One of the tragedies of our time is that we’ve caught up to our future.
Star Trek, in the mid-60s, posited that there would be something called the “Eugenics Wars” in the late 1990s. Gene Roddenberry didn’t worry about making up this rather silly (in hindsight) bit of canon arcana, because, after all, 1999 was the distant future! Who cared what some sci-fi television show in the 1960s said about it?
(Later generations of writers would fill the ensuing plot hole when the 1990s failed to erupt into open warfare between normal humans and genetically-modified superhumans by simply saying it was a “shadow war”.)
Of course, Arthur C. Clarke provided us with the most enduring example of reality overtaking future history with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Our own version of humanity seems uninterested in space compared to the busy beavers of his book; an established lunar base, with a second generation already being born there as natives? Tourist flights into low Earth orbit?
The late Victorians and the fashionistas of the Jazz Age had no qualms trying to peer into the future.
Postcards were printed up over a century ago predicting that in the year 2000, we’d all have personal zeppelins, that cities would be covered in glass roofs to keep out the weather, and buildings could be towed around by steam-powered locomotives.
People in the year 1900 didn’t have the weight of specific predictions of their own to meet. There are no “In the year 1900…” texts from the year 1800. People in the year 1800 had no reason to suspect that life a century from then would be substantively different than it was at that time. Sure, the politics might change, but the Enlightenment had ended. The intelligentsia figured that everything that was going to be known was known. Deism was on the rise, a society based on Reason was either about to come about or was already ascendant. Surely, there could be no more massive changes than what had already occurred!
Blame the death of the future on our “conquest” of space. When Star Trek (there’s Roddenberry again) famously called it the “final” frontier, it represented the End of History, especially for the Western World. After all, the frontier was how we defined ourselves throughout the entire Age of Discovery, American Manifest Destiny, Colonialism from the 15th century on up. With the planting of the American flag on the moon on July 20th, 1969, the entirety of the human drive to expand and explore, then ongoing for five centuries, reached its apex.
We didn’t realize it at the time, of course. Wernher von Braun saw the moon as an inconsequential pebble on the way to Mars. Popular fancy was captivated by stories of moon bases, orbiting space stations, and rocket flights for the middle-class consumer. We put fins on our cars and listened to our children tell us they wanted to be rocketmen when they grew up.
The delightful thing was how soon this bright, clean future was going to happen. Computers would make all the hard parts easy; within, oh, twenty years, those smart young men with the button-down shirts and mechanical pencils in their breast pockets would take care of all the issues. Why, by the mid-nineties, it would be considered as inconsequential as getting on an airplane!
We have been disabused of the notion of continual progress, even as the world keeps progressing around us. No, that’s not quite it. We’ve lost the sense that all progress is positive. This has never been a constant in society; thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment were entirely convinced that the new ‘scientific mind’ of the era was a positive development, but the Victorians were much more skeptical by the end of their century as to the achievements of the ‘progression’ of the previous devotions to Reason and Scientific Inquiry. (We have this backing away from the legacy of the Enlightenment to thank for Marxism and Anarchism, among other radical societal theories.)
Our own postmodern condition — and our cynicism about our own prospects — have seemingly turned our eyes from speculation about our own futures. We consign this thinking to well-paid and out-of-touch “futurists” who work for large multi-national corporations and think about what the consumer of the future may look like, and what they might want to buy. We talk in grand abstractions, “Trends” and “Microtrends“, and even then, we’re talking about the next five years, maybe the next decade. Of course, talking in specifics just seems silly as well: George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years talks about Mexico becoming a world power, and Japan and Turkey teaming up against an American-lead alliance, which strikes most modern readers as more than slightly implausible.
And then there’s the futurists of the Singularity, who believe that, at some point in the near future, humanity will have its cognitive functions surpassed by our computers, leading them to exponentially improve themselves, the consequences of which are our own sublimation into the silicon brain, and a utopia of abundance and the end of scarcity for all.
Being enthusiastic about the future is viewed by many to be a sign of Pollyanna-ism, of being simple-minded, of not thinking critically. Our futures are increasingly dystopian: the eternal urban sprawl of Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the fundamentalism and (occasionally self-inflicted) gender-inequality of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the horrors of 1984 and Brave New World.
We need to start thinking big again. “Think globally, act locally” is crap. Act globally. Make something that will last a thousand years. Don’t let your fancy schooling, and the peace of the environment you find yourself in, lull you into thinking this will last forever. Plan on how to make the whole world a better place, and then do it. Don’t think that the future’s going to be terrible, because, if history can be trusted to teach us anything, it’s that things keep getting better, and they get better because people *make sure* they get better.
So get out there and make sure the future is good.
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