by Dr. David McGrogan , Daily Sceptic:
Current political discourse has a peculiar pre-occupation with controlling the future. Hence, on the one hand we increasingly seem to be governed by deadlines: 2030 for the UN Sustainable Development goals; 2035 for the ending of sales of new petrol and diesel cars; 2040 for the making of cycling and walking “the natural choices for shorter journeys“; 2050 for Net Zero; and so on and so forth. And on the other hand, predicting, forecasting and modelling the future has become an obsession of government everywhere in the world, made most obvious during the Covid era (when “we must do X because, if we extrapolate from where we are now, Y will result if we do nothing” became the governing structure of our entire lives), but evident across the piece, with climate change being the most notable example.
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Clearly, whenever anybody plans anything, or indeed takes any action at all, they have in mind that the results will manifest themselves, definitionally, in events that are yet to pass. But I aim to show here that there is something deeper at work in contemporary government’s fixation on the future, understood not merely as a bunch of stuff that will happen, but as a something that is itself to be governed – measured, analysed and acted upon so as to be improved. The obsession says something vitally important about the nature of governing authority in our age. And also, as I will show towards the end of this piece, it helps us to criticise that authority and imagine that other possibilities may emerge.
“A better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet”
Let us begin, then, with a matter that is particularly apropos.
It would, of course, be to engage in tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorising to suggest that representatives of the world’s governments would ever all get together at a gigantic shindig in New York in order to discuss how they are going to transform global governance. But it just so happens that, as I am writing this post, representatives of the world’s governments are, well, all getting together at a gigantic shindig in New York in order to discuss how they are going to transform global governance.
The event is called the Summit of the Future, and it promises to “forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future”. One result, amongst other things, has been the adoption of a Pact for the Future, which sets out how “the Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world” will “protect the needs and interests of present and future generations” at “a time of profound global transformation”. And annexed to this is nothing less than a Declaration on Future Generations, which commits to ensuring that said future generations “thrive in prosperity and achieve sustainable development”.
This all stems from a wheeze dreamed up in 2021 by the current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, called Our Common Agenda – essentially a plea for the continuing relevance of the United Nations in the mid-21st century. The idea here is that, by billing COVID-19 and the ‘climate crisis’ as a watershed moment or ‘inflection point’ in history akin to the Second World War, it will be possible to reinvigorate the organisation – and, in particular, revamp the way its constituent bodies are financed (that issue, funnily enough, arises again and again and again) – by presenting humanity as facing a choice between “further breakdown and a future of perpetual crises” or a “breakthrough to a better, more sustainable, peaceful future for our people and planet”. The message, then, is pretty transparent: since, without the UN, a “future of perpetual crisis” beckons, wouldn’t it be a jolly good idea for the UN to continue to exist, and ideally be more lavishly funded?
The Summit of the Future was always intended to be the capstone for Our Common Agenda, and would ideally produce an ‘outcome’ of some kind that could be pointed to in order to evidence its success. Sure enough, it seems like some sort of a consensus has emerged, one of the results of which being the aforementioned Pact for the Future; from what one can gather, there were a few holdouts (Belarus, Russia, Syria, Iran, North Korea and so on), but in the end more or less all UN members are nominally signed up.
As one would expect given the title of the event, the central theme of the Summit of the Future, and the Pact, has been – you’ve guessed it – the future. And here I must give you fair warning; you’d better get used to the word ‘future’, because you are now going to have to read it a lot. On the first two pages of the final text of the Pact for the Future alone I counted “future” appearing on 17 separate occasions; a quick CTRL-F search reveals it appears 88 times in the document in total (although some of these will just be headings and subheadings). The future, in other words, gets mentioned a very great deal, and the word begins to lose all meaning in the face of such repeated use.
Thus, we are told, Heads of State and Government are coming together in New York “to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations”; the multilateral system and the UN, we hear, “must be fit for the present and future”; the Pact itself, we learn, will help “deliver a better future for people and planet”; the 75th anniversary of the UN is described to us as an opportunity for reinvigoration so as to “ensure the future we want” based around “the well-being of current and future generations”; the drafters proclaim their confidence that they will soon be on track towards a “better and more sustainable future”; we are warned that, if we don’t pull our socks up and eat our greens, we will lurch into the aforementioned “future of persistent crisis and breakdown”; and so on.
And the substance of the Pact is relentlessly future-oriented. Everywhere we encounter things being “transformed” and “renewed”; at every turn we are told to welcome the prospect of “progress”; we are bombarded with talk about “paths” and “steps” and “road maps”, about “building” and “striving”, about “acceleration” and “keeping pace”; we are continually reminded that “nobody will be left behind”. The image that is painted is one of continuous and endless advancement towards an idealised set of objectives: nothing may stand still, and the past is an irrelevance – the only thing that matters, the Pact seems to suggest, is where we are going and how we will get there.
As I earlier mentioned, it is one thing to declare intentions, which will ineluctably concern the future; it is quite another to treat “the future” itself as a site of government, to be manipulated, disciplined, re-made or re-shaped. And it is the latter, rhetorically, that is indeed what the Pact of the Future and its Annexes seem to be doing. These documents do not merely set out a policy agenda. They reify “the future” almost as another reality or world – one into which we are about to step, and which we will be able, with the right amount of knowledge, foresight, skill and predictive capabilities, to mould in advance, as though we are all architects planning the refurbishments of the dream home which we will shortly inhabit.
