Is There Any Future in Futurism?

By Stefan Kanfer

Prophecy, n. The art and practice of selling one's credibility for future delivery.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary In a characteristically dire report, the Central Intelligence Agency has just warned of potential global upheavals "almost beyond comprehension." The cause of the chaos: climatic change that will trigger massive crop failures, drought and widespread famine (see ENVIRONMENT). In contrast to this augury of doom, Herman Kahn, ebullient director of the foresighted Hudson Institute, has just looked at the future and found it good. His new book, The Next 200 Years, offers a plausible scenario of declining population growth, rising levels of affluence and, given the right so cio-economic conditions, "virtually eternal energy sources" and food for everyone.

Humorist Robert Benchley once divided the world into two groups:

those who divide the world into two groups, and those who do not. The men at the institute belong in the first category. Futurists, some conclude, are either Malthusians or Cornuco-pians. Malthusians foresee a world where there is not enough of anything to go around -- except people. The Cornucopians of the Hudson Institute find economic growth an essential for the future. The high consumption of the West, they argue, will lead the East to a land of plenty. Economist B.

Bruce-Biggs concurs: "The neo-Malthusians would have us be more generous and unselfish and less greedy and materialistic. No decent man would disagree, but are they more persuasive than Confucius, Buddha, Isaiah, or Jesus Christ? Have computers greater authority than Scripture?"

These are far from romantic queries. Indeed, their impact seems to have reached enemy shores. In its notorious pronouncement of 1972, the Cassandras of the Club of Rome warned that the world was consuming and polluting itself to death. The author of this suicide pact, said the clubmen, was economic growth. But last month the club decided that the vice was versa: growth, managed selectively, could close the gap between wealthy and deprived nations.

Caroming between gloom and euphoria, the reader of such conflicting reports can hardly be blamed for a queasy feeling of futurist shock. For prophecy is no longer confined to science fiction or Jeane Dixon. It is in the laboratories, think tanks, universities -- everywhere. A.D. 2000 has now replaced 1984 as the favorite year for speculation. At least 400 colleges are offering futurist courses; the World Future Society claims 18,000 members, holds international conferences and produces a semimonthly journal, The Futurist, to ponder new times.

But neither the futurists nor their adherents have ever been able to agree on a unified vision. The fault may lie not with the stargazers, but with the public. As Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni observes: "Too often we oscillate between blind faith and cynical contempt for futurologists. It might help to realize that like other professionals, their qualities vary; and while the more reputable ones are in evitably better than no help at all, no one owns a clear crys tal ball."

Which forecaster, then, can be believed? Are the dooms day seers correct in their despair? Or the technologues who detect abundance just around the corner? Was Konrad Lorenz accurate when he said that aggression was built into human germ plasm? Or was Jacob Bronowski right when he put forth the proposition that war is a way station in The Ascent of Man?

The ambiguities of the future have intrigued humanity since Joseph parsed Pharaoh's dream and forecast seven years of plenty and seven of lean. Today prophecy remains the most extreme form of curiosity and a vital part of all Western societies. Yet the profound belief in posterity seems uniquely American. The U.S. was, after all, a country that had no yesterday of its own.

Thomas Jefferson spoke for his entire generation when he said, "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." The past belonged to the Old World; the future was owned by the new one.

Well over a century later, that future remained a dream, peopled with citizens of unparalleled wealth and power.

Constraints were unthinkable. What 19th century American could resist the poet-prophet Walt Whitman when he urged his nation to "Sail forth -- Steer for the deep waters only/ Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,/ For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,/ . . . /O daring joy, but safe! Are they not all the seas of God?" Even in this century, H.G. Wells' premonitory works were consumed voraciously in the U.S. He seemed Whit man redivivus: "All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the un ending succession of days, when beings who are not latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars."

After the trenches of the Great War, however, science fiction and Realpolitik could no longer speak of posterity in the future perfect. The new paraphernalia of death, the threat of overpopulation, the thoughts of behavioral engineering -- all contributed to an exhaustion of the imaginative impulse. Tomorrow was no longer a dream but a fevered apparition. Wells titled his final pessimistic work Mind at the End of Its Tether. Huxley's Brave New World, Capek's creation of the robot in R.U.R., seemed increasingly pertinent. In the post-atomic era the very idea of a future was arguable. Antiutopias grew like botulism in a sealed jar. Kafka's guilt-laden bureaucrats, Beckett's barren moral landscapes denned the American mood. Orwell's 1984, Burgess's A Clockwork Orange expressed the new existential despair, the feeling that one's grandchildren would wake up in a place very much like hell, administrated by totalitarians far more ingenious than Beelzebub or Belial, Stalin or Hitler.

Recently, nonfiction has tried to confirm those dire forecasts. Biologist Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) tours campuses warning of a planet smothered by proliferation and overconsumption; Barry Commoner's new volume, The Poverty of Power, sees capitalism as an irresponsible, even destructive force in global affairs. Nuclear physicists describe the radiation catastrophes inherent in nuclear power plants; meteorologists calculate the insults to the ozone present in every flight of the SST; biochemists estimate the brain cells destroyed with every martini. Even the Pill, once announced as the answer to population control, now appears to have hazardous side effects.

Such perceptions may be glimpses of tomorrow, or they may be magnifications of the present--shadows thrown upon a screen labeled A.D. 2000. They may be accurate, or they may be as invalid as the predictions of almost a century ago that saw city dwellers transported everywhere by that newfangled invention, the balloon. Forecasters have a habit of extrapolating from their surroundings: the scientist from the laboratory, the statistician from his calculator, the administrator from his think tank. Such predictions rise, in Lewis Mumford's phrase, from a mind "operating with its own conceptual apparatus, in its own restrictive field ... determined to make the world over in its own oversimplified terms, willfully rejecting interests and values incompatible with its own assumptions."

Does this mean that prediction has no future? Hardly.

The human race can no more stop prophesying than it can stop breathing. Indeed, if anything has a future, it is futurism. The United Nations Institute for Training and Research sponsored an international survey of futures studies. Sweden has a Secretariat for Futures Studies reporting directly to the Prime Minister. The European Communities are now contemplating the establishment of a permanent group, "Europe + 30," to forecast Europe's needs for the next three decades. Last February Ohio's Senator John Glenn conducted a symposium on "Our Third Century." Scores of experts testified, among them Barry Commoner, Alvin Toffler (Future Shock), Nelson Rockefeller, B.F. Skinner and Buckminster Fuller.

In an epoch of uncertainties, the hunger for prediction is rising to the famine level. Never before has speculative fiction been so popular. Thirty-five science-fiction books were published in 1945; in 1975,900 such books were published. Even the pseudo sciences are flourishing. Shrewdly unspecific astrological charts can be found in most major newspapers (PISCES: Do your work despite passing moments of stress). The National Enquirer's annual contest to gauge readers' psychic ability is among the weekly's most popular features. In fact, it has become impossible to lead a modern life without some form of prophecy. Every stock market letter, every long-range weather report and baseball schedule is a prediction; every garden and every child is an expressed belief in the future. As Toffler observes, "Under conditions of high-speed change, a democracy without the ability to anticipate condemns itself to death."

But just how much can it anticipate? How deeply into the future can it peer? Unhappily, not very far at all. No matter how sophisticated the devices or demographics, certain events and event makers will always lie outside the scope of seers. The maniac, the genius, the random event are unpredictable; yet they have formed much of this century's history.

There is no reason to suspect that they may not form the history of the next.

Moreover, because of popular fascination with the remote, far too many futurists are busy examining the millennium, as if upon Jan. 1, 2000, a new apocalypse or renaissance would magically appear. The calendar is not so cooperative; by definition, the most astonishing changes always go unheralded. Of course, some predictions can be made. Given current trends --and even these are contingent--there will be increasing numbers of Third World citizens and a proportionately decreasing number of Westerners. There will be smaller concentrations of young Americans, and larger colonies of old ones. Working hours will drop; the political power of women and ethnic minorities will rise. Leisure will expand; traditional food and fuel supplies will diminish. Longevity will increase--and so will the dangers of ecological mismanagement and military conflict.

Futurists can help to forestall these troubles. Or they can press for changes in some remote purgatory or Eden. Examining Herman Kahn's thesis, Adam Yarmolinsky, University of Massachusetts professor, asks a series of rhetorical questions: "How do we get from here to there? What is the best mind set to move us in that direction? Are we more likely to succeed if we keep our eyes firmly on the target centuries away? Or ought we to be more concerned about pitfells, obstacles, difficulties we seem to be encountering in the immediate future?"

All responsible seers know the answers. The future of futurism does not reside in the millennium.

It lies rooted in the current human condition--the saving of cities, the administration of foreign policy, the forestalling of war and famine and natural catastrophe.

Given decent underpinnings, tomorrow may yet take care of itself. What Novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote three decades ago must remain the moral force behind all truly prophetic workers: "As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it." Stefan Kanfer

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