Utopia, Dystopia, and Reclaiming the Future

A preview of The Academy 2023

The Academy, organised by Ideas Matter, is one of the highlights of my year, and the programme is shaping up in an exciting way. The Academy is an annual step back from the maelstrom of day-to-day politics and a chance to put some of the bigger ideas of our time in context. I hope you had a chance to read my colleague Jacob’s introduction to the themes of that event - check it out here if not - but this week I asked Jacob to give us a little preview of the sessions that will be covered at the end of July. Over to Jacob below - but please do go get your ticket to the event now, as the early bird discounted rate will end on 15th May!

What happened to the future?

Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 July

Wyboston Lakes Resort, Bedfordshire

In the post that Claire mentions above, I note that what seems to be missing is anything resembling an idea of what the future would look like - except, that is, as a place of danger, worry and decline. This year’s event seeks to trace how this came to be, and what ideas might be able to get us out of it.

To remind us what is missing today, the event will kick off with a lecture from Professor Frank Furedi (who has a great Substack of his own over at Roots and Wings) on the topic of Why utopia matters. This is an important session especially for an age where ‘utopian’ is little more than a dismissive pejorative. As one of our suggested readings - Russel Jacoby’s The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy - puts it, the withdrawal of ‘impossible’ demands has opened the door to widespread sterility.

One area where we can see this quite acutely is in culture. Ours seems to be an age of remakes and reruns, with originality only notable in its absence. The intense politicisation of culture - the demand to make everything conform in advance to the ‘correct’ cultural script - has robbed art and culture of the ability to say anything interesting. So I am delighted that Dr Maren Thom, who co-hosts the excellent podcast Performance Anxiety, will be delivering a lecture on Cultural Exhaustion: Remakes and Originality.

But it’s not just culture that seems exhausted, but our society more broadly. To try and help us understand what to do about this, we are very pleased that Sherelle Jacobs, the Telegraph’s go-to 'guaranteed to make you think’ columnist (and author of her own Substack here) is delivering the lecture Is Progress a Thing of the Past? This has been a theme of much of her writing, and Sherelle will help us think about what ideas have unpinned previous eras of economic and social progress, and how to fight for them.

Without any kind of progress, dystopia and apocalypticsm seem to reign supreme. Ours is the world of The Handmaid’s Tale and Extinction Rebellion. So it will be the task of Spiked’s Tim Black to put this into context, and try and tease out whether, perversely, there is actually something liberating, even useful, about dystopia in politics and culture.

The final one of our keynotes will come at the issue from the perspective of the past. The author, broadcaster and commentator Dr Tiffany Jenkins will take a look at how our unease about our past represents one of the major stumbling blocks to imagining the future. Reclaiming the future from the war on the past is a session to examine how the connection between past and future seems rutptured today, and the ideas underpinning it.

But, as ever, we have a range of sessions on historical and literary themes to give us a chance to approach the topic from a variety of perspectives. We’ll have a session on The First Transhumanist? Haldane's Daedalus 100 Years On with Sandy Starr looking at how this essay defined medical technology and medicine’s relationship to society for decades to come. Academy regular Dr Nikos Sotirakopolous will tackle the bizarre, if hilarious, book defining the reactionary American right, Bronze Age Mindset. We’re excited, too, for ‘A short history of the future’ from Professor James Woudhuysen who will look at why forecasts of the future have always forgotten to include actual human beings at the centre. We’re also going to be investigating the transformation of science fiction - that reliable barometer for aspirations and fears about the future - with critic JJ Charlesworth.

There will be at least a couple further updates for the programme, but I hope for now that this is easily enough to get your appetites whet for the event. So, all that is left for you to do is to get your tickets before the offer ends, and pick up a few books to stimulate your thinking. See you there.

TICKETS

We are delighted to announce that earlybird discounted tickets are now on sale for a limited time only. Tickets start at £215 for a weekend including accommodation, meals, and lectures – not to mention the chance to carry on discussions with fellow attendees at drinks and dinner.

• One night, single occupancy £215 Buy tickets

• One night, double occupancy £370 Buy tickets

• Two nights, single occupancy £300 Buy tickets

• Two nights, double occupancy £500 Buy tickets

• Day tickets available from £60 Buy tickets

• Concession rates are available for full time students, senior citizens and unwaged

BOOKS AND READING

• Aristotle, Poetics (esp. sections I, II. IV, XXV)

• Tim Black, The tragedy of Capitalist Realism

• Arthur C Clarke, Profiles of the Future

• Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation

• Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why mortality makes us free

• JBS Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future

• Russel Jacoby, The end of utopia

• Sherelle Jacobs, Why everything we believe about progress is wrong

• Christopher Lasch, True and Only Heaven: Progress and its critics

• Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

• Harmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A new theory of modernity

• John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics

P.S. If you’d rather be sitting at the TV this bank holiday, at least watch the film Babylon, which Maren tells me captures some of the ideas she wants to discuss quite nicely.