- Email: [email protected]
The hudson report: a personal view
Futures Forum
Futures Forum
165
Discussion of issues raised in previous contributions
THE HUDSON
REPORT: A PERSONAL
VIEW
James Bellini DROR’S comments on Hudson Europe’s recent publication The United Kingdom in 1980, which were set out in the last issue of Futures,1 were, alas, both predictable and misleading. They were predictable because of their air of Olympian dismissal but, more important, misleading because, taken as a whole, they implied a unity of outlook among practitioners in the futures research field that does not presently exist, and therefore cannot allow for sweeping attacks at the level of methodology or objective.
YEHEZKEL
The UK press:
low marks
That the Hudson Report was newsworthy few can now deny. To take the example of the British press alone, discussion of it reached the front pages of such eminent papers as the Financial Times, and editorial columns stretching from the Daily Telegraph to the Daily Express and the Sun. Even the Workers Press found space in which to exercise its particular brand of self-justifying denigration. In themeantime, theReport reached fifth place in the British bestsellers’ list, sign enough, perhaps, that the wider public wanted to know. Neither was Professor Dror alone in expressing anger at what the Report spelt out. Indeed, his was a review that slipped easily into the serried ranks of Mr Bellini is with the Hudson Institute, European Division, 1 rue du Bat, 75007 Paris, France. With W. Pfaff, L. Schloesing and E. Stillman, he is a co-author of the Hudson Report, The United Kingdom in 1980 (London, Associated Business Programmes, 1974; New York, Halsted Press--John Wiley, 1974).
FUTURES
what a former Member of Parliament described, in a letter to The Times, as “the condescending ridicule of early press comment on the report”, before continuing his letter with the words “its carefully documented analysis of our condition must be recognised as substantially accurate”.a But then, to survey the entire press community and its significantly hostile reception to Th United Kingdom in 1980 would be, if we were to include, for example, the more pernicious of the London tabloids, to tread the fuzzy borderline between serious journals of comment and comics published for the daily titillation, it seems, of the suburban commuter. The balanced and comprehensive editorial treatment in the February issue of Futures (Vol. 7, No. 1, page 2) is sufficient for those wanting to gauge the sourness of Fleet Street’s reactions. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a central weakness of Professor Dror’s review that he chose to rely on a major British newspaper article, that by the Insight team in the Sunday Times, as a “thoughtful” index of considered opinion-an article, incidentally, not published, as Professor Dror suggested, as “An Insight Report on the Hudson Report”; it was graced by the far less scholarly title “Scraping the Bottom of the Think Tank”, a form of introductory rhetoric that should have given any objective reviewer pause. It was perhaps overlooked that the very same issue of the Sunday Times also carried a review of almost the same length by the Industrial Editor that accepted completely the theme of what was termed “a short
April 1@75
L
166
Futures Forum
and readable analysis. . . that set out clearly some of the latest facts and figures and then mince[d] no words in pointing out the serious social and political implications that face us if we do not quickly put our economics right”.a However, this alone would not have denied Professor Dror my accolade for his critique. That must certainly go to Tom Nairn for a perceptive analysis in, if one will excuse the expression, Bananas, a new literary review that appeared in January 1975.4 There, at any rate, the flavour of an imme~ately relevant socio-political essay was captured without resort to heavy and often superfluous footnoting. This was accomplished because Mr Nairn dealt with the Hudson Report, warts and all, as a reflection of, as well as a comment upon, the state of contemporary Britain. After all, the whole episode, from publication of the study to eventual concessions of validity by large sections of the British press fraternity, including the Times ~~~a~i~n~~ S~~~~~rne~t (“. . . a blistering indictment of the educational 22 November 1974), The system”, Times itself, which admitted, after a weekend of cogitation, that its initial rejection was in need of qualification (“Hudson Report Insights Worthy of 25 November 1974) and Debate”, much of the provincial press, merely showed up Britain’s opinion-forming establishment for what it is: ungenerous, confused and incorrigibly high-minded. Tom Nairn was probably the only reviewer, moreover, to note Hudson “undeniable prescience” in Europe’s setting out in the book the range of “stereotypical reactions . . . certain to greet publication of this study.” New
claims
and old methods
Yet Professor Dror’s assessment pointed, albeit unwittingly, to one outstanding feature of modern futures research that all should bend to eliminate, namely its pretentiousness. For despite the hint in Professor Dror’s commenta~ that, if
only complex correlation techniques and input analysis were to be employed the most amazing results could ensue, such research is still but an infant offspring of the more established social sciences, and therefore suffers from their weaknesses and more besides. In this sense it seems clear that the debate on the merits of futures studies hinges not on the capacities of such studies themselves, but on the claims of the broader group of social sciences from which they borrow and learn. And here I must plead heresy, for I am yet to be convinced of the systemic coherence of any of the social sciences or about unqualified assertions concerning their methodological self-sufficiency. The report’s “gratuitous opinion on as Professor Dror social sciences”, termed it, was, in fact, a statement of firmly held belief about the current state of most social science activity. I am sceptical of the ability of hermetically sealed analysis in the socio-political domain to produce realistic or meaningful conclusions. Yet, despite the evident failure of what I might describe as the Eastonian school of social science thinking to add anything worthwhile to policy-oriented analysis, the debate between systems theorists and, for want of a Iess obscure word, “behaviouralists” continues. Fortunately, systems theory seems to have made limited headway in political science teaching in British schools and universities. Easton’s major contention, that “systems analysis encourages us to interpret political life as . . . an interrelating set and a body of activities which, in their totality, are able to do work by converting inputs into outputs”5 appears to have been drawn from the main body of economic theory. More pertinently, it leans heavily on the conceptual foundations of the physical sciences themselves. But as an intellectual exercise Easton’s approach is only one part of the generalised effort witnessed in the post-war period to elevate essentially intuitive processes, to varying degrees supported by q~Iantitative research, to a FUTURES
April 1975
Futures Forum
status of rock-hard certainty-a certainty, in any event, that not even the “pure” sciences possess. Indeed, the effort even spread to foreign policy analysis, a field of endeavour in which I long laboured, through the work of people such as George Modelski. Modelski was the author of an ambitious attempt in the early 1950s to develop a science of international politics based on frameworks, as he put it “analogous to the economists’ income-expenditure pattern”.s So bold did Model&i’s theorising make him that he concluded “that a comprehensive and logically self-contained set of propositions about the way states behave can be made without any recourse to the geographic, economic, psychological approaches”,7 sentiments that, if adopted widely by governments, would surely have cut the average foreign policy establishment by twothirds, if not made diplomacy itself practically impossible ! Accepting that Model&i’s viewpoint was among the more adventurous, his extremism should remain a warning to us all. All the efforts by social scientists to poach on the territory of physics have so far come to nothing, in part because the tools of quantification and correlation upon which they depend are still clumsy and suspect. But they have failed also because they flow from a particularly technocratic view of the role of the social sciences overall, and now that these same efforts are being turned to the search for methodological rigour in futures studies, proven limitations are being built into a yet amorphous superstructure in a way that could cause irreparable damage. The critical question, then, concerns the purpose and capacities of the social sciences as a disciplinary family, for futures research can move little beyond the boundaries they themselves encounter. Karl Popper, in his collection of essays Conjectures and Refutations, which should be made compulsory reading for all those venturing onto the high seas of forecasting, gave an apt FUTURES
April 1875
167
description of the limits of social science. “The main task of the theoretical social sciences” said Popper, “is to trace the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions.“s Peter Winch, in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, took this viewpoint one stage further: “It is not a question of what empirical research may show to be the case, but of what philosophical analysis reveals about what it makes sense to say.“O In other words those-and I suspect Professor Dror is among them-who are ambitious for the social sciences impute predictive powers to the sciences generally that they do not purport to have and then transplant those presumed qualities to socio-economic analysis without any apparent recognition of the constraints that subjective philosophical considerations would impose. At best, the social sciences, as Popper has often argued, approximate to the experimental natural sciences in that both lead us to the formulation not of guidelines to positive action but of practical rules stating what, in fact, we cannot do. As he points out, the second law of thermodynamics can be expressed as the technological warning “you cannot build a machine which is 100 per cent efficient”. In the socio-economic sphere a comparable rule would be “you cannot, without raising productivity, raise the real income of the working population”.1° It is this observation, incidentally, that is the dominant theme of Chapter II of the Hudson Report. In plain terms, Hudson Europe made a conscious decision to eschew those methodological trappings of futures studies, springing from an exaggerated faith in the capacities of the social sciences as a whole, that have increasingly put the intellectual standing of such studies at risk. Having absorbed as much of the statistical data as could be found on the operational characteristics of the UK economy and having generated syntheses of historical, cultural, geographical and social factors as we
168
Futures Forum
perceived them, we took Peter Winch’s advice and said “what philosophical analysis reveals about what it makes sense to say”. In doing that we were only accepting what Professor Dror had himself said in Futures just over a year ago: “there are no accepted search patterns and selection criteria for futures studies subjects.“li For the state of the art is not yet at that point where it can displace the sheer weight of inertia that rests in the experiences of socio-political history. Until it can I for one am hesitant to ignore the writing on history’s wall, and certainly reluctant to question the virtue of the trend line. For a trend line, as James Bright put it in these pages in August 1973, is history, and “as a description of past change it is far more perfect than the most elegant model.“12 Yet that is also to strike at the advocates of technocratic social science at their most dogmatic point, for a distrust of the role of historical perspective in predicting social change is a distinguishing mark of the American social scientist bent on systemising our methodological approach, and of those elsewhere who follow his lead. Hence the recognition by Robert L. Heilbroner in T’ Future as HistoT that “the very notion of an ‘historic’ future is one which most Americans are apt to find uncomfortable. Our natural temperament inclines us in quite another direction. We are naturally sympathetic to ideas which stress the plasticity and promise, the openness of the future, and impatient with views which emphasise the ‘fated’ aspect of human affairs.“13 The Hudson Report might carry us little further towards a consistent body of predictive theory than did Daniel Defoe in his Tour Through Great Britain, published in the reign of George I-in which we were informed that “industry, agriculture and commerce all continued to expand; society moved forward unconsciously towards the Industrial Revolution, which grew in the next hundred years out of the conditions described by Defoe.“l* The United
Kingdom in 1980 was a manifestation of a belief that prediction is only an interpretation of the present and, as George Orwell put it in England Your England, “England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip.” Predictive essays, in other words, can only influence policy if the policy maker’s views of contemporary reality are freed of ideology. This means, at least, having a healthy scepticism of the extravagant model and a deeper grasp of the philosophical dimensions of pressing political choices. Professor Dror should forgive us, therefore, if we did not take his advice and by, as he suggested, “adopting a highly imaginative and innovative approach with a lot of wild thinking . . . considered alternative futures for the UK in, say 2010.” We were sufficiently troubled by the immediate prospects for Britain to limit ourselves to the next five years. In covering that time-span I was continually reminded of Engel’s remarks in his Speech at the Graveside of Marx; Marx, he said, had “discovered the law of development of human history . . . that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politics, science, art and religion.” These are remarks that, for Britain, have an increasingly ominous ring, for its economic problems are now that fundamental. References 1. Y. Dror, “The Misfired Report”, Fufurq Vol 7, No 1, February 1975, pages 64-68 2. Letter from Au&en Albu, The Times, 3 December 1974 3. The Sunday Times, 24 November 1974, pages 17 and 53 4. Tom Nairn, “Pardon Me Boys, Is This The Bognor Regis Choo-Choo?“, Bananas, No 1, January-February 1975, pages 5-6 5. D. Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life
FUTURES
April IS75
Futures Forum/Conferences
169
10. Popper, op tit, page 343 Dror, “War, Violence and 11. Yehezkel Futures Studies”, Futures, Vol 6, No 1, February 1974, pages 2-3 12. James Bright, “A Few Kind Words for Trend Extrapolation”, Futures, Vol 5, NO 4, August 1973, pages 344-345 13. R. L. Heilbroner, The Future as History (New York, Grove Crest, 1961), page 16 14. G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, Pelican, 1967), page 309
(Princeton, 1965), page 479 George Modelski, A lhcorctical Analysis of the Formation of F&gn Policy, PhD thesis, University of London, 1954, page 92 Ibid, page 397. Emphasis as in original Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) page 342 Peter Winch, 7% Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), page 72
CONFERENCES THE PROMETHEAN
SITUATION
‘ The Applications and Limitations of Genetic Engineering-The Implications’, DAVOS, 10-12 October, 1974 Organised Institute,
by the Gottlieb Duttweiler the Swiss Society for Cell
and Molecular Davos
Biology
and
Forum
Aware of the proliferation of dangers presented to the world by nuclear physics, biologists and geneticists have become alarmed over the even greater dangers inherent in the genetic manipulation of micro-organisms. Thus, new and emphatic recommendations for a moratorium on certain potentially hazardous research with DNA molecules were published last year in a letter to Science, signed by the members of the Committee on Recombinant of DNA, l under the Chairmanship Professor Paul Berg of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University, California. The letter appealed to scientists throughout the world to defer voluntarily the following types of experiments until proper safeguards had been developed and agreed upon: Type 1: Construction of new, autonomously replicating bacterial plasmids that might result in the introduction of genetic determinants for antibiotic resistance of bacterial toxin formation into bacterial strains that do not at present carry such determinants; or construction of new bacterial plasmids containing combinations of resistance to clinically useful antibiotics unless plasmids containing such combinations
FUTURES
April 1@7S
Ethical
of antibiotic resistance determinants already exist in nature. Type 2 : Linkage of all or segments of the DNAs from oncogenic or other animal viruses to autonomously replicating DNA elements such as bacterial plasmids or other viral DNAs. Such recombinant DNA molecules might be more easily disseminated to bacterial populations in humans and other species, and thus possibly increase the incidence of cancer or other diseases.
It was the contents and the prospects of this appeal which became the central issue of the conference in Davos at which Paul Berg was one of the main contributors. Filtering
systems
Harvey Wheeler of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, whom I had heard only a year or so before deliver a powerful speech on the systemic innovations and changes caused by the present scientific and cultural revolutions, appeared, incomprehensibly, to have abdicated from the Chair after a brief but challenging introduction. Because of this the promising diversity and heat of the debates became diffused and many creative thoughts were lost among the marathon contributions of 22 scientists, doctors, science publishers and knowledgeable members of the
Futures Forum
165
Discussion of issues raised in previous contributions
THE HUDSON
REPORT: A PERSONAL
VIEW
James Bellini DROR’S comments on Hudson Europe’s recent publication The United Kingdom in 1980, which were set out in the last issue of Futures,1 were, alas, both predictable and misleading. They were predictable because of their air of Olympian dismissal but, more important, misleading because, taken as a whole, they implied a unity of outlook among practitioners in the futures research field that does not presently exist, and therefore cannot allow for sweeping attacks at the level of methodology or objective.
YEHEZKEL
The UK press:
low marks
That the Hudson Report was newsworthy few can now deny. To take the example of the British press alone, discussion of it reached the front pages of such eminent papers as the Financial Times, and editorial columns stretching from the Daily Telegraph to the Daily Express and the Sun. Even the Workers Press found space in which to exercise its particular brand of self-justifying denigration. In themeantime, theReport reached fifth place in the British bestsellers’ list, sign enough, perhaps, that the wider public wanted to know. Neither was Professor Dror alone in expressing anger at what the Report spelt out. Indeed, his was a review that slipped easily into the serried ranks of Mr Bellini is with the Hudson Institute, European Division, 1 rue du Bat, 75007 Paris, France. With W. Pfaff, L. Schloesing and E. Stillman, he is a co-author of the Hudson Report, The United Kingdom in 1980 (London, Associated Business Programmes, 1974; New York, Halsted Press--John Wiley, 1974).
FUTURES
what a former Member of Parliament described, in a letter to The Times, as “the condescending ridicule of early press comment on the report”, before continuing his letter with the words “its carefully documented analysis of our condition must be recognised as substantially accurate”.a But then, to survey the entire press community and its significantly hostile reception to Th United Kingdom in 1980 would be, if we were to include, for example, the more pernicious of the London tabloids, to tread the fuzzy borderline between serious journals of comment and comics published for the daily titillation, it seems, of the suburban commuter. The balanced and comprehensive editorial treatment in the February issue of Futures (Vol. 7, No. 1, page 2) is sufficient for those wanting to gauge the sourness of Fleet Street’s reactions. Nevertheless, it was perhaps a central weakness of Professor Dror’s review that he chose to rely on a major British newspaper article, that by the Insight team in the Sunday Times, as a “thoughtful” index of considered opinion-an article, incidentally, not published, as Professor Dror suggested, as “An Insight Report on the Hudson Report”; it was graced by the far less scholarly title “Scraping the Bottom of the Think Tank”, a form of introductory rhetoric that should have given any objective reviewer pause. It was perhaps overlooked that the very same issue of the Sunday Times also carried a review of almost the same length by the Industrial Editor that accepted completely the theme of what was termed “a short
April 1@75
L
166
Futures Forum
and readable analysis. . . that set out clearly some of the latest facts and figures and then mince[d] no words in pointing out the serious social and political implications that face us if we do not quickly put our economics right”.a However, this alone would not have denied Professor Dror my accolade for his critique. That must certainly go to Tom Nairn for a perceptive analysis in, if one will excuse the expression, Bananas, a new literary review that appeared in January 1975.4 There, at any rate, the flavour of an imme~ately relevant socio-political essay was captured without resort to heavy and often superfluous footnoting. This was accomplished because Mr Nairn dealt with the Hudson Report, warts and all, as a reflection of, as well as a comment upon, the state of contemporary Britain. After all, the whole episode, from publication of the study to eventual concessions of validity by large sections of the British press fraternity, including the Times ~~~a~i~n~~ S~~~~~rne~t (“. . . a blistering indictment of the educational 22 November 1974), The system”, Times itself, which admitted, after a weekend of cogitation, that its initial rejection was in need of qualification (“Hudson Report Insights Worthy of 25 November 1974) and Debate”, much of the provincial press, merely showed up Britain’s opinion-forming establishment for what it is: ungenerous, confused and incorrigibly high-minded. Tom Nairn was probably the only reviewer, moreover, to note Hudson “undeniable prescience” in Europe’s setting out in the book the range of “stereotypical reactions . . . certain to greet publication of this study.” New
claims
and old methods
Yet Professor Dror’s assessment pointed, albeit unwittingly, to one outstanding feature of modern futures research that all should bend to eliminate, namely its pretentiousness. For despite the hint in Professor Dror’s commenta~ that, if
only complex correlation techniques and input analysis were to be employed the most amazing results could ensue, such research is still but an infant offspring of the more established social sciences, and therefore suffers from their weaknesses and more besides. In this sense it seems clear that the debate on the merits of futures studies hinges not on the capacities of such studies themselves, but on the claims of the broader group of social sciences from which they borrow and learn. And here I must plead heresy, for I am yet to be convinced of the systemic coherence of any of the social sciences or about unqualified assertions concerning their methodological self-sufficiency. The report’s “gratuitous opinion on as Professor Dror social sciences”, termed it, was, in fact, a statement of firmly held belief about the current state of most social science activity. I am sceptical of the ability of hermetically sealed analysis in the socio-political domain to produce realistic or meaningful conclusions. Yet, despite the evident failure of what I might describe as the Eastonian school of social science thinking to add anything worthwhile to policy-oriented analysis, the debate between systems theorists and, for want of a Iess obscure word, “behaviouralists” continues. Fortunately, systems theory seems to have made limited headway in political science teaching in British schools and universities. Easton’s major contention, that “systems analysis encourages us to interpret political life as . . . an interrelating set and a body of activities which, in their totality, are able to do work by converting inputs into outputs”5 appears to have been drawn from the main body of economic theory. More pertinently, it leans heavily on the conceptual foundations of the physical sciences themselves. But as an intellectual exercise Easton’s approach is only one part of the generalised effort witnessed in the post-war period to elevate essentially intuitive processes, to varying degrees supported by q~Iantitative research, to a FUTURES
April 1975
Futures Forum
status of rock-hard certainty-a certainty, in any event, that not even the “pure” sciences possess. Indeed, the effort even spread to foreign policy analysis, a field of endeavour in which I long laboured, through the work of people such as George Modelski. Modelski was the author of an ambitious attempt in the early 1950s to develop a science of international politics based on frameworks, as he put it “analogous to the economists’ income-expenditure pattern”.s So bold did Model&i’s theorising make him that he concluded “that a comprehensive and logically self-contained set of propositions about the way states behave can be made without any recourse to the geographic, economic, psychological approaches”,7 sentiments that, if adopted widely by governments, would surely have cut the average foreign policy establishment by twothirds, if not made diplomacy itself practically impossible ! Accepting that Model&i’s viewpoint was among the more adventurous, his extremism should remain a warning to us all. All the efforts by social scientists to poach on the territory of physics have so far come to nothing, in part because the tools of quantification and correlation upon which they depend are still clumsy and suspect. But they have failed also because they flow from a particularly technocratic view of the role of the social sciences overall, and now that these same efforts are being turned to the search for methodological rigour in futures studies, proven limitations are being built into a yet amorphous superstructure in a way that could cause irreparable damage. The critical question, then, concerns the purpose and capacities of the social sciences as a disciplinary family, for futures research can move little beyond the boundaries they themselves encounter. Karl Popper, in his collection of essays Conjectures and Refutations, which should be made compulsory reading for all those venturing onto the high seas of forecasting, gave an apt FUTURES
April 1875
167
description of the limits of social science. “The main task of the theoretical social sciences” said Popper, “is to trace the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions.“s Peter Winch, in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, took this viewpoint one stage further: “It is not a question of what empirical research may show to be the case, but of what philosophical analysis reveals about what it makes sense to say.“O In other words those-and I suspect Professor Dror is among them-who are ambitious for the social sciences impute predictive powers to the sciences generally that they do not purport to have and then transplant those presumed qualities to socio-economic analysis without any apparent recognition of the constraints that subjective philosophical considerations would impose. At best, the social sciences, as Popper has often argued, approximate to the experimental natural sciences in that both lead us to the formulation not of guidelines to positive action but of practical rules stating what, in fact, we cannot do. As he points out, the second law of thermodynamics can be expressed as the technological warning “you cannot build a machine which is 100 per cent efficient”. In the socio-economic sphere a comparable rule would be “you cannot, without raising productivity, raise the real income of the working population”.1° It is this observation, incidentally, that is the dominant theme of Chapter II of the Hudson Report. In plain terms, Hudson Europe made a conscious decision to eschew those methodological trappings of futures studies, springing from an exaggerated faith in the capacities of the social sciences as a whole, that have increasingly put the intellectual standing of such studies at risk. Having absorbed as much of the statistical data as could be found on the operational characteristics of the UK economy and having generated syntheses of historical, cultural, geographical and social factors as we
168
Futures Forum
perceived them, we took Peter Winch’s advice and said “what philosophical analysis reveals about what it makes sense to say”. In doing that we were only accepting what Professor Dror had himself said in Futures just over a year ago: “there are no accepted search patterns and selection criteria for futures studies subjects.“li For the state of the art is not yet at that point where it can displace the sheer weight of inertia that rests in the experiences of socio-political history. Until it can I for one am hesitant to ignore the writing on history’s wall, and certainly reluctant to question the virtue of the trend line. For a trend line, as James Bright put it in these pages in August 1973, is history, and “as a description of past change it is far more perfect than the most elegant model.“12 Yet that is also to strike at the advocates of technocratic social science at their most dogmatic point, for a distrust of the role of historical perspective in predicting social change is a distinguishing mark of the American social scientist bent on systemising our methodological approach, and of those elsewhere who follow his lead. Hence the recognition by Robert L. Heilbroner in T’ Future as HistoT that “the very notion of an ‘historic’ future is one which most Americans are apt to find uncomfortable. Our natural temperament inclines us in quite another direction. We are naturally sympathetic to ideas which stress the plasticity and promise, the openness of the future, and impatient with views which emphasise the ‘fated’ aspect of human affairs.“13 The Hudson Report might carry us little further towards a consistent body of predictive theory than did Daniel Defoe in his Tour Through Great Britain, published in the reign of George I-in which we were informed that “industry, agriculture and commerce all continued to expand; society moved forward unconsciously towards the Industrial Revolution, which grew in the next hundred years out of the conditions described by Defoe.“l* The United
Kingdom in 1980 was a manifestation of a belief that prediction is only an interpretation of the present and, as George Orwell put it in England Your England, “England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip.” Predictive essays, in other words, can only influence policy if the policy maker’s views of contemporary reality are freed of ideology. This means, at least, having a healthy scepticism of the extravagant model and a deeper grasp of the philosophical dimensions of pressing political choices. Professor Dror should forgive us, therefore, if we did not take his advice and by, as he suggested, “adopting a highly imaginative and innovative approach with a lot of wild thinking . . . considered alternative futures for the UK in, say 2010.” We were sufficiently troubled by the immediate prospects for Britain to limit ourselves to the next five years. In covering that time-span I was continually reminded of Engel’s remarks in his Speech at the Graveside of Marx; Marx, he said, had “discovered the law of development of human history . . . that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before it can pursue politics, science, art and religion.” These are remarks that, for Britain, have an increasingly ominous ring, for its economic problems are now that fundamental. References 1. Y. Dror, “The Misfired Report”, Fufurq Vol 7, No 1, February 1975, pages 64-68 2. Letter from Au&en Albu, The Times, 3 December 1974 3. The Sunday Times, 24 November 1974, pages 17 and 53 4. Tom Nairn, “Pardon Me Boys, Is This The Bognor Regis Choo-Choo?“, Bananas, No 1, January-February 1975, pages 5-6 5. D. Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life
FUTURES
April IS75
Futures Forum/Conferences
169
10. Popper, op tit, page 343 Dror, “War, Violence and 11. Yehezkel Futures Studies”, Futures, Vol 6, No 1, February 1974, pages 2-3 12. James Bright, “A Few Kind Words for Trend Extrapolation”, Futures, Vol 5, NO 4, August 1973, pages 344-345 13. R. L. Heilbroner, The Future as History (New York, Grove Crest, 1961), page 16 14. G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (London, Pelican, 1967), page 309
(Princeton, 1965), page 479 George Modelski, A lhcorctical Analysis of the Formation of F&gn Policy, PhD thesis, University of London, 1954, page 92 Ibid, page 397. Emphasis as in original Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) page 342 Peter Winch, 7% Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), page 72
CONFERENCES THE PROMETHEAN
SITUATION
‘ The Applications and Limitations of Genetic Engineering-The Implications’, DAVOS, 10-12 October, 1974 Organised Institute,
by the Gottlieb Duttweiler the Swiss Society for Cell
and Molecular Davos
Biology
and
Forum
Aware of the proliferation of dangers presented to the world by nuclear physics, biologists and geneticists have become alarmed over the even greater dangers inherent in the genetic manipulation of micro-organisms. Thus, new and emphatic recommendations for a moratorium on certain potentially hazardous research with DNA molecules were published last year in a letter to Science, signed by the members of the Committee on Recombinant of DNA, l under the Chairmanship Professor Paul Berg of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University, California. The letter appealed to scientists throughout the world to defer voluntarily the following types of experiments until proper safeguards had been developed and agreed upon: Type 1: Construction of new, autonomously replicating bacterial plasmids that might result in the introduction of genetic determinants for antibiotic resistance of bacterial toxin formation into bacterial strains that do not at present carry such determinants; or construction of new bacterial plasmids containing combinations of resistance to clinically useful antibiotics unless plasmids containing such combinations
FUTURES
April 1@7S
Ethical
of antibiotic resistance determinants already exist in nature. Type 2 : Linkage of all or segments of the DNAs from oncogenic or other animal viruses to autonomously replicating DNA elements such as bacterial plasmids or other viral DNAs. Such recombinant DNA molecules might be more easily disseminated to bacterial populations in humans and other species, and thus possibly increase the incidence of cancer or other diseases.
It was the contents and the prospects of this appeal which became the central issue of the conference in Davos at which Paul Berg was one of the main contributors. Filtering
systems
Harvey Wheeler of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, whom I had heard only a year or so before deliver a powerful speech on the systemic innovations and changes caused by the present scientific and cultural revolutions, appeared, incomprehensibly, to have abdicated from the Chair after a brief but challenging introduction. Because of this the promising diversity and heat of the debates became diffused and many creative thoughts were lost among the marathon contributions of 22 scientists, doctors, science publishers and knowledgeable members of the