Freedom, fatalism and the future
Freedom, fatalism and the future
Join me at Academy 2023
As you’ll have seen from my Inside the Lords, it has been a pretty gruelling time. So I am really looking forward to summer recess. But I am especially looking forward to the break because it means it is time for one of my favourite events of the year: The Academy.
Each year, thanks to the hard work of the Ideas Matter charity, I get a unique chance to step back from the madness of day-to-day politics and think about broader, more historical issues and ideas. Each year, their event The Academy takes an important theme, and looks at it through history, culture and philosophy.
The theme for this year’s event is What Happened to the Future? – and I think it couldn’t come at a better time. Parliamentary politics might be a particularly obvious example of how our common life lacks big, transformative ideas, but the event will have a broader focus than just this. An absence of imagination seems to affect culture, education, and the economy too.
So, I urge you to join me. You can still get a ticket to the event – you can stay for the whole weekend and enjoy the comforts of Wyboston Lakes Resort (and a chance to socialise with like-minded thinkers) or get a day ticket. There are concessions available, and, for a select number of young people, scholarships. If you want to find out more, head to the website or email jacob@ideasmatter.org.uk
Below, my colleague Jacob, convenor of the event, makes the case for a politics of the future.
See you there!
Freedom, fatalism and the future
If we take a moment to think about it, one of the defining features of contemporary life – from culture to economics, politics to technology – is a kind of stasis. Things seem stuck, people seem resigned to fate, and no-one dreams publicly of a better tomorrow. Few need reminding that our current crop of politicians wouldn’t recognise a transformative idea if it hit them in the face. As the blurb for the event notes, even if the ‘end of history’ era might be coming to a close, it is hardly like the era of big, transformative ideologies has returned.
In fact, despite how obvious it is becoming that we need something different, the Western world seems terrified of the idea of change. The future is a dark and dangerous place, where extreme weather and AI overlords wait for us. Progress – the idea that tomorrow will be better than today – has never felt more under threat. In the media, whether tabloid or broadsheet, shitposter or essayist, a gloomy future of interest rate rises, creaking infrastructure, energy rationing and managed decline awaits us. That’s to say nothing of the cultural rot that seems to be setting in: the transformation of education into indoctrination, endless identity-driven ‘re-imaginings’ of the classics, the purge of ‘outdated’ authors from the canon, and other such barbarism.
The response of some to this mood of doom and decline has been to turn against the idea of progress as such. Given that it seems to have been self-styled ‘progressives’ who push the ideas which got us into this mess, the logical response becomes to try and turn the clocks backwards. Reaction is the order of the day. There’s a new fashion for reclaiming limits, celebrating lower horizons and, in general, repudiating the free spirit said to have animated earlier generations. The ink spilled on the the reactionary response to contemporary feminism is illustrative of the general mood: the 1960s generation went too far, dreamed too big, released themselves from too many limits.
It’s seems no coincidence that the ire of these reactionaries falls so often on technologies, such as the pill. Being anti technology is as close to a consensus as we have today. Whether you are a Just Stop Oil activist, a vaccine sceptic, a NIMBY, or a reactionary feminist, it is the power of technology that is being called into question.
For all these groups, new technologies are said to have given us too much freedom: the freedom to drive (which is killing the planet), the freedom from disease (which is poisoning our bodies), or the freedom from the burdens of female biology (which alienates us from femininity). The only response to this surplus of freedom is to cut humanity back down to size. Humanity, having stolen too much Promethean fire, must be put in chains. As ill-conceived as the Titan submarine might have been, the almost unanimous finger-wagging at the ‘hubris’ of those aboard the ill-fated capsule suggested that the real target of those smugly pointing out the flaws of the craft was not unearned wealth or the hollowness of Silicon Valley ideology, but the Promethean spirit itself. Freedom comes with risks. If you can’t ever imagine taking a risk, you can’t imagine freedom.
The idea of the future is an immediate casualty of this turn against freedom. This is because the future is unthinkable without freedom - even sci-fi dystopias set in the distant future are all designed and shaped as if they are taking place in the past, all superstition, darkness and steampunk. It is tempting to say that the future is the expression of freedom, the tense in which freedom understands itself. If tomorrow is to be any better than today, it is only because we make it so through our free acts. It is as if freedom renews the shared world, takes on what has become old and grey and endows it with life once again. Freedom allows the past to live on into the future. Seen this way, the ‘natural’ state of things is stasis and decline – only through conscious, free effort do we sustain or make things better.
This, then, is why it is so important to allow ourselves to dream. Not idle daydreaming that relieves us of the need to act, but the use of our imagination as a prelude and inspiration to going out and forging a new world. When so much of our politics and culture seems to want to hem in our desires, what we need is to think them through and reject the stale conformity we find all around us.
A great place to make a start on this is at The Academy 2023 at the end of this month. You’ll be in good company – our attendees are serious thinkers from all walks of life, each with a passion for understanding the origins of our present malaise. The programme – covering everything from science fiction to the culture of remakes, our fascination with dystopia to the inability of our elites to change anything – is packed full of opportunities to do just that. So, get your ticket, and I look forward to welcoming you there.
THE ACADEMY 2023: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FUTURE?
SAT 29 & SUN 30 JULY 2023
WYBOSTON LAKES RESORT, BEDFORDSHIRE
EVENT PROGRAMME
Keynotes
Why Utopia Matters
Professor Frank Furedi
Without Utopia, are we left unable to imagine a truly different future? Without genuinely transformative ideals, what is there to fight for – merely a marginally better version of today … read more
Cultural Exhaustion? Remakes and originality
Dr Maren Thom
Ours is the era of endless remakes, repeats, reboots, franchises, cinematic universes and multiverses. What happened to creativity? Today many allege that the entire notion of representation– the master concept of film and art more generally – is under attack … read more
Is Progress a Thing of the Past?
Sherelle Jacobs
What happened to progress? For a long time, progress was assumed as a given. But these assumptions have increasingly been called into question in an era of both ever-expanding victimhood politics and economic stagnation. Perhaps the issue is that Western societies have lost their sense of mission… read more
Contemporary Dystopia: The return of apocalyptic thinking
Dr Tim Black, columnist, Spiked
End-thinking seems to abound today. Politicians and activists alike warn daily of the ever-impending climate catastrophe. Others talk excitedly of the next pandemic or of the world-ending threat posed by AI. What’s driving the prevalence of apocalypticism today … read more
The New Elite: Future Proof?
Professor Matthew Goodwin, University of Kent; author, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics
Lots of recent commentary from both progressives and conservatives has focused on the question of who the ‘elite’ are, and how, if at all, the make-up of the ruling elite has changed. But few would deny that our current crop of elites seem singularly unprepared for the challenges and crises of the 21st Century. Why is this? read more
Reclaiming the Future from the War on the Past
Dr Tiffany Jenkins
Today, we seem hostile to the past, more likely to hide it, as in the shutting of galleries in the Wellcome Collection, or try and remove it, as we see in the pulling down of statues. The demand for reparations for historical wrongs also seems to reflect a widespread fatalistic sense that the present is so determined by past events that all we can do is mourn … read more
History
The First Transhumanist? Haldane’s Daedalus 100 Years On
Sandy Starr
2023 marks the centenary of Daedalus, a landmark lecture – subsequently a book – by the geneticist, polymath and public intellectual JBS Haldane. The lecture surveyed humanity’s relationship to technology in the wake of WW1 … read more
Forecasting failure: A short history of the future
Professor James Woudhuysen
From the exuberance of Jules Verne to the forebodings of HG Wells, visions of the future are well known to say more about their own times than they do about the future itself. At the height of the Cold War, for instance, some still had faith in the future … read more
Literature
Bronze Age Mindset: Body-building the future?
Nikos Sotirakopoulos
In 2018, a strange book appeared, propelling its author, an anonymous twitter account by the name of Bronze Age Pervert, to the centre of public conversation. The book was said to be a manual for Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, and has come to define the reactionary Right. Is the book, or its author, just another voice wanting to preach to a disaffected youth … read more
Dune: Science fiction and the end of the future
JJ Charlesworth, art critic; editor, ArtReview
Frank Herbert’s 1964 sci-fi masterpiece Dune remains a pivotal work in the history of science fiction. Whereas the works of the earlier twentieth century trumpeted the infinite possibilities of humanity’s future, driven by technology, science fiction since Dune has been more preoccupied with the imminent eclipse of humanity. When much of today’s science-fiction can barely bring itself to imagine human beings even a few years into the future, how might science fiction recentre the human today? read more
TICKETS:
Tickets start at £240 for a weekend including accommodation, meals, and lectures – not to mention the chance to carry on discussions with fellow attendees at drinks and dinner.
• One night, single occupancy £240 Buy tickets
• One night, double occupancy £400 Buy tickets
• Two nights, single occupancy £340 Buy tickets
• Two nights, double occupancy £540 Buy tickets
• Day tickets £65 Buy tickets
• Concession rates are available for full time students, senior citizens and unwaged
READING LISTS AND MORE INFORMATION:
Please visit the Academy page for more information and reading lists: https://ideasmatter.org.uk/the-academy-2023-what-happened-to-the-future
For further information contact Jacob Reynolds jacob@ideasmatter.org.uk or Geoff Kidder geoff@ideasmatter.org.uk