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Writing the future
317
ESSAY Writing the future John Chris Jones
What are you futurologists
actually
doing?
My first thought is that we are looking at patterns of events in the world and trying to pick out the ones that will persist and the ones that will change. The patterns we look at are those that can be measured and expressed as numbers. Put like that it sounds very sensible and rational, justifying perhaps the -ology, our claim to be scientific. And then I remember that some of us do not work through observation but prefer to speculate, to construct imaginary futures, to make models in which different patterns of events can be tried out. To do this we use both words and numbers, starting from what is happening now and testing policies and plans before they are put into effect. This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be an exile, he was the first man to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy, at its Lavinian shore. He met many tribulations on his way both by land and on the ocean; high Heaven willed it, for Juno was ruthless and could not forget her anger. And he had also to endure great suffering in warfare. But at last he succeeded in founding his city, and installing the gods of his race in the Latin land; and that was the origin of the Latin nation, the Lords of Alba, and the proud battlements of Rome.
Was that you speaking? No, that was Virgil writing in 19 BC.’ You and I are not the only ones who are writing this, it’s a collective work, as is the making of the future. The essay is not what you and I write, nor what the other voices say, it’s the effect of all of us
John Chris Jones is a member of Futures’s advisory board and can be contacted via the editorial office.
FUTURES lune 1988
together. The readers are the authors of the thoughts that come to them as they read, this is just a context in which they can think. What are they thinking as they read this? . . . That is not predictable, thank goodness. In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear.
That was Dante,2 he is about to visit The Inferno. Have you ever been?
Certainly not, /et’s return or rather the present. ..
to the
future,
What do you see when you do futurology, when you ‘look at events’ or when you ‘make models and speculate’? Do you actually see the future? No we don’t. Few of us claim to see what is actually going to happen although sometimes our extrapolations, for instance of the growth of population, do come about. That the number of people in the world reached 5 billion in 1987 did not surprise us at all. Some futurologists had been saying that it would about 40 years ago when the population was about half of that. But there are some events, such as the decision of the Arab countries to raise the price of oil in the early 197Os, which took everyone by surprise. Herman Kahn used to say that he could only predict what he called ‘surprise-free’ futures, that is the pattern of events if the political context doesn’t change. He is assuming that people will not change their minds. But what do we actually see, through futurology, that is not visible without it? I’d say that the essential difference is that
318
Essay
we are studying the collective future and that we use methods that allow us to combine what is visible to many observers into a single picture, or model, that can then be seen by any one. This is much more than you or I could see from our direct experience. But, being generalized, it is of course much more abstract. Words and numbers, not the events themselves. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lorn and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open, fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.3
That has nothing to do with me. i’llgo with my questions . . .
provide what our employers need. It is paid for by big organizations, and by governments. What they look for is a way of seeing the future on the same timescale as are the collective actions and policies which they initiate and carry out. Industrial life is formed by investing in machines, processes, large constructions, organizational changes, etc, that take many years to mature, often longerthan is the time-scale over which the money has to produce a return or the government has to seek popular support. Oneobvious purpose of futurology is to provide ‘timeperspectives’ that fit the slower-acting rhythms of the technical process, and the actions that can change this process. Another is to give advance warning of what its sponsors see as dangers to themselves. Everything from pollution to the growth of terrorism, from unemployment to changes of taste.
on
And why do you do it, this science, or is it an art? Who pays you, who calls the tunes? You’re right, most of us are paid nowadays, we do it as a job. But many of the famous futurologists, who did not call themselves that, did it more because they were driven to it by events, by passions, rather than for money. I’m thinking of Plato, of Thomas More, of Marx and Engels (who spoke to us just now), of of H. G. Wells, of William Morris, George Orwell, the many utopians, or dystopians. They became famous and sometimes rich but that was not their motive. They wanted to change the world, not just to study it. But why do we do it? I think some of us are driven by childhood experiences to prophesy, to try to re-make, the world as we first knew it. I’ve noticed that futurologists tend to predict or to propose a picture of the future that repeats the world as it seemed when they were young. George Orwell, whose picture of the future is so bleak, was, I believe, unhappy at school. William Morris, whose utopia is one of the few in which people are happy and are able to rule themselves without governments, had I think a rich and happy childhood. But the purpose of futurology (for those of us who are paid to do it) is of course to
I CELEBRATE MYSELF, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease. spear of summer
. observing
a
grass.4
Cough. .. And what of the techniques of futurology, what are they like? What sort of things do you do, day by day? And if it’s the future you’re seeking where do you actually look, how do you make it visible? Well first there are the oldest methods, more with numbers than words. We look at statistics (other people’s usually) and, after making corrections to make them comparable, we plot curves, make tables, and try to find equations that fit. In plotting trends we deal with a few statistics at a time but in methods like cross-impact analysis or computer modelling, we try to find data on everything that seems to be important and we study the combined effect of each variable on all the others. That’s what enables us to make moving pictures (in numbers only) of how different policies could work out for years ahead. Doing this kind of work we are usually FUTURES
tune 1988
Essay
sitting at desks or computer terminals or consulting journals and books of reference. Most of the time we are not so Fuch looking at data, or calculating, as thinking about what assumptions to make and how to go about the work. Yes, there are many assumptions behind what we do but these are not visible in the result. That is a weakness. The more descriptive techniques are largely a question of writing. Sometimes we ask people to make estimates, or to react to statements, but usually we are working alone at our desks with the data. You might wonder why the future is apparently more visible sitting down, indoors, looking at pieces of paper, than it is out of doors, standing upright, walking about or using one’s eyes and ears? I’ve never been provoked to ask that before but it’s an interesting thought. Another technique (also done sitting down) is scenario writing. You could call this the writing of imagined histories, but with more statistics than is usual in a history book, and of course no peopleare mentioned by name. It’s all supposed to happen through ‘economic influence’, ‘environmental impact’ and such abstractions rather than through the conscious acts of people. A more human-sounding technique is Delphi-asking experts to estimate the likely dates of events like nuclear war or the general use of domestic robots. There is also ‘normative forecasting’. This is more like political action than academic research-think for instance of the fiveyear plans in socialist countries or of President Kennedy’s forecast (or command, or promise) that the people of the USA would put people on the moon by 1970. They did it by 1969.
When we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in the state of nature. And if we reflect upon the vast diversity of plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most difficult climates and treatment, we are driven to conclude that this great variability is due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat
FUTURES
June 1988
different from, those to which species had been exposed under
319
the parentnature.. .5
Yes, I can see that there is plenty of variability, but what do all your techniques have in common? That they are written. All the techniques, whether they depend upon numbers or words, reach the world as reports, as written statements, as books if you like, but a special type of book that is meant to plan and to legitimize the future. It is I think significant (and this is probably why we look for the future on paper) that nothing can be done, in industrial society, unless it appears first symbolically, in wordsand numbers, waiting to be approved, or rejected. Is that going to change, I wonder? If it did then the future could be really different from what we know at present for this, our dependence on writing out the future before it happens, is surely a powerful stabilizer, and perhaps a crippling fault. Could it be a hindrance to the spirit, to life itself? So you see, futurology is only a more far-seeing example of the way that everyone works, in the world of technology, by trying to plan things out on paper before they happen in life. In the real world as we call it. Though I’d say, while we persist in writing before doing, that the writing is the more real part. What follows is not really living, it’s just going through the motions. We intend to sing the love of danger, habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt essential elements of our poetry.
will
the
be
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath-a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.6
That may be so but down!
the driver
is sitting
320
Essay
And what are the limitations of trying perceive the future in this way?
to
The main one, as I’ve said, is that we can only foresee extrapolations of trends that exist now and these are not the trends which will be operating in future times. This is because, in all our techniques, we are limited by the preferences and assumptions of people now living, by our own self-interest, which is not the self-interest of the people who will be living later on. This is probably what underlies the doubt that many people have about our science, or art. They feel that it’s trying to do the impossible. And it is, if you think that we are trying to present the future as pre-ordained, as being a mathematical function of the present. But few if any of us claim that. Most of us will say, if pressed, that what we can do is to open up our own minds, and those who read our reports, to the possibilities and effects of the actions of people living now. We know very well that ours is not the whole story. The future will include more than ourselves and our perceptions. Perhaps more than we can say. After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man-the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the wholeof human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.. .7
Well he seems to have said it (wasn’t that McLuhan?). Not that I believe him, or even understand what he is saying. . My last question: What do you think about history, and what do you think about time? How does your picture of to the the future relate to these, fundamentals, perhaps, of life as we know it? Difficult. Well,
History my first
first. reaction
is that history
books are written after the event, whereas we write ours before it happens. So don’t expect too much. A typical page in a history book is full of words beginning in capitals-the names of the people who did things and of the places where they did them. Traditionally, history consisted of ‘what people did’, and usually only the heroic or powerful ones. But futurology has to take account of things as well as people, or perhaps of things instead of people. By things I mean economic facts, the states of the environment, all sorts of statistics. But of course historical study is itself changing, becoming as much concerned and with the collective with things, actions of people, as is futurology. The influence of heroic individuals is no longer so great, except as images through which the public (ie, us) is distracted from what is really happening. Since the growth of technology life has become much more collective. But I’m forgetting the most important thing about a history book, whether it is about people or if it is about economies, classes, technical developments or whatever-the early pages are no guide at all to what happens later. Discontinuity, unexpectedness, sudden change, these are the norms. The continuity and stability that we seek in our lives, that governments and people try to maintain, is not what happens. What we call ‘disorder’, and ‘chaos’, what we try to make illegal and suppress by force, these are the things of which history consists. And I’ll admit that, with a few exceptions, we futurologists like most people, share this tendency to leave disorder out of account. We think of order as if it were natural and of disorder as if it were a crime. One of the exceptions was Herman Kahn, again. His book On Thermonuclear War was an early attempt to look at the historic possibilities. It horrified many, with its questions about the acceptable number of megadeaths, but it was actually a part of the attempt to maintain order, through ‘balance of terror’. However, he didn’t refuse to look. I’m wondering now as I write how futurology will look to its historians? Will it be seen as influential or as a waste of time? Will it be seen as a necessity, given the collective and technical nature of our FUTURES
lune 1988
Essay
fate, or will it appear as blindness, as a desperate attempt to impose the present on the future? I don’t know. And time. Here I think we are at our weakest. We claim to study the future but do we know what time is. In assuming clock time to be the only kind we could be hiding our own presence from ourselves, and hiding from the presence of our descendants. Time, being the element of mortality, being ‘what the mind is made of’ (if I may speak poetically) is emphatically not just the movement of clocks, or even of planets. It is experience itself, composed as we live it, the basis of being alive, rather than dead. Furthermore, in each generation, as new people are born and old people die, there is usually the urge to do anything but what the earlier generations did, what they prophesied, what they tried to make happen. Our ancestors didn’t have futurology, they didn’t have the bomb, they didn’t have electronics. Given these, look what we have done, compared to what the Victorians did, or expected that we would do. H. G. Wells didn’t predict the growth of the car. And no one predicted the growth of the pocket calculator.. . . There were so many surprises, what will happen next? I don’t feel that we allow, in our futurology, in our education, in our technical plans, in any of our long-term views and actions, for the fact that history is made, not given. That the time we live in is only possible because we live it. But Gertrude Stein is still waiting. She will have the last word: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.‘8
Notes Before beginning this essay I realized that futurology, appearing as it does in written form, is in the category of ‘books intended to influence the future’. So I looked over my bookshelves and pulled out 32 books, listed below, that unquestionably had great influence in later times. I then used a random number table and some deliberate choice to pick eight of them from which to enliven the reading of the text. The quotations are taken from the opening paragraphs, or verses.
FUTURES
June 1988
The authors
and titles
321
of the 32 books are:
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick The Futurist Manifestos Homer’s Odyssey Dante’s Divine Comedy Milton’s Paradise Lost Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell Whitman’s Leaves of Crass Shakespeare’s King Lear Brecht’s Galileo Confucius’s edition of The Classic Anthology (translated by Ezra Pound) Lao Tse’s Tao Te Ching Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones’ translation of The Mabinogion Levi-Strauss’s introduction to a Science of Mythology Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams Arendt’s The Human Condition Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Storyofmy Experiments with Truth Thoreau’s Walden Morris’s News From Nowhere Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four Plato’s Republic Hobbes’s Leviathan Darwin’s The Origin of the Species Einstein’s Relativity Toffler’s The Third Wave Ellul’s The Technological Society McLuhan’s Understanding Media Stein’s The Making of Americans Ovid’s Metamorphosis Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and fvil Virgil’s Aeneid
The quotations in the text are taken from the following eight books, in the order shown: 1. Virgil’s Aeneid of 19 BC, translated by W. F. Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin Books, 1956). 2. Dante’s Divine Comedy of 1321, translated by John D. Sinclair (New York, Oxford University Press, 1939). Manifesto of 1848, trans3. The Communist lated by Samuel Moore (Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin Books, 1967). 4. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass of 1855 (London, Seeker and Warburg, 1959). The Origin of the Species of 1859 5. Darwin’s (London, J. M. Dent, 1971). 6. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos of 1909, translated by R. W. Fleet, edited by Umbro Apollonio (London, Thames and Hudson, 1973). 7. McLuhan’s Understanding Media of 1964 (New York, McGraw Hill, 1965). 8. Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, 1925 (New York, Peter Owen, 1968).
ESSAY Writing the future John Chris Jones
What are you futurologists
actually
doing?
My first thought is that we are looking at patterns of events in the world and trying to pick out the ones that will persist and the ones that will change. The patterns we look at are those that can be measured and expressed as numbers. Put like that it sounds very sensible and rational, justifying perhaps the -ology, our claim to be scientific. And then I remember that some of us do not work through observation but prefer to speculate, to construct imaginary futures, to make models in which different patterns of events can be tried out. To do this we use both words and numbers, starting from what is happening now and testing policies and plans before they are put into effect. This is a tale of arms and of a man. Fated to be an exile, he was the first man to sail from the land of Troy and reach Italy, at its Lavinian shore. He met many tribulations on his way both by land and on the ocean; high Heaven willed it, for Juno was ruthless and could not forget her anger. And he had also to endure great suffering in warfare. But at last he succeeded in founding his city, and installing the gods of his race in the Latin land; and that was the origin of the Latin nation, the Lords of Alba, and the proud battlements of Rome.
Was that you speaking? No, that was Virgil writing in 19 BC.’ You and I are not the only ones who are writing this, it’s a collective work, as is the making of the future. The essay is not what you and I write, nor what the other voices say, it’s the effect of all of us
John Chris Jones is a member of Futures’s advisory board and can be contacted via the editorial office.
FUTURES lune 1988
together. The readers are the authors of the thoughts that come to them as they read, this is just a context in which they can think. What are they thinking as they read this? . . . That is not predictable, thank goodness. In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear.
That was Dante,2 he is about to visit The Inferno. Have you ever been?
Certainly not, /et’s return or rather the present. ..
to the
future,
What do you see when you do futurology, when you ‘look at events’ or when you ‘make models and speculate’? Do you actually see the future? No we don’t. Few of us claim to see what is actually going to happen although sometimes our extrapolations, for instance of the growth of population, do come about. That the number of people in the world reached 5 billion in 1987 did not surprise us at all. Some futurologists had been saying that it would about 40 years ago when the population was about half of that. But there are some events, such as the decision of the Arab countries to raise the price of oil in the early 197Os, which took everyone by surprise. Herman Kahn used to say that he could only predict what he called ‘surprise-free’ futures, that is the pattern of events if the political context doesn’t change. He is assuming that people will not change their minds. But what do we actually see, through futurology, that is not visible without it? I’d say that the essential difference is that
318
Essay
we are studying the collective future and that we use methods that allow us to combine what is visible to many observers into a single picture, or model, that can then be seen by any one. This is much more than you or I could see from our direct experience. But, being generalized, it is of course much more abstract. Words and numbers, not the events themselves. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lorn and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open, fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.3
That has nothing to do with me. i’llgo with my questions . . .
provide what our employers need. It is paid for by big organizations, and by governments. What they look for is a way of seeing the future on the same timescale as are the collective actions and policies which they initiate and carry out. Industrial life is formed by investing in machines, processes, large constructions, organizational changes, etc, that take many years to mature, often longerthan is the time-scale over which the money has to produce a return or the government has to seek popular support. Oneobvious purpose of futurology is to provide ‘timeperspectives’ that fit the slower-acting rhythms of the technical process, and the actions that can change this process. Another is to give advance warning of what its sponsors see as dangers to themselves. Everything from pollution to the growth of terrorism, from unemployment to changes of taste.
on
And why do you do it, this science, or is it an art? Who pays you, who calls the tunes? You’re right, most of us are paid nowadays, we do it as a job. But many of the famous futurologists, who did not call themselves that, did it more because they were driven to it by events, by passions, rather than for money. I’m thinking of Plato, of Thomas More, of Marx and Engels (who spoke to us just now), of of H. G. Wells, of William Morris, George Orwell, the many utopians, or dystopians. They became famous and sometimes rich but that was not their motive. They wanted to change the world, not just to study it. But why do we do it? I think some of us are driven by childhood experiences to prophesy, to try to re-make, the world as we first knew it. I’ve noticed that futurologists tend to predict or to propose a picture of the future that repeats the world as it seemed when they were young. George Orwell, whose picture of the future is so bleak, was, I believe, unhappy at school. William Morris, whose utopia is one of the few in which people are happy and are able to rule themselves without governments, had I think a rich and happy childhood. But the purpose of futurology (for those of us who are paid to do it) is of course to
I CELEBRATE MYSELF, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease. spear of summer
. observing
a
grass.4
Cough. .. And what of the techniques of futurology, what are they like? What sort of things do you do, day by day? And if it’s the future you’re seeking where do you actually look, how do you make it visible? Well first there are the oldest methods, more with numbers than words. We look at statistics (other people’s usually) and, after making corrections to make them comparable, we plot curves, make tables, and try to find equations that fit. In plotting trends we deal with a few statistics at a time but in methods like cross-impact analysis or computer modelling, we try to find data on everything that seems to be important and we study the combined effect of each variable on all the others. That’s what enables us to make moving pictures (in numbers only) of how different policies could work out for years ahead. Doing this kind of work we are usually FUTURES
tune 1988
Essay
sitting at desks or computer terminals or consulting journals and books of reference. Most of the time we are not so Fuch looking at data, or calculating, as thinking about what assumptions to make and how to go about the work. Yes, there are many assumptions behind what we do but these are not visible in the result. That is a weakness. The more descriptive techniques are largely a question of writing. Sometimes we ask people to make estimates, or to react to statements, but usually we are working alone at our desks with the data. You might wonder why the future is apparently more visible sitting down, indoors, looking at pieces of paper, than it is out of doors, standing upright, walking about or using one’s eyes and ears? I’ve never been provoked to ask that before but it’s an interesting thought. Another technique (also done sitting down) is scenario writing. You could call this the writing of imagined histories, but with more statistics than is usual in a history book, and of course no peopleare mentioned by name. It’s all supposed to happen through ‘economic influence’, ‘environmental impact’ and such abstractions rather than through the conscious acts of people. A more human-sounding technique is Delphi-asking experts to estimate the likely dates of events like nuclear war or the general use of domestic robots. There is also ‘normative forecasting’. This is more like political action than academic research-think for instance of the fiveyear plans in socialist countries or of President Kennedy’s forecast (or command, or promise) that the people of the USA would put people on the moon by 1970. They did it by 1969.
When we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in the state of nature. And if we reflect upon the vast diversity of plants and animals which have been cultivated, and which have varied during all ages under the most difficult climates and treatment, we are driven to conclude that this great variability is due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat
FUTURES
June 1988
different from, those to which species had been exposed under
319
the parentnature.. .5
Yes, I can see that there is plenty of variability, but what do all your techniques have in common? That they are written. All the techniques, whether they depend upon numbers or words, reach the world as reports, as written statements, as books if you like, but a special type of book that is meant to plan and to legitimize the future. It is I think significant (and this is probably why we look for the future on paper) that nothing can be done, in industrial society, unless it appears first symbolically, in wordsand numbers, waiting to be approved, or rejected. Is that going to change, I wonder? If it did then the future could be really different from what we know at present for this, our dependence on writing out the future before it happens, is surely a powerful stabilizer, and perhaps a crippling fault. Could it be a hindrance to the spirit, to life itself? So you see, futurology is only a more far-seeing example of the way that everyone works, in the world of technology, by trying to plan things out on paper before they happen in life. In the real world as we call it. Though I’d say, while we persist in writing before doing, that the writing is the more real part. What follows is not really living, it’s just going through the motions. We intend to sing the love of danger, habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt essential elements of our poetry.
will
the
be
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath-a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.6
That may be so but down!
the driver
is sitting
320
Essay
And what are the limitations of trying perceive the future in this way?
to
The main one, as I’ve said, is that we can only foresee extrapolations of trends that exist now and these are not the trends which will be operating in future times. This is because, in all our techniques, we are limited by the preferences and assumptions of people now living, by our own self-interest, which is not the self-interest of the people who will be living later on. This is probably what underlies the doubt that many people have about our science, or art. They feel that it’s trying to do the impossible. And it is, if you think that we are trying to present the future as pre-ordained, as being a mathematical function of the present. But few if any of us claim that. Most of us will say, if pressed, that what we can do is to open up our own minds, and those who read our reports, to the possibilities and effects of the actions of people living now. We know very well that ours is not the whole story. The future will include more than ourselves and our perceptions. Perhaps more than we can say. After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man-the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the wholeof human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.. .7
Well he seems to have said it (wasn’t that McLuhan?). Not that I believe him, or even understand what he is saying. . My last question: What do you think about history, and what do you think about time? How does your picture of to the the future relate to these, fundamentals, perhaps, of life as we know it? Difficult. Well,
History my first
first. reaction
is that history
books are written after the event, whereas we write ours before it happens. So don’t expect too much. A typical page in a history book is full of words beginning in capitals-the names of the people who did things and of the places where they did them. Traditionally, history consisted of ‘what people did’, and usually only the heroic or powerful ones. But futurology has to take account of things as well as people, or perhaps of things instead of people. By things I mean economic facts, the states of the environment, all sorts of statistics. But of course historical study is itself changing, becoming as much concerned and with the collective with things, actions of people, as is futurology. The influence of heroic individuals is no longer so great, except as images through which the public (ie, us) is distracted from what is really happening. Since the growth of technology life has become much more collective. But I’m forgetting the most important thing about a history book, whether it is about people or if it is about economies, classes, technical developments or whatever-the early pages are no guide at all to what happens later. Discontinuity, unexpectedness, sudden change, these are the norms. The continuity and stability that we seek in our lives, that governments and people try to maintain, is not what happens. What we call ‘disorder’, and ‘chaos’, what we try to make illegal and suppress by force, these are the things of which history consists. And I’ll admit that, with a few exceptions, we futurologists like most people, share this tendency to leave disorder out of account. We think of order as if it were natural and of disorder as if it were a crime. One of the exceptions was Herman Kahn, again. His book On Thermonuclear War was an early attempt to look at the historic possibilities. It horrified many, with its questions about the acceptable number of megadeaths, but it was actually a part of the attempt to maintain order, through ‘balance of terror’. However, he didn’t refuse to look. I’m wondering now as I write how futurology will look to its historians? Will it be seen as influential or as a waste of time? Will it be seen as a necessity, given the collective and technical nature of our FUTURES
lune 1988
Essay
fate, or will it appear as blindness, as a desperate attempt to impose the present on the future? I don’t know. And time. Here I think we are at our weakest. We claim to study the future but do we know what time is. In assuming clock time to be the only kind we could be hiding our own presence from ourselves, and hiding from the presence of our descendants. Time, being the element of mortality, being ‘what the mind is made of’ (if I may speak poetically) is emphatically not just the movement of clocks, or even of planets. It is experience itself, composed as we live it, the basis of being alive, rather than dead. Furthermore, in each generation, as new people are born and old people die, there is usually the urge to do anything but what the earlier generations did, what they prophesied, what they tried to make happen. Our ancestors didn’t have futurology, they didn’t have the bomb, they didn’t have electronics. Given these, look what we have done, compared to what the Victorians did, or expected that we would do. H. G. Wells didn’t predict the growth of the car. And no one predicted the growth of the pocket calculator.. . . There were so many surprises, what will happen next? I don’t feel that we allow, in our futurology, in our education, in our technical plans, in any of our long-term views and actions, for the fact that history is made, not given. That the time we live in is only possible because we live it. But Gertrude Stein is still waiting. She will have the last word: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.‘8
Notes Before beginning this essay I realized that futurology, appearing as it does in written form, is in the category of ‘books intended to influence the future’. So I looked over my bookshelves and pulled out 32 books, listed below, that unquestionably had great influence in later times. I then used a random number table and some deliberate choice to pick eight of them from which to enliven the reading of the text. The quotations are taken from the opening paragraphs, or verses.
FUTURES
June 1988
The authors
and titles
321
of the 32 books are:
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick The Futurist Manifestos Homer’s Odyssey Dante’s Divine Comedy Milton’s Paradise Lost Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell Whitman’s Leaves of Crass Shakespeare’s King Lear Brecht’s Galileo Confucius’s edition of The Classic Anthology (translated by Ezra Pound) Lao Tse’s Tao Te Ching Wilhelm’s translation of The I Ching Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones’ translation of The Mabinogion Levi-Strauss’s introduction to a Science of Mythology Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams Arendt’s The Human Condition Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Storyofmy Experiments with Truth Thoreau’s Walden Morris’s News From Nowhere Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four Plato’s Republic Hobbes’s Leviathan Darwin’s The Origin of the Species Einstein’s Relativity Toffler’s The Third Wave Ellul’s The Technological Society McLuhan’s Understanding Media Stein’s The Making of Americans Ovid’s Metamorphosis Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and fvil Virgil’s Aeneid
The quotations in the text are taken from the following eight books, in the order shown: 1. Virgil’s Aeneid of 19 BC, translated by W. F. Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin Books, 1956). 2. Dante’s Divine Comedy of 1321, translated by John D. Sinclair (New York, Oxford University Press, 1939). Manifesto of 1848, trans3. The Communist lated by Samuel Moore (Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin Books, 1967). 4. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass of 1855 (London, Seeker and Warburg, 1959). The Origin of the Species of 1859 5. Darwin’s (London, J. M. Dent, 1971). 6. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos of 1909, translated by R. W. Fleet, edited by Umbro Apollonio (London, Thames and Hudson, 1973). 7. McLuhan’s Understanding Media of 1964 (New York, McGraw Hill, 1965). 8. Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, 1925 (New York, Peter Owen, 1968).