Note: this post was written three years ago, and my views have evolved somewhat since then, though I still agree with the general sentiment.
I have a friend who is very smart. We both love talking about politics and so we have a long back-catalogue of passionate conversations. But a few years ago during one of these conversations I was struck by something which stuck with me.
We were talking about Australian politics. For anyone overseas, Australian politics is nothing unusual in most ways: a bicameral representative democracy with two major parties. Sure we differ from the USA in many of the particulars: we have universal healthcare, strict gun laws and no Bill of Rights. But that’s really beside the point. We’re fairly representative of a sort of in-between kind of developed politics: not as social-democratic as Scandinavia, as nimbly technocratic as some East-Asian countries or as stubbornly regressive as the USA. We, like Canada and a few other countries, could be considered to represent a kind of political centre of gravity for the developed world. Boring, maybe, but isn’t boring affluence better than chaos?
Politically speaking, Australia is very stable. Australians might laugh at this, pointing to the fact that we seem to be the coup capital of the democratic world given the regularity of leadership spills we undergo. But this isn’t really the sense of stability I’m referring to. Yes, Prime Ministers come and go. But what about the horizons of political possibility?
Fundamentally, Australian politics is grounded in this broad and stable centre of agreement between centre-left and centre-right. There are some points of genuine contention, and I’m definitely not saying “they’re both the same” like some apolitical friends of mine will claim. There are real, substantive differences in policy. But nevertheless there is truth in the critique: much of our politics consists of a quibbling over crumbs while sharing the cake in common. Communists call this kind of contemporary magnetic centrism ‘capitalism realism’. Neoreactionaries might call it ‘leftist hegemony’. And any time traveller from the early twentieth century might rightly ask us, what happened to bold politics?
This brings us back to the conversation with my friend. I was talking about a myriad of political reforms I thought the government should attempt if they had any sense. At one point she looked at me curiously.
“Surely,” she said slowly “you think that things are nearly optimal though.”
I paused. I didn’t think that, not even close.
“Australia has found a kind of sweet spot,” she said. “Looking at history, hell looking at other countries now from China to the USA, we seem to have struck on the perfect formula. Sure maybe we could tweak marginal tax rates a percentage point one way or the other, or tinker with negative gearing legislation, but the fundamentals are rock solid. It sounds like you want deeper changes than that. Systemic changes. And I can’t for the life of me see why.”
Like I said, my friend is very smart. Most people couldn’t hope to win an argument with her about economic policy or political forecasting. And as soon as she spoke, I realised that this is what a lot of people think. And more than that, it makes sense to think it. Until the COVID-19 crisis, Australia had gone nearly 29 years without a recession. We are ranked 8th in the world on the Human Development Index. Australia is rich beyond history’s wildest dreams, peaceful and stable beyond all reasonable expectation. And we get to vote sometimes. I don’t think we take enough time to consider what a remarkable set of circumstances this is.
Maybe considering systemic change was just a symptom of negative bias, the natural human proclivity to fixate on what was imperfect or left undone, however minor. After all, I do agree that compared to other currently existing political-economic systems, Australia comes out looking pretty damn good.
I looked at my friend, and slowly formed a question.
“What…” I asked, “what do you think the world will look like in thirty years?”
She shrugged. “Hard to say. But I can’t see things changing that much. If Australia has any sense, it will look the same underneath all the flashy stuff. Technology will improve a lot of course. Flying cars are a silly example but a good benchmark for significant change. But think about fundamentals. Jobs, markets, businesses, political parties, currency, nation-states. Things might look different, but structurally I find it hard to believe things will shift.”
I paused and rephrased. “What do you want the world to be like in the future?” I asked. “Ultimately - further into the future than thirty years?”
She looked at me strangely.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
It’s easy to smirk at my friend’s final comment, especially if you consider yourself a futurist. But it represents a common phenomenon, even amongst very clever people. And after all, why on earth should we spend any time thinking about what we want the world to look like in a hundred years? It would seem to make sense to focus on our current problems, and only worry about the next five-to-ten years or so.
I think this exclusive focus on the near future converges with the exclusive focus on minor reforms in political economy. They are failures not only of Scope but of Aim.
The Scope part is obvious. As longtermists like to remind us, the future has the potential to be vast and full of people. This means that the things we do now could potentially have huge effects on how the world turns out for this vast majority of people who have yet to be born. I don’t intend to go into the arguments around longtermism here except to say that it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t care about the future at all. We might make pragmatic arguments about the difficulty of knowing how our actions will affect the long-term future, but it at least seems that we should care about it somewhat, in the same way that we would think it wrong for Ancient Egyptians to have said “the twenty-first century? Who cares about that?” and convinced the sun god Ra to send an asteroid towards Earth that would only hit us in 2021.
But I think the Failure of Aim is also egregious, and harder to convince people of. Consider a human life. Say you know you’re going to live for ninety years if you don’t do anything too reckless like smoking or sitting down for more than eight hours each day. Now imagine you’ve just turned twenty one. You’re in your physical prime, you’re mentally sharp, and you have an array of skills and resources at your disposal; maybe you’ve gotten a good education, saved up a little money, and you have access to the internet for crying out loud. There are hard limits to what you accomplish, but like your parents like to say there is a very real sense in which ‘the world is your oyster’. Now, with all of this under your belt, you’re about to step forward into adult life.
At this moment in your life, it might be smart to stop and consider where you actually want to end up. Sure eventually you will get very old and die. But what do you want your life to be like in that intervening time? In these considerations of personal ideals you might think of things like what you want your relationships to be like, whether you want children, what an ideal vocation might be for you, where you’d like to live, how you’re going to take care of your health, and even simply what kind of person you want to be in the world.
Of course there are always epistemic problems of one sort or another. Maybe you think you want to be an engineer but after working as one for a while you realise that architecture would be a better fit for your skills and interests. Maybe you don’t want kids now but you will once you’re in your thirties. And yes, this is a real consideration - there’s only so much you can know from your starting position. You may find yourself adjusting your aim a little as you go through life, acquiring more insight into yourself and the world, and as you naturally change. But the fundamental utility of considering what you want still remains. After all, we all know people who are ostensibly seeking nothing from life. They (at least the ones who aren’t buddhas) seem to consistently end up with unenviable lives. This is because when you don’t aim at something, you’re inviting life to simply happen to you - and in the complexity of the world, there seem to be far more undesirable states than desirable ones. But deeper than that, humans are always aiming. That guy who lives with his parents at thirty five and who buries his deeply restless melancholy beneath Doritos and porn isn’t aimless. He’s just caught in the thrall of acting on unreflective aims. In the absence of considered goals, our brain knows what to aim for: things like basic security and sensory pleasure.
This is why considering what we want our life to be like is valuable. Because otherwise, the natural forces of the world and our own unconsidered behaviour could conspire to create a less than ideal life for us. And as a twenty one year old, we shouldn’t just be thinking on a granular level “maybe I should replace some of the snacks in my apartment with nuts and celery going forward”. We also need to be thinking about the bigger picture, the fundamentals of our life - “why do I care about my health in the first place?”, “should I be a vegetarian?”, and even “in ten years, would I like to be a celibate monk in Thailand, or a New York architect about to start a family?”
I’m sure my heavy-handed analogy is pretty obvious. The twenty-one year old is us, as societies, nation-states, or even as a global civilisation. We find ourselves with a pretty decent amount of knowledge and technology, and a bunch of systems and institutions (the equivalent to the twenty-one year olds possessions, habits, and capabilities). And we know that we could be around for quite a while - you could think of the young person’s eventual death as representing the heat death of the universe, or some other inevitable end-point for humanity. And that’s where Aim comes in. What do we really want out of society? Out of our politics, economies, and institutions? What would the best possible world look like, or at least a really good one? This is where I think we’re falling short. We’re good at talking about interest rates and tax loopholes. And yes, these things have important effects on the world that we should be talking about. But on the margin, couldn’t we be talking a bit more about a grander vision? About the motivations for even bothering with any of this in the first place?
I think a lot of the reason people don’t ask these questions is an impoverished sense of the possible. I was born in 1996 and have spent my whole life in perhaps one of the most stable places in history. Say what you will about the Russian Revolution, but they were really pushing the boundaries of how the world could be shaped. The entire early twentieth century was marked by a shaky sense that things could really change in a bunch of really drastic ways. And yeah, we can kind of conceive of a post-scarcity communist utopia or whatever wild future we’re presented with, but these very different states of affairs tend, for most of us, to feel abstract and insubstantial. The problem is that technology marches ever onwards. And out of this terrible unfolding could come wonderful futures, nightmares, or anything in between. We can keep counting grains of sand or we can look up and see the great tide swelling towards us.
There is a real intellectual excitement behind this urge to drill down on first principles. But it’s not merely hypothetical. The founders of many nations and international institutions have troubled over these questions. And yet, it seems really difficult to find this kind of discussion in the popular discourse. I’m not saying all of our time should be spent discussing big-picture goals for society, but I suspect the optimum lies above zero.
What do we want?
What is possible?
How would we get from where we are to that intersection between what we want and what is possible? How good could the future be, if we really tried?