2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
A number of authors have recognised the revolutionary nature of the times in which we live. Most of them have, however, focused on the impact of technological change; typically using the previous 'Industrial Revolution' as their model. Alvin Toffler, for instance, has employed phrases such as Third Wave and Future Shock to emphasise the potentially all encompassing nature of such changes. Such technological change is indeed endemic; and will have massive impacts on some aspects of the future of society. On the other hand, we have now reached the stage where the resources available to humanity can meet almost all its reasonable needs, and in effect are now unlimited. In this context, such technological potentials have become merely the supporting factors for the new revolutions which are in the process of confronting a largely unsuspecting world. These new waves of revolutionary change are to be detected across all aspects of society and, especially, in its social organisation.
While such forces, from technological changes through to the remaking of society as a whole, may be fundamental in the longer term, those operating in the political environment are more immediate in terms of their impact. They determine how, and when, the underlying changes will be allowed to occur. To use the very relevant metaphor of an earthquake, they will determine where and when the stresses building up are to be released - the important point being that the longer they are contained the more powerful the ultimate shock will be.
The problem in trying to understand these political forces is that they are often hidden from view - especially in western societies. As a result, the forces themselves are poorly understood, not least by the very politicians who would claim to control them, and the changes which are occurring around them are very much misunderstood! Indeed, it is the mismatch between the changed circumstances and the unchanged - or at least inapplicable - policies supposed to deal with them which often causes the worst revolutionary pain.
Governments, in their anxiety to deal with new forces they do not understand, are grasping at 'solutions' which make the problems worse. For just one example, which currently applies to may governments around the world, choosing a strategy based solely on maintaining a low rate of inflation during a time of great change is at best naive - even if all the other simplistic nostrums (from control of money supply to exchange rates) have failed. All the precedents would suggest that inflation should normally rise to reflect the uncertainty about the future. To deliberately employ draconian measures such as unemployment to achieve low rates of inflation, at a time when the disadvantaged are already suffering from the problems of transition, is inhuman - and ultimately counter-productive in the extreme. Paradoxically, at a time when Marx is supposedly in disfavour, this is a policy based upon one of his most famous concepts - The Reserve Army of the Unemployed - which capitalists (in this case capitalist governments) use to force down the wages of the workers by threatening them with competition from the unemployed! At the very least, such a crude measure removes large numbers of personnel from the labour force - and demotivates those remaining - at the very time when extra effort may be needed. At the worst, it might foster the resentments which will erupt into bloody revolution; exactly as Marx predicted!
John Gray, Fellow of Jesus College Oxford, says "The task of the age is that of reconciling the human need for security with the permanent revolution of the market. This involves two other tasks: protecting common institutions whose ethos is not that of market exchange from the near-hegemony of market values in social life; and balancing the needs for common life and the reality of deep cultural diversity."
Brian Beedham argues "...that the next big change in human affairs will probably not be a matter of economics, or electronics, or military science; it will be a change in the supposedly humdrum world of politics."
Geoff Mulgan[b] says "They [governments] still seek to portray themselves as controllers of society, in charge of a rational machine, when in practice there are far too many variables at work, and far too many complexities for this to be credible."
John Gray suggests one solution "We cannot recapture a ‘thick’ community culture grounded in a deep consensus on morality and history; but we must, if we are to avoid America’s social fragmentation, strengthen and develop a thinner, yet durable and resilient, common culture of shared understandings of fairness and tolerance."
15 May 2003
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