Always going forward

On the idealisation of the future at the expense of the past

Going forwards, either used to mean ‘what we’ll do next’, ‘in the future’, or sometimes just as a hollow place holder meaning absolutely nothing at all, is another orientational metaphor which makes embodied sense. It belongs to the family of journey metaphors which we have referred to in previous posts: we choose our ‘direction of travel’, we know where we’re going, we are determined. We’re on our way to a better future, an onwards and upwards ‘trajectory’. Some years back a UK political party chose the tautologous slogan ‘forward, not back’ just to reinforce the point that to vote for them meant being in a car with no reverse gear. There is only the future: there are no regrets.

However, maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?

John Dewey warned us against an unreflective tendency which he termed a ‘lust for action’. What he meant was that if our default is to understand experience as a problem to be hammered into shape, then we rush on from one experience to the next without stopping to reflect. Each event is only experienced on the surface and with a particular end in view. We develop a superficial response to life and a diminished repertoire for what may be required of us. More, we cultivate a preference for situations where the most can be done in the least possible time — we rush around ‘delivering’ things without thinking through what is really important in the situation and what the ethical implications might be.

In our hurry towards an idealised future we may treat the past as an embarrassment unworthy of a backward glance, forgetting that there are some social traditions which have served us well. Take universities, for example, which one might think of as the institutionalisation of curiosity. The oldest amongst them, like al-Azhar in Cairo, have endured in some form or other for more than a thousand years because they serve an important purpose. All universities have survived by adapting and may look nothing like they were when they were first founded. But adaptation involves a reinterpretation of the past in the present, in anticipation of the future. In order to work out what to do next, to go forward, we may need to understand the traditions which have formed us as a community: we need a nuanced sense of our history. This became particularly evident in a piece of research I carried out with colleagues in six UK universities la few years back. Senior leaders in these universities showed themselves very thoughtful about the kinds of changes they were asked to carry out, but were often ambivalent about whether these were at all transformational, and if they were, then they questioned whether the transformation was necessarily for the good. I and colleagues reflected with them in the here and now about how they had become, and who they thought they were becoming as part of an academic community.

There is a risk that the application of will to every problem and an orientation to the future might obscure more important motivations which impelled us to contemplate a change in the first place, as Axel Honneth reminds us.[1] Being determinedly future-oriented, and in the process perhaps adopting management schemata which are logical, linear and abstract might lead to us forgetting about our colleagues who are an important part of the process. This is not a recipe for inaction, or encouragement to be half-hearted, but instead a reminder about the complexity of social ties and the interdependencies of our histories.

Understanding the interweaving of past, present and future, the rich and complex identity of a community, is a necessary starting point for understanding how we might go on together. Given who we are, what has happened to us, what we believe to be important and true, how might we take the next step together to address our current problems?

Although it has just become a glib throwaway remark, perhaps it is time to resist the idea of simply going forwards, at least not without a moment’s pause to reflect on what that remark might be covering over. Imagining a different, shared future is a complex undertaking.

[1] Honneth, A. Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Delivered at University of California, Berkeley March 14–16, 2005.