Who controls the global future? -Feb 12, 2004

As has wisely been said, "the trouble with aligning yourself to a trend is that you seldom know whether you are at its end, near its beginning, or somewhere in between."

It is the nature of technocratic societies to be carried away on the clouds of their own rhetoric. But this innate tendency has been compounded recently by the growth industry of 'political futurism'. Projected trends and reformulated paradigms now consume whole shelves in high street bookstores. And that's only last year's titles.

Just as much economic activity (being financial speculation) retains only a scant connection to productive human activity in the actual life-worlds we inhabit, so geopolitical futurism frequently involves exchanging goods that never quite exist in the form they are transacted.

Samuel Huntingdon's thesis concerning The Clash Of Civililizations, for instance, involves overlooking local variations and contradictions between religious nationalisms and the features they share with modernisation. This is something John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, points out in Al Qaeda And What It Means to Be Modern (Faber & Faber, 2003).

All too often, political futurism looks like a questionable combination of post-event journalism (not so much the first draft of history as the first recycling of op-ed columns), global psychodrama, and a twist of pessimism -- all grated through the mill of secular eschatology (pick your heavily armed saviour-of-the-moment).

However, since modern consumer societies have mortgaged so much of their present security on the future (we live in the age of the credit card, not the savings card), this attempt to shape what is beyond the immediately controllable assumes immense importance.

Thus the panic about terrorism, a procedure that throws existing nation-state based rules into confusion.

Francis Fukuyama, once of the Rand Institute and now resident at Johns Hopkins University, is perhaps the archetypal political futurist in it current form. His defining book The End Of History And The Last Man encapsulates in one monumentally portentous title the aim of the exercise: the continuing quest to be the ultimate trend-spotter.

To be fair to Fukuyama, he cannot be held responsible for the media trivialization of his underlying thesis. This is not that after communism there will no longer be philosophies or formations counterposing themselves to liberal, free-market democracy, but that none of them can offer any workable alternative because they've miscalculated the fallible nature of the world and its people.

What's more, he says, alternatives to capitalist modernisation are plain dangerous, since what we've got now in the West are the key ingredients of the best society we can achieve without compromising freedom based on private property.

Peculiarly, Fukuyama's pitch (which arose from reflection on the debris of state socialism) is usually understood to be the brand leader in 'post-ideology': political analysis arising from a world beyond the reach of over-arching alternative narratives or all-embracing religious systems.

This is strange because Fukuyama is actually an overt ideologue. Being a signatory of the June 1997 'Statement of Principles' produced by the Project for a New American Century (http://www.newamericancentury.org), he has aligned himself unambiguously with 'the pre-emptive doctrine' of the US Presidential war cabinet, for example.

Indeed ideology has come to play an unhealthily large role in the Bush senior-Blair junior administration. In his latest book, The Bubble Of American Supremacy (Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2004), international financier George Soros claims that the dominant political construct of the West has lost touch with the reality of the world. But since it thinks of itself as 'purely pragmatic' it cannot quite figure out how or why.

As an example he points out that Western politicians have little problem in perceiving the absurdity of al Qaeda's attempt to establish the purity of Islam through terrorism. But, hardwired as they are by militarism (the substructure of neoliberal ideology) those same politicians have great difficulty in understanding the equal absurdity of trying to promote an open society through armed supremacy.

Naming the 'unseen pass' as an unholy alliance between rigid market thinking and religiously-sanctioned nationalism, Soros describes how US geopolitical Darwinism has led to the of curtailing basic civil liberties in the name of freedom.

It has also, he says, played into Bin Laden's hands through a misidentified war on terror, and it has undermined the case for its own espoused values by seeking to impose mutant versions of them on others.

In periods of disruption and uncertainty it is tempting to ally yourself to overarching forces of control. Thus the longstanding appeal of superpower ideology. The ancient Hebrew prophets spent a good deal of energy warning against the blandishments of Assyria and Babylon -- and for good reason. Their cost in blood was immense.

In contrast to the Court prophets (whose 'realism' was the view from kingly office) these marginal forth-tellers of Judah and the Northern Kingdom took their cues from the underside of history -- where, surprisingly, God was to be found, and where difficult truths concealed by riches and power became visible.

Alongside the often broken communities from whom they sprang, the Hebrew prophets also discovered friends in unexpected places: people in power who had begun to suspect the ideology that shaped them, or who were in the process of defecting towards a different reality they had just begun to glimpse.

One of the features of our own political landscape are the presence of voices like those of George Soros, the questioning venture capitalist; Robert McNamara, the self-critical Vietnam war architect; or George Stiglitz, economics Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief, whose book Globalization And Its Discontents offers a measured picture of the emerging world system.

What each of these ex-courtiers acknowledges, in different ways, is the abidingly ideological nature of corporate power and the inescapable need for it to be mediated by something that transcends its own interests. This is the question the Gospel seeks to address -- what or who rules, how, and to what ends?

In one of Jesus' best-known stories, a house is exorcised of a singular, malign ruler. But nothing comes in its place. The resultant vacuum creates the conditions for even greater (but multiple, diverse) forces of occupation to move in. The notion that a centre of power can be neutral or vacant is a false one.

The peculiar New Testament symbol of the slain-but-living Lamb on the throne is therefore offered as an alternative to its seizure by the forces of self-interest and death. It is not about the triumph of Christendom (Christianity ideologized, which is to say corrupted by the power game). Rather it is about the possibility of what Archbishop Rowan Williams calls 'the truly non-competitive Other' occupying centre stage -- thereby enabling the human community to share power differently.

To construct a politics on this basis sounds, frankly, almost unimaginable in the current world climate. But to abandon the vision of the 'open heaven' is not to transcend ideology. It is to overlook the one resource that offers us hope beyond a society based on aggressive individualism, on 'the war of all on all' (Vinoth Ramachandra).

Moreover, the futurism of the Gospel - unlike political soothsaying - is not about conjecture and control. It is about practical commitments based on the limits and possibilities that arise from a God who prefers the down-to-earthness of Jesus to some speculative form of deity. It is about the actions and relations that reconstitute a liberating story in the face of a constraining one.

There is a future hope in this, for sure. But being a gift that comes from beyond our means (what we call resurrection), it is not something we can calculate or deploy to our advantage.

So the key political question for Christians is not "given what we know, how can we change what happens next?", but "given the One who knows us, what kind of people could we be?"

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) works for Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, but is writing in a personal capacity. His background is in journalism, adult learning, politics and theology.