“There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last forever,” the philosopher Karl Jaspers once wrote. “And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.”
Ours is clearly an age of upheaval. As war rages in Europe and the world counts the cost of the deadliest pandemic in living memory, an ominous mood reigns over the earth. After years of economic turmoil, social unrest and political instability, there is a widespread sense that the world has been cast adrift — like a rudderless ship in a terrible storm.
For good reason. Humanity now faces a confluence of challenges unlike any other in its history. Climate change is rapidly altering the conditions of life on our planet. Tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan have revived the specter of a conflict between nuclear superpowers. And breakneck developments in artificial intelligence are raising serious concerns about the risk of an A.I.-induced global catastrophe.
This troubling situation calls for new perspectives to make sense of a rapidly changing world and work out where we might be headed. Instead, we are presented with two familiar but very different visions of the future: a doomsday narrative, which sees apocalypse everywhere, and a progress narrative, which maintains that this is the best of all possible worlds. Both views are equally forceful in their claims — and equally misleading in their analysis. The truth is that none of us can really know where things are headed. The crisis of our times has blown the future right open.