Going Forward

It is, let us agree, a semantically pointless Briticism: “Going forward, we will develop integrated, cross-platform systems that will respond to uncertain markets.” This is not a sentiment distinct from “We will develop integrated, cross-platform systems that will respond to uncertain markets.” But going forward sounds as if it adds something — a frame, a launch pad, a directional indicator, and a mark of authority. The decision has been well thought out.

Mark Seacombe wrote about the phrase in The Guardian a few years ago, clearly hoping his intervention would curtail its use. But it’s still with us.

I am as susceptible to writing clichés as the next scribe, and going forward has shown up in my jottings. I tell myself it’s because for many years I worked for a British firm. (It was a time when the managerial class could tell us, without irony, that the next strategic plan would be forward and thrusting.  Clearly, forward  is a magical term in organization-speak. I don’t want to think much about thrusting, which didn’t catch on in the same way over here.)

If the empty phrase going forward  is meant to perform a sort of linguistic magic, we might think of it, at least for the next few minutes, as a nostrum. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word nostrum — a Latin form meaning ours — dates from the early 17th century and denotes “a quack remedy or patent medicine, esp. one prepared by the person recommending it.”

In the 18th century, a second definition of nostrum emerges. Now it’s “a means or device for accomplishing something; a pet scheme or favourite remedy, esp. for bringing about some social or political reform or improvement.”

The political nostrum is a party plank, a desideratum, an election-year promise. Some of these things prove to be doable and good and even get accomplished. But most don’t, can’t, and shouldn’t. The older sense of nostrum as a quack remedy lingers, and with good reason.

These senses of us and ours, of forward movement and of unoccupied rhetorical space, converged on June 23, when the Brexit referendum reset the political clock. I happened to be in London on the day of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London were geopolitical strongholds of Remain. Voters under the age of 24 formed a chronopolitical stronghold of Remain. Persons with higher-education degrees were another community in support of remaining in the EU. But a million more hands pointed in the other direction, and the motion carried.

No one yet knows the full consequences of the vote, and  no one knows precisely why individuals made their decisions. But surely each voter was imagining a version of tomorrow. It’s not enough to say that the Remain voters wanted things to stay just where they are  or, even more implausibly, that Leave voters wanted to return to the way things used to be. No, people voted for the future, for some version of what should happen next. Political life is a verb, and the bitter divide in Britain over the EU is about the future tense.

Thirty years ago, Benedict Anderson gave us the concept of “imagined community” — a non-statist, collective understanding of what us means. Britain’s EU referendum has brought too close for comfort the concept of an us now alarmingly dependent on a subordinated them. 

Long before Anderson’s neologism, Freud gave us the concept of the narcissism of small differences, those knife-edge distinctions that shadow the unlikeness between one individual and the next. Such narcissism is, by definition, petty. But that was Freud’s point — that the life-or-death distinctions with which we parse our social grammar may be imaginary, or close to it, and yet still work powerfully upon us.

Anderson’s imagined communities aren’t fantasies — they’re real enough because people need communities, and where they don’t find them they create them. It’s just that those spaces may not look like the one-color areas on a political map.

From the moment of  its founding, the European Union has been an imagined community. The British referendum seems to have offered voters one certain option: Shall an imagined community be unimagined?

Since last week we’ve begun to take the measure of that act of unimagining: tension in the markets, the pound’s fall, the enthusiastic applause of some of the globe’s most unsavory political figures, and a New Yorker cover that shows the Minister of Silly Walks taking one final turn off a cliff.

I’m sad for Britain and for Europe,  and for the repudiation of this imagined community.

I’m rueful, too, for that clichéd phrase going forward, especially now.

Suddenly I hear it with a comma in the middle — going, forward — as if the only way to make progress is through a departure from a transnational experiment which, with all its shortcomings and inconsistencies, has made a positive difference in the lives of many people. Above all, I’m sympathetic of the response to young British voters and the parents of children too young to vote, citizens who see future options abruptly curtailed.

Us. Ours. Nostrum.

Not every tonic is a nostrum, but our British friends appear to be going, forward  into a Britain that is equally imagined, though in ways that speak of troubled dreams as much as collective idealism and hope.