Towards the Perfection of the Future: The UN General Assembly Embraces its Pact for the Future

 

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In a prior post I considered the relentless pursuit of perfection by human collectives organized through States and operating through collective organs created to  serve as a platform for the rationalization of their joint projects.  (The United Nations Summit for the Future--On the Phenomenology of Progress and its Platforms). Now that project has reached a new stage of development with the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Pact for the Future (text in the UN Official languages here) and its two substantive Annexes: (1) The Global Digital Compact (pp. 37-52); and (2) the Declaration on Future Generations (pp. 52-56). 

Futurity, and the relentless grasping for pathways to (collective) perfection, if only to provide a safe space for individuals self actualization within the well managed structures of collective organization realizing a collective vision of collective exaltation. The connection with more ancient pathways toward perfection in religion and other perfection driven forms of organizing perception around the human is unavoidable.  But that doesn't weaken the project--it just contextualizes a drive toward content specific striving for perfection, grounded in the underlying core belief in the perfection of the human person and human collectives. 

That is a positive, in so far as the striving seeks to make thing better. Yet it also points to the contraction at its heart--it is cause of imperfection to the extent of the coercion necessary to bring people along to the vision and its application. Perfection requires a certain orthodoxy and solidarity; that works for those who share the vision; for the rest, deviation presents itself as the contemporary heresy. And heretics have never fared well in society's deeply committed to a particular way of seeing and understanding things that permits no contradiction. That suggest a corollary contradiction--that the mechanics of democratic collective decision making, especially with respect to the trans-temporal orthodoxy of futurity, may be incompatible wit its underlying objective of unity of shared belief in the premises that give form to that future perfection. That, contradiction, however, has been turned into a vindication of the vision adopted, precisely because a majority of the community agreed, and the rest will just have to be brought along or disciplined. In this sense the primary orthodoxy shifts, from the unifying vision of the future to the performance of the methods for its adoption.  Thus, the UN Press Release spoke to the adoption of its vision of futurity as a systemic triumph.

World leaders are at UN Headquarters in New York this Sunday where they adopted the potentially game-changing Pact for the Future by consensus, with a small group of just seven countries holding out, having failed to pass a last-minute amendment. The centrepiece of the Summit of the Future is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the multilateral system and steer humanity on a new course to meet existing commitments and solve long-term challenges. * * * Negotiations went down to the wire, with clear fault lines emerging ahead of the adoption of the Pact for the Future. But, what is also evident is that the UN remains the place for substantive multilateral negotiation - where the spirit of compromise has prevailed.

And, indeed, it might be said that the triumph of the Pact for the Future was less its content than the system invoked to achieve that result. Orthodoxy, at least substantive orthodoxy, then is meant to celebrate the triumph of negotiation and compromise followed by a sort of multilateral democratic centralism, than the verities of the substance of the thing adopted, with the apparatus of the UN at the center; indeed( much of the vision for the future involves the evolution and elaboration of an apparatus for the achievement of generalized substantive goals to be undertaken by and through that apparatus. And, indeed, what the Pact for the Future may augur is the form and rise of a transnational techno-bureaucracy as the founding premises of the organization of social relations, one manifested in functionally differentiated forms  (see, e.g., UN AI Advisory Body: "Final Report - Governing AI for Humanity").

For more on the Summit of the Future on 22 and 23 September, visit UN Meetings Coverage, in English and French.