The July 2018 edition of Foreign Affairs contains a special feature on different perspectives of the world in which we are living. I was attracted to this approach because I often feel that the way in which we view the future depends upon, in large part, they way in which we view the present. If that's so, then it's important to gather different worldviews of the present in order to tap into how people expect the future to unfold. The feature gives us six views of the world - the realist world, the liberal world, the tribal world, the Marxist world, the tech world, and the warming world. Each of these has its merits and is worth considering.
The realist world provides us with a description of big power politics. The base argument is that the players might change, but the game remains the same. It is big power rivalry and conflict that drives forward events, and thus progress. Every now and then, the conflict turns violent, but this has a restorative effect as the game continues with different players. Much of this worldview is evident in contemporary geopolitics, and the author does not have to hunt too hard for examples of his case.
Opposed to the realist world is the liberal world. Whereas the realist world is marked by conflict, the liberal world is marked by co-operation. In this case, nations come together and agree to certain modes of behaviour for everyone's mutual advantage. This world order is dominated by international organisations and rule sets. The main justification for this is that it provides a sustainable basis from which to grow prosperity in many parts of the world. Some economists see this as a pre-condition to prosperity. Once again, there are many examples to support this worldview.
The disadvantage of the liberal world is that it assumes that all people are basically the same. This assumption is questioned in the tribal world. The core tenet of the tribal world is that people naturally divide into groups, and that it is the group identity that provides human cohesion. By defining 'us', we also, ipso facto, define 'not-us'. It is the tension between us and not-us that gives rise to rivalry and conflict. There are numerous examples where this view explains much of geo-politics.
The Marxist world considers what it is that defines tribal identities and comes up with the answer that it is a shared socio-economic experience that translates into a form of political tribalism that we call 'class'. In this case, conflict is driven by competition between the capitalist class and the proletariat, and between rival groups within the ruling class, as each strives to resist a naturally falling rate of profit. This worldview as its merits, but seems a bit dated in a world in which the rate of profit is rising rather than falling.
The tech world sees everything as a body of data that is waiting for an algorithm to compute. This is the world for which I have the least sympathy because I find it to be quite one dimensional. I think that part of my problem is that I don't share the base tenet of this worldview that history is nothing more that a sequence of technological advances. I will concede that there is a point to this, but, to me, this is only part of the story and a long way from the whole of it. To me, the lack of well developed examples in the piece is telling.
The final world - the warming world - is one that resonates with me. The basic tenet of the worldview is that all of the other worldviews are redundant because impending climate change, and our inability to deal with it collectively, has the capacity to fundamentally change the way in which we organise our affairs. To that extent, climate change matters more than anything else. When looking deeper into the future from today, this point has some resonance. However, I would argue that the evidence to date suggests that humanity won't be up to the job until it's too late.
The interesting thing I find about the six worldviews is that they are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible for, say, the realist view to reconcile with the liberal view in a world in which pragmatic co-operation is a rational strategy. Equally, the tribal worldview and the Marxist worldview are, in my opinion, different sides of the same coin. This makes things a bit more difficult when moving from the present into the future because a well nuanced view of the future would want to balance all of these perspectives. In many cases, there is a little of each world in the present and the problem is to assign weights to their relative importance. These weights are likely to vary over time.
It is important to consider differing worldviews when conducting a futures exercise. We can consider how robust our views are by looking at the futures through a different lens. If it stands up to scrutiny, then perhaps we have something useful? If it doesn't, then perhaps we ought to keep thinking?
Stephen Aguilar-Millan
© The European Futures Observatory 2018
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