BY STEWART SLATER
Fifty-five years ago this week, man went to the moon for the first time in the culmination of a project started seven years earlier by President Kennedy. But if Apollo Eleven was the signature achievement of that decade’s techno-optimism, it was not alone for in the same year that JFK made his speech, Britain and France signed the agreement to build Concorde, a project which, perhaps unexpectedly, took rather longer to complete.
It was easy to believe in those days that these were just the starting shots of a new future. Mankind would slip the surly bonds on Earth and establish itself as an interplanetary species, while supersonic travel would become the norm. Neither of these, of course, came to pass. It is over 50 years since a human has set foot on our satellite and no-one has been to another planet while Concorde never became more than a plaything for the wealthy. Predictions, it turns out, are hard. Particularly those about the future.
But if the future did not look the way it was expected to (it never does – no “World in 2020” illustration from the last century bears any relation to the modern world, not least since our ancestors were unanimously convinced that men would continue to wear hats…), at least there was an ambition that it should not look like the present. A better world was waiting to be created. And politicians would build it for, despite my market fundamentalism, it would be remiss not to point out that both the moon mission and Concorde were government projects. Even fuddy-duddy, pipe-smoking Harold Wilson was enraptured by the White Heat of technology.
If one were to take a resident of that more optimistic time and transport him to the present, he would be surprised at how similar the world looked (no flying cars or, thank goodness, jumpsuits) and how different our politicians are. For in the West, the political class have given up on the future.
Consider the recent election. To the extent the Conservatives had a campaign, and to the extent they had a signature policy, it was National Service, an idea so old-fashioned, it was last used at roughly the time Kennedy announced his intention to go to the moon. Labour was no better. “Change” might have been the slogan, but it was not change to a brighter future, but a return to a better past it offered. All the party promised was to fix the damage caused by the Conservatives and return things to the blessed state that had existed before David Cameron – a surprisingly regressive ambition for a supposedly progressive party. The Lib Dems whole raison d’etre is to stand athwart history shouting “Stop!” to any passing bulldozer that might have the temerity to build something in the vicinity.
But Britain is not unique. Across the Channel, the E.U. touts itself as a “regulatory superpower”, not seeking to build the future but to control those who do. A glance at a chart of leading countries in new technologies or even at the share of global GDP shows just how well that has gone.
Even America appears to be succumbing. It is early days, but Vice President (perhaps President by the time you read this, the Democrats appearing to have swapped The West Wing for Weekend at Bernie’s as their fictional model of choice) Harris seems intent on campaigning on two main fronts. Firstly, Donald Trump is a criminal (if I deposited a pound for every time I had heard the word “prosecute” since sleepy Joe’s auto-defenestration, I’d probably be prosecuted on suspicion of money-laundering). Secondly, he and his running mate will end abortion, simultaneously taking America back to the past and into the dystopian future imagined by Margaret Attwood in The Handmaids Tale. It is not that Kamala will make tomorrow better; she will merely stop it becoming worse.
For his part, Trump explicitly offers a return to the past – whether the imagined halcyon days of his presidency when, in his telling, America was rich, happy and feared or a more distant time when the country’s still intact industrial base offered plentiful well-paid jobs to its middle class. To Trump, like the Labour Party, there was an Edenic time in history, and the job of the politician is to lead society back to that prelapsarian bliss. America was great, is no longer great but will become Great Again by returning to that ideal state.
In part this may be politics. Trump is not, and Labour were not, in power. It makes sense to say that the other side has messed things up. But both are limited in their ambitions. The (possibly mythical) past is as good as things can get. It can only be recreated, never surpassed.
In this, perhaps, they reflect the electorate. For the future has become a scary place. Climate Change will boil the planet. A.I. will take our jobs and then kill us. As for buying a house, forget it. To kids in the nineties, Things Could Only Get Better, to kids today, things will only get worse. And, perhaps they deserve to. For we have become accustomed to seeing our species as a plague on the planet, destroying it by despoiling it. The notion of bending nature to our will is quaintly old fashioned, instead, we must submit to its. It is notable that, to the extent Labour has a vision, the “Green New Deal”, it does not offer humans a better future, but merely proposes to continue the present in a manner kinder to the natural world.
But this is a particularly Western phenomenon. Other parts of the globe are still striding manfully towards the future. The Line, Saudi Arabia’s “linear smart city”, the world’s first (and future setting for a cracking disaster movie or cautionary tale of A.I gone rogue), may or may not have been reduced in scale from 170km to 2.4km, but it can already be seen from space, expanding humanity’s dominion through the desert. Physically challenging though it may be, building in such desolate areas has the advantage that there is no-one to upset. Not wishing to encroach further on the natural world, the West can only rebuild what has gone before and there are plenty comfortable enough in the present to use the law to veto the future as those who proposed the London Sphere discovered.
Saudi Arabia is, of course, not a democracy. Neither is China. And herein, perhaps, lies the rub.
Francis Fukuyama saw liberal democracy as the optimal political system because it allowed all to satisfy their “desire for recognition” but, he warned, absent an external threat, such a society could become moribund, the levelling of recognition dissuading any from pursuing it through the achievement of great deeds. “It would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompetently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and unchanging; its technology second rate.” Look around and say it is not so.
Such a situation does not work for everyone, particularly those with what he termed “megalothymia” – an outsized desire for recognition. In an act of prescience, in his 1992 work, The End of History and the Last Man, he identified Donald Trump as one such. Today he might choose Elon Musk, the one figure in public life willing to build a different future. But Musk is not popular with the authorities – “the Last Men” in Fukuyama’s parlance – currently finding himself in the E.U’s crosshairs. It is not hard to imagine a future in which the 21st century’s Prometheus suffers a less painful but not entirely dissimilar fate to his mythical forebear.
We should wish him success, though. For, without his sort, the future will not belong to us.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.