Article
Kevin Jae
Independent scholar, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
This article seeks to open up new directions for thinking about future generations. The current discourse on future generations presumes that previous generations are the only ones who possess agency; they create the conditions for life for later generations. The article shows how future generations have agency as well: future generations reinterpret their pasts, retroactively changing the past and acting on the lives and legacies of past generations. The article also goes beyond reinterpretation to show how future generations, by the virtue of living their lives, appropriate the past and bring past generations into the future as collaborators. Ultimately, the article attempts to contest everyday understandings of future generations, which is based on linear conceptions of time, and assert new connections between the generations.
Keywords
Future generations, Event, sustainability, Anthropocene
Introduction
We find ourselves in a strange time in human history. Instead of being masters of the systems that we created to govern human prosperity, we serve these unsustainable systems and the short-term interests of capital and politics. The result: a world fundamentally uncaring towards future generations. In the face of these challenges, our narratives of progress ring hallow. It is no wonder then, that the discourse of future generations sounds ever louder in the Anthropocene—it is a rallying cry, commanding us to escape our narrow horizons, urging us to reorient ourselves and secure a better world for the unborn.
“Future generations”: the concept appears to be straightforward and self-evident at first glance; we speak of those to come, for whom the sun also rises. However, the article deviates from the previous literature in the attempt to complicate this simple concept and to open up new approaches and new ways of thinking. I do so by introducing novel theoretical perspectives on the topic. In our current conception, future generations are merely the creations of previous generations; previous generations, endowed with agency, create the conditions in which future generations inhabit. The past creates the present which creates the future—the passing of generations follows the linear flow of time. I try to complicate this simple relationship. While we in the present are very well aware of how we impose our agency on future generations, creating the conditions of their livelihoods, we are less aware of the agency that future generations have on their pasts.
To expound on this thesis, I take the readers on a journey: I start with a literature review on current trends in the research. I then examine the epistemological limitations of understanding future generations, which is recognized in the literature thus far. I then go beyond the current literature and consider the present historical moment and its epistemological conditions that motivate our research of future generations today. This is a crucial stepping stone to the final destination of the article, which reconsiders future generations with novel theoretical frameworks to show how future generations can retroactively change the past and affect past generations. Through this process, a new intimacy is created between the past, the present, and the future. Past and present generations are made a collaborator to the present and the future, and future generations, to the past and present.
Literature Review
The world was not always so inhospitable to future generations. Referring primarily to non-industrialized societies, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1962) famously coined the term “cold” societies (as opposed to “hot” societies) to describe the societies reproduce existing societal structures, sustainably reproducing future generations. The term Anthropocene also implies the extent to which this is a problem of contemporary, or even modern, society: the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) suggests that it was in the early 1950s that human activity began to have significant impacts on the environment (Witze, 2023).
How has the topic of future generations been discussed in the literature and in futures studies in particular? If we are to point out a single dominant frame for our current discussions of future generations, it is the frame of sustainability.1 The Brundtland Report (Brundtland Commission, 1987) is one early document connecting sustainability and care for future generations: it provides an influential definition of sustainable development as what “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 16). From then onwards, the topic of future generations has become the focus of a large number of researchers and disciplines unrelated to each other, unified by a common desire to think through the problem of our unsustainable systems. An exhaustive catalogue is out of scope for the article, but there is research in moral philosophy and ethics (e.g., Mulgan, 2006; Scheffler, 2018), social science disciplines like economics (e.g., Bartolini & Sarracino, 2018; Martinet, 2012) and psychology, (e.g., Syropoulos & Markowitz, 2023), as well as in resource use and resource policy (e.g., Henckens et al., 2016). In addition, there is also an emerging interest in the topic in comparative politics, which compares institutions for future generations (e.g., von Knebel, 2023; Dirth, 2021) and even novel design methods for representing the interests of future generations in policy (e.g., Hiromitsu et al., 2021; Kuroda et al., 2021; Nakagawa, Y., Saijo, T., 2021).
The discipline of futures studies has had an early engagement with the subject of future generations. Early iterations of the topic are discussed in Eleanor Boulding’s concept of the 200-year present, which identifies “our space in time” as a period of time 100 years prior and 100 years later (Boulding, 1978 as cited in Slaughter, 1994). Other notable scholars include Allen Tough, who advocated for future generations in the discipline (Tough, 1993; Tough, 1996), who was involved in and organized one of the earliest seminars on future generations (Tough & Rogers, 1995), and who, along with Richard Slaughter, edited one of the first special issues for future generations in Futures (Slaughter, 1997; Tough, 1997a).
The work of Allen Tough is of particular interest: in his writings in the 1990s, he attempts to anticipate the needs and desires of future generations. However, this came with marked flaws. In his 1993 article “What future generations need from us” and the reprinted 1997b article “What future generations might say to us,” Tough writes out a letter to the present from the future containing seven recommendations from the future to people in the present, ranging from creating a sustainable environment to ensuring peace and security by eliminating nuclear and biological weapons. Tough used a particular methodology to determine the needs of future generations. He did individual role playing, creating “in my imagination five people alive several decades from now on four continents” (1993, p. 1043). Tough also connected with students all around the world to play the role of future generations, who, in this role, provided messages and key recommendations.
The “Epistemic” Dimension of Future Generations
One must commend Tough for his sincere care for future generations and for initiating and advancing these conversations on future generations in futures studies. However, Tough’s attempts fall short with its epistemic naivete. Instead of capturing future generations’ actual needs and desires through his investigation, Tough assumes that future generations will want the same as present generations today and reinscribes the present into the future. The epistemic flaw is not just limited to Tough—it is also present throughout the literature. For example, we can see it in novel design methods like the “Imaginary Future Generations” method, where a group of people in the present are chosen to represent future generations, pretending to be future generations and advocating for their interests, participating in the decision-making process on their behalf (e.g., Hiromitsu et al., 2021; Kuroda et al., 2021). However, without awareness of epistemic difference, what appears to be reasonable for current generations will be facilely transferred to future generations to make political demands and policies in their name. This leads to what Magaña (2023) identifies as the challenge of perverse goals, where “the rhetoric of political representation can be used, or co-opted, to pursue perverse goals” (p. 4).
Other scholars have also noted the problem of epistemic limitations when representing and claiming knowledge about future generations (Beyleveld et al., 2015; Thompson, 2010; Byskov, & Hyams, 2022; Ekeli, 2006). The claims of epistemic distance between the present generations and the future appears to be self-evident when they are articulated—who would not agree that different generations have a different reading and interpretation on things? It is perhaps for this reason that this claim is under-elaborated in the literature by those who point out this difficulty. However, some additional elaboration is required to support this statement more firmly and to demonstrate the extent to which this is the case. There may still be some readers, who, at this point, are still captured by the nostalgia of pre-Babel times, of a universal language. This is a language of unchanging Platonic forms, in which a set of God-given, pre-eternal signifiers map on perfectly to a timeless world—an eternal and static present. Only in such an artificial world of comfortable epistemic stability could we plausibly speak on behalf of future generations.
Yet the world we inhabit is fickle, impermanent, mutating. Human attempts to understand and interpret the world through our language and symbolic structures are always incomplete: the signifier (the external word or the image) and what is signified (the concept referred to) are arbitrary symbolic categories (de Saussure, 1983/2013); the map is constantly remade, attempting to capture an ever-shifting territory: a rose is a rose will not necessarily be a rose (both in signifier and what is signified, literally and symbolically) for future generations. Just as it has with every successive generation, each passing generation will embody and articulate a unique symbolic and semiotic system. This allows each generation to better describe, comprehend, debate, act upon, and transform their own idiosyncratic social and political conditions.
Tough aimed to bridge this gap—he wanted to communicate with the future using the inherently limited tools we have at our disposal in the present. However, without an honest appraisal of its limitations, we extend our present moment into the future, committing the hubristic error of “presentism.”2 We claim to care about the future, but in our attempt, we hide our egocentricism: the future becomes a mirror to our present; we unknowingly and innocently “colonize” the future (Dator, 1975/2005; Jae, 2023). An anthropology of the future is impossible. (This is to be distinguished with the method ethnographic futures, e.g., Textor, 1995; Candy & Kornet, 2019). Insofar as the future is to retain its fundamental uncertainty (in order words: insofar as we cannot prophesize the future), all of the advancements in theory and human knowledge will be unable to probe into the hearts and minds of the unborn. In this forever foreign terrain, even the most seasoned futurist loses their aplomb. Not only will the litany change, but also will the most fundamental structures of meaning—myth and metaphor—will change as well (Inayatullah, 1998). All of this is implied as much by the “epistemic critique” of future generations, even though they may do not express it as such in these terms.
Future Generations and Our Historical Moment
However, those who write about the epistemic critique do not go far enough. In their critique, they fail to interrogate the epistemic conditions of the present: namely, they fail to recognize that the questions and the impetus motivating the current discourse of future generations is itself the outcome of our historical moment.
To approach this idea, I take a detour through historiology with the work of Reinhart Koselleck (2018), a renowned German historian, who recognizes the importance of the historian’s present in the formation of their work. The historian’s present historical conjuncture motivates the rewriting of histories. When what Koselleck (2018) terms the “justifications” (whether religious, social, economic, political, or otherwise) for previous histories no longer make sense in the historian’s present environment, then “new questions thus arise that can no longer be answered by the histories transmitted thus far. Old histories need to be written anew, need to be rewritten” (p. 154). The past does not exist as stagnant mineral formations to be merely discovered and described by the historian. The past is vital and in flux; from the present we have agency to engage with and rewrite the past.
We can apply this insight to our discussion by looking the other way temporally. A similar principle can be applied for what motivates our writings on future generations. Our present moment is suffused with anxiety about the future, most notably due to the environmental problems created by our unsustainable systems. This provides the dominant frame around the research on future generations in the recent decades. As our brief literature review reveals, major themes in future generations research include topics about sustainability, intergenerational justice, resource use, and environment. If we listen carefully, these are writings understandably tinged with remorse; they sound penitent; they are an admission of guilt.3 In another era, discussions about future generations may have taken on another set of entirely different questions, coloured with an entirely different palette of words: in the 18th century, the time of the Enlightenment, future generations may have been thought of as the harbingers of continued moral progress; before our awareness of environmental crises and our planetary limits, one may have thought of them with envy, as the beneficiaries of unprecedented technical and economic prosperity, living lives of unparalleled leisure and luxury on an infinitely providing planet (there are some—like the transhumanists—who are still optimistic about the future in this way).
We must add at this point a short addendum and deconstruct the “we” that claims to represent each generation. As Beyleveld et al. (2015) note, each generation is not a monolith of sameness: there are differences in the generations, as any cursory reflection will note. As such, there exist a plurality of possible (epistemic) frames in each generation, which will differ by nation, culture, political persuasion, positionality, context, and other factors. I provide a short, Canadian example: note what was articulated by Liberal party member John Gibson in the House of Commons in 1947 to repeal the Chinese Immigration Act, which restricted Chinese immigration to Canada: “I believe that we should treat the Chinese with the greatest tolerance, generosity and understanding, but I would warn every hon. Member that we have a solemn responsibility toward the generations that come after us [emphasis added]to see that we keep this Canada white…” (Gibson as cited in Cho 2012:93). As this particular example shows, in Canada in the mid-1900s, the topic of future generations provoked an anxiety of a changing multi-racial Canada.
How Future Generations Retroactively Create the Past
Koselleck’s (2018) writings on history are not only instructive for analyzing our present moment (and by extension, the research questions we ask), but also offer us another frame with which to understand future generations by looking historically, not futuristically. We return to his idea of “justifications”: future generations will confront challenges in their future conjunctures that we in the present cannot anticipate. As stated previously, these are challenges for which we in the present will lack the proper contexts and concepts to articulate and comprehend. When these moments arise, future generations too will ask new questions to better address their contemporary problems, and these questions will lead to a rewriting of their histories. And these new questions will retroactively reinterpret and modify our present, stripping it of the meanings we understand it with today. Our present is future generations’ reimagined past.
We need not limit this idea to historical texts. Borrowing ideas from the philosophy of the Event, as represented in Zizek’s (2014) Event, we can make a bolder, more audacious claim: those in the present can retroactively change the past; those in the future have agency to retroactively transform the present. Put simply, the Event is a sudden miraculous emergence that disrupts the status quo: it is “the effect that seems to exceed its causes” (p. 3). This is partially due to its inexplicability prior to its happening: there is a lack of adequate language and knowledge structures to capture it. The Event creates the language to explicate its causes or reasons. And as this happens, the Event works retroactively to change the past. To quote Zizek “[h]ow is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to travel back in time? …of course we cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what we can change is the virtual dimension of the past—when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes/conditions” (p.111). The Event exerts the power to realign the past as stepping stones leading to itself as the end point. We are now in the arena of everyday life, having escaped the narrow confines of historical texts.
The philosophy of the Event deals with abrupt, jagged political transformations; however, we do not need a radically novel and transformative political Event for future generations retroactively change their pasts. A gradual, non-political change can also result in some of the key ideas of the Event that are important for our purposes. I provide a few thoroughly dissimilar examples as illustration.
The first example is a large-scale historical example. As Benedict Anderson (1983/2006), one of the founders of nationalism studies, notes, present generations change the past when the nation is born. Anderson analyzes the forgetting and the construction of memories that occurs when a nation is constructed: “A vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861-65 as a great ‘civil’ war between ‘brothers’ rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-state” (p. 201). In the case of the American civil war, previous generations fought with a deep-seated consciousness of the other—the enemy—as an entirely different nation, but the birth of the national consciousness retroactively transforms these antagonisms to a family affair—a case of fraternal infighting. This also occurs in other national contexts when the nation is born.
We can spot a similar occurrence with technological development. Technological development does not happen linearly: the development of a technology often requires appropriating research away from the original contexts that motivated them, redirecting research towards new applications. This is evident in the development of CRISPR-cas9, the revolutionary technology that allows modification of the genome by altering sections of DNA. There is nothing inevitable about CRISPR-cas9’s redeployment as a gene-editing technology. CRISPR is a natural system: it is a part of the bacterial immune system that copies DNA sequences of viruses that have invaded it in the past. These DNA sequences are communicated to the cas (“CRISPR associated”) proteins, which cut the matching DNA sequences in viruses as a part of the virus’ defensive mechanism (Broad Institute, n.d.). As Lander (2016) notes, the trajectory of CRISPR-cas9’s development as a genome modification technology was anything but linear. It also involved a web of researchers all over the world, who researched the topic motivated by completely different aims. For example, Francisco Mojica, who first worked on and discovered CRISPR and its function from 1993 to 2005, sought “to understand bizarre repeat sequences in salttolerant microbes” (p. 26). Further important developments to the understanding of CRISPR was sponsored by the military to “defend against biological warfare,” and then in a commercial setting to “improve yogurt production” (p. 26). It was only in 2013 that CRISPR-cas9’s utility for genetic modification was identified and discovered.
Innovation by present generations actively creates alternative purposes and meanings in the work of previous generations, appropriating the work and stripping of its original context and meanings. As this happens, past generations are made part of an irreplaceable process; they are turned into collaborators to the present. Present generations are required to reveal new meanings, to realign, and to renew the work of their previous generations. Innovators in the present also lie in wait to be collaborators to future generations.
A final example to consider: we recreate the past as we live our individual lives. Each one of us are connected to our fore-elders, and, by the very fact of our existence, give new meanings to their existence. Contrary to Western imaginings of the individual, whose birth signifies a new beginning and a figure at complete liberty from the past, we are instead hodgepodge mixtures of our ancestors: a potent chemical brew of hereditary characteristics, a chance union of genetic traits. Those genetic traits that do not find expression do not disappear. They are atavistic and lay in wait for a chance at recidivism, awaiting the fortuitous combinations and contexts that could lead to their expression, like the realization of the Buendía family’s biggest fear in Garcia Marquez’s (2000) One Hundred Years of Solitude: a baby with a pig’s tail. Our notable life events—our failures and successes—realign the past into a succession of occurrences that have to had happened for our own events to take place. We do not independently create ourselves as bootstrapping, entrepreneurial, self-reliant neoliberal individuals. Instead, we are our fore-elders—our agency is our interpretation of our genetic heritage. As we engage in the lifelong process of interpretation we pay homage to the past, reviving ancestral tendencies. Each one of our movements, actions, and words uttered are repetitions of the past in new contexts—they are rituals of reverence, methods to reanimate the past through the present and bring new meanings to the past. We recall and revivify the lives of our fore-elders through the drama of our existence. And we too will be recalled and revivified through the lives of future generations.
Conclusion
Our everyday ideas about future generations depend on underlying linear assumptions of time and about the past, the present, and the future. At first glance, the generations inhabiting each temporality are determined successively: the generations of the past determine the present conjuncture, and present generations determine the conditions of life for future generations. Agency, in this case, moves in only one direction alongside a linear, forward-moving flow of time.
It is this conception of agency that grounds our research on future generations. Current research and discourses on future generations are tied to sustainability concerns. Rightfully so, given the insufficiency of plans to limit temperature rise by 1.5 degrees by the end of the century (UN Climate, 2023) and the plethora of other environmental issues around the world (Stockholm Resilience Centre, n.d.).
As stated in the article, I do not disagree with or seek to refute the dominance of the sustainability lens in the literature on future generations. Instead, I seek to open up new paths for thinking about future generations. To do so, I looked to the existing research on future generations and explored the epistemic limitations of knowing and understanding future generations. I then pointed out the epistemic conditions of the present moment, which is the reason for the current sustainability framework around discussions of future generations. The article then advanced into new terrain on the topic by describing how future generations have agency to retroactively change the past. I show that future generations will inescapably experience, interpret, understand, and act upon their world with their own linguistic and symbolic structures (culture, in short), which helps them to navigate the complexities of their world. In doing so, they will inevitably reinterpret their past, which includes our present, emptying it of our intent.
This goes beyond (re)interpretation. Present generations forcefully appropriate the past, stripping away and remaking past generations’ efforts, their battles, their legacies, and the intentions with which they lived their lives. We enact a re-evaluation—what was silent is made to speak, and what was once spoken is made silent. We then forcefully subsume the past generations’ existence into new processes that have us as the natural culmination. And the future too will express their agency and appropriate our present. Our lives will be reduced to misreadings, broken and shattered to pieces, never to be made whole or restored as we intended them. To ourselves our voices sound clear and unambiguous; if sounded back to us through this futuristical recording device, we hear a stranger’s voice. Generations in the past, the present, and the future find themselves connected anew in this deviant and perverse linkage of misunderstandings; a contest to strip the other of agency. However, this is not just a contest; it is also a collaboration. The present depends on the past for its existence and it depends on the future to revivify it, drawing out the meanings that lay hidden and bringing forth new completions.
By saving future generations, we save ourselves in the present, and we save our fore-elders in the past.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Cheryl Doig and Yelena Muzykina for initiating and leading the Journal of Futures Studies’ Youth Special Edition.
Notes
- The literature review examines the academic literature, but there is evidence that concern for future generations is not a completely novel emergence. For example, concern for future generations is embedded in Indigenous institutions like the Iroquois constitution, where, according to the 28th law, “Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground—the unborn of the future Nation” (Murphy, n.d.).
- Others have identified this concept as well: see Sardar and Sweeney’s (2016) “Extended Present.”
- Of course, by writing this, I in no way mean to suggest or imply that the focus of current research on future generations is misguided, or that it is not important. I only point this out to show how our present historical moment intervenes in the questions that are asked and the directions that are taken, which informs the epistemic dimensions of current research about future generations.
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