1. We, the Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world, have gathered at United Nations Headquarters to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations through the actions in this Pact for the Future. (Pact for the Future, 27 August Draft Version 3 Preamble ¶ 1).
Future planning has always been a fascinating project. It is fascinating in its old or original sense "from Latin fascinatus, past participle of fascinare "bewitch, enchant, fascinate," from fascinus
"a charm, enchantment, spell, witchcraft," which is of uncertain
origin. Earliest used of witches and of serpents, who were said to be
able to cast a spell by a look that rendered one unable to move or
resist. Sense of "delight, attract and hold the attention of" is first
recorded 1815." (Etymology Online , Fascinate).
These enchantments, this witchcraft, has taken on the pall of science as appropriate to the linguistic-cultural turn from the 18th century and mixed it up nicely with the secularizing Enlightenment project of human directed perfectionism through the guiding forces of social leading forces which, when combined with a Leninism attached to and through arxist theory produces a combination of scientific and political power in the hands of a dedicated organized and institutionalized party which serve as the counterpoint to its analogues in the religious magisteria and in secular though more diffused "lading forced" well marbled within the leading institutions of education, science, politics and economics.
All of this to say that the 21st century may be witnessing a sort of apotheosis of the inclination of aggregated humans to tell people what is good for them, and what to do--not merely because they can, but also because they have been vested with the authority to tel others what is good for them. This inclination is now so well embedded in human social relations (especially in its positive elements--contrast traditional societies in which its leading forces were meant to serve to cultivate and protect customs and norms and work them at their edges (eg Aristotle's Politics).
None of this is bad--or good. But it is important to remember, especially because these underlying structures and the premises which give them authority and legitimacy, tend to be so well embedded in the product of presumption that it is easy to forget that what appears natural and inevitable are neither; just powerfully important choices.
In this century, the impulse toward the perfect has been founded not just on science, but also on the presumptions of "social" science, and with it its hybrid expressions in data based technologies that are meant to leverage both through tools that are both virtual and inevitably self-conscious. Those tools require workers to tend to them, and overseers to direct them. The first form the legions of well trained producers of the inputs necessary for the forward march of progress. The later form the techno-administrators who both define the pathways toward progress and direct and deploy the production of the worker castes. In a sense the interactions between techno-produces and their directorial consumers are undertaken within platforms in which those exchanges can be ordered and rationalized and then exported to the objects of all of this--human mass organizations. That projection and those platforms are constituted in ways that suit the cultural context and historical conditions in which they are applied--to those ends ideological ordering structures are useful. The result is that one can better understand ideological frameworks not as the generative but the consequential forms of the current state of the basic human impulse toward progress as it is currently manifested through the interaction of consumers and producers of "progress."
Until the later part f the last century, these trajectories were embedded in social relations constituted as states. After 1945, and slowly thereafter, the collectives of states developed sometimes more robust institutions in which their authority could be leveraged through sort of joint action. The problem has been that in order to achieve its states have to abandon to some extent, the locally contextually relevant and ideologically driven cloaks over the manifestation of the operation of this progress platforms in localities. That remains a work in progress; progress, as they understand it, though, appears to be unrelenting, in accordance with the basic premise of the contemporary organization of human social relations. And thus the loop.
And thus we come to the United Nations--as the formally constituted state driven platform for progress--and its long gestating Summit for the Future, its future; our future it seems.
The high-level event will bring together UN Member States, UN agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), academic institutions, the private sector, and youth under the theme, ‘Summit of the Future: Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow’. The Summit aims to forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like, and what we can do today to secure it. * * * Guterres has characterized the Summit of the Future as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate global action, recommit to fundamental principles, and further develop the frameworks of multilateralism so they are fit for the future”. (Summit for the Future).
The spectacle that marks the end of the construction of the vision for the future and the start of the process for its realization, such as it will be, is scheduled for 22-23 September 2024 in the UN New York office. The full text of the Press Release follows below (with links to generative documents). And yet it is in the underlying documents that create the platform for progress, including its managerial and guidance structures, that ought to be of great interest to those with an interest in peering into the heart of this particular Enlightenment-Leninist -Magisterial vision of a platform through which a specific vision of progress is sketched and the course of compliance mapped.
In the style that has become standard in this stage of historical development, That platform will be visualized through a framework "Pact for the Future," the several revisions of which to date have been posted online, the 3rd version of which, released 27 August 2024, also follows below. That is the heart, the textual core, around which the platform for progress is created and its course charted (or rather its pathway constructed. And like most human hearts, it is bound up in its past, now reorganized,
rearranged and projected into a future. In some sense, the Pact is a
coordinating and aggregating document--a master framework suitable for
coding. Pact, supra, 5, ¶ 67 ("A transformation in global governance
is essential to ensure that the positive progress we have seen across
all three pillars of the United Nations’ work in recent decades does not
unravel. We will not allow this to happen."); Acton 41-60). But it is also inherently narcissistic; a document fundamentally
concerned with placing the United Nations at the center of power
relations (Pact, chp. 5 ¶ 69). ) (That is no criticism but
rather a conformation of the semiotics of power relations; one in which
the objectivity of the core is a necessary foundational element in its
signification; thus signified it can then order the community around and
through which it is constituted. Every directed future requires a shepherd.
16. We reaffirm our pledge, made on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations, to reinvigorate global action to ensure the future we want and to effectively respond to current and future challenges, in partnership with all relevant stakeholders. We recognize that the well-being of current and future generations and the sustainability of our planet rests on our willingness to take action. To that end, in this Pact we commit to sixty actions in the areas of sustainable development and financing for development, international peace and security, science, technology and innovation and digital cooperation, youth and future generations, and transforming global governance. (Pact, Preamble ¶ 16).
Nonetheless, as is common with these sorts of enterprises, the project of moving forward appears more embedded in the past and the present than in what lies ahead. Like a crab that can see forward but walks sideways, the project of futurity tends to project the past forward. In this case, though, it adds value by rationalizing the entirety of the past projects, largely unsatisfied, into something like a coherent form. Indeed, from a certain vantage point, the Pact appears to be a quite rich cocktail of rejected, resisted, or historically potent efforts that speak more to the differences among leading forces among states than it might about any future that is itself something that goes beyond these past and present squabbles about what, decades from now, will be of interest only to historians. Strategic housecleaning may satisfy the impulse toward futurity among those who might profit from it; but one might be excused for wondering who that might be.
Whatever its direction, the glamour of progress is irresistible and returns one to the element of fascination in its construction. And so is its presumptions of linearity and morals. That concoction of premises distinguishes the human and forms an essential part of what orients human consciousness. A signal, a direction, a purpose,an orientation, a basis of comparison and judgment, a goal. These worthy objects, basic to the constitution of the human will, when sufficiently distilled, also form the basis of the generative intelligence that humanity will create to serve these purposes; and perhaps its own. But that is a story for later. For the moment, one adds another platform of progress into a formidable universe of such platforms. In solidarity there is reality.
