Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Innerarity holds the "Ikerbasque" Chair in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, where he directs the Institute for Democratic Governance. His recent books include the prizewinningTransformation of Politics (2010) and La Sociedad invisible (2004). In 2005,Le Nouvel Observateur profiled him in its special issue dedicated to "25 Intellectual Leaders of the Contemporary World."

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THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction: The Future Taken seriously.........................................................11. The Future of Democratic Societies: A Theory of Intergenerational Justice.....................72. The Temporal Landscape of Contemporary Society: A Theory of Acceleration......................233. How Do We Know the Future? A Theory of Future Studies.........................................344. How Is the Future Decided? A Theory of Decision...............................................495. Who Is in Charge of the Future? A Theory of Responsibility....................................646. Chronopolitics: A Theory of Social Rhythm.....................................................777. Politics in a Post-Heroic Society: A Theory of Political Contingency..........................908. The Political Construction of Collective Hope.................................................108Bibliography.....................................................................................127

Chapter One

A Theory of Intergenerational Justice

Human beings must establish a working relationship with the future in order to carry out projects that go beyond the present moment. The same is true for societies, which must be able to interact intelligently with the future if they wish to articulate collective criteria such as forecasting and predictions or group emotions such as hope and fear, desire and expectations, in a reasonable manner. The struggles confronting society when it tries to think about its purpose and collective promise make it abundantly clear that we do not take good care of the future. This is especially true of the less immediate, less accessible future, that is to say, the future in the strictest sense. But if there is a justification for politics that distinguishes it from simple management, it is that politics attempts to govern the less visible but no less real future where that which is most important is at play. The decisive question is whether our democracies are capable of predicting future possibilities in a context of great uncertainty, whether they are positioned to carry out projects and constrict social time, to communicate across generations, acting in the "shadow of the future" (Axelrod 1984, 124) with legitimacy and responsibility.

The difficulty of establishing an effective relationship with the future is one of the reasons for the current triumph of banality and our media-saturated democracies' persistent distraction by the short term. It could be that a reintegration of the future into political activity will bring about a pioneering transformation of democratic life.

The Tyranny of the Present

One of the consequences of the oft-proclaimed crisis of the idea of progress is that the future becomes problematic and the present is rendered absolute. We find ourselves in a regime of historicity where the present is lord and master. This is the tyranny of the present, in other words, the tyranny of the current legislature, of the short term, consumerism, our generation, proximity, etc. This is the economy that privileges the financial sector, profits over investments, cost reductions over company cohesion. We practice an imperialism that is no longer related to space but to time, an imperialism of the present that colonizes everything. There is a colonization of the future that consists of living at its expense and an imperialism of the present that absorbs the future and feeds off it parasitically. Bertman (1998) calls it "the power of the now," the present that is not invested in any other dimension of time. This present replaces the long term with the short term, duration with immediacy, permanence with transience, memory with sensation, vision with impulse.

The future's loss of relevance and the intensification of the present are correlative phenomena. We demand from the present that which we are not prepared to await from the future. The "society of instant gratification" (Schulze 1992) imposes a short-term perspective. This "presentism" is made visible in all aspects of culture, including politics, which races after the immediacy of the polls, making use of a just-in-time logic taken from consumerism, publicity, and the media.

There exists a reasonable suspicion that democratic political systems are systematically and problematically fixated on the present. What are the reasons for this autistic focus? When summarized, we see that the causes are structural and derive from the acceleration of social time, electoral periodization, the reign of public opinion research, the behavior of the electorate, demographic tendencies, and organized pressure from interest groups.

From the outset, all democratic societies have structural difficulties when it comes to taking the future into account because the acceleration of social time challenges their ability to perceive and predict it. Any increase in velocity is accompanied by a proportional decrease in the scope of vision. Acceleration produces the seductive feeling of getting closer to the future while in fact eliminating it as a strategically malleable dimension. To the extent that acceleration tends to eliminate wait time and opportunities for thinking and reflecting, long-term strategies are rendered impossible. Thought and transformative action are based on the certainty that our actions can shape the future. That being said, with the establishment of global instantaneity and simultaneity, this type of future is displaced by a rapid present understood as a focal point exclusively dedicated to gratification and self-interest. This is one of the reasons for the dissociation between two futures: the one we should bear in mind and the one that we actually factor into our considerations. While the repercussions of our actions reach even very distant futures, our perspective and activities continue to be reduced to the scope of operations in the present.

Another reason for this reduction in the scope of our attention stems from the fact that the units of time in representative democracies are structured by electoral cycles. The rules that confer power on governments do so for a fixed period of time. Democratic competitions that determine winners and losers are generally held every four years. This elemental rhythm tends to make political strategists focus on the goal of achieving or holding onto power and thus limits the political playing field by insisting that problems be dealt with according to the legislature's temporal time frame. Problems are managed in such a way that they improve—or at least do not decrease—the likelihood of governing in the next legislative session. Problems that do not adapt to these circumstances are postponed or confronted only when there is no other alternative.

This attitude reduces public interest to the scale of voters' interests and narrows political power to the realm of the electors. Public interest is not merely the concrete will of the voters, but also an intertemporal reality, the only justification for long-term planning. It is comprised of measures that are not meant to resolve but to shape, treaties or structural agreements, large-scale projects in areas such as education, infrastructure, pension plans, energy policies, government reform, etc. In order to properly attend to these types of issues, a different configuration of political willpower is...