Looking Ahead
Kostelanetz, Richard
Looking Ahead The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation, by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Werner. Macmillan. 431 pp. $9.95. The Most Probable World, by Stuart Chase. Harper & Row. 239 pp....
...Nonetheless, a primary function of futuristic thinking should be precisely the anticipation of such surprises— thinking about the unthinkable verges on conceiving the unconceivable, if only so that we may become aware of its possible imminence...
...Rarely does a heavily footnoted scholarly monograph cause ripples beyond academia, but Fischer's study of German aims in World War I aroused such passions that the argument spilled over into the German popular press, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit...
...In the processes of planning, persuasive futuristic thought becomes the power behind the powers...
...Also, I have been reliably informed that the Government's Advanced Research Projects Agency had contracts out on more than half of the items even before Kahn's list...
...and for comparison here, let me recommend the multi-volume World Design Decade by R. Buckminster Fuller and his associates...
...Council of Learned Societies...
...Paradoxical as it sounds," Kahn once wrote, "reality has left experience far behind, and central as common sense is, it is not enough...
...If nothing else, the book should repudiate the liberal stereotype of Kahn as, in Seymour Melman's phrase, "the intellectual generalissimo of World Wars III and VII," for the last chapter in particular demonstrates that Kahn is as worried about the hair-raising probabilities as the next humanist on the block...
...and for this reason alone, thinking about the future is too important to be left to a few specialists...
...They wisely acknowledge that computer technology is currently leaping ahead by such magnitudes that long-range predictions are foolish...
...The Year 2000 is unquestionably the most important and comprehensive book on the future to have appeared thus far, partly because quantity in this case brings quality—Kahn and Weiner, his colleague at the Hudson Institute, simply have more perceptive things to say about more trends and dimensions than anyone else...
...These two men are young enough to be Chase's sons...
...The two books seem to come out of contrary intellectual traditions and to address themselves to entirely different audiences...
...Beyond Tomorrow by Dandridge M. Cole...
...yet he does not seem to know as much about the significant trends and technologies as Kahn and Weiner, nor is Chase able to see as far ahead...
...The new discipline of futurology, as created by more than a score of major books, grows largely from our realization that planning is becoming powerful politics...
...Reviewed by Konrad H. Jarausch The most controversial work on recent German history since World War II, Fritz Fischer's book, originally entitled A Drive for World Power, has now been translated into English...
...The two cultures seem hardly cognizant of each other...
...Aside from farfetched speculations, which were usually classified as a sub-species of science fiction, there has been no tradition, let alone continuity, in America of thinking about the future...
...while The Year 2000 is a shade too present-bound to be as brilliantly advanced as that earlier work, it is still, especially in its endless enumeration of hypotheses, the sort of book that only Herman Kahn could write or co-author...
...The omissions in Chase's rather skimpy bibliography are indicative, and he quotes too often from newspapers when more substantial sources would be more appropriate...
...and the essay, "Pandora's Box," that introduces The Worlds of Robert Heinlein, to mention three authors whom Kahn and Weiner, as well as Chase, seem not to have read...
...The most difficult speculation for a science fiction writer to undertake," writes Heinlein, "is to imagine correctly the secondary implications of a new factor...
...Kahn and Weiner belong to the new culture of systems analysis, mimeographed reports, dictated prose, game theory, think tanks, tables and graphs, abstracted summaries, loose-ended collaborations, erratic explanations, contorted organization, imaginative leaps, and semi-sensible "scenarios...
...Even though the intellectual technique of the "scenarios" is designed to envision the gamut of effects that follow from major innovations, whether technological or social, the book seems comparatively weak at filling in the frame...
...The political and academic establishment was so incensed that the funds for Fischer's American lecture tour in 1965 were suddenly cancelled and his trip had to be financed by the U.S...
...The subject of the foreseeable future is still more open than closed...
...Two other members of the Hudson Institute, Raymond D. Gastil and Frank E. Arm-bruster, contribute their own speculative scenarios...
...Moreover, while Chase is concerned with "the most probable world," Kahn and Weiner, in recognizing that we should be prepared for several probable worlds, ingeniously conceive of alternative futures, each based upon a different convergence of observable tendencies...
...Since we need to conceive a goal before we can realize it, leaders on all levels, in private as well as public institutions, must become familiar with the probabilities and possibilities...
...The problem with such a list, as the authors admit, is that the really revolutionary innovations in the future are liable to be as unexpected as the laser and the digital computer were, even to professionals in related fields...
...And his book demonstrates why the new culture has a more intimate grasp of the present and the future...
...yet they hardly consider how computers of conceivable capability will revolutionize various dimensions of society...
...Almost any day," they write, "has some chance of bringing up some new crisis or unexpected event that becomes a historical turning point, diverting current tendencies so that expectations for the distant future must shift...
...The Year 2000 strikes me as neither radical nor imaginative enough for the far-ahead problem announced in its title...
...As the author of On Thermonuclear War (1960), itself a spectacular compendium of intellectual and linguistic leaps, Kahn is particularly well-equipped to contemplate unprecedented situations...
...What Chase lacks is a sense of how future technological developments and innovations will deflect current trends, as well as introduce entirely new primary forces...
...Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz The more I ponder it, the more amazed, if not shocked, I am to discover that until the last few years intellectuals had not thought much about the future...
...Predictions of the future must account for revolution as well as evolution...
...Chase exemplifies the old culture of professional writing, magazine articles, clear explanations, dramatic descriptions, intuitive perceptions, common sense, extrapolation, and experience...
...I think that anyone who has thought intensely about the future, if not read all the existing literature, will find this book less about the year 2000 than, say, 1980, perhaps because Kahn, as a military strategist, has in the past been concerned with futures only ten to fifteen years ahead...
...With introductions by Hajo Holborn and James Joll...
...for this reason, their language is full of words denoting tentativeness...
...Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wei-ner's The Year 2000 is considerably larger, as well as better, than Stuart Chase's The Most Probable World, which functions best as a popularization of more primary knowledge...
...Chase's projections are based largely upon extrapolations of obvious tendencies—more population, more pollution, larger computers, more environmental noise, more pervasive automation, greater energy and leisure per person, and so forth...
...To his credit, Chase is more predisposed to the foreseeable future than other prominent intellectuals of his generation...
...A thorn...
...While the authors of The Year 2000 envision extraordinary technological developments and some drastic social changes, certain connecting or inevitable steps get lost...
...Sensing how radically things do change, not only from decade to decade but from year to year, Kahn and Weiner believe that even our language for talking about the future must take the requisite leaps beyond the current conventional formulations •—a stylistic breakthrough comparable to that realized by an avant-garde artist...
...Drive for Power Germany's Aims in the First World War, by Fritz Fischer...
...652 pp...
...W. W. Norton...
...Nonetheless, Kahn's book occasionally disappoints, particularly where the future-concerned reader might expect it to be virtuous...
...5.95...
...Kahn and Wei-ner's list of one hundred technological developments concentrates upon inventions and/or applications that are now in the process of being realized...
...several sets of them are so entwined that the achievement of one invention will usher in several more...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
