future. We find it difficult to imagine that things will ever be very different from how they are now, especially in the field of politics, where there is grudging consensus on issues that once divided society, and little in the way of big ideas. At the same time, we are increasingly nervous about change that seems to be beyond our control, whether it is global warming, the onward march of technology, or war and terrorism. 

To the extent that we do imagine the future, then, it is as something bearing down on us, rather than something we can shape through our own actions in the present. At best we can brace ourselves for the next terrorist outrage, the inevitable epidemic of Asian bird flu, or the deluge that will follow the melting of the polar ice caps. (Even those who advocate drastic measures to reduce carbon emissions don’t seem to believe it will make much difference.) The script of the future is not written by politicians, much less the people who elect them, but by Hollywood disaster movie screenwriters. 

The world continues to turn, and people continue to live and work and be creative, but in the absence of a coherent set of ideas to make sense of change, there is little sense that we have any control over where we are going. Change is sometimes celebrated and often exaggerated, particularly when it comes to the effects of technology or so-called globalisation, but the assumption is that it just happens. We can prepare ourselves for it, or even ‘embrace change’, but we are not considered responsible for it. Consequently it is not surprising that the prevailing attitude to the future is fearful rather than enthusiastic. Every utopian vision is assumed to have a dark, dystopian underside.  

In 1984, George Orwell wrote archly about what he saw as naïve utopianism. ‘In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient – a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete – was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.’ Such thinking is implicated in the creation of the brutal authoritarian society imagined by Orwell in the novel, and today it is Orwell’s pessimism that is part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person: we have learned to read utopias suspiciously, seeing something sinister in the very promise of a futuristic society. We fear technology will enslave us rather than liberating us; even the promise of better health and increasing longevity is regarded with suspicion and pessimism.

This ‘rewriting of the future’ is of course a response to the history of the twentieth century, the horrors of war and the failure of the Soviet Union. But while some saw the end of the Cold War as the triumph of liberal democracy, Francis Fukuyama’s famous ‘End of History’ thesis was a lament as much as a celebration. It is not just Communism that was discredited, but any systematic attempt to shape the future. Indeed, as Orwell’s 1984 illustrates, there had been doubts about such a project for much of the twentieth century.In the 1970s the American social critic Daniel Bell coined the term ‘the cultural contradictions of capitalism’ to describe a growing tension between the values that drove Western society and those it produced. As society progressed materially, some of the values that traditionally had sustained that progress, such the Protestant work ethic and the idea of self-improvement, were culturally derided in favour of a newer emphasis on self-expression and consumption. 

Today, the whole notion of progress is regarded with suspicion. While few people feel comfortable talking about traditional values, there is a palpable ambivalence about the values that characterise contemporary capitalism, a desire for something more profound than consumer culture. In the absence of a political alternative, however, the dominant challenge to consumerism comes in a call for restraint and respect for limits. Fears about its effects on both social cohesion and the environment mean the very idea of economic growth is in question, as is evidenced by the current fearful discussion about the rise of China. The future is seen as a disaster waiting to happen. 

Much contemporary debate is really about how to reconcile the desire for individual fulfilment with our fears about the consequences for society and the planet. But the terms of debate are mostly inherited unchanged from the recent past. For all our hyper-sensitivity to superficial change, in a more profound sense, we often seem trapped in an eternal present rooted somewhere in the late twentieth century. This is most obvious in politics, where the categories ‘left’ and ‘right’ continue to dominate discussion despite the fact that they rarely make sense when applied to actual debates. Left and right imply competing visions of the future, more or less innovation, more or less tradition. But political debates today more often take the form of arguments over how to manage the present, taking each new crisis as it comes, rather than planning the future.

Partly for this reason, science looms large in the popular imagination of the future, as something that continues to progress, apparently autonomously of society. Responses alternate between ‘technophobia’, fears about science and technology running out of control, and ‘technophilia’, fevered enthusiasm about how new technologies might transform our lives, and even, whether through genetic science or IT, what it means to be human. Since neither outlook is part of a broader conception of social progress, however, the onward march of science more often appears threatening than exciting. While the ‘left’ tends to describe its fears in terms of the malfeasance of pharmaceuticals and other corporations, and the ‘right’ on threats to the dignity of life, in fact both express very similar sentiments. Crucially, neither can offer science a place in a coherent vision of the future.

In the arts, meanwhile, there is little sense that things are developing, never mind improving. Instead it tends to be assumed that artists can only rehash ideas from the past, or worse, that culture is relentlessly ‘dumbing down’. Like science, in fact, the arts continue to develop one way or another, and people continue to experiment with new ideas. But again, lacking a positive orientation to the future, society struggles to make sense of it all, and to distinguish what is truly valuable in the arts. Too often, the consequence is that we settle for the familiar and tired, fearing pretentiousness more than mediocrity. Alternatively, some artists seem to revel in pretentiousness, making a fetish of novelty for the sake of it, and leaving even the most committed audiences bemused. In culture, as in other spheres, the very notions of innovation and creativity are trivialised. 

Thinking seriously about the future and what we want from it is vitally important if we are to have any influence over it. The Battle of Ideas is about providing an ongoing forum for those who want to shape the future through debate. The aim is less to reach consensus on particular issues than to establish new terms of debate that correspond with the reality of the contemporary world, the better to understand it and how to change it. Indeed, by embarking on a future-oriented discussion about the various themes and topics covered at the festival, from the arts to international relations, we hope to provoke disagreement and ensure a genuine battle of ideas, not simply about how to deal with the latest crisis busying the media, but about the kind of world we want to live in.

 

Dolan Cummings
October 2005

 

 

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