The Age of Emergency - With Jonathan White

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics and author of In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea . His research explores how time has been used and thought about politically. I have found his argument that politicians (and the public) feel we are in a situation of ‘temporal claustrephobia’ really useful for understanding our current landscape. Our actions feel both urgent, uncertain and irreversible.Are you feeling a sense of temporal claustrephobia or do you think there are ways to avoid this? Comment below! Phil: Jonathan, you’re a professor of politics at LSE, and I was really keen to speak to you about your book In the Long Run , because your argument that it feels like in politics the future is being foreclosed has really structured the way I think about a lot of issues, including climate breakdown. But also, on an emotional level, I feel this temporal claustrophobia that you talk about in my own personal life. So welcome to the Tech Futures Project. Jonathan: Thanks very much for having me, Phil. Glad you found something interesting in the book. Phil: Could you summarize the argument in In the Long Run and maybe say a little bit about whether you’ve updated any of the ideas since you wrote it a year ago? Jonathan: Sure. The book came out of a course I was teaching at LSE on how the future is used and abused in politics—the ways in which different outlooks on the future get promoted by different types of ideologies and interest groups, and the political implications that come with these. It’s a book with a tortoise on the cover, which indicates something to do with questions of how much time one has—whether there are certain virtues of perseverance and deliberation that presuppose a certain way of approaching political time, and that get extinguished when one approaches it in the register of high-speed emergency. A running theme is how the question of how much future is felt to be available—whether it’s open and abundant, or whether it’s felt to be closing in on the present—varies historically. The book starts with an earlier phase of modernity 200 years ago when revolutionary politics was very much focused on immediate transformation. Then over the course of the 19th into the early 20th century, you get conversely a lot of politics with a sense of abundant time. The slow timescales of evolution made their way into political thinking—incrementalism, gradualism. The Fabians in this country used the tortoise as their emblem. This is quite in contrast to the present moment where, in a range of contexts—you mentioned climate change, ideas of climate deadlines, five years, ten years, twelve years in which to make certain key political decisions—this is clearly how we’ve thought about climate change for some years now. But it’s not just that. There’s also economic inequality and the sense that we have a critical window to arrest runaway concentrations of economic power, or somehow it’ll be too late. That sense of living in a critical moment where what can’t be done now risks going permanently undone. You asked how my thoughts have changed since I wrote the book. Clearly one thing that’s happened is Trump coming to power in the US. I’m perhaps more aware now of the ways in which certain kinds of far-right, potentially fascist forms of politics prosper under these conditions of temporal constraint and the sense of the closed future—that things can’t be otherwise, that we’re living with a limited array of possibilities. So many mainstream political parties seem willing to push this, including Labour in this country at the moment. I think this really creates an opening that Trump made use of in the US and potentially that Farage and Reform will make use of in this country—an opening for that desire to occupy the territory of the future from a far-right perspective with ideas of disruption, of breakdown, of imminent civil wars. We live in a time of temporal claustrophobia, and I think too many parties of the center and the left are too quick to adapt to this and become very reactive and emergency-focused in their politics. This then is part of what the appeal is of those types of far-right politics, which are all about saying the future is going to be different. It may be bad, it may be a breakdown of some sort, but you don’t have to simply reckon with the stasis of the present. Change is coming. Perhaps we’re going to be the agents of change as well. Phil: That’s really interesting. The word “abundance”—I know there’s a whole abundance movement now. It’s interesting to consider whether we could have an abundant concept of time as well. What are the conditions that create this sense of emergency that politicians are operating within? Do you think it’s partly to do with our information environment—the short-term social media dopamine-fueled news cycle that we’re in? Jonathan: I think it’s certainly partly that—the sense that everything is in such permanent flux, including the news cycle and attention cycle, that really the only way to get heard or politicize anything is to turn it into some kind of emergency that cannot wait. Anything that can be postponed is going to fall out of reckoning with this type of media environment. But I think what that touches on, which is perhaps slightly deeper, is a sense of weak power. Things become an emergency when you feel powerless to address them. If you feel you’ve got plenty of control over a situation, or you feel you’ve got time on your side—even if maybe you haven’t got immediate control, at least you think you can play the long game—then you have the capacity to set out your agenda. Conversely, things become this reactive logic of emergency when you’re just dealing with problems as they arise, precisely when you doubt your capacity to really control them. The best you feel you can do is respond to them in real time and cope in some fashion. This applies to different fields of politics. Politicians are working in that media environment you mentioned, but they’re also working with institutions that have been ravaged by austerity, that lack strong state institutions on which to rely. They may also doubt the capacity to command the allegiance of people that maybe in another age would have been long-term supporters. Think of party leaders who realize that electoral volatility is very pronounced and you can’t really rely on people sticking around with you. Again, you have to accelerate your actions because you can’t depend on long-term support. In wider society, it’s not just how politicians see the world. If you think of emergency discourse that comes from below, from social movements—something like Extinction Rebellion, where this was pretty central to the framing of the climate change predicament as one of climate emergency—again, I think it’s got something to do with the fact that when you doubt your capacity to influence people who have political and economic power, and perhaps you doubt the public’s engagement with the question, then this logic of emergency is one of the few resources that you still have. These general patterns play out in different ways across the political spectrum. The left has its emergencies to do with climate change and economic inequality. Right-wing politics has its own emergencies—things it constructs as such to do with migration, racial replacement. The language of emergency tends to be quite central to how the right and far right approach things they consider problematic. And there are centrist emergencies to do with AI or global geopolitics, breakdown of the liberal international order. From all these different political orientations, each has different motivations and content, but there’s a common theme of political actors responding to a world in flux and doubting their capacity to control it, therefore reliant on a register of urgency and quick decision-making. Phil: That’s really interesting. It made me think of Antonia Matuschek’s book Hyperpolitics , where she talks about exit costs being much lower from organizations like political parties. I think she mentioned Five Star in Italy purposefully didn’t have any physical spaces they organized in as a party, which made it easy to get into the party and leave it. I wonder whether that logic might extend to other aspects of trying to control your life in the medium term. In the UK, young people are buying houses much less than previously—there are loads of reasons for that—they’re also having fewer children, going to university less, and there’s a big attendance crisis in schools. To me, these are all medium-term investments. Peter Mandler wrote a book where he argued that in the 20th century there was only one decade where university enrollment went down—the 1970s—and he argued that people in that decade were losing faith in the future. Do you think there’s any link between those trends and the idea of a future being foreclosed? Jonathan: I think there is. All these things you mentioned are long-term projects, often individual personal or family projects, but they require you to have a certain confidence in the possibility of planning, of thinking ahead by a decade or two. These are things that may have short-term costs—you only really engage them if you can see the light at the end of a tunnel you have to pass through to reap the benefits. When you see a world that seems to be very fast-changing, that makes planning seem impossible or somewhat naive, that clearly makes all these activities that require a longer-term perspective less appealing. All the more so for those who are especially precarious in their economic conditions—this has clear class differentiations. Those in the most precarious situations are least able to count on things like even basic job security, and that’s a foundation on which to construct everything else you’ve mentioned. One way of thinking about it: the role of political organizations like parties and movements has perhaps always been to counterbalance that, to give people collective perspectives on the future that allow them to have a future orientation despite conditions of economic insecurity they may be stuck in. If parties themselves stop making available more collective visions of the future, people are left reliant only on the futures they can muster from their own life course. Then they’re all the more challenged by the loss of confidence that comes with being unable to plan their personal economic or social security. These all have multiple origins, multiple circular logics. To the extent that people struggle to buy a house or find accommodation to plan their personal lives, if you feel yourself locked out of these pursuits, then you start to lack long-term reference points. This in turn undermines the confidence in the future that you might otherwise have. There’s plenty of potential for vicious circles here, but the links are important. One of the stakes of the political abdication of the future is that it accentuates these problems as they play out at the individual level. Phil: One of the things I found really fascinating about your book was your exploration of fascism. I hadn’t really thought about fascism in terms of impulsiveness as a tendency within it and their general approach to the future and history. Do you think there’s a risk that fascism becomes more appealing in this moment? Jonathan: I think yes, partly as I said, it’s got everything to do with what other parties are doing. Whenever you think about the appeal of a certain political orientation, it’s maybe at most 50% about the intrinsic appeal of that orientation and at least as much about the appeal—or lacking appeal—of everything around it. Precisely as other parties of center and center-left become less willing to develop visions of the future, visions of alternatives, that does leave a vacuum. But also, fascism is undemanding in what it asks people to think about the future. This is not like socialism, where maybe you have to have confidence in progress, confidence in the measurability of progress, the capacity to find evidence for it. Various forms of liberalism likewise require credibility that comes with accurate prediction. This is not really the game that fascism is in. If we can speak of it as an ideology, it’s one where perhaps a lower weight is placed on internal coherence than many other ideologies like liberalism and socialism have tended to place. Fascism, going back to the ‘30s and even ‘20s, often emphasizes this as a doctrine of action and not of theory. People around Mussolini and Mussolini himself said exactly this: don’t judge us by some notion of putative logic—we are about action first and decision. We make our truths rather than simply formulating them in advance and then acting retrospectively in adhesion to them. It’s a politics where you can make it up as you go along, where you don’t have to apologize too much for incoherence but also for uncertainty, for surprises, for not doing what you say you’ll do, because this is somehow all priced in with fascism. It’s a politics of unpredictability and wrong-footing opponents, sometimes even deliberately contradicting your own line so that it’s much harder for critics to hold a normative standard against you. In crisis times where everything is changing fast anyway, where it’s very hard to plausibly make predictions or develop coherent programs of action, fascism just says: fine, we don’t do that. All we do is disrupt. We throw things in the air. We’re going to have maybe a bit of fun as we go about it. There’s an emotional appeal to the exhilaration of disruption and chaos, but also to the violence that comes with that, to the pain that comes with that. It embraces the chaos and unpredictability of crisis times and makes that somehow its calling card. What I call the impulsiveness of fascism—the act-first-and-think-later, if at all, aspect to it—is always going to be peculiarly well suited to times in which that seems to be what is happening anyway, that things are just changing with rapidity that makes it very hard to be coherent and considered in your actions. Phil: That indeterminacy is hard to fight against as well, or hard to argue with, because it’s a moving target. It reminds me of seeing Donald Trump being really nice to Zelenskyy recently, which wrong-footed a lot of people. That seems characteristic of his relatively indeterminate approach. Jonathan: Exactly. It’s very hard to know what you’re against when you’re against someone of that disposition. In addition to the wrong-footing effect, it can allow such an individual to present themselves as free-thinking, charismatic. Precisely because they’re unpredictable they can say they’re authentic—”I say how I see it, I’m not trying to stick to a line just because it’s correct or something.” This impulsiveness is not just bemusing to those around it, but acts as an indicator of unfiltered self-expression, which for certain types of audience can be read as a sign of authenticity, of strong will. Deliberate self-contradiction, or at least indifference to norms of consistency and coherence, is part of the appeal. It allows opportunism—you can take advantage of whatever seems like the opportunity at hand without thinking too much about how it coheres with other situations past and to come. Phil: I read an article about lots of TV shows that are popular right now being game shows where you win lots of money—like Squid Game . The journalist was arguing that this displays some form of idea that our society is zero-sum and get-rich-quick schemes are one of the only ways out of a difficult situation. That felt like it spoke to what we were talking about earlier—lack of control over one’s life, and the only way out is potentially a game show. Jonathan: Yeah, and the lottery would be the obvious example as well. In other words, rolling the dice is the best hope of a different future. Phil: Do you see any signs of either politicians or institutions trying to regain a sense of the medium term? Jonathan: Well, in some ways, sure, at the political margins on the left. There are plenty of experiments of efforts to organize in a way that’s not just about, or not even primarily about, the next election. In this country, clearly the Greens—and not just under Zack Polanski, but I think for some time this has been their position—obviously you’re not going to win the next election, but you have to think of how to develop some kind of cause that is nonetheless consequential regardless of whether you can understand that in terms of electoral success. Under Polanski, that’s taken a much sharper and more influential form insofar as this is now speaking a left-wing language that seems to be pretty much absent in the rest of the parliamentary parties in Westminster. I wouldn’t want to say it’s long-termism at the expense of immediacy or urgency. Clearly the Greens, more than any political party, are aware of the climate science and the need to act quickly. But what you see here is a sense of beginning with urgency but continuing indefinitely—thinking the longer term, not just about how to win the next election but how to influence public discourse, how to influence other political parties that maybe will win the next election, how to build a cause that will outlive the particular electoral cycle. Jeremy Corbyn and Sultana’s new party—we’ll see where that goes—is clearly some effort again to try and conceive a party that’s more centered on a political vision rather than an electoral machine. And possibly Zohran Mamdani in New York is something different. To some degree you have to realize that success is not the first priority. You have to find a way of building some kind of movement that’s going to maybe be successful in a few cycles further down the track in order to have any real political profile and substance in the nearer term. These are experiments perhaps speaking to frustrations with the reactive logic of emergency politics, trying to pursue something that’s much more like a normative vision of politics rather than simply firefighting problems as they arise. What’s also interesting about a number of these experiments is it’s not just at the level of rhetoric, it’s about the organizational structure that underpins this. There’s a fake response to the charge of short-termism which you see articulated almost everywhere, including in the last Labour manifesto, which is at the level of rhetoric saying, “Well, we know that everyone is frustrated with short-termism and crisis management, so we’re going to think a little bit more long-term, we’re going to think about goals for the next ten years”—we’ll give you however many thousand nurses by 2030 or whatever. These very specific, almost accountancy-like ways of sketching out the further future. I think that’s a fake response to short-termism because it doesn’t really go much beyond goals set by a leadership which itself is basically entirely in control of. It doesn’t really make itself accountable to anyone that’s going to hold it to those goals. If you really want long-termism in politics—however you define it, simply something longer than the next electoral cycle—you have to create the political structures that will mean that leaders are held to those goals. You need to strengthen the position of activists in parties, for example, who are the ones that tend to join parties because they care about the longer-term project, the cause. If you don’t empower those people, you’re probably going to find that even the most well-intentioned leaders are going to make pretty severe compromises pretty quickly. Insofar as you see any interesting experiments in the present, they’re interesting not just about talking about how we need to be a bit more long-term or visionary, but they’re also looking at that question of how do you empower those people for whom that is second nature—the people that join collectives without expecting any real immediate power but want to sign up to something they believe in. Empower those people and then you’ve got a more authentic kind of long-term politics. Phil: It’s interesting you said some of those projects had a normative dimension to them, because I’ve often wondered—given the ecological crisis and climate breakdown and all the different competing candidates for what the most important emergencies are—what would be a coherent moral framework to use? I was even reading about how David Runciman reviewed a book arguing that having children could be good for climate breakdown because it changes the population structure so you can have more progressive politics. That stunned me, because I’d assumed having children was one of the worst things you could do for the climate. Is one of the reasons why it’s difficult to approach these issues from a normative or moral point of view because it’s not clear what morals work in this current situation? I always think about Keir Starmer—he appears to know the answers, or portrays himself as knowing them. That’s a big contrast to how Trump presents himself, because he doesn’t present himself as knowing the answers since he changes them day to day. Do you think that’s part of the problem—that we don’t really have a coherent framework? Jonathan: It’s certainly the case that any type of moral position comes under a certain strain in conditions that are plausibly seen as unprecedented. Morality presupposes some type of continuity with the past. Morals are those things that are understood to be inherited in some way—of course refined, something you can put under critical scrutiny, but not something you simply make up on the spot, because that’s not quite how we normally see morality. Yet when you’re in a situation where the major issues of the day are so often said to be unprecedented—that they are unlike anything in the past—and clearly climate change is often presented in these terms, but artificial intelligence likewise—these all seem to put you on the cusp of a quite different type of historical situation. The susceptibility that society has to emergency claims in general is that if you can present a situation as unique, then you can say it needs a unique response that has nothing to do with existing normative precepts—that you’re in a new world, therefore let’s not worry about the morality we bring to it from the old world. That is one of the genuinely confusing and disorienting aspects of the present. I think at some level one has to almost refuse a little bit the idea that the contemporary situation is quite so unique and unprecedented, because I think the cost of accepting that point is basically to embrace this disorientation. Then you can quickly find yourself acquiescing in the mere exercise of power and not really having any type of normative standpoint from which to take distance from realpolitik and the exercise of power by the strongest. That is part of our difficulty, but I don’t think it can be allowed to be insurmountable. I think we have to assert the continuities. The world has always been a changing environment, and morality is always somehow requiring a leap of faith whereby we can say that ideas that developed before the present nonetheless have purchase in the present. That’s a leap of faith that is hardly new to the present. The revolutionary moments we talked about earlier in the 18th century are first instances of that. Is the revolutionary moment one in which there’s no normativity, no morality? Well, maybe sometimes it looks like that when you get a lot of executions in quick succession, but I think at the same time one wants to say that even in these exceptional moments there has to be some kind of appeal to limits on what can be done, or at least some kind of moral compass has to be applied even if we disagree where that’s exactly going to point us to. It’s part of the challenge, but it’s a challenge that has to be refused. Therefore it’s going to be about how to take existing normative frameworks, ideologies, and find ways of reconceiving them for exactly this kind of context. Ideas of 21st-century socialism, ways in which we might say there is something that is enduring in claims of equality—precisely what you want to see as living and dead in 19th-century socialism is clearly the key issue here—but there are certain enduring features of ideas of equality, even in ideas of progress and of the economic conditions that one has to pursue in order to make these things more than simply formal goods. These are enduring questions. The things the left is talking about today—wealth taxes, land taxes, how to find forms of justice in production as well as in distribution—these are all questions that are just as important in a climate emergency or an escalating emergency of economic concentrations of wealth. The situations may look new, but I think there’s still a lodestar to be found in some of the more familiar ideological perspectives if we really think what they might mean in a new context. For me that’s the position. Yes, this is what’s disorienting about unique circumstances or ones that seem to be such, but nonetheless the challenge must indeed be to find those continuities and distill from them ways of thinking normatively in the political moment. Phil: That’s a really good point. I had one final question about the long-termism movement. There are people who seem to be thinking about the long term in a lot of detail, including effective altruists. People like Toby Ord have written books about the importance of considering the long-term view. In some ways, unlike the Fabians, they’re probably not gradualist—maybe they’re more accelerationist long-term thinkers. Because you talk about thinking about an abundance of time, these people seem to be thinking about an abundance of time to some degree. Would you say that’s true for this long-termism movement? Jonathan: Yes, in a sense. They’re clearly stepping back to take the longest timescales into perspective—the timescales of transhumanism, of interstellar travel. Something I try to suggest in the book is that there are twin challenges to democratic politics that come both from what you might call short-termism and also from perhaps a kind of excessive long-termism. On one hand, the first is more intuitive. Short-termism is a limit on political imagination because there are long-term goals that we might want to pursue—of equality, liberty—things that take time, that are not to be equated with transformations you can pursue within a year or two. These are projects. Clearly a politics that is deaf to the longer timescales required for deep structural transformations of society is going to miss something. At the same time, this fascination with the furthest futures is something that can also be quite paralyzing, at least for democratic politics, insofar as it has a sort of flattening effect on the significance of the present. It’s not just these contemporary philosophical movements that have that effect. There are forms of utopian thought going back a number of centuries where you see the same interest in the far future, several centuries ahead, where the effect is somehow to diminish the present and to diminish the choices of the present. If you’re thinking in terms of many centuries, does it really matter what you do in the near term? Anything less than an existential threat to the human race in the present becomes almost no problem at all, because the meaningful timescales of change are well beyond that. And conversely, anything that is an existential threat, or can be presented as such, trumps all competing considerations. The long-termism that one sees in these effective altruist movements—philosophically it’s got some substance, but in terms of what its democratic implications may be, it’s really something that I think is almost as pernicious as severe short-termism, because it really doesn’t accommodate democratic disagreement very easily. It has a tendency to treat certain types of policy as trumps for the sake of the long-term survival of the human race, and likewise to see certain types of inequality as essentially irrelevant or perhaps even functional to longer-term gains in utility. If you’re thinking about these questions of the future from a democratic perspective rather than a perspective in a certain kind of moral philosophy, then I think one has to—and here there’s no magic number and it’s somewhat arbitrary—but there is a kind of democratic future that I would put something on the scale of decades. Long enough that one can meaningfully think about structural transformations of society, and yet not so long as to make the contribution of living individuals and their commitment somehow epiphenomenal to the future that plays out. That still makes agency somehow meaningful in the present. To that extent, I wouldn’t want to be an advocate of long-termism on the scale of millennia. While it may have some philosophical coherence—or at least the philosophical coherence is a separate question—in terms of its political implications, it’s clearly quite either paralyzing or quite deterministic. Phil: Thank you so much. That was brilliant. I really enjoyed it, and thank you for the book. I struggle to stop thinking about it. I think about a lot of things through the lens of the book now. Jonathan: Thank you. Thanks for reading it. It’s been a pleasure, and good luck with the podcast. This is a public episode. 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