Abstract
Contemporary Sociology 10(2) (March 1981):199–201.
Future-forecasting is a difficult but intellectually stimulating task. It makes us put our intellectual apparatus on the line and see whether it can stand up to the facts of the future, if we have enough time to wait. And if not that, at any rate, the next line of testing is whether we have enough intellectual substance to be able to say anything intelligent about possible futures at all.
Seymour Martin Lipset assembled a number of social scientists and asked them to project the future of the United States in its third century. Unfortunately, most of them had relatively little to say about it. Many are hung up on topical issues of the 1970s, and all they give us are a lot of opinion about various evils of today. Thus there are polemics about judicial activism (e.g., court-ordered desegregation), the alleged liberal bias of the mass media, our vicious sexual mores, the nefarious role of intellectuals and agitators in the unions and the universities, and the like. I suppose this is what might be called “neo-conservatism,” although I think this is a misnomer. It is the stance, rather, of 1950s liberals who were upstaged by the far more militant (and more effective) civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and who have spent their time ever since reacting against the ideas of anyone to the left of them. If this were all there is to this book, I would hardly find it worth reviewing.
Fortunately, there are some chapters that do take seriously the challenge of forecasting, or at least that grapple with some empirical evidence on long-term trends. As Gresham Sykes (1980) has pointed out elsewhere, we can forecast either by extrapolating trends, or try the more solid grounds of predicting the future of certain causal factors that we know theoretically are linked to the phenomena we want to explain. To predict the future of crime (in Sykes’s case) we need to apply theories of the causes of crime. In the same way, to predict the future of American politics, or the American family, or American religion, we need good theories of politics, family, and religion. Thus prediction lays bare whether we really have a theory or not. In this regard, the theoretical resources brought to bear by the writers of this book are not very impressive. One of the reasons that I found the topical polemics of this book so uninteresting (in addition, no doubt, to my own biases) is that they seem like such a feeble cover-up for intellectual poverty.
Still, as I said, certain chapters stand out. Orlando Patterson takes a very long-term view of the black community. He goes back as far as the Roman Empire to argue that slavery was the most advanced mode of production of its day, and hence that when economic development began again after a 1500-year interruption it necessarily had to pick up again with the slave plantation. The enslavement of black Africans, then, was an historical necessity, the crucial condition for the capitalist revolution. I do not find this entirely convincing; Patterson concentrates on his own scenario, and does not confront any other explanations of the capitalist revolution. Still, he is thinking in the grand manner, and that is a relief after a lot of this book.
When Patterson comes to future predictions, though, he largely falls back on trend extrapolation, projecting a huge split in the black community between the middle-class blacks who have made it and a large underclass of permanently ghettoized poor. Patterson declares that proto-fascist police measures will not control the urban poor because they have countervailing powers in the form of crime, sabotage, terrorism, and the upward diffusion of cultural sabotage (i.e., primarily the drug culture). Accordingly, the occupational structure will have to be restructured to make room for the poor. This is a structural necessity, and hence the blacks will be the historical agent that will humanize the postindustrial order. I think this is mainly just ending up the chapter with a rhetorical flourish. Severe hardships for particular groups have gone on for a long time in the past without bringing about structural transformations. I see no good reason to expect that the future of the United States will be any different, at least as far as this line of argument goes.
Patterson is the token radical of this book, and when we emerge from his chapter we are back in a very different atmosphere. One of the solider pieces is the demographic chapter by Kingsley Davis. There is no theory here, but the trend extrapolation is clear. For one thing, as we settle into zero population growth and an aging population, it is clear that we are going to have a society in which a very significant group consists of old women. This is because women outsurvive men at a quite spectacular rate. What effect this will have on politics, economics, or cultural conflicts Davis does not say, but it is interesting to juxtapose the elderly women in their condominiums with Patterson’s picture of the poor, black, criminally active young males in the ghetto. Just exactly how these would measure up is hard to say from these sources; Davis confines himself entirely to data on the white population, and gives us no projections at all for blacks, Chicanos, or Asians. But the demographic trends for these groups are rather different from those for whites, and Davis misses a likely very significant new ethnic challenge to the dominant white population. In that regard, the twenty-first century may well look a lot more like the nineteenth than the twentieth.
The introductory chapter by Lipset is one of the best in the book. The first part of it reviews various efforts at prediction by social scientists in the past, and concludes that the record is pretty poor. There is, for example, the failure to foresee the post-World War II baby boom (the 1947 projection of 1970 population was 65 million short), or to predict the end of the boom; the ill-timed announcement of the “end of ideology” just before the activism of the 1960s; the failure of economists to predict various recessions, the predictions of depressions that did not come, and their inability to foresee, let alone account for, the “stagflation” of the 1970s.
The latter part of the chapter reviews optimistic and pessimistic views of the future of economic growth. Lipset declares himself an agnostic as far as predictions go, but does go on to raise a significant analytical point. He argues, on the basis of a stratification theory, that it is growth per se that brings about most of the features that make people contented with the social order. It is the changing occupational structure, rather than exchange mobility, that accounts for most aggregate social mobility; and it is an expanding economic pie, rather than any redivision of it, that makes people feel their economic prospects are improving. A no-growth situation, says Lipset, would be one in which class conflict is sure to intensify. Lipset says he is an optimist, and believes that growth may be possible as well as, by his lights, desirable. Whether or not this is so, at any rate we have a more solid basis for future prediction, for if growth does slow down—and this may well be the case no matter who wins the debate over its desirability—we may indeed face just such a scenario of heightened class conflict. A projection of world economic cycles by the Wallerstein group (Research Working Group, 1979) gives a quite different line of reasoning, coming to the same conclusion.
One cannot describe this future very well on the basis of this book. Its theoretical points are too few and far between, and all too much of what there is consists of the patently erroneous assumption that we are in a high-skill, technocratic society, the so-called post-industrial society. I would say, on the contrary, that what people have mistaken for technocracy is a society of runaway credential inflation, and this may well contain the seeds of its own destruction (Collins, 1979).
One rather critical shift that this book does highlight is documented in the chapters by Alex Inkeles and Everett Carll Ladd. Inkeles presents survey data to buttress the argument that the American character is still very much like that noted by early nineteenth-century observers. Americans then and now are very nationalistic, believe that all people have a chance to succeed by their own efforts, and are optimistic, cooperative, and trusting. Still (and this contradicts somewhat what was just claimed), since the 1950s there has been a notable shift: few people now believe that one gets ahead by hard work; saving and planning ahead are not widely valued; and most striking of all, confidence in political institutions dropped very sharply, from a large majority to a small minority opinion.
Ladd corroborates the point: there has been a steady decline in voter turnout, and increasing dissatisfaction with presidential candidates during this period. Ladd gives a rather good picture of what has happened to party politics. Both Democratic and Republican parties have democratized their nominations procedures, which has made it possible for upper-middle-class activists on both sides to dominate their parties to a much larger degree than in the past. As the college-educated population has mushroomed, it has suddenly shifted from its traditional Republican preferences. A majority of the higher-status voters now go to the Democrats, and to a critical, left-liberal stance at that. At the same time, the college-educated Republicans have grown more conservative. Hence the activists of both parties now are a good deal more ideologically militant than the mass of the population. It is a situation in which everyone is disgruntled: the left and right activists because neither can get what they think is desirable, as well as the mass of the population, who react with apathy to the prevailing political tone.
Significantly, there is no theory of politics to account for these patterns, and the shifting trends do not leave us with much grounds for clear long-term extrapolation. It does look, though, as if a pretty serious ideological confrontation could be building up. On the prospects of sociological theory being able to predict the future, at any rate, I see no reason to be pessimistic. What we need is at least a few sociologists to pull back from the polemics and the purely descriptive data-gathering, and make a sustained effort to build theory around relevant topics. I think it can and will be done, although this is not the place to explain why.
Finally, I have to mention the chapter by Andrew Greeley on American Catholicism. This chapter is an exception to most of what I was just saying. It says nothing, really, about the future, and there is no theory in it either. Greeley’s is principally a topical account of recent events in the papacy and in church politics, and the reaction of American Catholics to them. But it is as lively and informed an account of these matters as I have seen, a wonderful combination of insider’s political info with sophisticated techniques of data analysis. It is a fascinating piece of writing, and Greeley’s virulent involvement in all this adds to its steam. Some of the personal footnotes are almost worth the price of the book.