The Future as Zeitgeist

...It assumes that the next great stride in human affairs may come about through discoveries in clairvoyance, precognition and "telekinesis," new sources of psychic energy that will emerge with the "release" of the brain from some of its humdrum tasks...

...The Next Hundred Years by Harrison Brown and his colleagues at Cal Tech (first issued in 1957, and just re-issued in paperback by Viking) goes over the same ground as the Baade book, but within the American context, and comes to some pessimistic conclusions about the scarcity of educated manpower...

...It used to be that in choosing a strategy in a "game against nature" (i.e., uncontrolled situations), one could follow a maximin path (go for broke) or a minimax route (cut losses...

...The Foreseeable Future by Sir George Thompson (Viking, paperback), is a hop-skip-and-jump through all these problems, technological, demographic and biological...

...Now there is a man unafraid of the future...

...Man and his Future, a Ciba Foundation symposium (J...

...In 50 years' time the size of fruits will be doubled...

...Few persons would now declare with confidence that something is unknowable...

...What I sought to do was speculate—in a "controlled" way, to be sure—about the face of society in 1985 and beyond...

...And Futuribles, edited by de Jouvenel (Droz, Geneva), is a collection of essays speculating on political trends— the only one of these volumes that touches on this subject—in Asia and Europe...

...The real difficulty in "experimenting with the future," however, is that situations in politics (unlike probability situations, which are based on repeated experiments) have a "once-in-a-lifetime" consequence...

...Fritz Baade's The Race to the Year 2000 (Cresset Press, London) attempts to picture the population curve, the food supply, the energy resources and the education potentials in the bi-polar world, indicating those elements which may put the West at a disadvantage 35 years from now...

...Few of these concerns are manifested in a fascinating compendium, Life in the Twenty-First Century, edited by M. Vassiliev and S. Gouschev (Penguin, London...

...But it is not only de Jouvenel who has taken the bold leap...

...Consisting of a series of interviews by two Soviet journalists with 27 Russian scientists in such diverse fields as water power, surgery, astro-physics, and botany, the book is uniformly cheerful in tone and mixes Utopian visions with dialectics in wonderful fashion: "Within a few years we shall be able to enjoy stoneless cherries and plums...

...The beauty of it all, I thought, was that nobody could fault me, at least not for 25 years...

...If you lose you are dead...

...All of this underscores a significant change m moral temper and mood...

...Millions of persons have been killed or have had their lives committed by individuals who held that fanatical belief...

...in part, ruminations about the consequences of what I called the new "intellectual technology" (linear programming, game theory, simulation and the like...

...The Unilever Corporation's study, 1984 (London), is a straightforward projection of 25-year trends in Britain, using data starting from 1959 (hence the conjunction with Orwell's year) that deals largely with population, incomes, housing and the like...

...One of the hallmarks of modernity is the awareness of change, and the struggle to control its direction and pace...

...To appreciate the extent of the revolution taking place in biology today remember that man has doubled the ear of corn in 50 years...

...In part, this involved extrapolations of existing trends...

...And the Ford Foundation, that extraordinary spotter of new trends, had underwritten this adventure with a five-year grant...

...A. Churchill Ltd., London), concentrates on the population and energy resource problem in relation to biological possibilities and poses some ethical problems created by the fact that man is now on the threshold of controlling biological evolution...

...We expect science and technology to rework the map of society, and not many challenge their claims any longer...

...In his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-1842), perhaps the last individual attempt to write a synoptic account of human knowledge (from astronomy to sociology), Auguste Comte cited as an example of the inherently unknowable the chemical composition of the distant stars and the question of "whether there were organized beings living on their surface...

...and in part, random fancy...

...The Future of Man—there are only a limited number of titles possible with the words "future" and "man"—by Nobel Prize-winning zoologist P. B. Medawar (Methuen, London), concentrates equally on the questions of genetic inheritance and intelligence...

...By obtaining polyploids man will be able to create new species which do not exist in nature...

...One of the chief concerns of the book, which ties it to those by Medawar and Brown, is the question of how to educate a sufficient fraction of the population to manage the complex tasks which a modern "intellectual technology" imposes upon the society...

...In 50 years...

...Yet every generation also feels that the foundation of its knowledge is inadequate, and that the social forms as we know them are about to change...

...I find it a most heartening development, therefore, that an existentialist element has entered modern utility theory, which is the foundation for so much of the work of rational prediction...

...Dennis Gabor's Inventing the Future (Secker and Warburg, London), a felicitous phrase coined by Melvin Lasky when an earlier version of Professor Gabor's essay appeared in Encounter, is one of the few books which links up changes in technology and population to the control of nuclear arms...

...Within a year the fecund venture produced over 50 studies, and in sorting out the different approaches implicit in those forays, I was able to come up with "Twelve Modes of Prediction" in the social sciences...

...Most of the modes of prediction are either extrapolative (projecting existing trends into the future) or probabilistic (statistical decisions taking chance into account...

...Clearly, the man who invented that has learned the lessons of love and politics...

...Gabor estimates, following some British studies, that little more than 10 per cent of a population can truly profit from a college education: Where then will the future mathematicians, physicists, economists, et al., come from...

...Medawar admits a possible decline in national intelligence, and suggests ways of dealing with this decline...

...It ends with a breathtaking paper by J. B. S. Haldane entitled "Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years...

...No sooner had I mentioned my new field to a few colleagues than I was told—a proof, perhaps, of the theory of simultaneous invention—that my ingenious and subtle friend, Bertrand de Jouvenel, had begun a new project, dubbed, in a French neologism, Futuribles, to do the same thing...

...Many, many others have begun to ride the wind...

...A different sort of book, and a forerunner of many similar studies, is Peter Hall's London 2000 (Faber, London), a meticulous examination of the probable growth lines of the London metropolis, and a plan to balance residential, office, industrial and recreational areas...

...And as soon as we have assimilated the information transmitted by the space probe of Mars and Venus, we shall be in a position to answer the question of whether there is life as we know it on the solar planets...

...It is the rationalist fallacy to believe that there is a single true, or optimal, path to any single decision...

...or Bernard Wolfe's Limbo '90, the effort to apply cybernetic theory (or a bastard psychoanalytic version of it) to the Great Power struggle—but attempts to deal with the state of the world in some defined period hence...

...As happens so often in the groves of academe, I became a consultant to the Ford Foundation, charged with the task of evaluating the products of Futuribles...

...So secure is the dominion of science that the obverse attitude rules: Today we feel that there are no inherent secrets in the universe, that all is open...

...Polyploidy affords a marvelous example of the change of the quantitative to the qualitative: the well-defined increase of the quantity of nuclear matter (chromosome) is accompanied by the change of the hereditary nature of the organisms...

...In the last month or so, I have received ten books that deal seriously with the future, and surely there must be more...

...Within two decades, Gustave Kirchoff applied spectrum analysis to the stars and provided that very knowledge about their chemical composition which Comte had declared unobtainable...

...I wrote a long paper entitled "The PostIndustrial Society" and laid it aside to mature, like old wine, for the future...

...These are not books of science fiction—like Leo Szilard's The Voice of the Dolphins, a fantasy about how the world came to be disarmed...

...Now, a third strategy has appeared: One can choose, depending upon temperament or values, a maximin or a minimax throw, but then, statistically, one can hedge one's bet by an added probability which has been termed, so neatly, "the criterion of regret...

...What I had not reckoned with (the first way in which I was immediately faulted) was the Zeitgeist...

...But it would be the sheerest arrogance to assume that we can exert such control...