Don’t Expect Too Much of 2050
It is human nature to imagine a future much different from the present, but the excess of this trait can also easily lead us astray. And while we may indeed reappraise the current mobilities and immobilities against the backdrop of climate change, we should be careful not to raise our expectations too high.
Thirty years is an odd time span.
In theory, it is long enough for profound social and technological change to take place. On the first pages of his groundbreaking biography of Joseph W. Stalin, Stephen Kotkin invites us to imagine a subject of the Russian Empire who had fallen asleep in 1894 (the year Stalin entered the Tiflis seminary to become a priest) and awoke exactly thirty years later in 1924 (the year Lenin died, and Stalin rose to power). What a bewilderment that would have been! “Vehicles moved without horses. Humans flew in the sky. X-rays could see inside people. […] Novels read like streams of dreamlike consciousness, and many celebrated painters depicted only shapes and colors” (Kotkin, 2014: 2). Not to speak of all the political chaos of this period, the dissolution of century-old empires, the end of aristocratic rule, and a World War that left large parts of Europe destroyed while fanning the flames of nationalist hysteria.
Continuity, Not Rupture
In practice, however, periods of such transformative intensity seem to be the exception rather than the rule, and one may argue that nothing remotely similar has happened over the last thirty years. Admittedly, the Cold War has ended, our communication and consumer behavior have adapted to the advent of digitization, and our societies have become more dynamic and irritable in response; more ‘liquid’ (Bauman, 2000), so to say. Yet, our fundamental outlook on the world has hardly changed compared to previous periods, and the transition from the burgeoning tech-societies of the 1980s to the more mature ones of the 2010s may validly be described as smooth and gradual. To borrow a contrast from the intra-Catholic debate on the ramifications of the Second Vatican Council, we may be well advised to view our current age through a hermeneutic of continuity rather than rupture.
This also applies to our perception of migration and mobility, and more importantly to the moral judgment rendered in this context. Of course, no one can foretell the future and how our norms will evolve, but assuming that 2020 is probably not another 1894, it seems reasonable to refrain from exaggerated fantasies when speculating about it. Not that I would be opposed to witnessing them materialize. Quite the contrary! To name just an obvious example, it would certainly be exciting to see people awaken from their moral slumber and become conscious of how devastating and unjust the concept of borders is (Hidalgo, 2019; Sager, 2020). It only strikes me as improbable that the majority will actually do so within the next three decades. Worshipping the strange man-made idol that is the border — an idol thirstier for human blood than even the most gruesome of Canaanite gods — has become so ingrained into the fabric of our everyday lives that it may take considerably longer to wean our societies from it.
Climate Change as The Best Bet
What forms of migration or mobility may we then condemn thirty years from now? Based on what we know at the moment, the most realistic answer would be whatever hinders our efforts to combat climate change. It is simply too crucial an issue and too likely to define the agenda of the coming years to ignore its normative potential. In particular, discussions about phenomena like flight shame are already providing us a foretaste of how specific mobilities can be turned into objects of applied climate ethics (Gössling, 2020). Future generations may increasingly question, and be questioned, whether their environmental conscience allows them to fly overseas, when an online conversation would suffice; or to spend the weekend in Paris, when beautiful La Chaux-de-Fonds is just a short train ride away. This, of course, does not guarantee material change, as moral condemnation is a rather poor predictor of individual behavior. After all, there are still plenty of people who engage in destructive acts, kill, torture, and abuse even though this is all considered morally reprehensible. To condemn something means to suppress it to a certain degree – but it does not make it vanish from existence.
And yet, we should be aware that not only mobilities but also particular immobilities could be subject to climate-related scrutiny. As we learn more about the downsides of urban sprawl and how environmentally problematic single-family housing is, social attitudes towards spatial immobility may change as well. The promise of settling down one day in calm suburbia, a promise that has been at the heart of elusive Euro-American middle-class fantasies for decades, could eventually be regarded as an “unsustainable excess in the new millennium” (Puurunen & Organschi, 2013: 183). In other words, an anachronistic life project that demands so much more from nature than it can offer us; a symbol of self-centeredness in the face of an ecological crisis.
There are probably many other forms of human movement that could be condemned and many condemnations that could be retracted. In any case, we should not take any of them as a given. “Do not expect too much of the end of the world” is one of the more famous aphorisms of the late Polish writer Stanislaw Lec. Offering a glimpse into the workings of history, it mocks the human inclination to indulge in illusions of what may come to be but never does. In this sense, it appears prudent not to expect too much of 2050 either, yet remain prepared for the unexpected to surprise us. What a dreary world it would be if we were not at least to give it a chance.
Marco Bitschnau is a doctoral candidate at the University of Neuchâtel and a fellow of the nccr – on the move, where he works in the project Mobility, Diversity, and the Democratic Welfare State: Contested Solidarity in Historical and Political Comparative Perspective.
Bibliography
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Gössling, S., A. Humpe & T. Bausch (2020). Does flight shame affect social norms? Changing perspectives on the desirability of air travel in Germany. Journal of Cleaner Production, 266 (1), 122015.
Hidalgo, J. S. (2019). Unjust Borders: Individuals and the Ethics of Immigration. New York: Routledge.
Kotkin, S. (2014). Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin.
Puurunen, E. & A. Organschi (2013). Multiplier Effect: High Performance Construction Assemblies and Urban Density in U.S. Housing. In A. Khare & T. Beckman (Eds.). Mitigating Climate Change: The Emerging Face of Modern Cities. Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer.
Sager, A. (2020). Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
