Liberation from dystopian fiction
The continuing call of the global South for a dialogue of civilizations
There have been what seems like a growing number of movies that portray a future apocalypse. The phenomenon is disturbing, because it implies the eclipse of hope and the pervasiveness of a view that the future of humanity is bleak. A fundamentally negative view of the future of humanity is contrary to the teachings of Islam and Christianity as well as the premises of revolutionary socialism. It encourages the pursuit of individual self-satisfaction, moral irresponsibility, and anti-social conduct. It favors the view that, if there is meaning in human existence, it only pertains to the personal level.
I find myself in agreement with Thomas Moynihan’s recent expression of lament that “from Hunger Games to Squid Games, from Black Mirror to Blade Runner, the appetite for dystopia seems higher than ever.”1 And I thought he was right on target when he wrote, “dystopian fiction can be vitally important. It can contain important warnings: raising alarms on social issues through extrapolating troubling trajectories. But in relentlessly imagining the future as already lost to dystopia in our fiction, it's possible we risk giving up on it in reality too.”
Can we find other ways to think about the future, Moynihan asks. He considers that utopian fiction is not the remedy, because utopias also have their flaws. “Although utopias expand minds, they also can tempt those too bewitched by them to act rashly or harmfully, by forcing their hopes upon the present.” I have a different problem with utopias, namely, that they are idealist, in the sense that they point to no concrete way to get to the realization of the utopian vision from the conditions of the present reality. They are not, therefore, a cure for pervasive social hopelessness.
Seeking to find fresh ways to think about the future, Moynihan examines what writers of dystopias and utopias were writing 100 years ago. He maintains that the writers of a century ago confronted a situation like our own, in that they had been witnesses to the mechanized massacre of the First World War combined with a deadly pandemic, and there has been rapid technological developments that were disturbing in their potential implications. In addition, disasters had become mass-media spectacles; there were a growing number of multimillionaires; and new authoritarian regimes had emerged.
Moynihan finds in his study of the “future histories” of the 1920s that there was a hopefulness that has been lost during the last one hundred years. He concludes that among these writers of a century ago:
there was resonant hope. . .. Hope that the juggernaut of civilisation could be steered: that its technological forces — unloosed by the genie of science — could be collectively and equitably harnessed for the betterment of the world. . .. Amid the dystopias, there remained widespread conviction that technology could be harnessed, in harmony with the natural world, to emancipate, rather than to suppress, humanity.
He cites noble examples, such as the pacifist Vera Brittain, who in 1929 published Halcyon: Or, The Future of Monogamy, which projected a future in which women’s work would be less burdensome and marriage would be mutually enjoyable.2
But hope cannot be renewed by the hopeful appeal for the renewal of hope. The historical and structural sources of the eclipse of hope must be understood, so that we can develop concrete remedies.
There are three reasons that writers of a century ago were more hopeful than writers in our time.
(1) One hundred years ago, the world-system had not yet reached the geographical limits of the earth, provoking economic stagflation and destructive economic policies.
Since its origins, the modern world-system has been characterized by economic expansion on the basis of conquest. In this regard, the modern world-system is not different from the great empires and civilizations of human history. Conquest has been central to the human story, and it has been the basis for socioeconomic development and the emergence of civilizations.
The modern world-system has had a unique stamp of advanced technology, and it was so from the beginning. The conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean was made possible by advances in navigation and armaments, and the conquest in turn fueled the modernization of northwestern European industry and agriculture, making possible the conquest of the rest of the earth by the beginning of the twentieth century. Advances in communication and transportation made possible an expansive economic integration that assigned particular economic functions to different regions. Whereas the pre-modern empires fragmented when they expanded beyond the technical limits of territorial expansion, the modern world-system attained worldwide economic integration.
But the modern world-system overreached its geographical limits during the twentieth century. Continually expanding economically through the conquest of new lands and peoples, it eventually reached and overextended the geographical limits of the earth, thus finding itself confronting constraints to economic expansion and to production, only partially ameliorated through further technological development. At the same time, its continuing expansion created ever increasing patterns of consumption, even among the colonized, generating a sustained demand for consumer products greater than supply. The combination of stagnation and inflation was evident by the 1970s.
The power elite, habitually generating pretenses to obscure the foundation of the system in conquest and colonial domination, was itself confused by the phenomenon of stagflation. It turned to neoliberalism, seeing reduction of the role of the state, especially in the neocolonized region, as an immediate solution for its own financial problems.
(2) One hundred years ago, the failure of the power elite to engage the collective voice of the colonized had not yet occurred.
From the beginning, the colonized masses have spontaneously resisted, unmoved by accommodationists among them who are better off. The masses lifted up exceptional leaders, whom they recognized as gifted in their capacity to understand the colonial situation and to formulate concrete solutions.
The resistance of the colonized began to attain international collective and organizational form in the 1950s, leading to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which formulated a declaration for a New International Economic Order, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974. The anti-colonial resistance formulated the necessary principles that must guide humanity from that point forward, if it is to attain peace, political stability, and prosperity, including the rights of all nations to sovereignty and to freely decide on their own political-economic system.
The anti-colonial resistance did not intend to condemn the world powers. Its goal was to cooperate in the construction of a more just and sustainable world, breaking the global economic and political structures that had been created on a colonial foundation.
But the power elite failed to engage the Third World proposal for cooperative construction. For the power elite, the anti-colonial resistance was an additional problem, not the basis for a solution. Ignoring the collective voice of the colonized and its offer of a cooperative resolution of the problems confronted by humanity, the power elite imposed mutually destructive neoliberal economic policies on the nations of the world, a project that was initiated following 1980.
At the same time, the professional classes of the West did not hear the collective voice of the colonized, in spite of their having economic interests distinct from those of the power elite, interests consistent in the long term with the construction of a more peaceful and prosperous world. The members of this class quietly made their peace with the post-1980 neoliberal world order, remaining largely oblivious to the call of the Third World for an alternative world order.
(3) One hundred years ago, university students of the North had not yet failed to fulfill the duty to which they had been assigned by history, namely, a dialogue of civilizations with the neocolonized peoples, thereby capacitating Western students to lead their own peoples toward the road of worldwide cooperation in the construction of a more just and sustainable world-system.
In the late 1960s, there was a rebellion among students in the nations of the West. It was fueled above all by the Vietnam War, which revealed the capacity of the Western representative democracies for barbarity, and it exposed the colonialist intentions of the Western powers. The moment was also characterized by elevated awareness with respect to racial and class inequality. The rebellion declared itself to be a movement against racism, poverty, and war, with some calling it a revolution.
There was in the student rebellion of the late 1960s a fleeting consciousness of the collective Third World proposal for a more just and sustainable world order. The names of Fanon, Nkrumah, and Nyerere were known among them. Analyses of the Vietnam War as a symptom of a systematic worldwide imperialism were floating among them. Leaders that they admired—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael—called them to global anti-imperialist consciousness.
The student rebellion of the late 1960s was a biracial and multi-class phenomenon. Black students were disproportionately represented in the rebellion, but white students were more numerous in absolute numbers. There were some tensions in understanding between white and black students, as a result of an emerging black consciousness, but white students were committed to the construction of a new non-racist social order. The student rebellion occurred in elite and non-elite universities, both public and private.
The student revolt of the late 1960s was a rebellion of the relatively privileged in the world-system. The students pertained to that sector of the world-economy that had been advantaged by centuries of colonial domination. They were privileged, moreover, in their opportunity for full-time study for a period of four years, during a historic moment in which the contradictions and deceptions of the world-system were becoming manifest. And they were politically privileged, pertaining to nations with governments that held power in the world-system.
The combination of developments—the geographical overextension of the neocolonial world-system, the emergence of the collective and organized voice of the colonized, and the rebellion of black and white students in elite and public universities in the privileged sectors of the world-economy—pointed to the duty of the students in the long term. Namely, to develop a multi-ethnic and multi-class people’s movement that would seek to take political power in the nations of the West (through electoral and legal means), with the intention of reorienting Western governments toward constructive engagement with the proposal of the Third World project. This was a duty assigned to the students in that historic moment by virtue of their condition of relative privilege.
But the students failed to comply with the duty that was assigned to them. They did not use their four years of study to develop understanding of the contradictions of the world order. They did not search for ways to turn their rebellion into sustained revolution. They made their peace with an established order in transition to neoliberalism. In the case of the United States, they were unprepared to prevent the election of the reactionary Ronald Reagan, and to point the nation in a different direction.
These, then, are the factors that explain the eclipse of hope among writers today, in contrast to the dystopian and utopian writers of a century ago. Although Moynihan sees conditions of a century ago as similar to what we experience today, I would submit that conditions today are far worse. To be sure, inter-imperialist competition among world powers had led to the tragedy of the First World War, which caused a rapid increase in awareness that technological advances can lead to destruction on a scale previously unimagined. But a century ago, the world-system had not yet arrived to decadence. Elites and people’s leaders alike were putting forth various proposals to improve their nations and the human condition. Most of the proposals were fundamentally flawed in their premises and concepts, rooted as they were in the colonial denial. But some emerged to effectively guide humanity, not merely for the short term, but for a middle term of several decades. And even if flawed, they nonetheless had credibility among the people to ground a sincere public discourse and debate.
But as of the late 1970s, short-term and medium-term solutions were no longer practical. Sustainable long-term structural reforms had to be implemented, and the colonized themselves were explaining what these reforms must be in concrete terms. But instead of a dialogue seeking consensus, the Western powers in their myopia turned to new, more aggressive forms of imperialism, imposing their own short-term solutions, not sustainable in the long term, with the comeuppance only a couple of decades away. As a result, confusion and division today reign in the societies of the North, with manipulation of empirical evidence and post-modern discourses fueling political games that are meaningless for the future of humanity.
To overcome our malaise, we need to constructively engage the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements of the global South, which envision and daily proclaim a future world order characterized by mutually beneficial trade and peaceful cooperation among nations. We in the North need to encounter their hope and embrace it as our own.
The anti-imperialist movements are not naïve. They have emerged from realities that have been created by human aggressiveness, violence, and greed. But recognizing that their only option was to change their reality or die, they began to find concrete steps to a better world.
The anti-imperialist movements see a positive future for humanity precisely because they see it under construction in their daily reality, forged by processes of regional integration in Latin America, East Asia, and the Arab world; by increasing bilateral relations among the nations of the South, in fulfillment of the movement’s historical concept of South-South cooperation; by the continually increasing trade with the Asian giant that proclaims win-win cooperation as the necessary and future road of humanity; and by the construction of socialism or progressive capitalism in various leading nations.
The anti-imperialist movements of the world today proclaim that the necessary road is the united worldwide construction of a post-neocolonial world order, built on the foundations of modern technological advances, and characterized by mutually beneficial trade and peaceful cooperation, for the common good of humanity, including the peoples of the North. It is a question of mobilizing the political will for taking the necessary road, the contours of which have been indicated by the most insightful leaders and intellectuals among the colonized since the 1950s, who remain organized for collective expression.
The anti-imperialist movements are not waiting for permission from the imperialist powers. They are proceeding to construct an alternative world order on their own, enduring the sanctions imposed by the Western imperialist powers, with the enduring hope that they will persist. But can they continue to advance on this project of alternative construction, if the Western powers persist in their determination to destroy anti-imperialist states?
It is not too late for the peoples of the North to begin the road of engagement and dialogue with the revolutions of the South. The peoples of the Third World continue to call for the overdue dialogue of civilizations. If the peoples of the West were to respond, not only would dystopian fiction disappear as an important cultural presence. But also, the people’s leaders of the North would find the necessary road of cooperative construction of a just and sustainable world order, already under construction in the global South.
Therefore, the writers of the West have a duty to fulfill, assigned to us by the events of our time. Namely, the duty to seek understanding and to formulate the truth, including scientific understandings of the empirical world, moral principles that must guide humanity, and concrete steps that are necessary for the attainment of world peace and prosperity. We are called to this duty by the neocolonized peoples of the world, who have convoked a dialogue of civilizations. Do not be distracted by the expectations of the bureaucratized university or seduced by the lure of attaining social media followers. Focus on the quest for truth and fidelity toward truth as the highest goals. The future of humanity depends on you. Only you can guide humanity away from dystopia.
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Thomas Moynihan, “What the ‘future histories’ of the 1920s can teach us about hope,” BBC, January 12, 2024. Thomas Moynihan is a historian of ideas and author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (MIT Press, 2020). He currently is a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University.
Vera Brittain’s most lasting book, Testament of Youth, was published in 1933. It was a memoir of her experiences as a nurse auxiliary in the First World War and a literary memorial to her brother Edward Brittain, her fiancé Roland Leighton, and their two close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, all of whom were killed in the First World War.