The future is now

This article was originally published on Domus 999, February 2016.

Our magazine is getting ready to celebrate the extraordinary and coveted publication of its one thousandth issue. The event comes as a truly unique opportunity to reconsider the epic cavalcade achieved by this glorious publication. For close on a century now, it has been covering the history of human habitation and our next issue will be especially conceived to mark this landmark occasion. It will also spur us on to keep up the good work, in the certainty, moreover, that we are now at a very important stage in people’s lives, a point where things can once again be changed in a big way. Indeed this is now possible. We have several times paused to consider a circumstance of our lives to which, unfortunately, little attention is paid: that every human being is granted only their own time to live, a time forced upon them, the only one that belongs to them and to which they also belong. This circumstance, superbly evoked and described in the thinking of Ortega y Gasset, in its evidence and its being definitive and unappealable, for the lives of all humankind, has in fact been neglected and forgotten by humanity itself. It has not been taken into proper consideration. This circumstance being an established, incontrovertible and unalterable fact, it may perhaps be right not to attach too much importance to it and therefore to take it for what it is. Nevertheless we think it would be a mistake not to treat it as a subject of reflection. In this way, we can draw on it for elements that may be of use to our actions and lives.

Likewise however, a reflection on the time, the time granted us to live, our time, compared to the whole long time of humanity, might help us to situate our actions within a perspective better attuned to our own lives, as adequately and appropriately as possible. If we think of our time as being precisely situated between a time past and a future time, and not as an autonomous entity in itself, we can for example begin to choose and select with a heightened awareness the courses of action to be followed today; setting store by what our past can best suggest as possible answers to benefit our present, but in such a way as not to hinder our future. In our coverage of these topics here in this magazine, we have often complained of having to live in a period of time characterised by a veritable system of life, rooted and deeply consolidated now internationally: a system that prevents any real change. Only outwardly free and hospitable, it is in reality a closed and sectarian system. It seems even not to be hostile to change, whereas on the contrary it continues to churn out an old and worn-out consumer recipe: that of newness for newness’ sake.

The principal effect of this situation has been to flatten out differences, towards a fateful sameness passed off as progress, against which fine minds reminiscent of Pasolini have done nothing but draw up long and interminable lists of grievances, repeated so often that we know them all by heart; or else they have proposed improbable, or worse, impossible reforms. These have regularly filled the pages of newspapers or politicians’ agendas, but have always fizzled out. A system, by definition, cannot be reformed, except to a minimal extent and never in its essence, in its constituent and underlying assumptions. A system can only be overturned, not changed.

The system that we live in today has even managed to absorb and to contemplate criticism. This is accepted as an integral part of the system itself, but not its extinction. There can be no denying that we live in one of these now global and pervasive systems with its local specificities. It is a system that has perfected and honed extremely sophisticated mechanisms which are thus increasingly hard to oppose. So, everywhere, it prevents any real change. Yet, we are now close to a change deemed by all to be necessary and no longer deferrable. The economic and financial structure that governs the world seems ever more unfit to support the level of contemporary democratic life which includes greater participation and freedom, whilst new nationalistic thrusts seem to be hampering the will for the union and free circulation of peoples and ideas.

To go back now to the disciplines that concern us, the ones that deal with habitation, we feel the need to act in order to get out of the contemporary deadlock. Since we do not wish to deceive ourselves, we know well that these actions can only come from those who stand as aloof as they possibly can from the system, from those least embroiled in it. And from this point of view the “young” are certainly the best suited to that purpose. It is precisely the younger generations that can spearhead the demand for change. They and only they can bring about that upsurge needed to spark a renewal. Only their impact, their wishes and future hopes, can trigger processes capable of blazing a new trail. So there will be trouble if this does not come true. If this longing for change were left in the hands of the ruling systems and consolidated powers, of the situation as it is today, the result would be a catastrophe. Indeed we already have warning signs of what might happen.

The diehard reactionary forces would win. Fear of otherness, of the different, would win and, ultimately, fear of the future would win. New walls – real and metaphorical – would once again be erected. There would be a renewed desire for an insular protection against elusive enemies perceived as coming from outside but which in reality lurk at home, within ourselves. It is perverse to keep thinking that change can come from the system itself, which can conceive and bring about change only in terms of it own being and its perpetration. For these reasons therefore, it is only the younger generations that can, indeed must, undertake to interpret and voice this desire, this sentiment and urge for renewal that is now a necessity. If this is true, as we firmly believe, it is true also that we would be to blame if the young alone were left to perform such a huge task. They would of course throw themselves into it with all the ardour of their age, with their passions and their irrepressible, propulsive yearning for a better future.

But unfortunately they would be compelled to do so with “clipped wings” – as Vittorio Gregotti so aptly wrote some time ago on the subject; and indeed those wings are increasingly clipped, in what seems like a never-ending motion. Thus the young are prevented from being truly young. As a result, they are forced to fix their attention wholly and only on the “moment” of their being, falling easy victims to the miscellaneous consumer-technological ideologies that crowd our contemporaneity. It is just that we cannot bear the idea of their being deprived of history and memory, in a word, of a past. We must admit that among the various effects of these first few years of this 21st-century, lived dangerously up in the stunning clouds of technology, perhaps the most disastrous has been that of burning up generations in a hurry, one after the other at a relentless pace. Luckily however, this phenomenon now seems to be giving way to a renewed and healthy pragmatism.

. What do we really need? What is missing? This is now what many are now loudly wondering. The new generations today have once again found the ideal conditions to express themselves, to make themselves heard and to demand a better way of living. Not only for them but for everybody. By placing means, tools and technologies, but also ideas, dreams, desires and hopes, at the service of a new goal to be attained. So no wishes, no presumptions or foolish aspirations on the part of their elders can tell the young what to do, which is neither justifiable nor acceptable. The only thing possible for them – us – is to make available to the dreams of the young and their projects, the acquired capacities, both material and intellectual, the experiences and the crafts, but also the defeats and the failures, as a collective heritage available to those wishing to draw on it, to those who need it. We think it is necessary however, in a sense, also to protect the new generations from the ones that preceded them, to protect them from their anxiety for reimbursement.

The best way to do that is to return to the masters, to those who, through their work and lives have become masters; to those acclaimed but also to the many who were masters but then remained in the folds of history. The masters, too, like the young, are far from the system and scarcely integrated into it, even if they have to live with it. So we firmly believe that this is now an essential task to be performed, a challenge that can be faced only by those fully aware of it. A seemingly secondary task, it is actually a noble and necessary one. What we propose then has nothing ancestral about it. Nor would we like it to be perceived as a paternalistic act. Instead we simply propose a useful contact between the young and the masters. This in itself certainly has nothing revolutionary about it but we think it can, in its evidence, revolutionize the present state of affairs.

Together, the young and the masters have the strength to get us out of the oppressive cultural and civil system in which we are stuck today; and that can be achieved because they are free, both really free. Each in their different freedom to be sure, but free. Only from this freedom can actions spring with the capacity to innovate, to let us live in a present once again bursting with hope and progress. All this would give a sense to this present, without having to wait for anything that does not belong to us now and which we do not already have: a present to be lived intensely, where the future is now and no longer tomorrow. The young and the masters can change the world. They do not need anything else. That is why it is important, fundamental, to set about this task.

Of course, we do not know what this may lead to, though as a matter of fact we don’t really care. We are not prophets. What we are sure of, however, is that this contact is essential to our time, to us too as well as to them and that we must do our utmost to make that happen. The freshness of youth and the beauty of the masters can become a lively explosive mixture, the only one that can at this time save us from the terrible conformity that we have sunk into, the only one that can break the ineluctable civil regression to which our contemporary life seems doomed. Our main job then is to promote, organise and encourage this contact both institutionally and privately; 1, 10, 100, 1,000 contacts, or maybe even conflicts – endless opportunities which we are sure could spark a new Renaissance. With the capacity to look and to see what is happening around us, to consciously reject what does not convince us and instead to go after what we would like to fulfil and now lack, to share common objectives for a better life.

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