How we address the future is a political discussion. Cultural nihilism declares the fight definitively lost. It confuses critical pessimism with moral and intellectual defeat. It celebrates the apocalypse through an aesthetization of his decadent life. The ruling class doesn’t speak of the future. It decides to center in the present of administered life and its conflicts. Its tasks consist in defending that present life is the best possible world. Future belongs to revolutionaries, from left and right. They must ensure that the best is yet to come.
The ascending bourgeoise and the global powers it produced were revolutionary. Powers that shook the old world-order. It waved the flag of progress. For progress to be attested we need a “before-and-after” structure. The West needed a story of triumph, a rise from ape to man and from man to God. But to ensure its power it required a comparison between primitive and evolved societies. This language was slightly refined. First, we spoke of the “first” and the “third” world, second, from “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations. The main idea was this: the former should see in the latter their prehistory; reciprocally, the latter should see in the former their future. Of course, there was too the romantic, inverted version of the myth of progress. Namely, where the ancients were supposed to be wise and in balance with nature and neighbors, while the moderns would be corrupt for having forgotten their origins.
What we see now, however, is that undeveloped nations were not the past of modern capitalist societies. Arjun Appadurai has significantly contributed in reflecting on the role of “past” and “present” in society and economics. On the contrary, the third world was in many respects the future of the first world. Religious fundamentalism, autocracies, pauperization, political purges, censorship, corruption, are not phenomena of banana republics, they are the seen mor and more in developed countries, especially the US. The truth is that the underdeveloped world was never premodern or precapitalist. It represented only the ugly face of modern capitalism. The ugly and pretty face of world order will continue to displace, showing how the masters of the future sink in the despicable present they created.