Is the Future Obsolete?

Prefatory Note: The Resurrection of Presentism

Just as this article was being formalized, pop culture critic and media theorist extraordinaire Douglas Rushkoff (2013) released his latest book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by “futurism,” Rushkoff notes, the twenty-first can be defined by “presentism”—or the reorientation of society to the present moment.

Our purpose here is not to trace or debate the evolution of future thinking over the forty-three years separating the publication of Alvin Toffler’s (1970) Future Shock and Rushkoff’s (2013) Present Shock. We do not intend to speculate—at least not directly—on why so many in the developed world have seemingly opted for the certain tyranny of the present over the perennially, or at least potentially optimistic promise of the future.

Ten years after Future Shock, Toffler (1980) argued in The Third Wave that

in a time of exploding change—with personal lives being torn apart, the existing social order crumbling, and a fantastic new way of life emerging on the horizon—asking the very largest of questions about our future is not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is a matter of survival (p. xxiv).

As a counterpoint, Rushkoff writes today that “the craft of futurism—however well intentioned—almost always comes with an agenda.”

“Futurism,” he continues, “became less about predicting the future than pandering to those who sought to maintain an expired past.” Toffler himself wrote that those who, “confidently expect the future to continue the past,” as well as those who “have apparently concluded that today’s society cannot be projected into the future because there is no future,” suffer from what he called “a paralysis of imagination and will.” ¹

Who is right—the presentists or the futurists? Put most simply, does “the” future have “a” future—or is it obsolete?

The answer may be found by examining some—but by no means all—of the uses humanity has found for the idea of the future.

A Brief Comparative Cultural History of the Future

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed,” famously observed cyperpunk novelist and icon William Gibson. Truer words were rarely spoken.

While we assume Gibson was referring to the post-industrial future as defined by computers, the Internet, and attendant cyberculture, the truth is that, from the perspective of comparative civilizations, the idea of “the future” has never been universally “distributed.”

Some societies, thank you very much, have done quite well not thinking about the future at all.

Commenting on the Kikamba and Gikuyu languages in his monumental study African Religions and Philosophy, John S. Mbiti (1989), the Uganda-born philosopher and theologian, noted that there is—at least in the way most of us in Western societies understand it—no way to discuss the idea of “the future” in some African cultures.

“The future is virtually absent,” Mbiti tells us,

because events which lie in it have not taken place, they have not been realized and cannot, therefore, constitute time. If, however, events are certain to occur, or if they fall within the inevitable rhythm of nature, they at best constitute only potential time, not actual time.

For the Narrow Bantu speakers of Kenya and Tanzania, only the present and the past constitute “actual time.” Time, Mbiti wrote, “moves ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’; and people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place.” East Africans recognize the concept of a near future, or events “unfolding” in time, but it still does not lead them to the concept of a future, since they regard as real only things that have occurred.

By the same token, the Ancient Chinese were largely unconcerned about the idea of a future, all the more remarkable given their preoccupation and success with measuring time. Yi Xing, a Chinese Buddhist monk, astronomer, engineer, and mathematician, built a working, water-powered “celestial globe,” or astronomical clock, in 725 AD. Being interested in the notion of time as a tool for charting the passage of seasons or the movement of planets was, for the Chinese, distinct from the idea of using time to structure a linear chronology of events linking what had happened to what was happening and what might therefore be expected to happen (Needham 1986).

While the Chinese word shi [时or 時] may be translated into English as “time,” it is more accurate to translate it as “timeliness,” in the sense of the appropriate time, or “seasonality.” Understanding when the planets aligned to calculate horoscopes to illuminate the present was important to the early Chinese. Trying to figure out what life would be like in, say, 947 AD was not.

The Same Is True in Vedic culture.

The Sanskrit word for time, kai, is seen as a manifestation of God, not a tool for linear measurement. The four Hindu yugas, or cycles of time, begin with the Satya Yuga, followed by the Treta Yuga, the Dvapara Yuga, and finally, the Kali Yuga—our present age—essentially repeating once they are concluded. Time, many Hindus believe, “begins to end and ends to begin.”

While the theology of Islam is as varied and rich as the societies that have shaped it, a simplistic reduction of Muslim historiography and eschatology would hold that God created the world, but transcends it. History—in the sense of the chronology of human events—has no temporal end because, unlike in the Jewish and Christian traditions, Islamic thought holds that while “the Day of Judgment” occurs, it belongs to God alone and therefore exists “outside history.”

In the way many Western people have apparently come to think of it, “the future”—as a neat tidy linear narrative, moving, as it were, from Alpha to Omega, looks like a uniquely Judeo-Christian cultural artifact. But the truth is that one’s view of the future is often tied to what Marcus P. Barber (2005) termed central Values Systems.

“By identifying someone’s central Value Systems (VS) we are able to anticipate their likely approach to time, their orientation toward the future (and therein foresight) and their potential expectations of the outcomes of planning.” The intellectual differences between, say, the Bantu and Greek views of the future are not rooted in warring ideologies about the nature of the truth so much as they are products of linear and nonlinear conceptions of time, conceptions tied to unique cultural values of the societies that produced them.

Some observers have gone so far as to suggest that our contemporary preoccupation with the future is really a fairly modern invention. “This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future,” noted science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke, as quoted in The Peter Plan (1976, p. 107) by Laurence J. Peter, “which is a little ironic, since we may not have one.”

Clarke’s observations on the precariousness of the prospects for human survival aside, the fact remains that the idea of “the future” lives deep in the heart of the West, along with an obsession for finding ways of foretelling what it might bring.

Throughout the history of occidental societies, foresight has assumed a thousand faces. There is a continuous prophetic line running from Cassandra—cursed by Apollo to accurately prophecy a future nobody would believe—and the Pythia, or Apollonian Oracle at Delphi, extending through the prophets of the Old Testament and straight on to today’s military war gamers, hedge fund operators, futurists, and business consultants.

Western literature is replete with those who have knowledge of the future, from the three wayward sisters (later weird sisters or witches), who appear in Act 1, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the anonymous Time Traveler in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, right down to the character of Delirium, the youngest of “The Endless” who inhabit Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of graphic novels. ² In what could be a sly footnote to the notion of “change in the rate of change” described in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the sundial that sits at the center of Delirium’s world bears the Latin inscription Tempus Frangit—“Time Breaks (Shatters).”

It was the idea of a knowable continuity, not “shattered time,” that caused H. G. Wells to state so confidently in his The Discovery of the Future (1913, p. 44),

I believe that the deliberate direction of historical study and of economic and social study toward the future and an increasing reference, a deliberate and courageous reference, to the future in moral and religious discussion, would be enormously stimulating and enormously profitable to our intellectual life. I have done my best to suggest to you that such an enterprise is now a serious and practicable undertaking.

Unlike Macbeth’s witches—and a countless legion of seers, prophets, and predictors before and since—Wells believed that knowledge of an individual future was a pipe dream, but that it was entirely reasonable to believe that one could anticipate a collective future. “I would call your attention to the essential difference that must always hold between our attainable knowledge of the future and our existing knowledge of the past,” he wrote. “The portion of the past that is brightest and most real to each of us is the individual past—the personal memory. The portion of the future that must remain darkest and least accessible is the individual future.”

What exactly do we want the “brightest and most real” future to do for us? The answer may, in some sense, be as diverse as the number of human hearts beating on the earth, but at the risk of oversimplification, we think most of us look to the future in one or more of the following ways:

The Future as Utopia/Dystopia

Of course, one person’s utopia is often another’s dystopia, but there is little question that a good deal of contemporary literature looks to the future as the location of models of both ideal and intolerable societies. This was not always the case.

From Hesiod’s Works and Days to the Garden of Eden in the Bible, many early utopias were located in a glorious and mystical past. Other ideal states, like Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s City of God, and Al-Farabi’s Al-Madina al-Fadila, can be categorized more as abstract discussions or conceptual creations of what a perfect society might look like. Still other utopias were offered up as though they could be visited, if one only had a map. The idea that utopia/dystopia exists in the present just waiting to be discovered is a popular literary plot line running from Tao Yuanming’s The Peach Blossom Spring (421 CE) (http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/china/taoqian_peachblossom.pdf) to James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933).

Starting in the late-nineteenth century with works like William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1892) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and continuing through to contemporary popular fiction (especially in the Science Fiction and Fantasy categories) like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008, 2009, 2010), it has become increasingly popular to use the future—immediate or long-term—as the de rigueur backdrop for utopian/dystopian visions.

Utopian—and dystopian—thinking is just a small portion of the futurist canon. Throughout history, other kinds of “futurists” have looked beyond the present to very pragmatic advantage.

The Future as a Hidden Source of Economic, Military, or Political Power or Advantage

Knowing what was going to happen before a military or political campaign was launched has been the Holy Grail of generals and rulers since the beginning of time. From the Oracle at Delphi to the shamans who marched in the forefront of Chengiz Khan’s Mongol army as it conquered the known world, conquerors and would-be conquerors have looked to the futurists of their day to inform strategy.

Perhaps ironically, many of these military campaigns had an equally profound impact on how we began to think about concepts such as time, history, and the future. One has to look no further than how Nordic mythology—culturally transmitted by raid and conquest—helped shape and influence European thinking about the future.

Economists, hedge fund operators, and other predictive algorithm enthusiasts aside, we’ve come a long way since the days when oracles probed owl entrails to determine whether to launch an attack. As we have progressed, strategists have looked longer and deeper into the future for inspiration. An examination of the relationship of future-telling and military thought would take up several volumes, so we will just reference a few works to illustrate our point.

In his study On Thermonuclear War (Kahn 1978) and again in The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (Kahn and Wiener 1968), co-authored with Anthony J. Wiener, Herman Kahn morphed war-gaming techniques developed by the Department of Defense in World War II into the cornerstone of modern scenario planning.

As the authors explained in The Year 2000,

Scenarios may explore and emphasize an element of a larger problem, such as a crisis or other event that could lead to war, the process of ‘escalation’ of a small war or local violence into a larger war, the spread or contraction of a limited war, the fighting of a war, the termination of the war, or the subsequent peace. The focus of such a scenario can be military events and activities, the internal dynamics of various countries, bargaining among enemies or inter-ally relations, and so on.

In The Year 2000, Kahn argued that “the surprise-free future isn’t” a way to counter the argument that change was steady and knowable across both well-established and recently established countries. To this day, The Year 2000 remains one of the best examples of extensive research of future possibilities.

Whether the issue is—or was—political, military, economic, or ecological, the future offers us the delicious possibility of secular salvation from past transgressions.

The Future as Historical Punctuation Mark or Rationalization of the Past

We often look to the future to validate our actions in the present and the past. The idea that the future will vindicate even the most egregious behavior lies at the heart of most tyrannical regimes and apocalyptic movements. Sadly, history provides us with an embarrassment of examples to choose from to prove our point, so we will content ourselves with the oft-told story of Jan Bockelson (more commonly known as John of Leiden), the sixteenth-century tailor from Leiden who—in the wake of the Anabaptist seizure of Münster on February 8, 1534—was to become the self-styled King of Münster and “Messiah of the Last Days.” ³

Bockelson assumed almost total control of the city in July 1534, having first run through the streets naked and then fallen into a three-day ecstatic trance. Among the many “reforms” he established during his brief reign were the abolition of private money, the essential abolition of private property, compulsory polygamy, and the expulsion of non-Anabaptists.

These rather drastic steps, he preached, would be justified once the rest of the world was destroyed, Münster became the New Jerusalem and seat of the New Order, and “King John” could turn control of things over to God. Needless to say, he was a tad zealous in his pursuit of his vision, and things did not go well in the end.

On January 22, 1536, Münster was retaken by the forces of sanity; Bockelson was publicly tortured and dismembered, and his remains were left out for public display. Some accounts say his body was put into a cage and hoisted over the church steeple, while others say his genitals were nailed to the town gates.

In any case, the present caught up with him before he found his future.

Assuming that the “Doomsday Preppers” and others who obsessively dread or welcome an imminent apocalypse are wrong, many prefer to see the future not as the beginning of the end, but as a new beginning, replete with miraculous wonders.

The Future as a Source of Advanced Knowledge and Technology

In his poem “A Dream within a Dream,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence as a dream.”

From the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci and the novels of Jules Verne to the pages of USA Today and beyond, humanity has assumed that in the future, technology— human or extraterrestrial—would be discovered that would improve or, more recently, imperil our position on the planet. Over time, this view of the future as a tabula rasa of possibility has, more or less, proved self-fulfilling.

Standing in the stadium of Houston’s Rice University on September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke of his plan to see that America reached the moon, and beyond. Acknowledging that the technology to reach the moon did not yet exist and that U.S. space science was not necessarily the best in the world, Kennedy told the audience,

To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead. The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.

In other words, solutions to the challenges of how to actually get to the moon were out there—it would just not be until some point in the future, that we would uncover them. We had the vision, and therefore (in the way we like to think about the future) the “hard part” was already done. In terms of landing on the moon, all that remained was to discover the future technology needed to transform that lofty vision into a reality—and damned if we didn’t. Societies with grand visions almost always imagine—and often achieve—bold, positive futures.

The ability to imagine future possibilities is a prerequisite to progress, because without it, we would never consider other options. Of course, this does not mean that we will automatically get everything we can imagine, but our track record is not too bad. You may not have your personal jetpack, but they do exist. Not all hopes can be realized, of course, nor all promises kept.

The Future as the Repository for Answers to Currently Unanswerable Questions

Contained in the simple phrase “We’ll see what happens” (or the parental short form, “We’ll see”) is the underlying assumption that questions that are currently imponderable will become answerable at some future date. This view of the future always seems more comforting to the answerer than it does to the questioner.

It is not simply that hope always springs eternal. The future can sometimes cast an oppressive shadow over the present it is meant to define. As Shakespeare expressed it in Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth,

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time.

To paraphrase a contemporary American political idiom, “We’ll see” is an explanatory way of kicking the can down the road of time toward the future—an approach whose lack of immediate gratification has in no way decreased its popularity.

This view does not really assume that the future actually has the answer, but rather that needed facts may present themselves at some future date or, more simply, that it is better and/or easier to postpone a decision when it is as yet uncertain whether an answer is possible.

The idea that there will be an ultimate answer someday—even to the most vexing questions—is the key to our next popular application of futuring.

The Future as the Validation of Faith

Eschatology may be the ultimate form of “futuring.”

Since it deals with “end times,” or the final events of human history, and therefore represents, quite literally, the end of the future, eschatology provides true believers with a one-size-fits-all-times tool for understanding almost everything really worth understanding. For the faithful, eschatological thought addresses not the true end of time but merely the end of human history.

Viewing the end of history as the ultimate goal of humanity’s future may strike the secular mind as a grim worldview, but there is no question about its popularity. The end of human time—and its attendant rewards and punishments—is the ultimate validation of faith and the ultimate rationale for sacrifice, ritual, and belief.

From Hindu eschatology, which sees the end time as the point at which Shiva simultaneously dissolves and regenerates the universe, to the visions of the Abrahamic faiths—The Second Coming of Christ in Christianity; the End of Days, aḥarit ha-yamim (אחרית הימים) in the Jewish tradition; and Islam’s Day of Judgment, Yawm ad-Din (يوم الحساب)—all characterized in one form or another by the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment of humanity en masse, to the beliefs of many other major faiths, the future represents the final validation of belief. ⁴

The assumption that the world will not in fact end, thanks to actions and agents divine or human, gives great comfort to those who believe that hope does indeed spring eternal and that better days are just around the corner.

The Future as a Source of Hope

The old Irish saying, “Tá iasc san fharraige níos fearr ná a bheith gafa riamh,” is perhaps the purest expression of seeing the future as a source of hope. It means, “There are fish in the sea better than have ever been caught.”

Taking a buoyantly optimistic view of the future may be little more than an unqualified extension of the “we’ll see what the future brings” point of view.

From the cynicism of the French poet and polymath Paul Valery, who once observed, “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be,” to the unbounded positivity of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who held that, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams,” one can find innumerable references in western literature to the idea that keeping one’s eyes focused on the future is the way to improve one’s lot in life, both individually and collectively.

The Future as Fulfillment for Past Promises

“Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible,” the German American political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in “Civil Disobedience,” which appeared in her 1972 collection of essays, Crises of the Republic (Arendt 1972).

Using the future to collateralize our promises is not just the stuff of lofty political theory. It is a tactic employed—with greater or lesser success—by nearly every wayward child; innumerable erstwhile suitors; legions of eager, prospective employees with no performance record; and many veteran employees whose performances have been documented all too well.

Promises often form a personal eschatology—a historical timeline for the person we hope to become, living the life we hope to lead, and ideally ending in a demise consistent with our wishes. The wedding promise “Till death do us part” is emblematic of this idea: a promise that the future will include the same husband and wife until the end of one, or both, of their lifetimes.

Arendt is right. Just as we see the future as a repository of undiscovered but imaginable technology, the “future as promise” approach seeks to impose order on the face of chaotic unpredictable events.

Controlling the future through promise is a kind of intellectual, sympathetic magic, as described by Sir James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough. “The second principle of magic,” Frazer (1981) wrote, is that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.” In this case, a promise made in the present is somehow seen as determining the course of the future.

The exchange of wedding rings is an act of what Frazier called “correspondence magic,” whereby the physical presence of the rings reinforces the power of the wedding vows over time. When one spouse strays, we do not say they broke their rings, but rather that they broke their vows, partly because we understand the implicit power of the promise.

Aside from an alarmingly high divorce rate, only one alternative lurks beyond that potent promise of “Till death do us part”—immortality—the most seductive idea associated with all futures thinking, from tribal dreams of eternal salvation to the sophisticated technological underpinnings of Ray Kurzweil’s (2005) vision of “The Singularity.”

The Future as a Guarantor of Immortality

In the 2004 film Troy, Agamemnon boasts to Achilles that his army has won the beach. “You can have the beach,” Achilles tells him. “I didn’t come here for sand.”

“No,” Agamemnon agrees. “You came here because you want your name to last through the ages.”

From the Great Pyramid to endowed chairs in universities, our world is littered with the physical detritus of generations’ worth of bids for immortality. It is said that on one of his Asian campaigns, Alexander the Great commissioned a giant suit of armor and had it buried so that future generations would believe that he and his army had been larger than life.

Preeminent among all its other qualities is the future’s potential to allow at least some part of us to elude the finality of death. The idea that our name, image, words, products, and/or progeny will allow us to transcend the confines of mortality and live—in one form or another—for a generation, a century, a millennium, or beyond has, for many throughout history, proved the most seductive of all social constructs. It is the reason we have monuments, not to mention libraries and halls of fame.

In our contemporary age, the idea that nothing ever really goes away in cyberspace is simultaneously one of the great selling points and largest sources of concern about the Internet. Today, even a poor person can achieve digital immortality and, with a handful of keystrokes, leave a permanent binary mark in the collective silicon memory and consciousness of the species.

We have looked at many of the ways people use the idea of “the future” to rationalize their behaviors, justify their conquests, address their fears, and frame their dreams. But does any of this help us answer our initial question: Is the future obsolete?

Penultimo Finem a Perpetua Fabula

“The future” is, if not obsolete, clearly an endangered species. To quote Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Like the East African Narrow Bantu speakers discussed earlier, our future is increasingly narrowcast.

Perhaps the problem is that, as the cynical, always-on, media-centric citizens of a global society, we just don’t have enough—or strong enough—common beliefs to justify the idea of a future. Or, maybe we simply believe in different things than we used to.

Maybe we believe too much—or not enough—in ourselves to support a viable sense of the future. Or maybe it is that the future needs a shared context to be effective as a cultural touchstone.

One thing is certain, whether you believe the future is humanly created or divinely ordained, kismet or chaos, pattern or accident, the world needs a common “future” today more than ever before in history. And to date, that need—unique in our collective history on this planet—goes unmet. There is a lot of hard thinking and work ahead for human beings as a species if we are to have a future at all.

Never have we needed to ask so much of “the future”—and never has it asked so much of us.