Survive the Future: Three Principles to Get Started

What guiding principles will you need to not just survive the future, but imagine a better one? To answer this question we not only need to look within ourselves, but at our community as a whole, and identify our flaws. By understanding each other, we can work together to build a better future.

The following is an excerpt from Surviving the Future by David Fleming. It has been adapted for the web.

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Listen to the following excerpt from the audiobook of Surviving the Future.

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In thinking constructively about the descent of the market economy, and about sequels, it will be helpful to keep in mind three guiding principles:

Manners

“Manners”, in Surviving the Future, are about treating ideas with the respect, attention and good humour needed to hear them. They open us up to encounter with nature, with each other and with our own thinking minds, and encourage the reflection that may uncover, over time, practical and astonishing responses to a fiercely difficult future.

In this sense, the rules of thinking, informal logic, judgment and reasonable conversation are rules of good manners, and this guide to thinking about the future is also a Book of Manners.

The art of recognising the difference between honest argument and fraud has been in poor health of late. That’s good enough for a political economy which is overflowing with the riches of oil and held together by the self-interest of the market, and where there is a range of choice, with plenty of ways to be right, and second chances if you’re wrong. But in our new, urgent world, getting it right matters more. If we are to usefully think through systems-solutions to the climacteric, the first system to be aware of is the system of language, insight and self-deception that guides, or confuses, the way we think.

For a taster of some of the hazards that can arise in conversation, see the appendix “Survival Tool 1: How to Cheat in an Argument” on page 183. The accepted name for these is “fallacies”, errors with staying power. They are so common that it is sometimes hard to think of any argument in which at least one of the participants has not built his or her case on one of these fault lines. The potential for mayhem and grief is large. They are best avoided or, at least, understood.

Scale and Presence

It is widely supposed that large size confers advantages. It is claimed to be more efficient, since there are economies of scale: once you have got things set up for a particular task, you can get a lot more done for relatively little extra cost and effort (lower ‘unit costs’), and you can go on building on that principle—up to a point. And yet, large-scale systems have problems, many of which apply to large-scale anything—including animals. They need large quantities of stuff (water, fuel, materials, information), which must be gathered over long distances; they may require complicated infrastructures; they then have to get rid of the waste; and they need complex specialisms to do all this. And, in the case of a big-city state, there is disempowerment. It is like a wave: you can ride it, but not steer it.

In contrast, small scale has its own economies: shorter transport distances, less waste, less infrastructure (lower total costs), more attention to detail, more flexibility, and it opens the way to empowerment: you can make a difference. For instance, given a chance, communities on a small enough scale for individuals to feel real influence can be so effective that doing the apparently impossible is their daily bread. Anarchists in terms of their independence, orderly in terms of ownership and responsibility for their particular places, surprising in their inventiveness, they are, even now, beginning to wake up to a long transition from the global city, towards located habitats on a human scale.

This is presence. It is about rediscovering citizenship, taking part in the life and creativity of well-beloved places that would not, without it, have a hope of coping with their future. There was something of this in the mind of one of history’s early defenders of what we might now call the Big Society, Pericles. In his 431 BC funeral oration for those who had fallen in the most recent year of the Peloponnesian War, he spoke of the virtues and values for which Athens was fighting. At the heart of this culture he placed ordinary citizens: these “fair judges of public matters”, he said, bring “daring and deliberation” to politics, and “regard him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless”.

That is the spirit of our age: the Transition movement, lean thinking, the principle of co-production, local people who care for local people . . . the idea is getting about. And there are those who haven’t waited for local participation to be invented and given a name, for they have been doing it for generations anyway. But the rediscovery of something as obvious as presence (in this sense of participation) is not trivial: since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the century since 1914, it has been draining away. Many of the would-be participants died in the trenches and their sequels, as the command-and-control culture of war acquired the standing of a public virtue.

The large-scale state, dazzled by its good intentions, saw itself as provider; iconic liberties engaged our attention while regulation closed in; economic competitiveness usurped other standards. While democracy has advanced, the part we ordinary citizens have played in the making and sustaining of the places and communities we live in has diminished. Never has so much been decided for so many by so few.

And yet, as that accursed century—saeculum maledictum—draws to an end, we may have learned enough to come together, to develop ideas with brilliance and authority, being present, participating, investing imagination, being inspired by, and bringing inspiration to, the places we live in.

And not before time. Presence is beautiful; it is friendship; it is our being; it is what life is for. Absence makes things difficult. The task of rebuilding the competence of a place, its conversation and confidence, is hard by any standards, but especially so when there’s no one at home.

Slack

It is a truth universally acknowledged that competitiveness is a good thing. It is a life-saver, in that it enables an economy to pay its way. It is a provider of equity, in that it enables people to achieve wealth and status on their own merits. And it is the only way in which a price-based market economy will work. But it comes at a cost.

A competitive market economy must, by definition, be “taut”. The price charged by Fred for his goods will hold only so long as the price charged by Dan for the same goods, in the same place, is no lower. If it is, Fred will need to reduce his prices, or else to go out of business. Prices for goods therefore tend to converge to the same level. And that level requires all the producers in the market to be efficient—to work full-time, to use the methods that cost least, and to sell as much as they can.

Producers all understand this necessity—there is little choice in the matter; what distinguishes them is how good they are at doing it. There is a requirement to innovate, because the competitive market is taut: everyone else is doing so, and anyone who does not is quickly priced out of business.

In the future, it will not be like that. Producers will not always want to provide their goods and services in the most efficient way. They may—for good local reasons—want to use a technology which is more expensive. For instance, it could make sense, from the point of view of the resilient community, to use less energy, water or material, at the cost of having to spend more on labour. Or local craftsmen may be able to keep up with local demand for long-lasting goods despite working for only three days a week. Or producers may simply decide not to produce the maximum quantity, and to take it easy and produce according to what they see as reasonable need, or what they have the time for, after spending time with family and neighbours.

All these choices would have the effect of raising the price of the goods supplied by that producer or—if other producers did the same—by the community as a whole. In a taut market, such decisions could not be made. If they were, they would not stick, because a producer that tried to do so would be quickly put out of business by others who went for the cheaper option, the efficient and competitive one. Any market that did manage to make such sensible, yet inefficient, decisions stick, would be slack—and it would be at constant risk of being stymied by competitive producers seizing the opportunity to make easy money by producing and selling at a lower price.

How can a community, despite all this, be mistress of its own fate in this sense? How can it sustain that condition of slack—that is, have the freedom to make enlightened decisions and make them stick? Well, here is the good news. The “normal” state of affairs, before the era of the great civic societies, and in the intervals between them, has consisted of political economies—perhaps better known in this case as villages—where the terms on which goods and services were exchanged were not based on price.

Instead, they were built around a complex culture of arrangements—obligations, loyalties, collaborations—which express the nature and priorities of the community and the network of relationships and reciprocities between its members. No, don’t scoff. This is what households still do—and friends, neighbours, cricket teams, magistrates, parent-teacher associations, allotment holders; this is the non-monetary ‘informal economy’, the central core that enables our society to exist. It is outrageous to the received values of now: it is not transparent; it is nonconformist; social mobility in it is limited; it is neither efficient nor competitive; it is full of anomalies. But it keeps things going.

So, back to the question: how do communities manage to keep such an apparently unstable economy going? Well, it turns on culture. Sheer naked loyalties and family values can only go so far. There needs to be something interesting, connecting, going on too—something to talk about, to cooperate in, to mull over, to aim for, to laugh at; there needs to be a story to tell, something to coordinate and to do together.

A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the context, the story, that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of ‘social capital’. And the social capital of a community is its social life—the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith, civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.

Ever since Adam Smith observed that people are willing to carry out almost any service for each other despite being motivated by nothing more than commercial self-interest, it has seemed to be unnecessary and ridiculous to suppose that there is any significant role for such higher motives as benevolence. Economists simply haven’t needed such concepts. Well, they do now. The economics of the future will be benignly and inextricably entangled with social capital—with intense links of reciprocity—in comparison with which the reduction of economic and social relations to the piteous simplicities of prices is not up to standard any longer, and is due for retirement.

It is now all right to speak of benevolence as an economic concept, for economics is at the early stages of being reintegrated into community, and community into the whole nature of the living things that belong there. It will not be from the impersonal price-calculations of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the reciprocal obligations that join a community together, and the benevolence among its members.

Slack is the space in which judgment lies. The early shocks of descent may leave little room for choice: just one tolerable option could be a fine thing, and that may be as much as most of us can hope for, at least for the time being. In the mature settlements that could follow, however, the tyranny of decisions being made in lock-step with competitive pricing will be an ancient memory. There will be time for music.

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So what does that leave Surviving the Future to do? Well, the answer to that is that it is a lean book. It does not have the last word. You, the reader, are invited to explore ideas from more than one point of view, to follow up the references, to build up your own familiarity with the key concepts, in your own way. You are invited to participate in a story—a story about the shared experience of something discovered, something discussed, something done.

Surviving the Future is a book about inventive, cooperative self-reliance. Inheriting and inventing families of enabling principles (such as the rules of chess, the instruments of music or the grammar of language), we can construct things with more confidence and ambition than we could if we had to invent everything from first principles. Whether Surviving the Future has a place on the edge of these enabling principles it is too soon to say. But it may, perhaps, provide some of the little bricks that, with luck, judgment and conversation, turn out to fit together.

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Becoming Resilient in an Ever-Changing World

The Condition of Wondering