My last post has been up for some 24 hours – and has attracted only a couple of dozen clicks. The title was “A Better World is Possible” since Neal Lawson was discussing prolific writer Geoff Mulgan’s latest book of that name with the author on one of the great Compass podcasts.
The low number of clicks seemsto confirm Mulgan’s belief that a book was necessary – pessimism if not downright fatalism is on the rise
You may have seen the fascinating recent research surveying the patterns of sentiment in all books published in English, German and Spanish over the last 150 years (as gathered on Google) which showed symptoms of a collective depression, on a scale greater than during the world wars, in recent decades. The authors wrote of an upsurge of ‘cognitive distortions’ since around 2000, leading them to comment that ‘large populations are increasingly stressed by pervasive cultural, economic, and social changes’ linked to ‘the rising prevalence of depression and anxiety in recent decades ’ and they show that what they call ‘catastrophising’ ways of thinking have risen sharply as utopias have been displaced by distopias in our collective mind.
This shrinking of the future matters politically too – because it fuels what the German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has called the switch from positive politics, which emphasises the openness and possibility of the future, to a negative politics which is defensive, sceptical and nostalgic, convinced that the best years lie in the past.
Now it’s possible that we are all, indeed, objectively, doomed. But it seems to me implausible that we could know this with any certainty and one lesson of history is that it’s rarely possible to judge prospects accurately.
So it’s surely better to try to think our way out of our many crises - and if we don’t even try then we certainly will be doomed and will deserve to be.
So how might we collectively do better, how we might use the incredible knowledge of social science now to help us see and shape better than we are doing now, and to fill up the fuzzy pictures in our minds with sharper pictures of what’s possible and better?
That’s very much what Mulgan’s latest book offers – and why it’s such an important read.
I realise that it’s a bit expensive but the great thing about academics is that they like writing so much that, if you look hard enough, you can find material which they later worked up into books. As I like archiving such material and sharing it on the blog, everyone wins! For more detail see
The role of Social Sciences in mapping and shaping the Future; a 2022 Mulgan lecture
“The Imaginary Crisis” (2020) a 40 page paper which maps out the argument
Social Innovation (2019) googlebook excerpts
Thinking Systems 2019 30pp paper
Government as a brain How Can Governments Better Understand, Think, Create, and Remember, and Avoid the Traps of Collective Stupidity Both in Emergencies and Normal Times 2022 paper
https://ecfr.eu/podcasts/episode/another-world-is-possible-the-transformative-power-of-political-imagination/ mark leonard podcast
Short answer to the question is yes. I've written before about catastrophism from the time of Malthus, but, of course it goes back way further than that, hence the term Cassandras. Look close enough and you will find the interests behind the claims of impending doom.
ReplyDeleteMarx and Engels wrote a book critiquing the ideas of professor Eugene Duhring that became known as "Anti-Durhing". I've been thinking of writing a a book critiquing all the castrophists, and calling it "Anti-Dooming"!