Of many that engulf our ideas of the present and the future, four are the most significant. First, post-cold war (fall of the Berlin wall, fall of the USSR, and the phase of liberalisation and privatisation in India, for instance), the disparity between the rich and the poor has increased. This development is a result of a paradox between economic and political process. The entrenchment of capitalism, the intensified harnessing of all forms of energy, and the emergence of new forms of global businesses coincided with a push to democratise and radicalise the formerly elitist political orders.For instance, in a country like India, from the early 1990s through the 2010s, the liberal economic policies that allowed the operation of private capital into various spheres of production and investment went hand in hand with an outlook of social justice politics which, at least theoretically, stood for equitable distribution of resources in the favour of the deprivileged. Yet, the net result of the last 30-40 years is the widening of the economic gap: the rich have become richer and the poor poorer. The richest 1% of India’s population controls almost 50% of the total wealth, which is the highest in the last six decades.Second, the subsequent journey of the relationship between economic liberalisation and political questioning of the erstwhile set-up that turned blind to the growing class disparity has transformed the liberal aspirational journey into a widescale popularity for right-wing politics. As capital became highly mobile and culture began to cross boundaries in a more rapid manner, new ideas of identity and territory – two central ingredients of right-wing ideologies – resurfaced in a dominant and populist manner.The core of the right-wing resurgence across the worldAll across the world, in varying degrees, the core of the right-wing resurgence is based upon these two entities: one, identity, which has taken forms of majoritarianism, supremacist ideologies, and exclusionary policies; and two, territory which is tied to the idea of exclusionary belonging: that only a certain ethnic group, through an invented logic of purity and authenticity, belongs to a certain piece of territory.The irony of this mode of thinking is glaring: the whole of human history and existence is based upon numerous big and small cycles of migration yet in the world in which we live, the migrant has become the most villainous figure of the society.Although they provide the necessary cheap labour by doing irregular, dirty, and low-paid jobs to help the capitalist and middle classes generate profit and comfort for themselves, the migrant is not an economic category alone. The value system behind this term works through larger social practices defined by race, religion, class, gender, caste, language, and region. In some places migrants are bad because they happen to belong to a certain religious faith; in others, they are hated and thrashed because they speak different language.The third feature of our current times is the deep and astonishingly normalised practice of sub-or de-humanization of people who are seen and treated as inferior and unwanted. The current form of capitalism has become a conduit for practising unequal human relationships, which we otherwise casually characterise as feudal. But our own modern values and systems based upon informal work, low-paid jobs, and continued faith in the relevance of maintaining social distinctions have emboldened the process of dehumanisation. Some lives have become cheaper than others; the dignity of a few is precious than the rest.History has never been egalitarian. For centuries, race, gender, and caste, for example, have governed the systems of hierarchies amongst people. But an interesting feature of our times is the effectiveness with which the exclusionary social and political views have been mobilized under the name of nationalism, civilisational legacy, democracy, and even constitutionalism¾concepts which are modern in provenance and have at least nominally adhered to establish the principles of equality – to create unequal relationships among people. The inversion of the concepts which otherwise were meant to establish equality and inclusion within the framework of diversity has created one of the biggest intellectual blackholes of our times.The fourth challenge, which is in some ways an aggregate of all three, is the effect of human actions on the planet Earth, leaving a question mark dangling before the future of not only humans but other species as well.Science, beyond doubts, has shown that we have created conditions for our decay and destruction. The rising sea level, the irregular draughts and floods, the unliveable conditions of urban clusters due to air pollution are the facts of life. Yet, one section of the world political leadership sees it as a conspiracy of science; the other pretends to provide a corrective to it by glorifying the past.Technologies – from industrialisation through computerisation to that of digitalization – have always shaped our vision of the future. Until now, that vision was of betterment of humankind and its progress. It was based upon the idea of triumph over nature, which, as is abundantly clear by now, was a flawed one. History appeared as a script of the forward march of humankind towards progress and development for all.The truth is, we have damaged our planet and its diverse species, to a significant extent, irrevocably. Through technology and imperialism, some have contributed more to this; only few have benefitted from it, and a lot are suffering and will continue to suffer in the future. The human ‘we’ is not uniform in both causing the damage and bearing its repercussion. The class divide and the climate divide will merge to allow some groups to endure longer than the vulnerable rest.The futurism of the twentieth century – of technology taming the nature – is a passé, and a new vision combining society, nature, and progress is urgently required. The four spheres of humankind – economy, politics, society, planetary¾will continue to remain in a bind of apparent contradictions.The politics of populism and age of authoritarianismCapital will seek more spaces, both below and above the Earth, to expand while the politics of populism will continue to ruthlessly de-humanise certain groups and communities based on restrictions of borders, movements, and policing of everyday choices. The right-wing populism will maintain speaking in the name of common people while a club of billionaire czars will occupy the hotseat of power. Nationalism may continue to be weaponised as a tool of discrimination and violence while the pretension of social harmony will keep working to inflict the new and established order of social hierarchy.The age of authoritarianism, artificial intelligence, wars and genocide, and planetary decay presents itself as the time of unprecedented change. The re-writing of the past – taking place in the silos of community, religion, and nationality, to ‘make nations great again’ – has become a defining feature of this moment. This raises a pressing question: Does the unprecedented scale of contemporary change demand an entirely new way of engaging with the past, given the uncertainty of both present and future?While some contemporary thinkers argue that climate crisis and technological futurity render historical thinking obsolete, such claims mistake the limits of certain historical methods for the exhaustion of historical thinking itself.We make sense of the present and the future through historical pasts. In that sense, history has its limits in being processual, that is, of making sense of the impending future through the trajectories of the past. Some scholars have already begun to question the utility of this mode of thinking under the weight of climate change and technological adventurism. Despite critiques of its limitation, historical mode of thinking should remain indispensable, especially in moments of crises, for both political and ethical reasons. By ‘historical mode of thinking’, I do not mean a faith in linear progress based upon predictive causality, but a practice grounded in contextualisation, structural analysis, and ethical accountability to the past.History’s greatest strength lies in its deep commitment to contextualisation, its rigorous scrutiny of evidence, and its careful juxtaposition of competing interpretations. These practices allow us to guard the boundary of the past against fanciful, distorting, and mischievous reconstructions of the past while keeping historical inquiry open to new approaches and perspectives that necessitate innovative engagements with earlier histories. It is precisely this openness based upon historical mode of thinking that enabled the shift from kings to people, from men to women, and from royalty to ordinary individuals as significant agents of historical change.There are indeed many ways of remembering the past. Myths and memory are as crucial as documentary evidences. They are not truths in themselves but are source materials that historians critically interpret to create the best possible truthful account of the past. Opposed to this is the deliberately untruthful and manipulative accounts which selectively uses certain elements of the past precisely by neglecting the historical mode of thinking and resorting to decontextualised presentation of evidences to serve the political needs of the time.Historical amnesia can enable extreme forms of injusticesContestation is intrinsic to history; manipulation arises when interpretive plurality is replaced by selective extraction and decontextualiaation. When evidentiary standards and contextual reasoning erode, political power gains greater freedom to mobilize the past as ideology rather than inquiry. If historical thinking is abandoned, the past may become an open field for fabricating authoritarian narratives; the historical amnesia can enable extreme forms of injustices; and governance can become detached from addressing structural causes.Historical thinking cannot predict planetary futures, but it remains essential for determining responsibility, obligation, and collective response. While climate change disrupts our conventional notions of the linkage between past, present, and future and AI unsettles assumptions about human-centred agency, these conditions demand historical thinking attentive to rupture, asymmetry, and responsibility – rather than its abandonment.Contemporary crises are both the product and a reflection of long-term structural inequalities produced through processes such as colonisation, extraction, and social discrimination. Technical ‘quick-fixes’ bereft of democratic participation and redistribution are extensions of very conditions that generated these crises. The continued unequal inheritance of power and vulnerability makes the historical mode of thinking indispensable for anchoring any democratic response to social and planetary crises.Grounded in histories of extraction, exclusion, and inequality, a more radical practice of democracy is not only desirable but necessary. Such a vision must take the relationship between humans and other species seriously; resituate technology not as a tool of colonisation over nature but as an instrument of social justice; and explain connections and contradictions between human groups and societies as a part of shared collective whole. Crucially, it must confront the questions of social fissures and historical injustices in their correct context and refuse to appease or acquiesce to prevailing dominant views.Seen this way, the historical mode of thinking is not merely a method of understanding the past but a necessary ethical framework for articulating democratic futures rooted in justice, responsibility, and collective life. The vision it sustains resists both deliberate historical amnesia and manipulation on the one hand and unchecked technocratic futurism on the other, insisting that meaningful change must remain accountable to the pasts from which it emerges.Nitin Sinha is a senior research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin.