2020 will be an interesting year, maybe even a pivotal one.

Things have tilted but understanding how all the fragments will rearrange themselves has only just begun; it will take at least a year for the contours of our new political reality to reform.

The status quo is in flux. There is no remaining where we are, no going back and all attention is now on a future as yet only imagined, willed and feared in equal measure.

Change is a disorienting force that disrupts the present, chewing up the comfort of the familiar and churning out strong emotions that favour prejudice over critical thinking. We are quick to presume and preempt, to judge things based on expectation or preference rather then events or evidence. To suspect is not to know.

I don’t know how Boris Johnson will govern as a Prime Minister with a comfortable majority.

I don’t know when the scourge of austerity will be over.

I don’t know how we will trade with other nations in future or the economic impact.

I don’t know the implications of a resurgent right.

I don’t know how liberalism or the left will regather and renew.

I don’t know how we will arrest and adapt to accelerating environmental stress and ecological degradation.

I don’t know how we will recognise and respond to increasingly sophisticated information disorder.

The shape of these will become more discernible as the year unfolds. They will not be the unmitigated triumphs or disasters we immediately augur in the breaking up of things. The world usually turns out more complicated and nuanced than that. They will though be what we allow to come to pass.

As these things fall into place we can wish for the best whilst fearing the worst. We can choose amity over enmity. We can hold all that we have in common closely and our disagreements more loosely. We can endeavour to pay attention and reject chauvinism. We can question but keep an open mind. We can campaign without becoming too comfortable with certainty or prophecy. We can hold to account without raising false alarm. We can celebrate success and censure failure. We can make the political less personal. We can pause to ask whether claims are substantiated before considering a response or succumbing to the emotions they arouse. We can strategise without scorn and scrutinise without being scathing. We can seek out facts buried under dissembling and distracting misconceptions. We can favour specific, justified critique over sweeping generalisation. We can be purposeful but mindful of hubris. We can back our words with practical action.

Otherwise, instead of linking the chain of events to alternative arguments going forward, we will simply be buffeted by the storm of progress like Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, seeing only wreckage rising skywards as we are irresistibly propelled into a future to which our back is turned.

It is ultimately less exhausting and more enjoyable to amplify the world we want to see than to perpetually lament the ones we don’t. So keep looking for beauty and opportunity in the tumble of events. We should be sceptical and diligent but also hopeful as these new patterns shift and settle.

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Image by H. Pellika CC-BY-SA source: Wikimedia Commons