It is that people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe. One does not come to that belief by reducing social process to mechanical and statistical models, nor by winning some of one’s battles for the control of one’s own corner of the fallen world. One comes to it by sharing the life of those who sing about the Resurrection of the slain Lamb.

— John Howard Yoder

Recent history is littered with the human and social debris of visionary attempts to build the future. We’d be hard-pressed to identify a utopian movement that has not had a terrible cost – either in freedoms curtailed, lives lost, or in shocking atrocities.

No one needs reminders of the human cost paid to implement Communism’s vision of equality and plenty, or the National Socialists’ ideal of peace through order, strength and patriotism, or the antebellum Southern gentry’s agrarian plantation paradise. But it would be a mistake to treat these as exceptions, or as good ideas gone wrong in execution. The fact is that practically every paradise on earth, every New World Order, requires suppression or elimination of opposing voices. A few examples come to mind:

• The Congregationalist Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the Anglican Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the Baptist colony at Rhode Island all fled from religious persecution in Europe to set up their idea of a millennial kingdom in the new world. Here they began by eliminating the troublesome freedoms – religion, speech, association – that had sabotaged their attempts to remake society back in Europe. Dissenters were welcome to leave and try their luck among the Indians, but not to follow their conscience in the colony.
• U.S. founding father John Adams’ remark that only a third of the American colonists ever wanted a rebellion has been widely quoted; what’s rarely covered in elementary school civics is the harassment, lynching, exile, and summary execution that awaited colonists who spoke up against the revolutionary minority.
• Wahhabi fundamentalism aims to bring the world to peace [salaam] through universal submission [islam] to God. The Wahhabis are at least honest: Their world consists of the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission, and the Dar al-Harb, or House of Warfare.

Actually, the real-life Muslims I’ve known personally — as disgusted by Wahhabi fundamentalism as anyone else — hasten to emphasize that they aren’t in the business of building heaven on earth; their jihad is a struggle for personal integrity and devotion to God. And perhaps there’s the point where post-futurists depart from the futurists.

No more new world orders

Visionaries, futurists, and think-tanks are still leading their flocks off to the right or left, but maybe it’s time to let the makers of the New World Orders get along without us. As Ken McLeod has written, “No more new world orders. We have seen the future — we have by now centuries of experience of the future — and we know it doesn’t work. It’ll be a great day when the future goes away! A great day of liberation when the armies, the functionaries, the camp-followers, the carpetbaggers of the future go away and leave us in peace to get on with the rest of our lives.”

Don’t get your hopes up. The futurists, the visionaries, the social reformers and demagogues and dictators and peddlers of conservative or liberal virtue are not going away any time soon. Scavengers and parasites always survive; they’re tough that way.

But we don’t have to buy the futures they’re selling.

Futurism in one form or another, from medieval millennialism to the Project for a New American Century, aims to make a better world by changing society. Inconvenient individual lives mustn’t stand in the way of what’s best for the people — that ill-defined but compelling mass in need of salvation. But the fact that social-change advocates seem to miss is that societies aren’t irreducible: Societies are made up of individuals.

Want to bring about short-term change to a society’s values and behavior? You can do that through marketing or persuasion. But radically engineering a society requires either settling for isolation and a small vision — the Amish or Shaker model — or the application of force.

Post-futurists want no part of utopia-by-force. Pragmatic, disillusioned, refusing to hold up images of an ideal society or to crank out small-scale models of it on patches of contested ground, post-futurists are neither conservative, progressive, nor subversive. No shared ideal unites them – on the contrary, having every cause to rebel, they need no ideal, no cause.

Is this retreat? Abdication of social responsibility? Far from it. In rejecting visions of utopia, post-futurists recognize that it’s not really possible to help or love the masses. Anyone who tells you he loves The People is trying to sell you something. The People does not exist: There is no such thing. What exists, tangibly and in front of us all every day, is quite a lot of individuals. Acts of love, kindness, and compassion all benefit tangible individuals. Not parties or ideologies, but persons, one at a time, with faces and names and lives, are worthy of loyalty and commitment.

The energy that we devote to building a future is energy we divert from being effective here and now. With the effort that’s so often siphoned off into politics or social activism, anyone can instead teach literacy, volunteer locally, donate to food banks, mentor young people, resettle refugees, practice random acts of kindness, or get involved in a dozen other ways in the lives of real, tangible individuals. Or, for those inclined to be really radical: Get to know your neighbors, and your child’s classmates’ parents, and find opportunities to build relationships.

Communists used to say that their brave new future would consign capitalism to the “trash heap of history.” Let’s consider consigning futures to the trash heap and get on with our lives today.

What will our lives look like if we decline to march in step with visionaries and their ideologies, and simply live, here and now, as individuals with the responsibility and opportunity to do good?

He has shown you, O man, what is good – and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)