Defining the F Word

In its simplest sense the future can be defined as the moment after this one, the day after tomorrow, the week after next.  But when I argue that the future is currently on hold, I’m not suggesting that there will not be a day after tomorrow. The future can also refer to the unfolding of human progress. This is closer to my meaning, but it would be absurd to argue that human progress has stopped, and I fully expect that computers will continue to get faster and more powerful, that medicine will continue to chip away at disease, that our productive capacity and economic growth will continue to progress, and that our lives will continue to be improved in countless ways. So what do I mean when I claim that we have no future?

What I mean by the Future (as opposed to its lower case meanings), is the next stage in a conscious process of human history; our ability to transform the natural and social world in ways that create a step-change in the satisfaction of human needs and the expansion of freedom. This sense of the Future emerged during the great transformation that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the industrial revolution and the French revolution, not only transformed the world, but gave rise to the belief that we could consciously use science and rationality to create a fundamentally different and better future.  Where previous generations had located the golden age of humanity in the distant past the new ideologues of progress located it firmly in the Future.

It is this sense of the Future that I feel we have lost sight of or lost faith in. When commentators discuss the Future it is usually with gloom and despondency, pointing to environmental ruin, economic stagnation, the pensions time-bomb, unsustainable public spending, the list of doomsday scenarios is never ending.  It is not at all unusual to hear young people predicting that their lives will be substantially worse than those of their parents, and blaming this outrage on the selfishness of the baby-boomer generation. To the extent that there is a political agenda for the future, it is all about ‘sustainability’, reducing our ‘footprint’ on the planet, lowering our expectations of what the future might bring.

Certainly, there have been sufficient horrors to bring into question the notion of linear progress towards a brighter future: two world wars, environmental disasters, totalitarian regimes, militant Islam, and on-going poverty and anti-social behaviour.  Science, rationality and the pursuit of economic growth may have been implicated in some of these horrors, but they also offer the best chance we have of creating a different and better world. As Sartre observed, ‘progress is crab like’.

This blog will document the world we’ve been denied, by looking at specific examples from transport, housing, the arts, leisure, sport, work, health, the domestic realm, science and technology. More than this, we will explore the political, economic, cultural and social factors that have denied us our future.  Why is it that new houses are less desirable than old ones? Why have the Americans moth-balled the space shuttle programme? Why is pop music so dull compared to the 50s, 60s and 70s? Why is our transport system based on 19^th century technology? If you want to find answers to these questions, and many more relating to the future we’ve been denied, read on…