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Philosophical Reflections on the Future as Dialectic between Ingenuity and Regularity*Anton A van NiekerkDirector: Centre for Applied Ethics
To know the world historically, ie to be aware of, and to accommodate the force of location and hour (“oord en stonde”) in our assessment of what is the case, or, rather, what is understood to be the case, is, amongst others, to live in the persistent face of the future. Ours is an age in which awareness of the future permeates our every thought and act. The future is uppermost in our minds because never before in the history of mankind have we been more aware of the inevitability and rapidity of change. Before the advent of the 19th century the world also changed. But changes occurred so gradually that people were often not aware of them within the span of their own lifetime. Alvin Toffler’s famous idea of “future shock”, as I understand him, is precipitated by the unprecedented velocity of change in our time. I often ask my students to try and conceive for themselves what has occurred and how the world has changed in the lifespan of someone who is currently 85 or 90 years old. The history of aviation provides a single, yet telling example of what I’m talking about. We shall, on 17 December 2003, celebrate the centenary of the first self-powered flight by a human being - that of Orville Wright, assisted by his brother Wilbur, on 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. The distance of that first flight was less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. What has happened to aviation since is a metaphor of the contemporary experience of change. Wilbur Wright died in 1912. Orville lived on until 1948 and experienced, within his own lifetime, the first aircraft that broke the sound barrier. Within 66 years of the Wright brothers’ achievements, mankind took the giant leap to the moon. Aviation is one example of the plethora of developments that people have seen and are seeing in our age within a single generation. This is unprecedented in human history. This, above all else, is the cause of our future-obsession and fetish. A humbling aspect of growing older is that one can start producing these kinds of examples from one’s own experience. When I was a student at Stellenbosch in the mid-seventies, the campus had exactly two photocopy machines and one computer - a massive machine that occupied nearly the entire basement of one of the Engineering Faculty’s buildings. Needless to say, it could do infinitely less than any lap-top today. Imagine a university or a business without photocopiers or computers. That seems inconceivable. Yet I am of a generation that had that very experience, and I can nevertheless assure you that we did not live in caves or swing from trees - at 50 I insist that I am not yet quite ancient, although a mischievous friend likes to tell me that I’ll never become as old as I look! Another dimension of growing older is that one increasingly has to remind oneself that the future, about which so much was said two or three decades ago, has now arrived. It is, moreover, humbling to learn that many of the future predictions of the past turned out to be dead wrong - South African demographics being a quite pertinent case in point. And yet we hardly have time or opportunity to wholesomely reflect on that. Every new day is yesterday’s future and tomorrow’s history. Our lives in the world is the consistent integration of past and future in the present, analogous to the way in which a door (the future) turns on its hinges (the present) towards the past (the door-posts). Our concern with the future has anthropological, epistemological and existential roots and motivations. As far as anthropology goes, we distinguish ourselves as a species by our orientation towards the future. It has become commonplace to claim that our kind of concern with the future is unique in the animal world. Utilitarian bioethicists such as Peter Singer, John Harris and Michael Tooley are (in)famous for their provocative arguments about the value of foetal and neonatal life. According to them, the only life with value is that of a person. Personhood, however, is not limited to members of the human species, and not to be identified with that species either. A person, for these thinkers, is a being who has a conscious interest in its own life and the continuance of that life - something that cannot, for example, be said of a foetus, a neonate or a patient in PVS. In short, personhood is identified by the person’s awareness of and interest in the future. Although we might disagree with the ethics of the utilitarians’ arguments for abortion, euthanasia and even infanticide on the basis of this argument, we might nevertheless concur that, anthropologically speaking, our concern with the future is definitive of our humanity. On an epistemological level, that is, as far as the theory of knowledge is concerned, the future turns out to be equally pivotal. I mean this in a much deeper sense than indicated by our curiosity about the future, and the resultant plethora of science fiction experiments in which the possibilities opened up by imagined knowledge of the future are explored. (The Terminator series of movies provide a good example in this respect.) I do not for one moment think that we can know the future. It makes no logical sense, for example, to speculate that we could possibly predict innovation or “new knowledge”. After all, once innovation has been accurately predicted, it ceases to be new. That makes me rather sceptical about concepts such as “innovation management” (a concept that has, incidentally, been introduced into the current management structure of our own university, although the term might be a mere conceptual error) and “instruction/teaching of creativity”. To deny that we can know the future raises the question whether we can accurately and reliably know the past. Can history ever be circumscribed as “what actually happened”, or, as is more likely, as “what historians (who we know differ markedly from one another) assert about what happened”? (Cf the sharp differences between Churchill’s and Macauly’s interpretations of the Duke of Marlborough, or Floors van Jaarsveld’s and Mark O’Meara’s radically opposite interpretations of South African history.) It does not seem possible to write history without the guidance of some theoretical framework that, for every historian, provides a horizon of fundamental meanings in terms of which events are interpreted and valued. In times of radical historical change, such as the one we are currently living through, the past seems to be as much up for negotiation as the present. Our knowledge of history reflects as much who we are and what we value as it does the events of the past and the value constellations that guided the actors of the past. This brings us to the relationship between past and future, which is an important topic, but also open to grave misunderstandings. The most famous caution about misconceptions in this regard was expressed by Sir Karl Popper in his classic book The Poverty of Historicism. Historicism is a position that Popper spiritedly opposes in this book, and which, according to him, is one of the main causes of totalitarian thinking. He defines historicism as “an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history” (p 3). Once such “rhythms” or “trends” are identified in history, they are reified, ie they are seen as fixed and inevitable. They become “history”, ie a metaphysical force that operates persistently and inevitably. Historicism entails the position that insists on the extrapolation and projection of these trends to the future. In that sense it insists that we “learn from history”. But “learning from history” in this case does not mean the creative discernment of that which is of greater or lesser value in the past in order to improve our situation. Much rather it means to subject oneself and one’s society to alleged “regularities” that will impose themselves and will establish their effects with “historical necessity”. Examples of such “trends” include Hegel’s idea of the “cunning of reason”, ie the inevitability with which the “Objective Spirit” of dialectical reason holds the development of world history under its sway, as well as Marx’s idea of historical materialism, ie the idea that history is both generated and operationalised by class struggle, that the exploitation of the working class is a necessary condition for the survival of capitalism, and that the unavoidable contradictions of capitalist society point towards the inevitable demise of capitalism in the final apotheosis of the communist revolution and the classless society. This kind of extrapolation of the future from the past is not only empirically and scientifically dubious. It is politically and ideologically dangerous. We have shown the limitations of historical knowledge. The “trends” or “patterns” that historicism identifies are never indubitable historical realities, but invariably ideological constructs that fit the political and social agenda of certain people in society. A future based on such ideas is seldom the emancipation of which Hegel and Marx dreamed, and more often the criminal enslavement of ordinary people who are the victims of the unattainable utopias conjured up in the minds of the derailed tyrants of totalitarian states such as Hitler and Stalin - people who were prepared to trample on anything to attain their misguided utopias, even if it meant stepping on and over dead bodies. Yet in spite of these distinct dangers, we cannot avoid our interest in and concern with the future. We are, in the words of Ernst Bloch, “hoping animals”. Or, to use an expression of Eric Hobsbawm’s, “we dream forward”. And not only do we concern ourselves with the future and live important parts of our lives in the mode of the dream; we can make significant predictions about the future. Predictions, of course, should be distinguished from mere desires. When one engages in predictions, one must be able to ground them in relevant and accurate analyses of past and current trends, without falling into the trap of historicism. Hobsbawm also reminds us that to say that we can predict the future is not the same as claiming that we can know the future. We can work with the justified assumption that, as Hobsbawm writes, (B)y and large, the future is systematically connected with the past, which in turn is not an arbitrary concatenation of circumstances and events. The structures of human societies, their processes and mechanisms of reproduction, change and transformation, are such to restrict the number of things that can happen, determine some of the things that will happen, and make it possible to assign greater and lesser probabilities to much of the rest. This implies a certain (admittedly limited) range of predictability - but, as we all know, this is by no means the same as successful forecasting. Hobsbawm continues, in a statement with which I largely agree: (I)t is desirable, possible and even necessary to forecast the future to some extent. This implies neither that the future is determined nor, even if it were, that it is knowable. It does not imply that there are no alternative choices or outcomes, and even less that forecasters are right. The questions (…) are rather: How much prediction? Of what kind? How can it be improved? (On History, p 51) The future, however, is not only important because we wish to make predictions for the sake of economic well-being or socio-political improvement. A concern with the future permeates our very effort at any kind of understanding at all. One of the most significant contributions made by Hans-Georg Gadamer to hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation is his insistence on identifying understanding with application. We do not, according to Gadamer, understand any meaningful or symbolic form (be it a text, an artefact or an institution) merely by ascertaining the intentions of its author(s) or creator(s), or by assuming that it forms a seamless whole with a complete and definitive sense. Meaning, for Gadamer, is not a state of completed fact, but rather a process. It is a process influenced by the fusion of different horizons of meanings. Horizons, as the necessary conditions for intelligible observations, are shifting borders; they shift relative to the position of the observer. In that sense, they are both “outside” and “inside”. To interpret is not only to register a completed meaning, but to apply that meaning to the existential needs of one’s current situation. And to apply necessarily means that one anticipates, conceptualises or invokes the significance or relevance of a meaningful form to one’s future existence and well-being. This means that orientation towards the future is an integral and inalienable part of the process of understanding. This is the deeper sense of the epistemological motivation for our future-orientation to which I referred earlier. The most important thing that must be said about the future is that it is an open question. There is no one future that is inevitably heading our way. What the future holds is always a function of the choices we make in the present. In his historical writings, Paul Johnson has often stressed the almost complete lack of historical determination that we encounter in path-breaking historical developments. The one example that he discusses at length, and to which I briefly want to draw your attention, is Hitler’s invasion of Russia that commenced on 22 June 1941 and that made that very date one of the most decisive in the history of the 20th century. Johnson argues persuasively that the invasion was the product of nothing less than the drive and resolve of a single individual: “the historian cannot but be astounded by the decisive role of individual will”. If historical precedents had been taken into account, eg Napoleon’s campaign against Russia in 1812, the “lessons”, if any, would have been clear: “Whatever you do in war, do not attack Russia, because the Russian winter is bound to stop you in your tracks.” None of Hitler’s closest advisors was in favour of the campaign. His power in Europe was almost unchallenged; the scene was indeed set for a long reign of mastery over the European continent. And yet, contrary to what could rationally be expected, the mad resolve of this power-hungry demagogue drove Germany to war with Russia. Says Johnson: “We have here the very opposite of historical determinism - the apotheosis of the single autocrat” (A History of the Modern World, p 376). Like nothing else this invasion ensured Hitler’s eventual demise, but also brought the Russians into the centre of Europe and thus constituted the geopolitical predicament of the Cold War that lasted for the next half century. Nothing about it was “necessary” or “inevitable”. Many other examples of the same phenomenon can be provided. In matters of great political and strategic importance, John F Kennedy always tended to follow the advice of his brother Bobby. Yet in the Cuban Missile Crisis - the most important challenge to his powers of decision-making during his short term in office - he chose to follow the advice of a “quarantine” at sea given to him by Robert McNamara, his Secretary for Defence - advice that probably saved the world from a Third World War. FW de Klerk’s famous speech of 2 February 1990 is another case in point. If historical “trends” were to be taken seriously, there was little hope that this former Potchefstroom professor with his apparent conservative disposition could break the deadlock of South African politics of the 1980s. When he came to power there were wide expectations that De Klerk’s first move would be a deal with Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht. Yet the future was very different from what might have been expected in the past. In conclusion: Do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing that the future is, in its entirety, the product of unpredictable innovation or human ingenuity. If this were indeed my full argument, it would fly in the face of what I said earlier about the desirability of predictions and the link between past and future. What rather seems to be the case (again I speak as a layperson in the presence of experts!) is that the future is the product of a dialectic between the genius of historical actors and the regularities that condition (rather than determine) human actions. To give one example: the Battle of Trafalgar was, to a significant extent, a demonstration of the genius and unpredictability of Nelson as the greatest naval officer of his time. Yet not even Nelson could completely ignore the regularities that inevitably guided sea battles in his time (cf WH Welsh: An Introduction to Philosophy of History, p 52). In addition, history is not only made by the behaviour - however enigmatic, unpredictable or idiosyncratic - of individuals or groups. Objective - sometimes natural - forces, such as the Russian winter, the El Niño weather pattern, the terrain of a battlefield or the psyche of a culture such as the Vietnamese, also play decisive roles in the unfolding of the events that might constitute the future. As our most recent experience in Africa shows, the future might also be decisively influenced by entities such as unexpected diseases and natural disasters which might entirely alter the range of choices a society faces at a historical juncture (the AIDS virus currently being the most pertinent case in point). (Question: if AIDS can appear and destroy at a rate similar to what is currently occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, what other dangers are lurking in the future?) Like little else, this pandemic shows how little control we actually have over forces of nature that might consume us at any time. What, furthermore, could not have been the possibilities in this country if the R2 billion that is to be spent on anti-retrovirals in the next three years could have been channelled towards more productive enterprises? That is why, although I have no formal knowledge of the discipline in which you engage and for which a society is being constituted tonight, it seems to me that the study of possible futures requires an unusual sense of complexity. It also seems to me that this study field, like my own (philosophy), is not primarily geared towards definitive solutions to problems, or to the development of technologies that will yield indubitable power over nature and history. Rather, it seems to me that a prudent study of and engagement with possible futures will at best enable us, on the level of thought and realistic analysis, to negotiate and deal with the fundamental uncertainties of our daily existence as humans. Rather than seeing the future with certainty, which is impossible, such a prudent orientation will help us to deal wisely with the choices that will determine the future, and to optimise the possibilities of and conditions for those choices. If that is what can be achieved by your study and research, it will serve us all admirably, and I wish you the best for it. * Inaugural lecture delivered at the founding meeting of the Western Cape branch of the South African Futures Society, 20 November 2003, at the Stellenbosch University Business School in Bellville.
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