Battle for the future

As an “image of the future” from utopia, it turned into a strategic resource of social development in the era of populism

We publish the thoughts of the expert of the Committee of Civil Initiatives, the leading researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the FNISC of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Sogomonov.

To be free from error, you must be captured by him.

Averroes in the retelling of H.L. Borges

Residents of the Arkhangelsk region continue to courageously resist the Moscow "garbage plans". They are provided by moral support by citizens from all regions, even part of the clergy. The authorities and monopolists increase strength pressure and so far do not think of abandoning the plan. What is the paradox of the conflict around the Shies station? The authorities are sure that they offer a technologically competent and economically justified solution, and not just change the geography of megaslavl. The people rebelly, opposing such a radical, in his opinion, manifestations of ecocide. It is the rebellion that causes bewilderment and anger in the elites. The authorities, in principle, do not like it when they are overtaken or disagree with their decisions. But in this case, they are convinced that they do everything correctly and in accordance with the principles of environmental conservation, although corruption schemes are openly visible. And therefore, they do not understand the most important thing that the inhabitants of Pomerania are fighting, first of all, for their civil law for a free local future . More precisely: for the right to choose sustainable development in their interests and future generations. And they express active disagreement both against authoritarian violence and corruption, and against the fact that their collective future is alienated from them.

It is far from the first time that we are observing how internal disagreements in Russia are unfolding around the topic of the general future and the right of citizens to it . Obviously, the Yekaterinburg confrontation belongs to this type of conflict. The metropolitan renovation, by the way, is also an example of such alienation, but so far it causes only a quiet and slurred grunt of patient Muscovites. Meanwhile, at the PMEF-2019, the general conversation only went about the images of the future, but which of the ordinary people learned something specific from them? It seems that our local future is no longer constructed on these stage. In a word, the correct understanding of the very phenomenon of the right to the future can explain a lot to us from what is happening today in the country and the world.

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Throughout the 1990s. Russian elites tried in vain to develop a national idea. It was not possible and, fortunately, they abandoned such a crazy venture by the beginning of the 2000s. At the beginning of the Putin era, this IDEE FIXE thoroughly forgotten, and the national ideology, imperceptibly for all citizens, was under vigilant control by the state and security forces. But today national ideas are again dictated to us from above.

After that, it is logical that every big and small policy in the superconsier's conditions began to be interpreted as “technical”. Ideological and cultural meanings were seized from it. The spirituality of the people was identified with patriarchy, religion and sovereign. Exactly like that of Count Uvarov. The universal value gate turned out to be locked for the emerging nation. There was practically nothing fundamentally and symbolically significant that the country would have led forward.

And then the time itself began to act as a “technical” goal. The state was eager to live tomorrow. Apparently, partly because in the current reality he did not work out. And the envy of the successes of the near and distant neighbors only added oil into the fire.

The society, on the contrary, was vital in an endless series of unsuccessful reforms, forgot about the future time. One part of it is barely surviving, the other-it went headlong into the consumer carnival of the day of the current one, believing in the only “correct” philosophy of Carpe Diem (“catch the day”-lat.).

A curious situation has developed: the need for national projects intensifies, and the manic search for national ideas ends every time. However, the replacement for them was quite simple. The image of the future . More precisely, its absence has become most often mentioned in recent years by experts and politicians a phrase. After all, it is easier to get away from relevant and transfer the present to the future.

What happens in our native Fatherland is seen in different ways, but most of us agree that it is precisely the shortage of ideas and visions of the future that the chaos of the present determines. Safe development, failures and falls, endless circulation in a circle, stupid government planning and, most importantly, the feeling of permanent crisis - all this, as it seems to many, the consequences of the image of the desired future , which were not formed from the nation and the state. And while there is no clear answer to the question "Where are we going?" (or more correctly: “Where do we want to come?”), Russia at best we will stomp on the spot, experiencing economic decline and sociocultural degradation, falling out of the global world both politically and competitively and in a thing.

Amazing deja vu! Isn't it true? Many of us still believe that if someone is created by someone, then life is normalized again, or at least, the public path to the future will become clear. It is only better for everyone from this - the country's leadership is easier to lead the general process, to determine the framework priorities and rules, and the people will be inspired by the ideas of the “bright” future, granted to national projects.

It is clear that we are dealing with the post -communist syndrome . And for its manifestation there are all conditions. Was not many live in the last century, although not as well as today, but still easier and more understandable than now? The long -term goals and tactical tasks were clear, the public universe was clearly seen, where every person needed to integrate professionally and biographically. I'm not talking about today's poor layers, the present of which has become unbearably heavy, gloomy and completely hopeless. But even a generation back, small prosperity was much more worthy and not as humiliating as today.

In a word, the faithful image of the future, as an intellectual illusion and a magical savior, can and should return us to consent with ourselves, to harmony with historical time and its conditions. Such is the persistent requirement of the masses and most of the elites. But where does confidence in the miraculous abilities of the image of the future come from?

Everything is simple. This model itself, like many other intellectual innovations, was borrowed from abroad, though it was already initially incorrectly interpreted and introduced into the experience of political development in free improvisation. Since the images of the future are constructed by people around the world - in politics, business, culture, institutional development - therefore, we must also do the same, our “creators” of the future are naively, in these images, only a strictly pragmatic picture of the future is drawn (the number, robotization, large data), and the ideology and values ​​of Western universalism are practically reduced to nergrained.

And this is their deep error. The images of the future in the West are fundamentally value products and their role in world progress-first of all, moral-humanistic. This cultural rod cannot be removed from creative techniques for constructing the future. But, after all, we wish you purely external imitations in order to maintain our identity, as it was done in Russia. Without freedoms, human rights, the rule of law. Alas, the superficial borrowing of someone else's experience without the meanings accompanying it makes borrowing itself meaningless . The Chinese do not borrow experience, but only technologies, their identity, they protect differently, but they seemed to have complicated, which means semantic imports.

The more we plunge into the hopeless chaos of the present, the louder the votes of our public leaders are louder, requiring the executive branch of a clear image for the future of Russia, as if this could lead the country out of the impasse. At the same time, the permanently condensing geopolitical situation, in turn, is more likely to the hands of the Russian authorities. In fact, how is it possible to construct the future, if it is not clear what will happen in the world even in the evening? As a result, thousands of plans/projects are accepted without a holistic image of the future.

The federal center and regions compose their long -term strategies with incredible perseverance, plan in detail the development of the country and its individual territories for decades to come. And most of these texts lie down in a dead load on the table and remain unremarkable, even Pro Forma.

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Looking over the horizon of current time is the natural need and desire of a modern person. If in an archaic society the future completely and completely belonged to otherworldly forces, today the acting person alienates him in his favor. A tense look into the future becomes a significant quality of our civilization, balancing in mass moods between fatal catastrophism and unbridled optimism. The popularity of futurological scenarios and daily forecasts only confirms this thesis.

The scientific vision so far remains the destiny of the elect, ordinary citizens are unlikely to have something more than ordinary human curiosity, although it also affects their daily activity. The average Russians, as sociological studies show, does not plan to at all, or, if they plan, for no more than a few months. Even the massive distribution of a mortgage did not make time managers of their long-term future from Russians.

The wide formulation of the issue of planning inevitably leads us to the discourse about the foggy meanings of the future . Why do no need planning if the movement of the nation-state (as well as regions, cities, places) is absolutely not finalized? There are no common goals, there are no joint values ​​of development, but the miserable attempts of the authorities to announce their dreams, such as “enter the five or ten” of the leading countries of the world in one or another indicators, is not reflected in people's lives. Therefore, such intermediate “fins” rather irritate the people than set up in a positive way. However, the paradox: if we do not see any signs of real changes for the better, then why is hopes for the life -giving power of a single “image of the future” for the nation? Truly, in our conditions you can only believe in a miracle . But this "miracle" is no longer an otherworldly nature. It can be created by himself and, speaking in a fashionable language, designed his furses.

What is the "future" in such a semiotic context? This is not a specific chrono, for example, the future generation. Not a specific date, as Khrushchev thought during the thaw, announcing that the country will come to communism in 1980 and a particular electoral cycle that is not even predetermined by the constitution. The future is now not measured by either the exact numbers or the iconic eras. It is drawn by large strokes and free temporary limits. It is more dependent on the accelerating ticking of planetary watches than on the voluntarism of local watchmakers. In fact, who will believe today that only after 2024 in Russia will finally come that very desired future? Of the sober people, most likely no one. Meanwhile, people who courageously endure the hardships of the alarming of the present have less strength, hopes and, most importantly, desires.

Social philosophers argue that the future can only be felt, and precisely together, rather than individually . Its symbolic essence is easy to convey to the heuristic formula: the future is a state when everything becomes different , that is, not the same as at the moment. In a word, the images of the future are not just mental products, grammatically expressed Future Perfect Tense, but significantly updated in the present and prolonged forward the desired “picture of the world”. Such a future has the right to expect people and civilian nations. But, after all, Osip Mandelstam was right, calling us not to believe in temporal metamorphoses: "... everything was getting up, everything will happen again ...".

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Creating images of a qualitatively updated future, experts and public leaders are in a difficult position, because, despite the radical populist sentiments and expectations, they are forced to strictly adhere to the ancient Greek rule “nothing beyond measure”. They draw the image of good fantastic, it is unlikely to be taken seriously. Do not add to the image the elements of a beautiful illusion attracting the ordinary consciousness with its tempting fairy tale, they simply will not pay attention to it. Of course, the image of the future has the right to delight, delight, arouse surprise, but nevertheless it should remain a realistic project, repelled from familiar and understandable meanings and values, that is, not only technological.

The main problem for all of us is that the future must speak the language of the future . But with words and concepts in today's world, great difficulties. In conditions of lexical deficiency, we again appeal to the socio-political thesaurus of the past century, and he, of course, has exhausted his heuristic potential. Changing civilizational realities do not fit into its strictly defined semantics and lose semantic attractiveness. Neologisms are easily born, bake like pies, especially with simple transliteration of English words, they gain popularity with amazing speed, but also quickly and go into circulation.

Explaining new trends with the help of "old" concepts, we risk remaining inappropriately understood. People recognize reality through the words, therefore, through the "old" meanings embedded in them. This dissonance is observed even with such stable categories of social knowledge as capitalism, socialism, market, democracy. What can they tell us about now? Almost about nothing! Obviously, behind the facade of these Key-Notions do not see the real changes that have been outlined in the socio-political sphere. But also introducing unjustified neologisms, we equally for the general public remain behind the families of general understanding. For example, the term “Connectography”, proposed by the paragraph of Hannna instead of the usual geography, initially caused lexical delight in the world bomon, but quickly subsided. Such is the fate of such newfangled phrases as “creative class” and “creative city”. Over time, the author (R. Florida) turned away from them.

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Let's try to answer the question: for whom and why do you really need the image of the future today? The sociological version of the answer, it seems to me, is simple to banality. All the inhabitants of the planet of our complex and with the monstrous acceleration of the changing world need the concept of a given future for a more adequate and correct understanding of the present . In other words, in order to figure out in today's conditions and see genuine trends, we need remote or at least intermediate “finals” of relevant changes.

When social scientists, futurologists and humanities begin to be seriously engaged in such design, it suddenly discovers that there can be many “finals”. It all depends on how different factors and circumstances develop. There is no programmed future. So, drawing the images of the desired future, we actually only publish our relevant fears and hopes . And we are waiting for the appearance of a "black swan." Science offers us only probabilistic scenarios. There is no single and at the same time academically justified image and, in principle, cannot be.

The last and, perhaps, the most loud in world history, the attempt to anticipate a single future was made in Marxism. How it ended, everyone remembers well. After the “end of history” and the collapse of socialism at the end of the XX century. Futurologists-forecasters began to think exclusively with scenarios, not paradigms, and henceforth only postulate only a multiple future . The holistic picture, they recognize, it is impossible to create the efforts of scientific thinking, only individual sides of the inevitably impending future and, above all, in the field of technology, ecology, spatial development and world integration can be foreseen. However, even quite expected innovations may not take place, that is, not to go through the full cycle from the emergence of an idea to its practical embodiment.

Thus, if it is unlikely to predict the course of history, then we can assume what options for civilizational development a global choice of humanity is possible. However, in this we stumble upon a blank anthropological wall. The most unpredictable were people themselves. The American social philosopher Alvin Toffler defined this intellectual trap of the creative interaction of a person and his future about half a century ago as a “shock from a clash with the future” (Future Shock, 1970).

The failure of the Marxists in predictions turned away almost all of social science from serious attempts to build a picture of the world of the future. And if the prognostic trend is preserved among scientists who are still amusing futurological plots, then they do this from now on without reliance on serious academic knowledge and predict only some particular changes. Philosophers were completely limited to the study of utopias and their roles in the life of our global contemporaries.

At the same time, any academic prognostic today rotates around two fundamental topics: technology and ecology . Even the threats of wars have faded into the background. But in paradoxically, both are seen by scientists and experts alternately in the apocalyptic, then in utopian light. Perhaps because it is with technology and ecology that the most massive fears and hopes are associated. Digitalization, of course, will provide the world with new opportunities, but most likely, the radically social inequality will deepen. Robotics will facilitate labor by taking a lot of jobs. Universal computerization leads the world to the verge of total (not) safety and extreme fragility. But, after all, we do not choose this progress, which means that we accept the new rules of the ambiguous world .

At the same time, as soon as the thinker goes beyond the horizon of the observed future, he again returns to the problem of public arrangement of future post -capitalist civilization . An analysis of scientific literature shows that academic forecasts, in fact, are reduced to four mega-images of the future. Their nominations may seem banal, but their semantic filling today is completely innovative.

For example, disputes about “communism” still do not subside, but from now on it is not interpreted by orthodox in Marxist, as an inevitable formation, how much is such a future state of abundance, in which the principle of egalitarianism permeates its entire institutional architecture. He is contrasted with a different probabilistic mega-model of the future-“Rantism”. It is also a society of abundance, but at its basis the exact opposite principle of a strict hierarchy is laid. Expert predictions of future world deficits pushing researchers to discuss public answers and these challenges. They can be both pro-socialist, that is, hyper-distributive, which is unlikely to solve the problems of deficits and externalist, meaning a return to the rigid estate structure of society. By the way, ideologists of deep digitalization for the chosen and artificial cultivation of a narrow caste of post-people, bio-kilbords often discuss the latest scenarios.

But all these are very distant prospects and it is unlikely that they are talking about when they are talking about the images of the future. People want to see him benevolent and, more precisely, an improved version of today . World examination is also responded to this request.

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Humanity still relies on the professional skills of foresighting social researchers and experts. They, in turn, offer a wide audience “scientifically based” pseudo -products. Predictive analytics - with this phrase, we grasp the vector of the tendency that showed itself in a newfangled examination. It is addressed to global humanity, calls for him to think about the challenges of time and expand the course of history. Each author is trying to make his own world better. Social reclamation , if you like, in global science, replaced the suffering Fiasco practical Marxism.

At the same time, the thinker who turns to the thinking public must perform three ritual actions. First: to deny the present as if recognizable reality. The second: to grab a certain phenomenon from it and, extolying it into the future, build on it your author’s picture of the future and thus see the future of a purely personal optics. Third: come up with the original name and new concepts for your concept. The Novoyaz is an integral part of today's construction of the future.

But in this case, who will belong to such a future ? Obviously, the one who knows the answer to this question also learns the secret of power in the 21st century. In other words, it is not so important today to understand how and by whom the future is being constructed, how many people as a result will assign the final product of this co-creation. In a medieval society, the future belonged entirely to God, although he, sometimes, “shared” him with the power of the emerging classes. The capitalist economy and the market were born in the old sacred circumstances of European history, but soon a general understanding came that the entrepreneur invests in the economy, which means he should “see” the future, own them, guarantee his long -term predictability, primarily financial. However, this new class in the end also had to share the future with great politics.

Today, the future has slipped away from the hands of elected or, moreover, authoritarian authorities, and the constancy of crises shows that businessmen, by and large, have lost their characteristic intuition and ability to anticipate the development of events. Of course, visionaries remain, like Liu Kuan Yu, but they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. National states are gradually inferior to the leadership of megalopolis and transnational corporations, the competitive positions of which depend not so much on their visionary, but on the ability to clearly impose their image to the future states, but often to the whole world. That is, to construct the future, position it in the mass consciousness and expert communities as the only possible and correct. And then move in this direction, forcing earthlings to follow their dynamic vector. So, in particular, our capital's mayor receives, imposing the country's agglomeration scenario, based on the interests of Moscow and large capital.

This trend illustrates how the public discourse of change around the world changes. The fourth technological revolution sets a certain tone regarding the expected future, paying less and less social interest to social problems and, on the contrary, focusing the main attention around the plots of the upcoming Digital Utopia, tied to the place. That is, the national agenda is inferior to the line of urban, and the topic of the cities of the future overshadows all the others.

All this logically fits in the multiple reality of tomorrow, because we are talking about thematically different cities. And today this is already perceived, rather, not as a barrier, but as a chance and a wonderful reason for territorial planners - to think, discuss and invent their local future , not excruciating about the complex sociocultural aspects of civilizational progress and the fate of mankind. In a word, the futurological center of public attention began to move everywhere from state and expert brain centers to cities, where active civil communities were seriously concerned about their local future. Russia, however, is late here, territorial planning is still invented, imposed and controlled from the center.

And what are the cities of the world, especially megacities? Forsytes. Strategic sessions. Master plans. Positioning. Branding. All this, like many other techniques of urban creativity, is the most popular tools for constructing the image of the future. Any thoughtful strategic conversation in the field begins with the ritual of the collective creation of the future . It can no longer be appropriated by either an individual, or a narrow group of interests, even if endowed with great power and money. Naomi Klein convincingly showed in her books that the anti -globalists or, say, supporters of the OCCUPY movement, oppose the corporate way of privatizing the future and desperately resist any desire to take their civil law on him.

The Russian millionaire cities with great difficulty conquer the right to an autonomous path to the future and to the strategic development of their images of the future, but it is obvious that this process has been launched.

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Seeing the future of countries and continents is the task of a narrow caste of professionals in the field of geopolitics . To construct the local future of cities - from small to great - the prerogative of active civil society . The local future is happening together with people with different interests and is carried out on the basis of jointly shared values. For some time, of course, different models of constructing the future-national and city-will compete for the loyalty of people. But the outcome of this battle, as I think, is predetermined in favor of cities and many local times . Recall that Thomas Mor, the author of the first utopia, drew his social imagination in the form of an ideal, as it seemed to him then, city. He did not think that all of the humanity of the planet could be located within its borders?

Someone may seem to someone the triumph of anti-utopia and the onset of the era of even more civilizational chaos, but these will be people who want to control our future “from above” in the old fashioned way. The national time gradually and irreversibly gives way to local time. We quite expect the moment when the national clock is turned off at all. However, such temporal transit can result in unpredictable consequences.

Today, no one can really foresee how people living in different parts of the planet and focusing only on local time will verify it with global hours, will they fall out of global architecture, will not roll back? In a word, doubts about the legitimacy of such a transition, indeed, do not leave us: is this a dangerous misconception that can lead cities and regions into a civilizational impasse? Time will show.

But you still need to try, as the Averroes advised.