Looking up from the strategic confusion

The world of 2024 is in a deep state of confusion. This is true in two senses of the word. One is the sense of having been thrown into disorder, as whatever passes for a world order frays amid upheavals and the calamitous actions of our era's great men of history. The other is that with so many signals and counter-signals it has become perilously difficult to tell any coherent story about the present or the future we are heading towards.

This state of confusion brings a risk of helplessness and strategic inertia, as though the best we can collectively hope for is prevention or mitigation of the worst. Optimism for the future seems to be a missing ingredient in so many of this year's elections. Persistent chatter of war in major capitals suggests that short-term containment is the highest aspiration we can hold for now.

I wonder if we are experiencing something akin to George Orwell's characterisation of poverty - an annihilation of the future. Where we should be developing big ideas for the future, short-term survival has become the goal. Perhaps there is some explanation here for mainstream politics becoming, at least in some countries, a contest between grievance and low-key pragmatism. There seems to be nothing bigger in sight.

But the fundamentals of our world are shifting, and risk management is not good enough. This is a time when we need to look up. The only way beyond our predicament is to seek out bigger horizons. We need to generate new stories for the world we want to become.

These stories need to work at different levels. In the spirit of Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Homo Deus, we certainly need stories about the future of our species. The past century has delivered an unprecedented pace of change in evolutionary terms: the oldest 5% of the population were born before Colossus or ENIAC, the first recognisable computers, and their grandchildren are entering a job market underneath a billboard that asks bleakly, 'Still Hiring Humans?' So where do we want to go from here?

But we also need stories that work at the scale of nations, communities, families. People's sense of belonging operates at different units of scale and we should accept and engage with that.

The question confronting us all is this: What would a future look like that our generation would be proud to have fostered?

Stories of the future

The future is everybody's business, and building inclusive participation in politics and beyond is so important. And because everything is connected, we need stories and ideas that transcend defined sectors - all of which have their own narratives, preoccupations, and contradictions.

Here are a few suggestions for what our story of the future could be.

We will allow our planet to heal, and in the process find better ways of living.

The planet has to come first, and to make progress we must not allow the green agenda to become fixed as a political wedge issue. We know the story: there are huge incentives for powerful interests to stand in the way and stir discontent; and political will for action is feeble, despite the scientific consensus and growing evidence of public demand. But there is also a theory-of-change problem. Is it possible to find a balance between mobilising capital, litigating against the worst offenders, and the contentious but essential task of reforming the systems that have brought us here? This is the challenge of our lifetimes. In answering it, we must seize the deeper opportunities for the transformation of public policy on a vast range of areas from transportation to the design of cities - and to reappraise with humility our place as organic beings within the fragility of nature. We should expect new economic, social, and political orthodoxies should emerge from this process.

We will hold the line for peace and make it possible to reduce nuclear risk.

There is an unimaginable risk today that major powers stumble their way towards war. There simply must never be a third world war, which would carry the potential to extinguish life. Meanwhile, the process of militarisation is very real indeed - and deeply harmful for the planet and for people living in poverty. But to hold the line for peace is not cost-free. It is to hold firm on the basic principles of state sovereignty so that we do not return to an age of empires. As the Pax Americana fades into the past, for better or for worse, the fiendishly difficult task for governments is to create a different security equilibrium in which de-escalation and nuclear non-proliferation become possible once again - even as climate and AI act as destabilising forces on an already tempestuous world. But we must hold this ambition, beyond the more immediate task of containing the imminent conflict risks.

We will redesign for human equality.

Human equality has always been the most fragile of ideals. But as disparities of wealth become increasingly obscene - one person's pay packet closes in on the entire GDP of a country on whose natural resources his wealth is built, migrant workers die out of sight to create sporting spectacles - we are in danger of establishing a kind of global caste system. The concentration of control over technology (and its rewards) in the hands of a tiny few and the uneven impacts of the climate crisis will likely accelerate this trend, with the oligarchic classes enjoying unprecedented advantages that will put them far beyond reach, while the most vulnerable people become ever more so. But there is nothing inevitable about this trajectory - it is about the choices we make, and we still have many options. The reassertion of fundamental human equality should guide fresh thinking in areas from healthcare to work to undoing the legacies of colonial domination and pursuing a more equitable world order.

We will make human greed much more costly.

Confronting gross inequality requires dismantling the unfair structures that facilitate it. Through a combination of reforms to the global financial architecture, foreign investment (especially in green infrastructure), massive delivery of climate finance, increased development assistance, and debt reform, we need to reverse the net flows out of the developing world into the rich world. Global tax reform - with a wealth tax that spans borders - is a crucial aspiration. Alongside this, we need to strengthen the infrastructure for combating transnational corruption. A vast majority of people will stand to gain from these reforms in the long term.

We will build democratic systems fuelled by hope not fear.

There is no single story to tell about the health of democracy in the world, but many democracies are marred by distrust and corrupted by disinformation and voter suppression. Democrats around the world are on a defensive footing, in fear of extremism and authoritarianism. In a world awash with crises, growing inequalities, and palpable threats to security, democracy feels fragile. The human rights community inadvertently feeds into this, calling for "civic space" as though for an exception to the rule. Instead, we need a new emphasis on the quality, inclusiveness, and depth of democracy - and on democratic governance that is inspired by vision rather than grievance. We do not need civic space, but civic systems that are capable of realising collective aspirations for the future and lifting up the most vulnerable people in society.

We will put technology back at the service of humans.

We need a story about the relationship between humans and technology. It is otherwise driven by forces of market, state, and military competition that could lead us deep into many possible dystopias. The first thing is to assert the fundamental separateness of humans and technology. This calls for reconceptualising the digital divide not only in terms of access to technology but vastly differentiated experiences of technology - it offers potential for liberation and tyrannical control. AI is a frontier area in which "we can" easily trumps "we should". The proliferation of ethical frameworks is a messy but necessary effort to draw boundaries in a context where philosophical or moral value judgements could have very direct real-world impacts. A basic idea such as the right to a human decision is helpful, but even this may become of limited value when war is a matter of my robots versus your robots. Keeping sight of humanity itself, and its primacy over technology, is the most fundamental task of all.

We will choose to reject culture wars.

The so-called culture wars are not a natural state but a proven mobilising tool, and one that weakens the bonds of society. We need to start believing it is possible to foster genuine debate and build a measure of consensus around contentious social issues. This will require compromise on both sides, and a repudiation of polarising media formats. The tendency of some progressives to insist on moral or ideological purity is a statement of pessimism about the human condition, a failure to believe in our power to persuade each other or to adapt our views. Social attitudes have complex root systems and often feel precious to those who hold them, but they are also reshaped by experience. We can negotiate difference better: our species is uniquely capable of cooperation, and our culture wars serve nobody well. We need to choose to grow out of them.

None of these ideas are new or particularly radical. But the key point is that we need all of them, simultaneously. Each of them is daunting in scale, and they impact heavily on each other. An age of strategic confusion draws us into focusing our attentions too narrowly, or simply becoming overwhelmed by complexity. But we must not lose sight of the whole.