Proactionaries vs. Precautionaries

The following are excerpts from the essay “Precautionary and Proactionary as the New Right and the New Left of the Twenty-First Century Ideological Spectrum” by Steve Fuller. 

Proponents of the proactionary principle would re-invent the welfare state as a vehicle for fostering securitized risk taking, while precautionaries would aim to protect the planet at levels of security well beyond what the classic welfare state could realistically provide for human beings, let alone the natural environment. Taken together, these two opposing innovations to the modern concept of welfare imply a rejection of the classic welfare state ideal. For all their substantial disagreements, both poles of the emerging ideological order dismiss the welfare state as a twentieth century fantasy. Not surprisingly, conventional political and business leaders are not entirely comfortable with either the precautionary or the proactionary principle, which in turn helps to explain their lingering attachment to some version of the old ideological right–left divide. After all, precautionary policymakers would have business value conservation over growth, while proactionary policymakers would have the state encourage people to transcend current norms rather than adhere to them. A precautionary firm would look like a miniature version of today’s regulatory state, whereas a proactionary state would operate like a venture capitalist writ large.

The classic welfare state’s loss of political salience reflects a massive transformation in humanity’s self-understanding, albeit in two diametrically opposed directions.

Precautionaries aspire to a “sustain- able” humanity, which invariably means bringing fewer of us into existence, with each of us making less of an impact on the planet. Proactionaries are happy to increase the planet’s human population indefinitely as nothing more or less than a series of experiments in living, regardless of outcomes. Thus, precautionaries would reacquaint us with our humble animal origins, from which we have strayed for much too long, whereas proactionaries would expedite our departure from our evolutionary past—in some versions, even the Earth, if we succeed in colonising other planets. In any case, proactionaries would at the very least re-engineer our biology, if not replace it altogether with some intellectually superior and more durable substratum.

The ideological axis is beginning to shift. In combining policies that draw on both the libertarian stance to the individual taken in classical political economy and state socialism’s interventionist stance to society at large, proactionaries have begun to identify a recognisable precautionary foes who wed a strongly normative orientation to nature to a communitarian politics. Karl Polanyi is reasonably regarded as a founder of this ‘precautionary socialism’, since he grounded socialism’s redistributivist ethic less in abstract considerations of universal justice or even allocative efficiency than its historically normal (what a conservative would call ‘traditional’) character, the violation of which by both the modern state and the modern market is then invoked to explain the striking resource inequalities that exist in today’s societies.

The precautionary–proactionary divide has the potential to shift the ideological axis by 90°. The right is currently divided into traditionalists and libertarians; the left into communitarians and technocrats. In the future, the conservationists and the communitarians will form the precautionary pole of the political spectrum, while the libertarians and technocrats the proactionary pole. These will be the new right and left—or, rather, down and up. One group will be grounded in the earth, while the other looks toward the heavens.