Opinion | We Have Two Visions of the Future, and Both Are Wrong
It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with. Yet this selective emphasis gives rise to accounts of the world that are fundamentally flawed. To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.
Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality. It sounds technical, but it captures an essential aspect of the human condition. Derived from the Latin word for threshold, liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between, neither here nor there. Ask any teenager: Such a state of suspension can be a very disconcerting time to live through.
We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger. Yet for all their destructive potential, they are also full of possibility. As the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt once noted, the great upheavals in world history can equally be seen “as genuine signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions. “The crisis,” he wrote, “is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth.”
Once we embrace this Janus-faced nature of our times, at once frightening yet generative, a very different vision of the future emerges. No longer do we conceive of history as a straight line tending either up toward gradual improvement or down toward an inevitable collapse. Rather, we see phases of relative calm punctuated every so often by periods of great upheaval. These crises can be devastating, but they are also the drivers of history. Progress and catastrophe, those binary opposites, are really joined at the hip. Together, they engage in an endless dance of creative destruction, forever breaking new ground and spiraling out into the unknown.
Our age of upheaval may well result in some global catastrophe or even the collapse of modern civilization — but it may also open up possibilities for transformative change. We can already see these contradictory dynamics at work all around us. A pandemic that killed millions of people and nearly led to economic collapse has also empowered workers and ramped up government spending on vaccine development, which may soon give us a cure for cancer. Similarly, a major European land war that has uprooted millions and unleashed a global energy crisis is now inadvertently accelerating the shift to renewable energy, helping us in the fight against climate change.
The solutions we pursue today — on global peace, the clean energy transition and the regulation of A.I. — will one day come to form the basis for a new world order. It is impossible to predict where these developments will lead, of course. All we know is that our civilizational rite of passage opens a door to the future. It is up to us to walk right through.