Immanuel Wallerstein defined the politics of the 20th century in terms of an irresolvable tension between the modernity of technology--the capacity of human inventiveness to increase our material wellbeing--and the modernity of liberation, thecapacity of political action to enhance our secular wellbeing. The ideological faithful on the left and the right, albeit fordifferent reasons, believed in the harmony of technology and liberation; the ideologically sceptical on the left and the right,again for different reasons, agonised about technological enslavement masquerading as emancipation.However, for both, the distinction between technology and humanity was the commonsense complement to an ethicalsystem that distinguished between the determined (our creations) and the autonomous (our capacity for freedom). That tensionwill be challenged in the future because technology will develop personality and persons will become "bio-technologised." Inthis new era the faultline of politics will be between post-humanism, the radical version of which would abolish alldistinctions between the natural and the artificial, and old humanism, the radical version of which would transform theinheritance of the modern into a quasi-sacred and romantic cult of authenticity. The contesting visions are likely to be Blakeanin tone, about the nature of being and not about the distribution of wealth. Michael Axworthy, writer The end of the cold war removed the edge of the left/right division, and left a question about the direction of politicalleadership. Political spin moved into that space, but the spin doctors got overconfident, and scandals and cover-ups followed.Truth reasserted itself, and the people became disillusioned. They see a country that has real problems: terrorism, climatechange, an overblown civil service that neither governs nor critically analyses the operation of government. Above all, acountry lobotomised by the failure of state secondary education, and the failed theories of comprehensive schooling andso-called child-centred teaching. The division in future will not be between left and right, but between the vested interests of governmental incompetence onthe one hand, and the democratic urge for reform on the other. Sooner or later some politician will discover the opportunity toreassert honesty and integrity, tackle the problems, and achieve popularity. Julian Baggini, philosopher The new conflict is between liberal universalism and a communitarianism which asserts the need for cultures to maintaintheir own values and traditions. Is the latter just a temporary brake on the former, or will the universalist dream die? One of the tasks of politics is to work out which values are universal and which are not.
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