The Politics and Science of Prevision

Governing and Probing the Future

Andreas Wenger, Ursula Jasper, Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Andreas Wenger, Ursula Jasper, Myriam Dunn Cavelty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367513559
• eBook ISBN: 9781000088366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book inquires into the use of prediction at the intersection of politics and academia, and reflects upon the implications of future-oriented policy-making across different fields.

The volume focuses on the key intricacies and fallacies of prevision in a time of complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. The first part of the book discusses different academic perspectives and contributions to future-oriented policy-making. The second part discusses the role of future knowledge in decision-making across different empirical issues such as climate, health, finance, bio- and nuclear weapons, civil war, and crime. It analyses how prediction is integrated into public policy and governance, and how in return governance structures influence the making of knowledge about the future. Contributors integrate two analytical dimensions in their chapters: the epistemology of prevision and the political and ethical implications of prevision. In this way, the volume contributes to a better understanding of the complex interaction and feedback loops between the processes of creating knowledge about the future and the application of this future knowledge in public policy and governance.

This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, political science, sociology, technology studies, and International Relations.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-and-Science-of-Prevision-Governing-and-Probing/Wenger-Jasper-Cavelty/p/book/9780367900748, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part I

Introduction

1 Governing and probing the future

The politics and science of prevision

Andreas Wenger, Ursula Jasper and Myriam Dunn Cavelty

To muse about the things to come is a common characteristic of human life, an anthropological constant, regardless of historical epochs or cultural belongings. No matter whether the prevalent notions of time and cosmology cast the future as ‘God’s predestined gift’ or as an ‘empty territory that is to be settled’ (Adam 2010), human beings seek to anticipate and prepare themselves for what is lying ahead. Beyond the many ‘small futures’ that get enacted continuously in people’s day-to-day lives, social and political communities also like to envision ‘big futures’ with much larger temporal and spatial horizons (Michael 2017).

That way, politics and the wish to assemble future knowledge through scientific means are intricately interwoven. The desire to govern the future through science arose in parallel to the rise of the modern nation state and a more technocratic and scientific approach to public administration in the nineteenth century. With the dawn of modernity, foreseeing and preparing for possible future developments became a key task for policy-makers, bureaucrats and scholars alike. Today, future knowledge offers the administrative basis and justification for state intervention and societal, military and economic planning (Bell 1964; Seefried 2015). To govern the future, both with regard to long-term strategic planning and the prevention of and preparation for unforeseeable ruptures and crises, can be seen as the political task par excellence for today’s states (Landwehr 2018: 38). It is, after all, the promise to order and govern not only the present, but to anticipate, manage and secure the future that gives legitimacy and a ‘raison d’être’ to the modern state (Henne et al. 2018: 9).

Science and politics are no easy bedfellows, however. This is largely due to the different knowledge conceptions that are at work in the two fields, or what Maasen and Weingart describe as ‘knowing’ vs. ‘deciding’:

The mode of science is oriented to the continuation of systematic knowledge production, to learning and, thus, to the questioning of existing knowledge. The mode of politics, by contrast, is oriented to the closure of public conflicts through compromise, using knowledge strategically as it unfolds.

(Maasen and Weingart 2005: 7)

As a consequence, the knowledge that is produced in science is not necessarily the same as that required by politics.

In addition, there is a disparity in the temporal orientation of decision-makers and scholars. Adam describes this as a disjuncture between ‘the futurity of social life’ (and one might add: futurity of political life) and ‘the present and past-based empirical study’ of this life in the social sciences and history (Adam 2010: 362). Gavin provides a similar explanation to describe why decision-makers rarely draw upon the conclusions provided by historians: ‘Forced to make difficult choices under enormous time pressures, government officials want “usable” knowledge that provides guidance for making the best decisions. Understandably, they seek certainty, particularly about the future, and are grateful for clear-cut rules and parsimonious explanations’ (Gavin 2008: 163; also Brands 2017).

And yet, perhaps paradoxically, we observe growing demand for and interest in governing and probing the future at the intersection of politics and academia today. While in politics the openness and temporal horizon of the future are contested, in academia we witness renewed reflection and debate about the purpose, epistemologies and methodologies of probing the future. The politics and science of anticipating the future are clearly intertwined – and it is the goal of this book to inquire into the epistemological possibilities and pitfalls of prediction, while at the same time assessing the political and ethical implications of future-oriented policy-making across different policy fields. This introductory chapter provides the background to this endeavour, situating any attempt to understand the future for political reasons in a larger socio-political context.

Governing the future: the co-constitution of future visions and politics

Different visions of the future as well as social and political orders and governance mechanisms evolve together over time. Accounts of past futures, i.e. historical imaginaries of a possible future, tell us a lot about the historical political and cultural circumstances under which they were sketched, regardless of whether they later prove to be accurate or not. From them, it becomes visible which ideational patterns, knowledge regimes and political orders gave rise to a particular sketch of the future. Thus, pre-modern prophecies and divinations tell us more about then-prevalent religious cosmologies and eschatology than about the veracity of expectations (Adam 2010). The same can be said about utopias or dystopias: they are not primarily meant to predict a state of the world that is to materialize at a specific point in time, but rather contain a proposal for an alternative order to the present one (Landwehr 2018: 39).

That humans accommodate and locate themselves in a narrative mesh of past, present and future holds across time and culture. What differs is the specific temporal horizon of the imaginaries to which they adhere: Either their life script is organized around certain memories of the past or it is subordinated to some kind of futurity (Hölscher 2016: 91). Unlike pre-modern societies which seem to have predominantly oriented themselves towards the past, modern societies are characterized by their orientation towards the future and a belief that said future can and even should be shaped by actions in the present. Future-orientedness as we commonly understand it today is therefore a phenomenon closely tied to the modern era (Jordheim 2012: 153). At the dawn of modernity, a process of reordering the temporal thinking was set in motion in the Western world that marked the beginning of the parallel rise of a rapidly growing interest in the future and the industrial nation state. It is that intersection we need to understand to be able to situate our own undertaking in the flow of history.

The advent of modernity: a new openness of the future and the rise of the industrial nation state

With the advent of modernity people’s ‘space of experience’ and their ‘horizon of expectation’ disintegrated, as Koselleck explains: In the post-Enlightenment period individuals and communities could no longer primarily rely on tradition, previous experience and past historical knowledge to cope with the new and the coming, because the accelerated societal, political and cultural upheavals were too fundamental and too swift. Increasingly, history came to be seen as fundamentally different from the present and the future (Koselleck 1989: 349ff.). The new epoch reflected a new temporality – a linear, directional understanding of time – and spurred the perception of a fundamental openness of the future. This enabled a form of anticipation of the unfolding and a propensity to imagine and proactively shape the future that had been unknown in previous historical periods (Koselleck 1990: 541).

The preoccupation with the upcoming greatly expanded in the context of the Western state building process that not only established state bureaucracies – tasked with upholding the internal (police) and external (army) state monopoly of violence and the establishment of a tax system – but a more scientific and technocratic approach to public administration and economic affairs more generally. The new interest in expectations and plans was further facilitated by an emerging enthusiasm in numbers and numerical analyses of demographical, economic or agricultural trends. The resulting upsurge of statistics reflected a broader ideational shift characteristic for the era of the Industrial Revolution, as Hacking explains: ‘The acquisition of numbers by the populace, and the professional lust for precision in measurement, were driven by familiar themes of manufacture, mining, trade, health, railways, war, empire’ (Hacking 1990: 5; Agar 2003).

Projects of state modernization and rationalization vastly heightened the demand for systematic and structured academic advice geared towards the future and increased the pressure put on academia to provide such insights – a task that was facilitated by the expansion and differentiation of the academic landscape and the growing importance of an empiricist epistemology in the late nineteenth century. Foreseeing and preparing for possible future developments became thus key tasks for scholars and bureaucrats and the administrative basis and justification for the interventionist planning activities of states (Seefried 2015: 40). State intervention peaked in the war economies of World War I and in post-depression era efforts to avoid similar economic crises by developing more efficient tools to anticipate and steer economic development. The economic ideas of anticyclical fiscal spending and fiscal policy interventions developed by John Maynard Keynes were especially influential in fostering a future-oriented, prognostic perspective on processes of socio-economic planning (Van Laak 2008).

The trend towards anticipating, planning and engineering the future was intensified further in the years to follow, when notions of technocratic rationalization, resource optimization and societal engineering emerged simultaneously in Europe and the US. Under both fascist and communist rule, these ideas soon acquired a totalizing determination as revolutionary blueprints of a new socio-political/racial order, which drew upon large amounts of newly generated statistical and planning data. They culminated in the brutal race policies, forced displacements and genocidal policies emblematic for both regimes, as well as in many of their totalitarian architectural, infrastructural and engineering projects. While the totalitarian character of planning and societal engineering was thoroughly discredited thereafter, scientific approaches to the future kept blossoming on a different basis in the decades after World War II (Van Laak 2008; Seefried 2015).

The golden age of future studies: big science and the dark side of modernity

The 1950s and 1960s are often described as the ‘Golden Age’ of future studies. Geopolitical, technological and social drivers contributed to the parallel rise of big social and political planning ambitions, on the one hand, and big science, on the other. First, the economic reconstruction and recovery efforts of the post-war years led to big investments in research and a large growth in the number of trained scientists working in a diversified landscape of research institutions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This in turn triggered a phase of professionalization and specialization as well as a general ‘science boom’ and blossoming of academic output (Rossiter 1985; Holloway 1999). Second, this trend was fostered by the establishment of ‘big science’ projects commissioned and funded by big states, resulting in a dense entanglement of academic work with governmental interest. Early on, and building upon vast wartime efforts such as the Manhattan Project that had led to the development of the US atomic bomb, these ‘big science’ project concentrated on the defence sector. Later, however, they rapidly spread to a wide variety of social and natural sciences disciplines (Reynolds 2010; Solovey 2001; Galison 1992).

Third, the invention, improvement and fast diffusion of computers contributed heavily to the rise of future studies in the decades after World War II. New technologies made the collection, structuring and processing of large amounts of data possible and raised the hope that computational models could be built to anticipate future developments (Agar 2003; Edwards 1996). Fourth, the growing interest in the future was not only driven by material factors but also stimulated by new ideological-intellectual currents that gained hold in the middle of the twentieth century, as Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė explain convincingly:

Different strands in futures research stood in either striking proximity to or critical engagement with modernization theory, which garnered authority in both social science and politics by the early 1960s. Similarly important were emerging postulates of rationality, created with an aim to explain and foretell social developments so that desirable ones could be privileged and undesirable ones avoided. Through such approaches in the social sciences, the future reemerged as a scientific interest, but also as an object of control and intervention.

(Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė 2015a: 3)

Several of these trends became manifest in the newly founded interdisciplinary research domain of cybernetics. Based on the premise that natural, social and technological processes and systems all behave according to similar patterns, this new meta-discipline aimed to uncover the information transfer and underlying rules and mechanisms within a certain system but also between the system and its environment. The proximity to the future studies field is evident: If all systems behave according to a set of specific rules and information transmission patterns, this would allow the simulation and modelling, and ultimately also the predicting and forecasting, of natural and social actors’ behaviour and even of complex systemic processes. Unsurprisingly, these convictions fed into an outright and arguably quite paternalistic euphoria for steering, planning and social engineering that culminated in the 1950s and 1960s (Seefried 2013, 2015; Van Laak 2008).

While large parts of this cybernetic-inspired research remained staunchly empirical and positivist in its outlook, there was also new space for a critical-normative investigation of alternative, emancipatory, even utopian futures. Writings within this latter research strand provided discursive space for discussions about multiple possible futures, change and agency vis-à-vis mankind’s futurity as well as about participation, responsibility and empowerment to actively shape what is to come. At the same time, and in light of new cultural currents, non-traditional political actors had begun to fundamentally problematize the orthodoxy of Western political and economic principles and had called for a discontinuation or at least recalibration of the capitalist orientation on growth and consumption (Radkau 2017: 242ff.).

The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a new perception of the ‘dark side of modernity’ (Giddens 1990: 9) in the West, as the almost mythical expectations raised by the positivist steering and planning ambitions of the previous decade had remained unfulfilled. The appearance of hitherto unknown, potentially existential risks to humanity and the planet’s ecosystems triggered apocalyptic scenarios and future scepticism among many in the Western world (Beck 1986). The pessimistic economic and ecological forecasts contained in the widely acknowledged 1971 report ‘The Limits of Growth’ by the Club of Rome nurtured ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Academic perspectives on future-oriented policy-making
• PART III: Empirical perspectives across policy fields
• PART IV: Conclusion
• Index