This page was updated 08/14/2008

The problem of talking about the future and saying things will or should happen then is:

When IS the future?

I am talking about the future that started anywhere from some years ago to some years ahead and that is different from the present in one simple way: We have or will have recognized, probably also experienced, the hole I’m talking about.

The hole is a lack of substance, a vaporous, indistinct territory in a place where we should be able to function, to be able to live and live well. In the sense that the future – as not yet formed – is empty, I am seeing a hole that UUs and UUism are called to fill. We can help the whole world here, and I feel we must.

Let’s start with some more specific ideas about the future.

The Foellinger Foundation brought futurist David Pearce Snyder to town this year for its annual Williams Lecture. He describes the future as having two components. First is what he called "Our unpredictable random future." Things like environmental events, political developments, stock market behavior, economic performance and scientific breakthroughs in addition to the more scary "wild card" events like hyper-weather, pandemics, Peakoil, cybertage, industrial accidents and terrorism.

Nevertheless, he argues that the future is not chaotically unpredictable. "The long-term stream of events," he said, "is coherent, not random, and the future will primarily reflect forecastable realities." Being a skilled consultant and presenter, he calls this second component of the future "Our inevitable inertial future" and he even identified the predictable event horizons.

Snyder is pretty optimistic overall. He even makes it sound doable that our non-profits will be able to use productivity improvements he says we will finally reap from our investment in computer technology to handle the necessary work of helping all the victims of this particular revolution. Otherwise, the extended household is likely to be the only available social safety net.

And there will be plenty of victims.

He quotes Grady Means and David Schneider, authors of the eight-year-old book "MetaCapitalism," who stipulate that in these final stages of this technological transformation the very idea of what constitutes a business is changing. "The networks of suppliers, producers and customers will be the business," they say. Snyder reminds us that this network is global, which means that global labor markets worldwide will be driven to pay comparable wages for comparable work.

This is not good news for an American economy accustomed to higher wages than the rest of the world. Snyder tells us this is the "wave of creative destruction" that always clears the way for a new economy. It’s the bust before the boom, during which the economy will finally create large, new classes of median income jobs.

Will the people of this new world be as able to succeed as well as the Medieval craftsmen who formed guilds and built a new world of cities in the ruins of the feudal world? Will they be as successful as the millions of their immigrant ancestors who built this country? Will they enjoy prosperity like that of post-World War II Fort Wayne?

A lot of that depends on how good an educational system we leave for them, and we are mired in a debate over education that is unlikely to end any time soon with clear answers. Snyder cites the push for more technology-trained (including engineering and math) college graduates and a K-12 system that teaches basic workplace skills. Yet, he says, we have a surplus of underemployed science, engineering and math graduates, especially Ph.D.’s, and current 10-year estimates do not see a significant increase in jobs requiring such education. He cites the push for educating children to have interactive and analytical skills "for which there are no common standards of curriculum content or student assessment."

We have work to do here.

And meanwhile, back at the economy, three unavoidable forces of change continue to "disrupt employment, shrink the social safety net and sustain public sector austerity," Snyder says. These forces are: 1. The "info-mation of work; 2. The disaggregation of work (it’s the network, remember?), and 3. The globalization of the economy.

The Bust Before the Boom. Plus all those scary unpredictables.

This is real and significant change, and it is here to stay. He says our great-grandchildren’s history books will call it a revolution. The nicest way I can put it is to say the future will be challenging.

Now is a good time to talk about the call I feel in my very bones that UUism can and must fill this hole in the future, that we are the ones already developing the tools and techniques to live well together in the world as it is now and is becoming. Of course, few of us will be around in 50 years to see how and what our grandchildren are doing as adults. We will be becoming spectators rather than leaders in the next few decades as our children replace us in the workforce and in community leadership.

How UUs and UUism respond to the challenges of the future and how they prepare our future members to respond is hugely important, but other things are going on — cultural developments and changes — that provide the rest of the answer. I cannot fail to recognize the impact of culture on how the world works.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens says "culture consists of the values the members of a given group hold, the norms they follow and the material goods they create." Fellow sociologist Paul Taylor describes it as "the learned, shared behavior of members of a society. Culture is a social blueprint, a guide for living, the way of life of a society."

Culture, the way of living we hand on to our children and grandchildren, is not static, and the culture we have lived with and through in these post-World War II years has been about the opposite of static. The culture of the Fifties was upended in the Sixties, and the Seventies and Eighties were filled with varyingly successful explorations and experimentations, triumphs and tragedies. We’re just not the same as we were, and our cultural legacy to our children is significantly different from the culture we inherited.

Remember The Establishment so many of my generation rebelled against in the Sixties? It’s gone and replaced by a new, different one. David Brooks, in his book "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There," says the old-money WASP Establishment pretty much set in motion the forces that replaced it with a meritocracy based on education. He dates it to the Nineties when the new upper class began "to assume the necessary role of an establishment. That is to say, it has begun to create a set of social codes that give coherent structure to national life. Today, America once again has a dominant class that defines the parameters of respectable opinion and taste — a class that determines conventional wisdom, that promulgates a code of good manners, that establishes a pecking order to give shape to society, that excludes those who violate its codes, that transmits its moral and etiquette codes down to its children, that imposes social discipline on the rest of society so as to improve the ‘quality of life,’ to use the contemporary phrase.

"This new establishment has assumed this role hesitantly. It hasn’t become a technocratic elite with a strong sense of public service, as many of the early champions of the meritocracy envisioned. It hasn’t established clear lines of authority, since it still has trouble coming to terms with authority. Instead, it has exercised its influence through a million and one private channels, reforming society through culture more than politics. Its efforts to establish order have been spotty and often clumsy — all the political correctness codes, the speech codes on campuses, the sexual harassment rules. But gradually a shared set of understandings and practices has cohered into a widely accepted set of social norms. Thirty years ago, when tearing down the established structure was the order of the day, civility was not a cherished value, especially on campuses. But now that a new civil order has come into being, the word civility is again heard on nearly every educated person’s tongue. And somehow some sort of looser social peace is in the process of being restored. Many of the social indicators that skyrocketed during the age of transition, the 1960s and 1970s, have begun to drop: crime rates, abortion rates, teen births, illegitimacy, divorce rates, teenage drinking."

He calls this new upper class the Bobos, short for bourgeois bohemians. They have pulled together the bourgeois and the bohemian ways of life, they value intellect and intelligence and they understand and know how to make money. They’re the lawyers who met their wives, teachers in progressive schools or social workers, when they both were running marathons. They’re the academics who socialize easily at conferences with corporate leaders and government officials, and their children go to the same schools. They’re journalists and financial analysts, CEOs of non-profits and founders of software companies.

"What unites them," Brooks says, "is their shared commitment to the Bobo reconciliation." It’s not a perfect reconciliation. Bobos are both driven to succeed and fearful of selling out. And they believe in social equality. Everyone who works and achieves to that meritocratic level becomes a Bobo. The children of Bobos do not automatically inherit their parents’ status. They have to earn it, too, which triggers significant anxiety and effort on the part of Bobo parents.

Nevertheless, this new upper class has staying power almost because of its openness and vulnerability.

"The WASP Establishment fell pretty easily in the 1960s," Brooks says. "It surrendered almost without a shot. But the meritocratic Bobo class is rich with the spirit of self-criticism. It is flexible and amorphous enough to co-opt that which it does not already command. The Bobo meritocracy will not be easily toppled...."

It’s a fascinating Establishment — "rich with the spirit of self-criticism" is an amazing attribute for a culture’s elite. UUs are rich in this spirit, too. We area already operating in this new leadership mode. It appears the Bobos not only take the critical role of intellect seriously but also feel the paradoxes in their cultural leadership, as we do when we remind ourselves to question privilege and be aware of oppression, to mind our carbon footprint.

French social philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky describes what Brooks calls the Bobo way as "paradoxical individualism." It is significantly different from what we have called individualism in the modern era of emancipation politics. Its hedonism is measured, and its consumption is to express what is important to the individual rather than to mark status. No more Studio 54. Day trading is not so cool any more. The Me Generation has been left behind.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens explains how doubt and risk assessment are constant preoccupations in this new cultural milieu. "Doubt, a pervasive feature of modern critical reason, permeates into everyday life as well as philosophical consciousness, and forms a general existential dimension of the contemporary social world," he says. Today’s self-identity is made reflexively, in constant interaction with the whole world of options and possibilities. We question, consider consequences and choose — endlessly. UUs are more accustomed to this exhausting and exacting practice than most other cultural groups. We can lead by example and by exploring what has and has not worked for us.

This kind of doubt and this necessity to weigh risk and reward is not an unavoidable aspect of human nature. Giddens argues that our fairly recent ancestors — those who lived in traditional cultures oriented toward the past — understood that the world was dangerous but had no need for the concept of risk.

"In the Middle Ages," he says, "there was no concept of risk because it wasn't required. The idea of risk only develops when you have a society, which actively tries to break away from the past and to conquer the future. The rise of the idea of risk and the introduction of the very concept of risk stems from the development of modern industrial civilisation in the seventeenth century. For the first time western civilisation was dominated by technology, science, progress, shaping the world to human interests, refusing to accept that the world is given by God, and starting to believe that we can make our own history." We have deep roots in those times and ideas. Giddens continues:

"The idea that we can control nature through science and technology was the kind of belief that fueled the expansion of western industrial civilisation and the journeys of explorers across the world. When the first missionaries went to Japan there was a physical process of exploration of space and a temporal process of the exploration of time. In traditional cultures there is a sense in which there is no notion of future and no notion of risk. There is no notion of the future as a separate temporal domain because the future looks very much like the past. But with the rise of modernity you have a society bent on changing the future. The Enlightenment philosophers saw the future as a territory which you can colonise and occupy. You can thereby shape history to human purposes and get away from God and dogma and from the influence of the past to shape the influence of the future. The idea of risk is bound up with the control of time and the future, but it is also very much originally bound up with the control of space."

Risk, he reminds us, has to do with both danger and opportunity. When economic risk is undertaken, the rewards can be great. We have turned that kind of risk assessment into a science.

We have turned another cultural corner, he continues, with a more sophisticated understanding of risk. In addition to the familiar external risks, we have identified what Giddens calls "manufactured risk," that "comes from human intervention either in history or in nature through science and technology.

"Manufactured risk is the discovery that areas of growth in human knowledge have collapsed in on us," he says.

"The old Enlightenment precept of increasing knowledge about the world leading to increased certainty is now known to be only partly true. The increasing intrusion of human knowledge into our own lives and into the world of nature creates new uncertainties, new risk environments, to which we have to respond differently from those characteristic of the past. One of the main reasons for the expanding entry of risk into the discourse of our everyday lives is the prevalence of manufactured risk. This results from two processes. The first affects nature. What some people call the 'end of nature' is a useful phrase for what’s happened in recent years. The end of nature doesn’t mean the natural world or its physical processes disappear, it simply means that there are very few things in the external world, including the climate or physical geography, which are not influenced by human technology or by human impact in some way or another. The end of nature means the end of nature as natural, if you like. There are very few things which remain as purely natural processes uninfluenced by human intervention in some form or another. Our very absorption with natural and organically grown foods, the idea of returning to a natural way of life, is a reaction to and is bound up with the end of nature. You only start worrying about doing things naturally when you see that the world’s nature itself is becoming undermined and transformed — irretrievably so because there’s no going back to the past.

"The other process occurring is a result of globalisation, de-traditionalisation or what could be called the ‘end of tradition.’ These are gross phrases for complicated processes, but the end of tradition does not mean that traditions disappear any more than the end of nature means that the physical world disappears. The end of tradition means that tradition shapes our lives less and less. Tradition and custom used to be the landscapes of activity, and they still are in many traditional cultures."

We have a new understanding of apocalypse, Giddens says, not as a world "inevitably heading towards calamity" but because in our lives we face "risks which previous generations have not had to face." And we also have opportunities previous generations lacked, largely because of the ways in which the 20th Century’s politics of emancipation succeeded. Giddens calls the new politics "life politics."

David Brooks gets us to the same politics in a less grand but more user-friendly way, so I’ll explain it his way.

"If you sit down and read through a series of books or essays with titles like ‘The Spirit of the Age," Brooks writes, "you’ll discover that no matter when they were written, they almost always contain a sentence that says, ‘We are living in an age of transition.’ Whether it is the 1780s or the 1850s or the 1970s, people tend to feel themselves surrounded by flux. The old labels and ways of doing things seem obsolete. New modes and ideas seem as yet unformed.

"We must be special," he explains. "We are not living in an age of transition. We are living just after an age of transition. We are living just after the culture war that roiled American life for a generation. Between the 1960s and the 1980s the forces of bohemia and the forces of the bourgeoisie launched their final offensives. Bohemian counterculturalists attacked the establishment, the suburbs, and later the Reagan eighties. Conservative politicians and writers attacked the sixties and blamed that decade for much that was wrong in American life. Each force on the bohemian left — from the student radicals to the feminist activists — awakened a reaction in the bourgeois right, from the Moral Majority to the Supply Siders. This last spasm in the long conflict was a bumpy time, with protests, riots, mass movements, and a real breakdown in social order.

"But out of that climactic turmoil a new reconciliation has been forged. A new order and a new establishment have settled into place .... And the members of this new and amorphous establishment have absorbed both sides of the culture war. They have learned from both "the sixties" and "the eighties." They have created a new balance of bourgeois and bohemian values. This balance has enabled us to restore some of the social peace that was lost during the decades of destruction and transition.

"The politicians who succeed in this new era have blended the bohemian 1960s and the bourgeois 1980s and reconciled the bourgeois and bohemian value systems. These politicians do not engage in the old culture war rhetoric. They are not podium-pounding ‘conviction politicians’ of the sort that thrived during the age of confrontation. Instead, they weave together different approaches. They triangulate. They reconcile. They know they have to appeal to diverse groups. They seek a Third Way beyond the old categories of left and right. They march under reconciling banners, such as compassionate conservatism, practical idealism, sustainable development, smart growth, prosperity with a purpose."

Brooks refuses to say everything is rosy politically or socially, however. He has concerns about our Bobos and whether they will actually lead our communities, nation and world. The elder generation, the ones who fought the battles of emancipatory politics, showed a deep commitment to civic service. The Bobos are not their equals, yet anyway, in that respect. But they are a young elite.

"The Bobo task," Brooks says, "is to rebuild some sense of a united polity, some sense of national cohesion, without crushing the individual freedoms we have won over the past generation or the bonds of intimate authority that are being restored today. That is to say, we have to consolidate the gains we have made as individuals and communities while at the same time re-energizing national politics. In that famous passage when Edmund Burke praised the ‘little platoons’ of family and community life, he went on to make an equally important but much less often quoted observation. Local affection, he argued, ‘is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love of country and to mankind.’ Healthy families and healthy communities are insufficient if the nation is in decay. Healthy self-interest becomes self-absorption if it is detached from larger national and universal ideals."

UUs have valuable lived experience, hard-earned lessons to share about healthy self-interest and larger cultural and universal human ideals. We can help frame the rebuilding task and move it forward.

Brooks acknowledges he is a Bobo himself. I think if he is aware of this challenge, then others are thinking about it, too. Lipovetsky, who calls this whole complex of cultural changes "hypermodernity," shares my cautious optimism. The whole world cannot be reduced to pure consumption. Human rights, the desire for truth and the importance of human relationships are treasured values with a kind of immunity to consumer thinking. Society, he reminds us, is being reconstituted from roots in the singular desire of individuals.

"At the same time as the priesthood of duty and the taboos of the Victorian era have become obsolete," he said is a book poetically titled "The Twilight of Duty," "new regulations have come into being, prohibitions have been re-established, values have been re-imposed, thereby producing the image of a society that is quite unrelated to the one described by all those who condemn its ‘ubiquitous permissiveness.’ Hymns to a sense of duty that could tear you apart are no longer heard in society, but moral behaviour has not collapsed into anarchy; well-being and pleasure are more widespread and important, but civil society is avid for order and moderation; subjective rights govern our culture, but ‘everything is not permitted’."

Lipovetsky actually goes way beyond cautious optimism. In the end, he makes me envy — despite the crushing burden of all those manufactured risks — the experiences our movement’s future members will enjoy.

Let me conclude with a lengthy quotation from his concluding essay in "Hypermodern Times."

"There is no lack of phenomena which might justify a relativistic or nihilistic interpretation of the hypermodern universe. The dissolution of the unquestioned bases of knowledge, the primacy of pragmatism and the reign of money, the sense of the equal worth of all opinions and all cultures — these are all elements which feed into the idea that skepticism and the disappearance of higher ideals constitute a major characteristic of our epoch. Does observable reality in fact suggest that such a paradigm is correct?

"While it is undeniable that many cultural landmarks have been displaced, and that a technocratic and commercial dynamic now organizes whole sectors of our societies, the fact remains that the collapse of meaning has not been taken to its logical conclusion, since that meaning continues to deploy itself against the background of a strong and broad consensus about the ethical and political foundations of liberal modernity. Beyond the ‘war of the gods’ and the growing power of the market, a hard core of shared values continues to assert itself, one which fixes strict limits to the steamroller advance of operational rationality. Our entire ethical and political heritage has not been eradicated: there are still checks and balances that prevent us from accepting the radical interpretation of hypermodern nihilism — in particular, ethical protests and commitments. The new consecration of human rights puts these right at the ideological centre of gravity as an omnipresent organizational norm of collective actions. It is not true that money and efficiency have become the emotive force and ultimate aim of all social relations. How, if this were true, could we understand the value accorded to love and friendship? How could we explain the indignant reactions to new forms of slavery and barbarity? What gives rise to new demands for an ethical attitude in economic activity, the media and political life? Even if our epoch is the stage on which are played out the conflicts between a whole variety of different conceptions of the good, it is marked, at the same time, by an unprecedented reconciliation with its basic humanist foundations: never have these enjoyed such an unquestioned legitimacy. Not all values, not all benchmarks of meaning, have been blown apart: hypermodernity is not a question of ‘ever greater instrumental performance, and therefore ever fewer values that have the force of obligations’, but a technocratic and market-driven spiral that is accompanied by a unanimous endorsement of the common roots of humanist and democratic values.

"No one will argue with the fact that the way the world is going arouses more anxiety than unbridled optimism: the gulf between North and South is widening, social inequalities are increasing, all minds are obsessed by insecurity, and the globalized market is reducing the power of democracies to govern themselves. But does this enable us to diagnose a process of world-wide ‘rebarbarization’ in which democracy is no longer anything more than a ‘pseudo-democracy’ and a ‘decorative spectacle’? This would be to underestimate the powers of self-critique and self-correction that continue to dwell in the liberal democratic universe. The presentist age is anything but closed, wrapped up in itself, doomed to an exponential nihilism. Because the depreciation of supreme values is not limitless, the future remains open. Democratic and market-led hypermodernity has not uttered its final word: it is merely at the start of its historic adventure."

My fondest and deepest hope is that as UUs we will share our pioneering experiences in these hypermodern territories and lead with courage into the new experiences to come because the new social structure and the new cultural mores that will come/are coming from those experiences are the ones the world needs.

Home