Afterword: Thinking futures

This Afterword considers the many ways in which social theorists have thought about the future and the end of modernity such as post-histoire and postmodernity. The accelerating speed of modern society and the destruction of the natural environment has been captured in the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’. To understand our future, we depend more and more on experts, but with unknown threats to democracy. Finally, the potential technological disaster confronting us with advanced AI is known as ‘the singularity’.

Although these articles address a wide range of issues concerning how we think about the future, there is a general agreement that the present is characterized by ‘disasters’ ‘catastrophic risk’, ‘speed’ and indeed ‘existential threat’. Consequently, this sense of present and pending disaster from climate change, endless wars, political crisis, pandemics and more runs throughout these articles, bringing into view many adjacent issues around pessimism, anti-utopian thought, risk, chance and the Anthropocene. The idea of an apocalypse is alive and well. Our crisis-ridden time invites us, in fact compels us, to contemplate the future in the light of the past and the present. However, the issue that informs these articles is less concerned with grasping what may happen in the future than with the task of how imaginaries of the future have been and are being constructed. Any picture or imaginary of the future is inevitably embedded in our understanding of the present and the past.

Following Gerard Delanty’s focus on present conceptualization in his ‘Introduction: Social Theory and the Idea of the Future’, many of the articles concentrate on ‘temporalities, imaginaries and imagination’, for example, by Natalia Canto-Mila and Sven Seebach in ‘Between Temporalities and Imagination Disseminated throughout the Social’. Perhaps, a consistent imaginary of time and an overwhelming sense of impending doom were prominent components of apocalyptic thought. Aldo Macareno in ‘Contemporary Visions of the Next Apocalypse’ argues that the next apocalyptic imaginary will confront the dilemma of ‘avoiding the unavoidable’. The primary focus of the modern apocalypse is climate change that will be attended by many catastrophes associated with droughts, forest fires, food shortages and political unrest.

Macareno argues that the paradoxical constitution of apocalyptic semantics as ‘the unavoidable’ provides a dramatic insight into the present. The apocalyptic imagination includes a moral idea of the good or salvation and at the same time includes evil pointing to a future condemnation. The apocalyptic imagination supports practices that seek to mitigate the ominous future. Finally, it is an invitation to political action that can support radical changes.

Although the apocalyptic imaginary can be traced back to, for example, The Book of Revelation by John of Patmos, Susan Buck-Morss in a lecture on ‘Apocalypse and History’ at Cornell in 2018 argued that the apocalypse was never a prophetic prediction of the future, but rather a prophetic accounting of the recent past.

The most important modern period of apocalyptic accounting took place in Germany in response to the devastation of world wars and genocide. The most significant figure in that context, but also a much neglected and misunderstood figure, was Jacob Taubes, who has been labelled the ‘Professor of Apocalypse’ (Muller, 2022). The limited number of his publications appeared roughly between 1942 and 1962, but their radical nature was not fully appreciated until much later. His underlying question in a letter to Armin Mohler in 1952 was ‘What today is not “theology?”’. This addressed his idea that we live in a period when we are haunted by theological residues. Nevertheless, messianic and apocalyptic ideas could be directed towards revolutionary change.

Although Barbara Adam in ‘Tempering the Not-Yet: Towards a social theory for the Anthropocene’ is critical of the limited nature of sociology’s engagement with futurity, she recognized that Max Weber grappled with the subject-specific nature of sociology that is different from the study of physical objects in motion. I would express this issue somewhat differently by noting that Weber’s sociology involved the study of social action as directed towards future goals. However, we have little control over the effects of our future-oriented action – that is our fate.

These debates in social theory evolved eventually into the idea of posthumanism which can be seen as an emerging critique of ‘humanism’ which privileged the human over nature. Feminists have treated humanism as a disguised form of androcentrism (Braidotti, 2013). In a further development, deep ecology looks towards the cleansing of planet earth.

The special issue of the journal also raises some basic questions about how the future (in the present) has been understood. The German Zukunft perfectly captures the future as the to-come or the not-yet. In addition, thinking about the future inevitably raises issues about how we understand the past, the present and as well as the time to come. Delanty reminds us that the past was also at one stage the future. The future challenges us as a way of thinking about the present and the past.

In her contribution to this special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory, Barbara Adam in ‘Tempering the not-yet’ concentrates on the idea of the Anthropocene. The concept emerged from recognition of an acceleration in human-caused change from the research of Paul Crutzen in 2000. It takes account of the effects of pollutants, mass extinction, loss of biodiversity and the climate change that will make many parts of the globe uninhabitable. The radical nature of these changes requires a radical response in the ways in which we understand the ‘not-yet’. How can sociologists undertake meaningful empirical investigations of the present future, future presents, past-futures and future pasts?

Sociology and cultural studies began to embrace debates about what came after modernity in the final decades of the twentieth century. The idea of post-times has proliferated with the idea of being beyond modernity. These new developments began to emerge with the notion that the basic components of industrialization were coming to an end. The post-industrial world of Bell (1973) in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society was primarily a description of how the economy had progressed including the rise of a new knowledge sector. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in 1984, which was originally commissioned as a ‘report on knowledge’, had a general impact on both the social sciences and the humanities. It gave rise to two basic debates about postmodernity as a condition of society in the work of Harvey (1990) and as the cultural movement of postmodernity in Jameson (1991). These two developments indicated that post-modern times were a period of chaos and uncertainty.

The idea of post-times can in fact be traced back to a more challenging and controversial notion of ‘post-history’ or Posthistoire (1952) in the work of Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976). The idea emerged in an obscure discussion of standards of living where consumption resulted in ennui not satisfaction. His argument was that history had come to a standstill, and the western world had entered a period of cultural stagnation. Many authors contributed to this debate from different perspectives in Germany and France. The idea of post-history had no single or agreed meaning (Neithammer & Templer, 1989). For Gehlen, it was a period of social and cultural stagnation. It had a significant impact on art, as visual representations were replaced by conceptual art. As a period of de-institutionalization, it increased human anxiety as the social world became more unreliable and unpredictable (Gehlen, 1980).

The articles in this special issue offer a mixed view of whether sociology has or has not contributed to, what we may for convenience call, future studies. Has sociology produced the goods? According to Delanty in his ‘Introduction’, ‘a theory of the future remained undeveloped’.

Any response to this view may hinge on what counts as ‘sociology’. For example, although Marx and Marxism do not occupy a significant part in these articles, there is one famous passage in Marx and Engles (1969) from chapter 1 of The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 that figures in almost every discussion of postmodernity and postmodernism, namely: ‘All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’.

In referring to Marx, we cannot avoid the contribution of G. W. F. Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1989) to any understanding of the logic of historical progress. Christianity was the supreme expression of this historical development. It was in fact the ‘consummate religion’ of the evolutionary process. Within the Christian faith, the historical principle of subjective freedom came to a complete realization. Hegel’s philosophy of history described the long march of liberty. The future of western world was seen in terms of the historical unfolding of freedom and growing self-awareness, while the Orient remained stagnant. Islam, coming after Christianity, should have been more advanced than Christianity. Hegel invented several strategies to overcome that inconvenient problem. Christianity was the ultimate form of religious consciousness based on freedom. In fact, by excluding Islam from history Hegel departed from the logic of his own dialectic.

Hegel dismissed the Orient as a world that was in fact stationary. The history of the Oriental world ‘is for the most part, really unhistorical, for it is only the repetition of the same majestic ruin’ (Hegel, 1956, p. 106). This view of the stationary character of Oriental history may have also been shared in the Marxist theory of history for example in the Asiatic Mode of Production.

The idea of an axial age offers us an insight into the early origins of the social and cultural changes that transformed human societies, thereby creating the conditions of evolution that to some extent foreshadowed the modern world. Weber’s comparative sociology is seen as a precursor of the idea of an axial age (800–100 BC) that has been understood as the turning point where major movements in religion and philosophy first emerged. Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was in large measure the original theorist of the idea of the Axial Age. Appearing at the end of World War II in Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, he spoke about the Achsenzeit as the common turning point in human history. The idea of axiality was promoted as an antidote to the racial ideology of fascism and the idea of racial superiority.

It is argued that this axial age gave rise to the idea that, given the suffering of humanity in this world, there is a better world to come. In contemporary sociology, this idea has been elaborated by Robert N. Bellah in the idea of transcendence in his Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah, 2011) and further developed in The Axial Age and its Consequences (Bellah & Joas, 2012). This age is also credited with the idea of thinking about thinking. We cannot study the axial age without once more recognizing the influence of Hegel on this construction of an Axial Age, as the early unfolding of a new consciousness.

If there is one sociologist who appears in most of these articles, it is the dominant figure of Max Weber who inevitably appears in any discussion of modernization, secularization, bureaucracy and rationality. There is, however, one aspect of Weber that does not figure large in these contributions, namely, the issue of fate in Weber’s presuppositions. For example, Frederic Jameson (1973), employing the methodology of structuralism from the work of A. J. Greimas, explored the fate-determined world of modern politics and society (Turner, 1981). We cannot predict let alone control the fateful outcomes of our future-oriented actions. According to Jameson, the fateful irony of Protestant spirituality was the creation of the secular, competitive and exploitative world of capitalism. Jenny Andersson in ‘Between responsibility and escape’ also notes how the future is entangled with ‘secular notions of fate and destiny’.

The work of Bruno Latour is obviously relevant to any debate about the future, but was he a sociologist? He was a frequent critic of sociology, but nevertheless his actor–network theory has been incorporated into many aspects of contemporary sociology (Blok & Jensen, 2011). What did he say about our future? Latour, whether a critic of sociology or not, his major contributions were inevitably provocative such as We have never been modern (Latour, 1993). The notion is deliberately provocative, but the basic idea was to distinguish how moderns think about modernity as opposed to what is actually happening in historical terms.

Latour’s challenging deconstruction of modernist social science is addressed by Jenny Andersson in ‘ Between responsibility and escape’. For Latour, L’avenir is composed of the agency of both living and non-living forms. Only a fundamental change to the human psyche can save the future.

Ulrich Beck is one sociologist who perhaps inevitably features in a discussion of modernity and its possible futures. Beck’s major publication was Risk Society (Beck, 1992), which first appeared in Germany in 1986 only weeks before the Chernobyl nuclear power plant crisis and his book became an immediate publishing success. Beck’s basic argument was that the more we depend on advanced technology, the more we expose society to devasting accidents. Beck’s sociology was popular among young audiences, because he rejected any talk of catastrophe and defended the idea that every crisis opens up opportunities for building or rebuilding communities. Every catastrophe creates opportunities for emancipation through collective action (Beck, 2015).

Zygmunt Bauman (2000) was another sociologist whose analysis of modern society in terms of its liquidity defined the present and anticipated the future. Perhaps in line with Marx, Bauman argued that nothing was fixed or permanent in modernity. The idea that late modernity presents us with profound challenges, possibly unique challenges, is hardly new. However, Hartmut Rosa (2020) has offered a compelling and comprehensive view of the challenges that confront us in a new theory of Uncontrollability. Although modern society is based on assumptions about regulation, management, measurement and hence predictability, Rosa proposes that our world is actually uncontrollable. His vision is not ultimately pessimistic, because there is always the prospect of resonance with the world we inhabit.

Although there may be doubts about how far classical sociology engaged in attempts to understood and anticipate the future, there have been no shortage of philosophers who grasped and responded to the dilemmas of understanding what can be meant by ‘the future’. Charles S. Peirce, for good reason, makes several appearances in this collection, for example, in Piet Strydom’s ‘Towards a sociology of the future: An exploration of cognitive social theory’. Pierce’s philosophy was directly relevant to the idea that, while the past and present can be known, the future cannot be known or predicted. To understand this issue, we need to be clear about Peirce’s distinction between the language of actuality and the language of possibility.

Actuality relates to the ‘have-been’s’, while potentiality relates to the ‘would-be’s’. Peirce did not put any undue emphasis on either the past or the future ‘but rather he draws the past and the future into the present in the form of present possibilities which are real now, though not actual’(Rosenthal, 1968, p. 162).

Peirce was a critic of any theory promoting the idea of determinism and by contrast defended the idea of chance (Turley, 1969). Piet Strydom also draws attention to the perhaps obvious, but incalculable role of chance in human affairs and the tendency of sociologists to extrapolate from the taken-for-granted everyday semantics regarding the future.

Beck (2015) had an optimistic view of our futures. Catastrophes create new opportunities for progressive change. Bauman (2017) warned against continually looking backwards through a ‘retrotopia’ to an imaginary security in history. Contemporary catastrophes have indeed witnessed a revival of debates about optimistic change that often trace their roots back to Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516 which concerned either a utopia or nowhere, but it was embraced by, for example, Karl Kautsky (1927) in Thomas More and his Utopia as a socialist tract before its time. Mark Featherstone in ‘The tragedy of utopia in the age of the Anthropocene’ by concentrating on the economics of utopia usefully notes that More was writing against the background of the enclosures of common land that drove many displaced peasants to crime in order simply to survive.

Contemporary socialism has indeed struggled to embrace an optimistic view of the transformation of capitalism and communism. In her Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2002) Susan Buck-Morss lamented the failures of both capitalism and communism to deliver on its promise of a better future for the working class. The dream world of both systems to provide peace, plenty and prosperity had failed miserably. Loren Goldmann, taking up the legacy of Ernst Bloch, introduces the idea of ‘Experimentation and the future(s) of political hope’ as a way of formulating a political future.

In this volume, several articles raise issues connected to expert knowledge such as the contribution by Jenny Andersson, while Haud Gueguen and Laurent Jeanpierre in ‘The government of possible futures and the regime if modern historicity’ underlines the importance of critical research on what is possible to counter the official views of governments on our futures. They complain that ‘The symbolic struggle to define what is possible and what the future holds is now fragmented into various confrontations between experts and prediction technologies, arenas in which the general public remains largely absent’. Perhaps with few exceptions, namely, Stephen Turner (2001, 2013), sociologists have also been absent. Turner has looked at the threats to democracy arising from the interventions of experts and our dependence on expert knowledge.

The role of experts is also considered by Jonathan White in ‘Technocratic myopia: on the pitfall of depoliticising the future’. He argues that politicians who are mainly focused on winning elections will opt for short-termism when adopting new technological solutions rather than a long-term commitment to achieve lasting results.

In conclusion. one future prediction that deserves our close attention is the idea of ‘the singularity’. This idea is associated with Ray Kurzweil(2005) who in The Singularity is Near predicted that by 2045 AI would have the same computation capacity as human beings. Although technophiles may welcome this development, it does raise some difficult political and economic questions such as the impact of AI on the labour market and the future of work. Other interesting speculative questions might include whether a future AI system could tell lies. The idea of the singularity is interesting in the context of these articles, namely, is the singularity ‘to-come’ or a reflection on our present struggle to understand the impact of AI in the here-and-now?