I’ve been teaching a course called History of the Future for some years at Swarthmore. In it, I work to introduce students to how human societies generally imagine the future, but more specifically how attempts to envision, design and desire the future have been a major component of global modernity since the 19th Century.
For the most part, I don’t see the class as one long sustained “gotcha” that debunks prophecy, projection and futurism as mendacious or incorrect. However, I think futurist thinking and culture has frequently given rise to intense efforts to control or produce a future described or envisioned. This has often been a waste of resources and energy at best; at worst, it has been a wellspring of oligarchic or authoritarian power, whether in civil society, the state or in capitalist enterprise.
I’m also uneasy about overtly utopian aspirations as a driver of contemporary politics, for fairly conventional reasons that go all the way back to my not-relative Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution on one hand, but are also rooted in left and progressive worries about grand schemes that take little note of the necessary sufferings they entail in between now and some indefinite tomorrow.
I’ll be talking about both of these concerns here every Tuesday. At the same time, I’m certain it’s important that we have some ability to talk about and imagine the future. I think that is in fact what is now missing from progressive politics almost everywhere in the world. Progressives have an adroit, on-target diagnosis of the ills of the present but their ability to envision concrete alternatives is either mired in the incremental small-mindedness of technocratic planning or is purely reactive. Progressives are sure what we don’t want, hence we want anything but that. What is “anything but that”? We’re not very sure: we can’t describe it to anyone clearly (including ourselves) and we can’t advocate it before or outside of reacting to what we oppose. (One big exception to this, I think, is environmental politics, but even there folks tend to focus on the futures they’re preventing rather than the futures they desire.)
I hope to use a concept I first heard from a former colleague, Barry Schwartz, to describe a decision rule that produced psychological comfort when individuals were facing a choice: “good enough”, also known (rather awkwardly) as “satisficing”. The “good enough” chooser sets some basic parameters on a decision, sets some basic benchmarks for what they want. Once those criteria are satisfied, after that the chooser is indifferent to the remaining options—any of them will do. You’re travelling for business and you plan to go out to dinner. You know you don’t like Tex-Mex food, you know you don’t want to spend more than $20/entree, you know you don’t like a restaurant that’s too loud or crowded. After that, anything’s fine. You pick the first place you see or the first place close to the hotel and never think about the choice again.
The thought here is that continuing past that point to find the absolutely optimal choice is the habit of a “maximizer” and it is a habit that creates misery and renders all choices inadequate. (You spend an hour researching where to eat on that business trip and despite all the effort end up feeling that you should have gone to the other place.)
I take from this and from philosopher’s Daniel S. Milo’s book Good Enough: The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society the proposition that many systems and structures produce the best outcomes when they are not over-designed, when they accept many outcomes as satisfactory. Systems that must produce a single absolutely optimal outcome through strong control or hierarchy are expensive, fragile, and short-lived.
In that spirit, I’ll be trying to talk about concrete futures or conceptual imaginings of the future that strive to be “good enough” alternatives to the present—and that are not just trying to deliver a future that some present client or authority already knows they want, made to order. That kind of futurism is not really trying to imagine something different or better: it is just providing protective cover for decisions that dominate our present dispensation.