Fred Polak
Images of the Future
“We cannot humanize the future until we draw it into our consciousness and probe it with all the intelligence and imagination at our command. This is what we are now just beginning to do.”
Alvin Toffler
Introduction to The Futurists 1972
To remember the future, anticipate the past...
They weren’t sure what to call themselves. Europeans apparently preferred “futurologist.” Somebody came up with the nifty category of “futuristics.” Most North Americans seemed to settle for “futurist.”
Futurism had been an early 20th century term: part manifesto, part marketing, for a group of Italian artists. Now in the 1970s futurists were to be something different, and something new.
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| Alvin Toffler |
Toffler quoted futurist John Platt on what defined the futurist field: “a considerable number of organizations, institutionalized programs and individual workers...whose major, and often sole, activity is concerned with the study of the future.”
Studying the future was a seemingly new (and paradoxical) occupation. While institutions and individual professionals had been moving towards this concentration since at least the early 1960s, it was the popular success of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock that made futurists part of the public dialogue.
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A flood of paperbacks ensued over the decade (Profiles of the Future, The Future of the Future, The Future As History, Creating Alternative Futures, Futures Conditional, The Futurists) as well as many other books about the future, including more best-sellers.
In Future Shock, Toffler studied how people could or should respond to change that was only going to happen faster and more thoroughly in the onrushing future. The subject was actually “change shock” as a new form of culture shock, but it was the future in the title that magnetized attention.
Others explored possible futures through art and performance, or envisioned and advocated for desirable futures in various media. The futurists with the most institutional support concentrated on ways to predict and rank future possibilities, to provide information that could be used to prepare for those possibilities, and to influence the direction of change. Businesses were intrigued, and eventually so was the government. After the unheavals of the 1960s, the seventies were seeing widespread changes, and they wanted to get ahead of them.
These futurists studied actions in time. They analyzed data to discern trends, measured resistance, extrapolated on where the trends led. They looked at countervailing forces and possibilities, access to resources and other factors. Beyond the "if present trends continue" futures, what might shape the future differently?
The future they examined could be quite narrow: what will be the market for paper towels in 1990? Which suburbs will contract and which expand in the next 20 years? What will be the economic and social result of increased automation? Their futures could also be comprehensive--what will America and the world look like in the year 2000?
Scientific prediction had its acknowledged roots in military operations research during World War II and the subsequent work of the RAND Corporation and other think tanks. While still part of the Douglas Aircraft Company, Project RAND employed the first electronic computers in 1946 for their report on “Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship.” Eventually RAND studied urban development, health, education and other topics, but its main work was centered on nuclear war.
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| Herman Kahn in the 1950s |
Kahn is credited with introducing a key concept that made futurists possible: alternative futures. Instead of settling on one prediction, Kahn at RAND assembled packages of assumptions, applied them to data and came up with multiple outcomes. Borrowing an Italian term that denoted the story told in an opera, each alternative future was described in a “scenario.” The now-familiar word is still used in this sense.
Kahn’s alternative futures (especially in his infamous book, On Thermonuclear War) were all grisly variations of unprecedented catastrophe. Still, the idea of alternative outcomes freed futurists to parse their packages of data and extrapolations into a range of probable and possible futures, as well as to start with preferable futures and work backwards to identify factors that could be changed in the present to make the preferable probable.
RAND and other futurists also employed a number of analytical techniques including information theory, game theory, statistical and cross-impact analysis, modeling and simulations. But the most basic conceptual tool was systems analysis. It was an attempt to look beyond individual factors to how they interacted.
Predictions were still tricky, however, as was the behavior of systems themselves. The study of systems suggested some surprising and paradoxical characteristics that applied to most systems over time, regardless of their content.
The perils of prediction and the limits of current capabilities were soon demonstrated in a fairly big way. In addition to ongoing issues (nuclear war, Vietnam, environment, poverty and racial inequality, for example) the early 1970s saw three international issues force their way into public consciousness.
Overpopulation and the disasters it might lead to (food shortages, resource depletion, overcrowding, loss of liberties etc.) were talk show topics in the early 70s, as well as prompting new organizations and public policies.
Then, as if fulfilling predictions in The Population Bomb, there were global food shortages caused in part by two disastrous harvests in 1972 and 1974. Though not directly related to these failures, severe famine in Bangladesh captured public attention in 1974, partly due to relief efforts that inspired the Concerts for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, the first of many subsequent multi-artist benefit concerts.
At about the same time, the OPEC cartel of Middle Eastern oil-producing states imposed an oil embargo on western nations that supported Israel, leading to shortages and long lines at American gas pumps as well as quadrupling the price of oil. Another oil crisis later in the decade added to the sense of vulnerability, as energy became a prominent and emotional issue.
The study tabulated and compared statistics on food, population and industrial growth to come up with a computer simulation that forecast worldwide collapse. It set off an immediate, extensive and intense debate.
Critics called the report oversimplified, because it didn’t include important relevant factors and because its understanding of the dynamics involved in population growth and food production were crude.
The Club of Rome was sensitive enough to these critiques to produce a more sophisticated second report. Mankind at the Turning Point developed short, medium and long-range alternative scenarios, separated into regions and including other factors such as politics and values.
But the first report had already inspired a radical policy prescription that its critics warned could be dangerous and self-defeating as well as ethically repugnant.
But first we need to set the stage for this debate.
Another new area of public attention and concern in the 1960s was the natural environment. Rachel Carson’s bestseller Silent Spring, warning of the dangers of DDT, provided impetus to a movement to address pollution of water, earth and air by harmful chemicals and waste. By the late 1960s, environmental consciousness began to shift towards ecology, the long-term health of natural systems, which emphasized their future. Ecology became a factor at least some futurists included.
This photo, as well as the subsequent "Blue Marble" photo of the Earth in space taken during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, were widely credited with bringing home the message of ecology, and of the Earth as a single, vulnerable planet in the darkness of space.
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| Buckminster Fuller in the 70s |
Considered the grandfather of futurism by some, Buckminster Fuller was at the height of his popularity in the early 1970s, especially on college campuses. An innovative thinker and designer since the 1930s, Fuller was known for his long talks and writings that employed complicated sentence structure and unique if highly precise vocabulary, advocating for “comprehensive anticipatory design science,” by explaining that understanding is “symmetrically tetrahendronal.”
But he also had a way with brilliantly catchy names and phrases. As an active sailor and former naval officer, Fuller maintained that this planet is an enclosed system spinning through deadly space, utterly and completely dependent on the resources it holds, like a ship on the high seas. Those onboard systems include the properties of the atmosphere, photosynthesis and so on--all of which are indispensable to life. If the resources run out and the systems don't work, there's no place to go for alternatives.
He called it Spaceship Earth, a metaphor that is also a deeply accurate description in many practical ways. It is also memorable, and along with the geodesic dome he designed, is still associated most prominently with his name. It especially seemed to summarize the impression produced by the Earthrise and Blue Marble photos.
And then in 1974 an American philosopher named Garrett Hardin called Spaceship Earth a really bad idea.
Hardin wrote a series of articles about how to respond to the catastrophic future predicted by The Limits to Growth report. He asserted that because of the inexorable mathematics of population growth, nothing could be done to prevent massive starvation in underdeveloped parts of the world. He maintained as well that if the developed world even tried to help, both rich and poor nations would suffer. He wrote one of his articles to specifically oppose relief for the ongoing famine in Ethiopia, because it would encourage the overpopulation that he saw as the cause of the famine.
Together with Jay Forrester of MIT, who developed the computer models for the Club of Rome report, Hardin proposed that the U.S. save its resources, and engage in “triage” by parceling out surplus food for political benefit.
But Hardin also recommended that advanced nations like the United States adopt a long-term philosophy he called Lifeboat Ethics. He specifically named Spaceship Earth as the idea he was opposing.
He accepted the idea of a craft alone on the boundless ocean, with only the resources aboard to sustain life. But his metaphor was the lifeboat: one per (rich) nation.
Hardin saw individual rich nations as lifeboats with limited capacity. If they tried to save victims in the water (symbolizing poor nations) by bringing them aboard, the lifeboat would capsize and they would all drown.
Hardin asserted that the metaphor of Spaceship Earth doesn’t work because a world ship would have one captain to keep the crew and passengers in line. Otherwise resources will be quickly looted when everyone has access to them, resulting in what he called “the tragedy of the commons”—a theory he previously proposed that would itself become the center of debate in the 70s.
Hardin wrote that the Spaceship Earth idea, which implies the interdependence of all humanity, “can be dangerous when used by misguided idealists to justify suicidal policies for sharing our resources through uncontrolled immigration and foreign aid.”
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| Another reaction to the population debate was the 1973 film, Soylent Green. |
Alan Berg of the World Bank questioned the accuracy of the food figures. Ecologist Barry Commoner and economist Robert Heilbroner both suggested that lifeboat ethics would lead to military conflicts, including nuclear terrorism.
Others said that he was identifying the wrong problems. Geoffrey Baraclough of Brandeis University was among those who maintained that prices and monetary policies rather than actual scarcities were the main culprits causing food shortages. Harvard’s Jean Mayer asserted that the problem was in the rich nations because they consume and pollute more. Nutritionist Frances Moore Lappe claimed that rich nations are wasting huge quantities of food, partly through overconsumption of beef: that lifeboat ethics is really hamburger ethics.
(Somebody may have also noted that immigration to America had in fact been controlled since the 1920s, and foreign aid was a very small item on the federal budget.)
Some countered Hardin and said that Spaceship Earth is the right metaphor. Limits to growth are real but they are global. Climatologist Stephen Schneider pointed out that long range climate change that affects agriculture could hit rich nations as well as poor. (Schneider would soon be one of the early voices warning of global warming.)
Hardin’s views of human nature and faulty history (particularly of cooperative use of common areas in England and elsewhere) were also attacked. Though he may have set out to show that the needs of the many outweigh the freedom of the few, he wound up defending selfishness, cruelty and genocide.
Though even by the early 21st century a food crisis of such dire proportions had not materialized, and the economic interdependence of globalization has made the lifeboat metaphor problematic if not obsolete, clearly such fears persist, or at least recur.
In terms of 1970s futurism, the Club of Rome episode had at least one cautionary lesson. While some resistance to the report was noticeably due to a deep sense of denial that there are any limits to growth, some who accepted the report’s findings responded with panic—the kind of frenzy that might result in hasty adoption of extreme and ultimately self-destructive policies.
Considering the future became a matter of law when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Foresight Provision that required that a House committee study the future impact of bills sent to the floor. Congress also created the Office of Technology Assessment to keep Congress informed on possible effects of technological change.
Colorado Senator John Culver predicted that political decision-makers would turn to futurists for help on critical problems. The office of one representative from North Carolina ran a Congressional clearinghouse on the future, with seminars reputed to be among the most successful futurist activities in Washington.
In the Senate, a Democrat and a Republican cosponsored a bill to create a federal Office of Economic Planning. Russell Train, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under both Republican and Democratic presidents, called for “a continuing and comprehensive census of the future.”
Nationally, a consultant’s investigation found more than 35 major corporations employing forecasters, looking at least 20 years into the company’s future. Meanwhile at least a thousand college courses in future studies were being taught in North America, including Harvard, UCLA and Simon Fraser University in Canada. They used textbooks and readers like Worlds in the Making: Probes for Students of the Future. (“Probes” was the word Marshall McLuhan used to describe his own investigations into contemporary phenomena. McLuhan also must be regarded as an inspiration and forerunner of formal futurism.)
There were future studies courses in high schools, and at least one (on Long Island) had a curriculum entirely organized by studying the future. There were adult education courses at the New School in New York City, and at least two graduate programs in futurism. The University of Massachusetts offered a PhD in Futures Studies. According to an academic observer who kept track, courses at all levels were increasing by about 50% every two years.
There were parallel developments in western Europe and elsewhere in the world, including within the Soviet Union. As the head of one of those Washington organizations suggested, futurism was becoming “an intellectual industry.”
But there were already problems within this dynamic field, as became clear when the second general assembly of the World Future Society convened in Washington in 1975.
It is at this point that I enter the story. For several years in the 70s I’d been looking into the futures field as a freelance journalist. I read the literature, conducted interviews, and visited organizations and universities, mostly in Massachusetts and Washington. In that role I attended the aforementioned convention, and witnessed what went on.
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| Alvin Toffler and Barbara Marx Hubbard at the 1975 WFS Assembly |
There were parapsychologists, science fiction buffs, and members of communes dedicated to ecological self-sufficiency. Participants included the director of Technological Forecasting of Tel-Aviv University, government planners from Japan and India, and the director of marketing for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics. There were also at least four members of the House of Representatives in attendance.
Formal sessions explored topics such as long-range economic and environmental planning, new technologies, systems analysis, and the future of religion. The exhibit hall overflowed with future-oriented products from flushless toilets to books on the anthropology of outer space.
Above all, there were the futurist stars. Young visionaries like Stewart Brand and Karl Hess mingled with Alvin Toffler and author Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), who both roamed the halls between hotel meeting rooms wearing sunglasses. Economist Kenneth Boulding spoke at one session. Roy Amara, head of the Institute of the Future in Menlo Park, California delivered a paper. Senator Edward Kennedy (who’d pushed for the Office of Technology Assessment, and introduced three other future-oriented bills) was a featured speaker. Senator Hubert Humphrey spoke on food security.
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| Herman Kahn in 1970s |
Kahn, who was once an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, was looking more like a white-bearded Santa Claus. He was speaking softly, gravely and authoritatively about the prosperous future ahead, when the stage was suddenly invaded.
The invader wasn’t a young protestor shouting slogans, but a neatly dressed middle-aged woman. She was Wilma Scott Heide, a past president of the National Organization of Women. Nevertheless, she was protesting. Standing uninvited on a stage filled exclusively by white men, she made the point she spoke about: the future didn’t have any women. Specifically, the assembly had no women among the main speakers.
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| Wilma Scott Heide in the 1970s |
Nor should the protest itself have been surprising. The feminist movement had been making headlines (and disrupting meetings) since 1970. It was therefore also an ironic moment, since the largest organization dedicated to the future was having its feminist crisis several years after everybody else. Anticipating it wouldn’t have required systems analysis, just reading the newspaper.
The assembly leadership’s first response was to try to physically shove Wilma Scott Heide off the stage. The audience protested, and she had her say. She finished to applause, and some conciliatory mumbles from the leadership.
That night a women’s caucus was formed, and assembly leaders were persuaded to add a woman as a main speaker. She spoke the very next morning, and apart from being the hit of the convention, she changed its entire emphasis. She brought another kind of futurism to the forefront.
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| Hazel Henderson from around this time |
She told them that she wasn't interested in developing strategies and scenarios. "I have humbler goals. They are to open up processes and decision mechanisms, to expose underlying values and assumptions buried deeply in our so-called value-free methodologies.”
“Citizens now understand that professionals with narrow, specialist training cannot adequately define our problems,” she continued. “Not that professionals aren't essential to the debate, but they must now see where the limits of their technical competence end, and”—the key phrase—“where their values carry no more weight than those of any other citizen in a democracy."
Hazel Henderson was instantly the new star of the convention, and her message inspired a fierce energy and focus for the rest of the proceedings. No one from the World Future Society had predicted this.
This is not to say that all futurists were the same, let alone confirmations of any stereotype. At an MIT futurist seminar I met an advertising copywriter who talked about vector analysis and Gurdjieff, a social scientists who was also a transcendental meditator, and a Harvard Business School student who had spent four years in Vietnam. There was an Israeli physicist, an economist and several biologists who talked about an operating principle common to biology and futurism, that survival during periods of change depends not so much on being well-adapted as on being collectively adaptable.
Nevertheless, finding ways for the broadest and yet most effective participation in envisioning desirable futures became the emphasis of mostly smaller and newer futurist organizations.
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| On left, Barbara Marx Hubbard, with Hazel Henderson (sitting on the floor), probably in the 1970s |
Grassroots groups like Earthrise, loosely affiliated with the Rhode Island School of Design, engaged in what it called “community future-consciousness raising” as part of a state planning effort. Mass planning meetings were conducted in Iowa, Oregon, Hawaii, and Georgia, often with the involvement of the governors of those states. In Georgia, that meant Governor Jimmy Carter, who would become President of the United States little more than a year after this WFS assembly. (The current President, Gerald Ford, had already spoken to a WFS symposium on energy.)
Others emphasized the need for more diverse voices within the futurist community. One potential effect was suggested at the assembly by the faces of technocrats listening to Third World speakers who said they weren’t interested in American advice anymore.
Eventually an alternative session led to a list of recommendations that were shouted from the podium in a free-form manifesto. The assembly ended in a frenzy, with several people—including Alvin Toffler—trying to set up some sort of communications network.
I checked back a year later. There had been a flurry of activity at first—Toffler’s Anticipatory Democracy Network sent out a follow-up letter noting “clearly the Washington meeting was an intense experience for a lot of people.” A gathering of Washington futurists resulted in a planning committee for a model futurist organization, which produced a simulated year-end report for five years in the future that anticipated a more participatory and rigorous futurism.
But beyond that report, not much happened in a formal sense as a result of the assembly’s fervor. Toffler’s network quietly died, and other groups “just melted away” in the words of a young Washington futurist. “Futurists don’t like to organize,” he explained.
An administrative official of the World Future Society was philosophical. “You know how it is at conventions,” she said. “People have an interesting time, but there’s not a lot of follow-through.”
Five years later, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, federal interest in futurists began to wane. By the early 1990s, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who has a young congressman identified himself as a futurist, dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment.
Many futurist assessments in the 1970s focused on the year 2000. But by the time 2000 came around, there weren’t many futurists left.
Some of what they had advocated became institutionalized. Lots of corporations employed forecasters or consultants on the future. Planning on local, state and regional levels routinely called upon citizen participation and input. But what concern for the future remained became more compartmentalized according to specific areas and disciplines.
So apparently did the future as focus or motivation. "We dwellers in the empire do not seem to want art with visionary power now—art that looks to the future," wrote Mark Edmudson in the late 1990s.
“Today we live entirely in the present," wrote British professor of Political Economy Robert Skidelsy at the end of 2000. "For most people the past has little meaning; there is no future on the horizon except more of the present, apart from the ambiguous promises offered by science.”
After interviewing a number of professional futurists, writer Jack Hitt concluded in early 2001, "I believe we the people have actually changed; we have turned the corner…Our cultural gaze turned away from the future…[O]ur once-ranging future has shrunk into a snug and warm place, as cozy and shag carpeted as a suburban den."
Then came the shock of September 11, 2001, when New York’s Twin Towers were toppled by terrorists piloting passenger airliners, leaving at least 3,000 dead. The future turned dark.
"Just yesterday, it seems, we were making a speed-freak, high-tech, fast-money hurdle into the 21st century," wrote San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joan Ryan that December. “Now the future is a fog, vague and ominous...”
Even after Americans recovered, observers tended to agree that they preferred to forget the future. “We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects,” wrote economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in 2010. “We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.”
This was the lasting legacy of the 70s futurists: the sense of responsibility for the future.
Some concerns for the future transferred into specific categories, like climate change. When virtually all nations on Earth acted as one planet for the first time to address the climate crisis in the Paris Accords, they had the future in mind.
But perhaps the future receded as the present became overwhelming. Future shock had become future numb. The unrelenting speed of life was transforming America into the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed.
Hopes and fears still are fixed on the future. But as a guiding idea, the future faded. It no longer seems to be in the active vocabulary of the current zeitgiest. The future comes and goes.
Part of the reason for the latest lull may be that the future became tainted with promises seemingly made but not kept, as well as alarming consequences of breathless promises that did come true. In both instances, futurists were not blameless.
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| Kurt Vonnegut from a posthumous collection, "Armageddon in Retrospect," 2008 |
The problem Hazel Henderson identified was also a conundrum. There were values hidden in the structure of all those numbers and categories fed into computers. A diversity of views could simply create chaos, and yet they were necessary to expose those values, as well as to propose alternatives and creative solutions missed by experts.
Important changes with vast implications (like the women's movement itself) just hadn't been factored. On the other hand, advocates could tend to exaggerate the change, or at least speak of it in too general a way.
They needed time to figure it all out.
But there was failure, or at least incompleteness, deep in the structure of what many futurists did, and therefore in the futures they proclaimed. A key weakness was quickly discovered by their usually unacknowledged forefather, in many ways the first futurist. He identified the idea of alternative futures a half century before Herman Kahn. He saw both the possibilities and the fallacies of scientific futurism in the first few years of the twentieth century. He realized there was a better way.
to be continued...
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