A futures research outline of a post-modern idea of progress

Abstract

Post-modernity in the social sciences may be recognised as an intellectual attitude of “anything goes” or “end of everything characterising the modernity”. At the extreme it seems that post-modern deconstruction, not aiming at anything, dissolves everything into meaningless residuals of merely individual peculiarity. The very idea of progress is one of the things not to be sustained by the intellectual forces of deconstruction. The author agrees on the necessity of de-constructing the prevailing modern idea of progress in the sense of revealing the pitfalls of modernity, but maintaining the idea of progress beyond modernity and recognising sustainable development as an intellectual and ethical challenge in this respect. To meet the challenge, futurology is needed to provide perceptional knowledge of reality whereby the whole field of scientific enquiry needs to be generalised. A methodological approach of futures research called dialectical deconstruction is outlined.