Abstract
International Sociological Association Prize, New School for Social Research, New York NY, 15 Nov 2016
The West and Western sciences, in particular, have a peculiar way of conceptualizing time, derived from two millennia of Christianity.
Thus, in the civilizations of Hinduism, Buddhism, China, and Japan, to mention some, time flows from eternity to eternity. In the West (and Islam is similar), there is a Beginning (Creation for the religious, Big Bang for the secular) and an Ending, the End Time (Armageddon for the religious, entropy, death, etc., for others).
For some, time flows from the past into a possibly different future. In the West, the future is continuous with the past. In the natural sciences, “laws” from the past are automatically valid for the future, reality being as stable as the planetary system, the galaxy. Astronomy is the model. The Creation has been finished, once and for all.
In the social sciences, the future is largely off-limits, taboo. Predictions are often discarded as “wild speculations.” Extension of built-in trends into the future is permitted, but not forecasting with qualitative jumps. The underlying assumption is stable equilibrium; things have found their place and that’s it. Thus, there was no forecasting of (early) modernity during the Middle Ages, let alone working for it.
That is in theory, but the practice is different. People design their individual careers—life trajectories—and have always done so. For collective life there is politics, designing future societies.
But the social sciences are not supposed to be part of it. They approach past and present with data and theory. But data have the final word, and only the past delivers data, leaving us with theory and value for exploring “futurelandia.” Then we declare science to be “value-free” so that social sciences—and people—are deprived of the basic tool for designing futures.
Thus, politicians get rid of a major competitor.
The West has constructed a wonderful tool for understanding past empirical reality, empiricism: collect data, make theories, and check whether the observed is foreseen and/or the foreseen is observed. Values enter in law, health sciences, architecture, and engineering. Law preserves old reality, the others create new: people with lower morbidity and mortality, living in houses of all kinds rather than caves, with miracles of engineering all over. They try to solve old problems at the risk of creating new ones, while the social sciences are not allowed to follow suit by presenting alternative social constructions.
Economics is different. It settled early for a stable equilibrium model accommodating small aberrations, but not the big ones, the crises, as revealed by Queen Elizabeth II asking why such intelligent people did not foresee 2008. The answer—they can predict only small changes but not a system crisis—was a death sentence over them for being like meteorology only handling winds up to Beaufort Scale 5, a breeze, not storms or hurricanes.
In came future studies exploring futurelandia, doing to time what “discoveries” of unexplored (by us) lands did to space. But somebody else had been doing this for millennia, with another wonderful tool, Daoism: holism and dialectics—huge realities cut through by forces and counterforces paving the way for potential reality becoming empirical reality. The Chinese know Western empiricism and use it; the West is mainly ignorant of Chinese Daoism, and too arrogant to learn.
Of course, all civilizations map time, not only the Chinese. Hinduism does it with much complexity. The West does it with the naive simplicity of “the idea of progress,” picked up by liberalism as economic growth and expanding freedoms, and by Marxism as jumpy stages in the means/mode of production relations. We are now on the way down. The iconic countries, USA and USSR, these last decades live the fervor of unforeseen contradictions. One collapsed; the other is on the way? Both might have learnt from the yin/yang in the yin/yang.
How do we enter the future without data, with “only” theory and values? By means of visions, not of what was, nor of what is, but of what may be. We envision, imagine, a desirable and viable future; using values for the desirable, and theory for the viable.
To work on visions of negative peace without direct-structural-cultural violence, and positive peace with direct-structural-cultural peace, use dialogue. Establish the goals—values, interests—of actors and parties; test the goals for legitimacy using law, human rights, and basic needs as guides; then create a vision of a new social reality meeting the legitimate goals. The record shows that it often works.
The goals of the parties are established by asking questions like “What does Afghanistan, the Middle East, or the marriage you would like to be in look like?” These are the values. And the theory is that for viability, the goals have to be legitimate: “How do you justify that?” Then create visions of new social realities meeting legitimate goals.
The Washington Post, November 14, 2016, featured, “To frame future for D.C. boys, schools turn to art.” The focus is not on art as beauty—neither value, nor theory—but on art as creativity, giving them “the support to be innovative,” as “producers, writers and creators.” Excellent! Artists are among the most creative human beings.
But why so indirect? How about “D.C. boys” addressing “What does the D.C. you would like to see look like?” Why not directly; not going via art?
Much work is needed to bring the future closer to us. People articulate the past much better than the future, using their facts, not their visions. And it is so much easier to be negative than positive. Words flow in torrents about the “negative past”; for “positive futures,” we stutter and wave our arms about. Do we learn this from the media’s negativism?
The argument is not for the future to dominate as the past did. The argument is in favor of a symmetric presence in our minds and sciences of past and future, not falling into the empiricist trap.