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rfmcdonaldW. Warren Wagar. A Short History of the Future. 2nd edition 1992. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 324 pp.
Wagar's utopian libertarian socialist future depends upon a devastating Third World War (or Catastrophe, as his characters call it). Up until 2044, the global-corporate regime of the Confederated States of Earth had ruled the world from the capitalist cores of the European Community, northeast Asia, and the United States, but the alignment of the United States with a middle-power challenger coalition triggered the geopolitical maneuverings that ended up destroying the Confederated States and several billion people. With the capitalist economy ruined, the World Party--an grass-roots socialist organization motivated by a socialist critique of the capitalist world-economy and organized cellularly to survive repression--was able to begin the process of taking over a fatigued post-capitalist world, and so trigger the eventual high-technological libertarian socialist utopia that would replace the World Party's Commonwealth. (For more information on the World Party, see this link to a real-life equivalent, and this link to a peer's analysis of Wagar's methodology.)
There's a fair bit of the eschatological and the apocalyptic in A Short History of the Future, but then there's always been that element in visions of future utopias--or at least visions of radically different futures. Revelations in the New Testament is the obvious antecedant, the prototype, written as the divine assurance to an obscure persecuted religious sect that as bad as things might be now, their persecutors would suffer badly and then God will fulfill His promises. (We're still waiting, of course.) The frankly eschatological plans of certain Jacobins in the French Revolution--to remake Europe on the image of Revolutionary France, to destroy all of the corrupt old traditions in secular and religious culture, language and economics, and introduce something new--come to mind as the first modern apocalyptic vision of the future, with the Hussite and Anabaptist radical revolutions in (respectively) the 15th and 16th centuries serving as a bridge. To this day, the image of the apocalypse ushering in a brave new future is potent: look at Communism's early promise in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic before the mass killings began, or at Year Zero in Cambodia (in with the new people, out with the old). it maintains a presence in culture, of course--Greg Bear's Eon and Eternity might take place in a transhumanist near future, with space-time corridors of infinite length and ubiquitous reincarnations and the apparati needed for godhood, but said present is founded on the wreckage of an alternate Earth's decimation in a NATO-Soviet Third World War. (At the other end of the scale, there is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which--it is rarely appreciated--formed in a post-nuclear future, where hundreds of nuclear bombs fell down upon the cities of North America and western Europe and European Russia and the Oceania-Eurasia-Eastasia trifurcation emerged in the aftermath.)
A Short History of the Future is written by a noted social scientist, a specialist in world-systems theory who nonetheless seems to retain a faith in the liberatory ideals of the Enlightenment and in progress. His vision of the future as one where unjust economic and political systems can be overturned and replaced with better ones, where immense suffering doesn't cancel the potential for positive peaceful change, and where people can expect to live happy, healthy, and well-integrated lives, is immensely attractive. Unfortunately, I have to agree with my initial evaluation of Wagar's futurology: It sounds wonderful, but it's subverted by numerous flaws inherent in its depiction of the World Party and the Commonwealth, and of its successors the Small Party and the House of Earth. How is the World Party able to remain a coherent entity during the CSE phase and after the Catastrophe, when the nature of grand global ideological coalitions has been to fragment incessantly? Similarly, the extreme centralization of the Commonwealth--the entire planet was made into a patchwork of a thousand departments on the French model--seems to contradict the Commonwealth's origin in a coalition of functioning middle- and upper-income nations spread across the Southern Hemisphere. As wonderfully ironic as the collapse of the Commonwealth with the rise of the Small Party is, and as interesting as the image of the House of Earth--a global mesh uniting more than fifty thousand polities of vastly varying sizes--is, I likewise have to remain skeptical that such an intricate global polity, superimposed on populations which have gone through vastly divergent experiences in previous centuries and which have retained their own loyalties, would be able to endure global crises.
Ah well. It's a good book, though, and I definitely do not regret owning it.
Wagar's utopian libertarian socialist future depends upon a devastating Third World War (or Catastrophe, as his characters call it). Up until 2044, the global-corporate regime of the Confederated States of Earth had ruled the world from the capitalist cores of the European Community, northeast Asia, and the United States, but the alignment of the United States with a middle-power challenger coalition triggered the geopolitical maneuverings that ended up destroying the Confederated States and several billion people. With the capitalist economy ruined, the World Party--an grass-roots socialist organization motivated by a socialist critique of the capitalist world-economy and organized cellularly to survive repression--was able to begin the process of taking over a fatigued post-capitalist world, and so trigger the eventual high-technological libertarian socialist utopia that would replace the World Party's Commonwealth. (For more information on the World Party, see this link to a real-life equivalent, and this link to a peer's analysis of Wagar's methodology.)
There's a fair bit of the eschatological and the apocalyptic in A Short History of the Future, but then there's always been that element in visions of future utopias--or at least visions of radically different futures. Revelations in the New Testament is the obvious antecedant, the prototype, written as the divine assurance to an obscure persecuted religious sect that as bad as things might be now, their persecutors would suffer badly and then God will fulfill His promises. (We're still waiting, of course.) The frankly eschatological plans of certain Jacobins in the French Revolution--to remake Europe on the image of Revolutionary France, to destroy all of the corrupt old traditions in secular and religious culture, language and economics, and introduce something new--come to mind as the first modern apocalyptic vision of the future, with the Hussite and Anabaptist radical revolutions in (respectively) the 15th and 16th centuries serving as a bridge. To this day, the image of the apocalypse ushering in a brave new future is potent: look at Communism's early promise in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic before the mass killings began, or at Year Zero in Cambodia (in with the new people, out with the old). it maintains a presence in culture, of course--Greg Bear's Eon and Eternity might take place in a transhumanist near future, with space-time corridors of infinite length and ubiquitous reincarnations and the apparati needed for godhood, but said present is founded on the wreckage of an alternate Earth's decimation in a NATO-Soviet Third World War. (At the other end of the scale, there is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which--it is rarely appreciated--formed in a post-nuclear future, where hundreds of nuclear bombs fell down upon the cities of North America and western Europe and European Russia and the Oceania-Eurasia-Eastasia trifurcation emerged in the aftermath.)
A Short History of the Future is written by a noted social scientist, a specialist in world-systems theory who nonetheless seems to retain a faith in the liberatory ideals of the Enlightenment and in progress. His vision of the future as one where unjust economic and political systems can be overturned and replaced with better ones, where immense suffering doesn't cancel the potential for positive peaceful change, and where people can expect to live happy, healthy, and well-integrated lives, is immensely attractive. Unfortunately, I have to agree with my initial evaluation of Wagar's futurology: It sounds wonderful, but it's subverted by numerous flaws inherent in its depiction of the World Party and the Commonwealth, and of its successors the Small Party and the House of Earth. How is the World Party able to remain a coherent entity during the CSE phase and after the Catastrophe, when the nature of grand global ideological coalitions has been to fragment incessantly? Similarly, the extreme centralization of the Commonwealth--the entire planet was made into a patchwork of a thousand departments on the French model--seems to contradict the Commonwealth's origin in a coalition of functioning middle- and upper-income nations spread across the Southern Hemisphere. As wonderfully ironic as the collapse of the Commonwealth with the rise of the Small Party is, and as interesting as the image of the House of Earth--a global mesh uniting more than fifty thousand polities of vastly varying sizes--is, I likewise have to remain skeptical that such an intricate global polity, superimposed on populations which have gone through vastly divergent experiences in previous centuries and which have retained their own loyalties, would be able to endure global crises.
Ah well. It's a good book, though, and I definitely do not regret owning it.
