Past Future: Day of the Futurists

“The challenge of the times can also be based on the future, which may challenge us to examine and prepare in advance to solve the problems it has in store for us....The future works upon the present only to the extent that the present can receive the challenging images it broadcasts.”
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.

Alvin Toffler

They brought skills and knowledge from many existing areas. In his 1972 anthology called The Futurists, Alvin Toffler listed some: “anthropology, biology, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, sociology, art, economics, history, journalism and a dozen other disciplines.”

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.

It was an immediate global best-seller, and its bold paperback cover in several different florescent covers were everywhere for several years. Its terminology became part of professional inquiry and popular conversation, but its title alone was enough to convince publishers that there was a keen public interest in the future.

 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.

Herman Kahn in the 1950s

Out of their work in tandem with the U.S. military and policymakers came the terminology that haunted the 1950s and early 1960s: throw-weight, megatons, megadeaths. Their analyses resulted in paradoxical doctrines like Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD), the "rationality of irrationality" and "thinking the unthinkable," among the phrases coined by the best known nuclear warfare theorist and RAND’s star, Herman Kahn.

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.

The first was the fast-growing global population that started a very public debate with the 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb by Paul Eurlich.

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.

Population, food and energy had been the major factors considered and evaluated in the 1972 report on the future produced by the Club of Rome. It was called The Limits to Growth, and issued in paperback, it became another very controversial best-seller.

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.

Meanwhile, the Apollo space program was working towards its goal of a lunar landing.  During Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon, astronaut Bill Anders took an unscheduled photo of the Earth from lunar orbit, subsequently known throughout the world as "Earthrise."

 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.

Buckminster Fuller in the 70s

Enter Buckminster Fuller.

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.

Fuller published a book called Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, but his phrase was first popularized by Barbara Ward’s 1966 book titled Spaceship Earth that examined the impact of technology and other factors on the planet’s future. By the 1970s it was a well-known if not always well-understood term.

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.”

Another reaction to the population debate was the 1973 film,
Soylent Green.

Hardin’s assertions were quickly criticized on all fronts. Rodger Revelle of the Harvard Center for Population Studies questioned his population projections and understanding of population growth.

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.

Still, by mid decade, futurism seemed to be exploding in size and influence. There were at least 20 independent futurist organizations in Washington alone, with futurists of one kind or another working for federal government agencies, Congress, foundations and corporations. The World Future Society claimed 1700 members just in the DC area. The Washington Chamber of Commerce itself employed 30 futurists.

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.)

MIT students were excited by prospects of Bucky Fuller’s World Game, a kind of Internet without service providers that attempted to match world resources with needs.

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.

Alvin Toffler and Barbara Marx Hubbard at the
1975 WFS Assembly

Organized in 1966, the World Future Society was the big tent of futurism. So gathering in the Washington Hilton in early June were an estimated 2800 participants: city planners in Hush Puppies, corporate forecasters in khaki suits and university students in cutoff jeans.

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.

Herman Kahn in 1970s

The opening press conference on the first afternoon hosted the main eminences, including Harvard’s Daniel Bell and Herman Kahn, who’d left RAND and founded the Hudson Institute to research the future beyond nuclear war scenarios. He’d already issued Things to Come: Thinking About the Seventies and Eighties, and came armed with material from his forthcoming new book, The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America and the World.

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.

Wilma Scott Heide in the 1970s

As shocking as the moment was, the issue shouldn’t have been a surprise. In his introduction to The Futurists, Alvin Toffler had noted that women and people of color were underrepresented at the previous General Assembly of the WFS, and among futurists generally.

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.

Hazel Henderson from around this time

She was Hazel Henderson, an economist with an interest in ecology, and an advisor to the Office of Technology Assessment. Born in England and retaining a British accent, she was tall, blond, and charismatic, and she galvanized her audience.

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.

She’d issued a clarion call for a kind of participatory or democratic futurism, to guide and critique the experts and their priorities. Once “alternative futures” were admitted, choosing desirable alternatives became possible. What kind of future do you want? Answers might depend in part on different experiences of the present. Differences in race, gender, occupation and interests, socioeconomic status, geographical region, urban or rural etc. were all likely factors in those experiences.

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.

On left, Barbara Marx Hubbard, with Hazel Henderson
(sitting on the floor), probably in the 1970s

For example, the Washington-based Committee for the Future, founded by Barbara Marx Hubbard, used video technology to conduct symposia on the future to broaden participation. It convened community “Meetings to Design a Desirable Future” in eight U.S. cities, including Boston, where the three day Town Meeting of the Future was broadcast on public television.

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.

Some futurist organizations persisted, as did some futurists—notably Hazel Henderson and Barbara Marx Hubbard. But the thrill was gone.  Futures Studies courses evaporated, and professors went back to their departments. One or two books a decade got any attention. John Naisbitt’s Megatrends in 1982 was the last best-seller of the futurist era. While good work was being done behind the scenes, the goal of envisioning comprehensive futures pretty much disappeared from public view.

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.”

There were of course exceptions. During his eight years in office (2009-2016) President Barack Obama frequently linked the policies he advocated to their effect on the future. "Our future shouldn't be shaped by what's best for our politics,” he said. “Our politics should be shaped by what's best for our future."

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.

Kurt Vonnegut from a posthumous
collection, "Armageddon in Retrospect,"
2008

Yet even in the mid 70s, futurists knew that they hadn’t yet fulfilled their own promise. They knew what they wanted to do, but mostly (as several admitted to me) they didn’t know how to do it. The technology didn’t work well enough (including communications technology.) There turned out to be too many factors and inadequate means to organize them, or to forecast their relative contributions to an overall effect.

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...

Present: A Quotation.2

“....men are right when they affirm the value of private enterprises and when the affirm the necessity of public enterprises: where they go wrong is in denying that both are necessary.”

Walter Lippmann

Present Future: Nothing to See Here

Does it bear repeating?  We're in bad shape.

And I'm not even talking about today's news.

Let's do the inventory anyway.  Here's what we need to face contingencies, disasters, major challenges of the near and farther future: capacity, redundancy, resilience.

As I'm thinking again about World War II, it becomes even clearer that the side that was going to win was the side that had the greatest capacity: the largest industrial base, the easiest access to the greatest amount and quality of resources, and the skills and organizational ability to use those assets.

Both sides had organizational ability and skills, close enough to cancel each other out, with a few crucial exceptions (radar, breaking codes and that Germany never developed an atomic bomb.)  But though both sides had formidable industries and resources, the United States just had more.

All that was used in the most insane way imaginable, which was to build thousands of complex devices and send them out to be blown up, sunk or shot into the air or through the water.  All created to destroy people and things, including themselves. The side that could keep on building them would win.  It's why we won.

The next crisis, or the next war, won't be precisely like that.  But it will take all those elements and we are short in key areas, and losing capacity by the day. Our manufacturing base is a fraction of what it was, and skills in all manner of making things (with the possible exceptions of smartphones and cardboard boxes) are being lost.  We don't make things anymore.  China makes things.  They have capacity, and ours is dwindling.

Another crucial area of capacity is food production, and judging from where and how far the food from the grocery comes from, we're getting in trouble there as well.

Without capacity, we are vulnerable to any disruption in transportation, for any reason: technical, political, environmental.  It's one thing to get goods across a contiguous expanse of land.  It's quite another to get stuff halfway around the world across oceans, in the quantities and frequencies our population requires.

Capacity also means the resources, including human resources and skills in identifying problems and delivering solutions.  These are resources that often only government can muster and deploy on a large enough scale.  Once again, capacity is thin and getting thinner--as tragically proven by what should be a national scandal regarding the federal response to hurricane devastation in Puerto Rico.  Or (as now documented) in Texas.

Puerto Ricans responded the way people all over the world respond to situations that make living in their homes and communities impossible: the ones who can leave, have left.  Puerto Rico is emptying out.  But sooner or later, we run out of places to abandon, and to go.

Capacity includes leadership, and in every crucial area in which we depend on federal leadership, we're obviously in trouble.  Congress can allocate money, but how it is spent is crucial.

Which suggests another area of capacity: information.  Apart from government's information gathering and dissemination, the capacity of independent media reporting is crucial.  That capacity is also dwindling.  Apparently with the resources the news media can now deploy, Puerto Rico may as well be the moon.

The internal infrastructure of this country--needed to transport resources and products, for example--is falling apart, and all Washington is doing is trying to figure out who can make money from it.  That's the infrastructure we need to respond to disasters and emergencies, to keep the country from splintering and falling apart.  Especially since resources for life--food and clothing--aren't close by anymore, almost everywhere in America.  Once the remaining stores empty out, of course.  Or you run out of gas.

Redundancy means more than one system to perform functions necessary to survive.  So in your home you don't want to totally depend on electricity, or totally on gas, or totally on batteries you can't replace anyway.  We're losing redundancy in almost everything now: communications, transportation, food, and increasingly, information.  That's a biggie.  Right now the satellites go out, the Internet goes down, and it's just about game over, because the alternatives have been starved to death.  Government used to think about these things.  Nobody seems to care anymore.

Think also how about how we're becoming more and more dependent on access to stuff from long distance: clothing, food and other things it would be hard to live without.  It also seems so easy, click click, and the truck shows up.  What could go wrong?  It would take very little to go wrong in this system to prevent it from working.  And with physical stores driven out of business because of this dependence, we're very quickly out of stuff and out of luck.  The redundancy in the consumer supply system-- several kinds and sizes of physical stories plus mail order from afar--is much weaker and is quickly disappearing.  No Amazon, no Fedex for a few weeks, and we're screwed.

Resilience is a buzzword in certain quarters these days, but it basically means the ability to take hits and keep going.  In the big picture, resilience (beyond individual character) comes from nature, where it's being destroyed.  It comes from community, which is destroying itself, although at least some spirit of "you'd do the same for me" persists.  It comes from families and individuals, but they can't do it alone.

It comes from institutions that are themselves resilient.  It used to come from businesses, but there are fewer local businesses anymore, with local ownership and resources.  It even came from corporations, when they identified themselves with the community, or even with America.  They mostly don't anymore, except for PR purposes. Do they even exist anywhere, when their faceless ownership is in another state and the only people who will talk to you are in another country? Their only allegiance is to their own greed.  I'm talking about you, Suddenlink and AT&T.

 And it comes from government, from the public sector, which is currently being destroyed from within in Washington, as well as looted on a massive scale.  So when it comes time for the federal government to save us all, as it did in 2009, the cupboard is bare, and the morons in charge won't know what to do anyway.

So, with suicidal policies in Washington, homicidal attitudes in the country, and a population with their heads buried in their screen toys, we seemingly haven't noticed that we don't know how to make anything or do anything, and don't have the means to do it anyway.

So no, we're not in great shape.  But let's move along.  Nothing to see here.

Past Future: It Comes and Goes

“The future is an integral aspect of the human condition. Man survives, uniquely, by his capacity to act in the present on the basis of past experience in terms of future consequence. By assuming a future, man makes his present endurable and his past meaningful. Pasts, presents, and their alternative futures interweave in the anticipation and prediction of his future actions.”

Opening paragraph of the The Future of the Future by John McHale (1969)

"Dr. Memory, do you remember the future?"
"Yesss."
" Forget it!"

Firesign Theatre LP I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus (1971)

To remember the future, anticipate the past.

While people think about their future all the time, it's true that "the future" isn't always a conscious or fashionable subject.  The future comes and goes.

In various ways the future was prominent for several decades of the 20th century.  At times it was a symbol of hope and at others a focus of dread.  It defined dreams and aspirations, and at times it guided policy and action on a large scale.  And for awhile it was the focus of intense and widespread study that seemed to offer possibilities for a unifying guide to policy-making, education, and action: a science of the future itself.

 For example, it was a conscious source of hope and guidance in the Great Depression of 1930s America.  In The American Clock, Arthur Miller’s play about this decade, a character recalls: “Then and now, you have to wonder what really held it all together, and maybe it was simply the Future: the people were still not ready to give it up.”

It was a remarkable time to be focusing on the future. The 1930s in America was a decade of multiple and bewildering crisis. The Great Depression was deep and long, calling into question the dominant institutions of finance, business and government.

 According to various surveys, more than half of American families were living in poverty in the early years of the decade, and nearly 30% of the population had no income at all. Farm families (a quarter of all Americans) were destitute, and in the mining areas of Appalachia, up to 90% of school children suffered from malnutrition. Hunger was a widespread fact of life.

Dire poverty was lessened as the decade and the New Deal progressed, but as late as 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

Meanwhile Americans were warily watching the rise of European dictatorships, particularly Hitler in Germany, who began armed conquests aimed at accumulating mineral and other resources for endless weaponry, and fertile farmland to feed an ever-growing military.

Yet there was material for hope. Americans saw the federal government together with private contractors engaged in building the physical foundation for the future. The Tennessee Valley Authority and the massive Hoover Dam were two of many hydroelectric projects in the West and South that brought electricity to entire regions. (Fewer than 5% of farms had electrical power.)

The federal Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs built and repaired thousands of roads, bridges, schools, and libraries. The Golden Gate Bridge, Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, La Guardia Airport and New York’s George Washington Bridge were among the landmark structures erected in the 1930s. Much of the infrastructure still used in the 21st century, including national and state parks, was built in this decade.

Though these New Deal programs were most immediately employment projects, they were deliberately designed for the future, and not just in terms of physical buildings. “By using the new materials of social justice,” FDR proclaimed in his second Inaugural Address, “we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.”

But even providing employment had long-term consequences. These projects maintained and trained a workforce for the future. That included professionals such as scientists, architects and artists who found support to learn and practice their crafts.

At the very end of the decade, an immense vision of the future arose just outside the city: the 1939 New York World’s Fair, with the theme Building the World of Tomorrow.

This huge and hugely popular fair, spread over 1216 acres outside New York City, hosted pavilions and exhibits from more countries than any world’s fair before it, yet was planned to be more than an international trade show or patriotic pageant (though it was both of those.) It had a purpose: to make the future physical.  It carried on the 1930s spirit of building on a big scale into the transformative future.

Akin to an impossibly large Art Deco science fiction film set, the Fair as a whole as well as individual buildings and exhibits were the work of some of America’s best designers. Hundreds of gleaming buildings demonstrating technologies no one had seen before were carefully arrayed in a spacious landscape, permeated by fountains and greenery, with the Lagoon of Nations at its center.

Elegant and otherworldly, playful and serious, hokey and inspiring, the 1939 World’s Fair was a future vision that people could walk around in.

And some 44 million people did, from all over the country and elsewhere in the world. Some 90% of American surveyed said they wanted to see it. Many who visited did so more than once—a third of those who attended in the Fair’s last months were there for at least the fifth time. Others (usually nearby New Yorkers) visited 20, 100, even 200 times over the Fair's two year life.

President Franklin Roosevelt opened the Fair, promising those who came that “they will find that the eyes of the United States are fixed on the future.” The opening was the first public event in America to be broadcast on television, though there were only 200 existing TV sets to receive it.

The two major exhibits were Democrcity, depicting the America of a century ahead, and Futurama in the General Motors building, which foresaw a 1960 future of superhighways, streamlined cities and quiet suburbs embedded in green landscapes. Visitors left the Futurama experience bearing a white button with dark blue lettering that said simply, “I have seen the future.”

These were visions for a 1930s America in which less than half the population owned a home or a car, and where even an uninterrupted four-lane highway was unknown (the first, a section of the Pennsylvania turnpike, would open as the Fair closed.)

So the Fair spoke on a personal level. An exaggerated version of the urbanizing, modernizing effect of this future was seen in an animated cartoon of the time by Max Fleischer. It depicted a rural couple that arrives at the Fair in a horse and buggy, and thanks to various automated processes, they leave as swinging cosmopolitans in a fast new car.

Apart from the usual technological wonders unveiled at a World’s Fair (in this case television, florescent lights, FM radio, new generations of aircraft and a long distance telephone system, as well as a robot and a rocket to Mars) the 1939 Fair directly addressed what else would have to change for a better future.

One exhibit showed four levels of income: subsistence, maintenance, “the good life”, and luxury. A third of the nation was indeed below subsistence (as FDR had famously proclaimed) and 90% of Americans were below the “good life” minimum income.

The exhibit asserted that to raise the income of the entire population to “the good life” minimum was no fantasy. “With modern technology and power production, it is no longer physically impossible...we need to discover a workable formula for its distribution to ‘Three-Thirds of a Nation.’”

For all its consumer hoopla and the self-serving future centered on superhighways for General Motors cars, the Fair aptly demonstrated a formula for building the future, as noted by columnist William Lippmann who came away from the Futurama show “feeling that men are right when they affirm the value of private enterprises and when the affirm the necessity of public enterprises: where they go wrong is in denying that both are necessary.”

As the Fair seemed to conceive it, the future required that combination applied to the opportunities provided by science and technology. “We were great believers in Science in the Thirties, the Depression time,” wrote Arthur Miller in his foreword to works by Czech science fiction author Karel Capek. “Our problem seemed to be that scientific objectivity was not being applied to social problems, like that of scarcity in the midst of plenty.”

“See the sun through the gray/the dawn of a new day,” went lyrics to the World of Tomorrow song, as belted out by Ethel Merman. In the anxious drabness of the times, the Fair was a sanctuary and an escape into a hopeful future. Those who created the Fair insisted it was realizable. “The tools for building the world of tomorrow are already in our hands,” said the Fair’s science director. “Action is our slogan...If the world is awry we can change it.”

But the world was becoming even more seriously awry. Because the Fair’s future seemed to become immediately obsolete when World War II broke out in Europe before it had even closed, it is often characterized as a naive Art Deco pipedream and a sadly ironic failure. Yet major elements of its vision proved out as blueprints for the future.

It especially seems to have captured a passionate interest in the future, in the midst of so much suffering. Historian William Manchester noted that, in contrast to their elders, the young in the 1930s had a different look. “There is an intensity to their expressions,” he wrote. “They are leaning slightly forward, as though trying to see the future. And they are smiling.”

Even through the intensity of World War II, the future remained a motivating focus. In searching for the purpose of enduring the most destructive years in world history, many looked to the effects on the future. Apart from preserving freedoms and independence, they found meaning in the cooperation of Allied nations and in the troops from many backgrounds working together. These were felt to be the living seeds of a more united world, and a prosperity more equally shared.

The unique and frequent wartime radio productions by Norman Corwin on the CBS network were particular conduits of these hopes for the future. Corwin was the best-known and most influential radio writer and producer of the 1940s, when radio was the primary mass medium. His popularity was based on a form of program he essentially invented. According to radio historian Gerald Nachman, they were one of a kind, “blending drama, history, journalism, verse, narrative, music and sound into a kind of radio tone poem, using the finest actors, composers, poets and special effects available.”

Corwin wrote about the anonymous GI, the “little guy” who proved his mettle and judgment in the war, and who could do great things when given the opportunity. These soldiers deserved good housing, health and education when they returned.

International cooperation along with the nature of a world war broadened the horizons of those involved in it, as interdependence seemed a foregone fact of future life. “Before this war all of our countries were islands,” Corwin wrote in a broadcast script, “each one of us cut off in spirit from the rest of the world...But now we’re together...”

Corwin caught this attention to the future from more than American troops. He quoted an English officer who insisted that after the war “things are never going to be the same as they were...We’ve discovered that the idea of every-man-for-himself, that the old class distinctions have outlived their usefulness.”

Ordinary soldiers must insist, he said, “on a new life—by demanding that the same tremendous sacrifice and energy, the same resources of men and material that are put into a successful war be put into a successful peace.”

In England, a version of this desire was general enough to lead immediately after the war to such major changes as nationalizing the mining industry, enacting universal healthcare and other aspects of what came to be known as the welfare state.

In the United States, responses included the GI Bill of Rights, which supported returning troops and provided funds for their higher education. This provision was an immense success, enabling millions of men and women to attend college, who would not have otherwise had that opportunity. (The G.I. Bill, unlike some other postwar programs, did not discriminate on the basis of race.) This also changed higher education permanently, from serving only the elite.

But at the same time, much of Europe was in a shambles, its future in question. Between a half and two-thirds of the housing in major European cities had been destroyed. There were between 13 and 20 million displaced persons. Starvation and disease swept across Europe.

Much of the devastation was due to the bombing in civilian areas, more and more relentless towards the end of the war. Some cities and villages in Italy and other countries had been bombed repeatedly by the air forces of four or five nations on both sides.

 It something that World War II added to warfare. Whereas the casualties of World War I were 95% military, only a third of those killed in World War II were soldiers. Two-thirds were civilians. “There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of life,” wrote Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times in 1945.

Seeing the present need but also the future implications, the United States under the direction of its wartime military leader, General George C. Marshall, undertook a massive program of aid to Europe, with the financial partnership of European countries. With popular support in the US, the Marshall Plan made a decisive difference in Europe’s survival and its subsequent prosperity, as well as creating the impetus for nations to cooperate, leading eventually to the European Union.

Marshall was the first military leader to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The Marshall Plan can be seen as partial vindication for the war veterans whose motivations included fostering a framework for a more peaceful international future. The same might be said for the formation of the United Nations immediately after the war.

With their reflexive imagery of the Organization Man commuting from and to to his sedate (or sedated) suburb, the 1950s of President Eisenhower are not normally seen as particularly engaged with the future. But the gigantic federal highway program, together with federal loans and other housing programs, literally paved the way for the suburban expansion, as well as partially fulfilling those Futurama visions. These and other public investments were largely enabled by high tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, even with Republicans in power.

Meanwhile, the rapidly expanding American consumer industries were transforming pre-war innovations like television into new foundations of post-war life. New chemicals and plastics changed the substances of life, while the nation became linked with highways and faster airplanes.  The future was appearing, now named as the demi-god Progress.  The General Electric advertising slogan summed up this aspect of the 1950s: "...progress is our most important product."

The election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960 brought a set of more articulated arguments for focusing on the future as motives for present action. The Peace Corps, the space program’s goal of landing a man on the moon, the nuclear test ban treaty and Civil Rights proposals were among those actions that Kennedy justified with historical perspective, and with the future in mind.

Throughout the postwar decades, an enormous shadow had fallen over the future. The first atomic bombs that destroyed two Japanese cities in 1945, followed by development of nuclear and then thermonuclear arsenals in the US and the Soviet Union, with missile systems to deliver multiple weapons of unimaginable power in a virtual instant, severely darkened the human prospect.

The threat of nuclear Armageddon combined with the dour mood following President Kennedy’s assassination.  Together with the growing dissent and discontent over the Vietnam war, they fueled intense and sometimes desperate attention to the future.

 This included new interest in comprehensive and systematic approaches to the future in the late 1960s and especially throughout the 1970s. It was the golden age of futurism, of studying the future.

To be continued...

More information and photos on the Great Depression, the 1939 World's Fair and the Marshall Plan by following the links to posts on Soul of Star Trek.

Present: A Quotation

“When Pandora opened the fabled box and let sorrow and trouble loose in the world, she was still left with the spirit of hope, the possibility of visions.”

Fred Polak

Past: Always Changing

The future is unknown, but then, so is the past.  The story keeps changing, as several revelations and studies announced this week suggest.  First there's the cosmic story, the so-called Standard Model of the universe (which basically means the theory that works mathematically as well as in terms of observations) which may have gotten shaken up by findings in one new study.

Then there's the standard but often revised story of early humans and their migrations, shaken up (perhaps) by discoveries of what appear to be sophisticated stone tools in India that could point to an earlier migration from Africa than previously known, or to a higher skill level of some known or unknown humanoid species.

Finally there's the discovery of a previously unknown but very large Mayan city obscured by trees and buried underground in the Guatamala jungle that blows away previous estimates of population and development, necessitating a whole new story for the region.  The thousands of hidden structures over a wide but interconnected area (by elevated "highways"!) include this huge pyramid, illustrated above.  We make inferences about the present and future based on what we think we know about the past.  When that changes, it all changes, at least a little.

The Passing Show: Joe Kennedy

 Bill Clinton, who as a teenager shook hands with President Kennedy, was inspired by JFK to pursue a political career.  Barack Obama, too young to have met either John or Robert Kennedy (both assassinated in the 1960s), nevertheless was inspired by them.  The sudden support of JFK's daughter Caroline and then the rest of the Kennedys provided Senator Obama's campaign for the 2008 presidential nomination with a huge boost.  A special friendship developed between President Obama and Senator Ted Kennedy, ending only with Kennedy's death.

So in turn, when Representative Joe Kennedy gave the official Democratic rejoinder to the anti-president's state of the union address, he made a speech before an audience in a Massachusetts auto assembly plant that echoed Obama themes and language to an almost eerie extent.

Joe Kennedy is the grandson of Robert Kennedy, a US Attorney-General and Senator from New York who was fatally shot minutes after winning the final big primary of 1968 in California, preparing to go to the August convention with the most delegates won for President.

Joe's father, Joseph P. Kennedy II, served in the US House of Representatives for about a decade, from the late 80s to the late 90s.  He was actually the third Joe Kennedy in his family line.  The first Joseph Kennedy was the family patriarch who built a fortune and served as US Ambassador to England for FDR.  He was grooming his eldest son, Joseph Jr., to run for President, the first Irish Catholic to do so.  But Joseph Jr. was killed in combat in World War II, and eventually his younger brother, John F. Kennedy, ran for President in 1960 and won.

So this Joe Kennedy is political and American royalty, and like the young royals of the UK, he is informal and unassuming.  He doesn't seem to have a trace of the famous Kennedy accent, a unique combination of Boston and New York.

His speech was widely applauded, though some on Twitter etc. fixated on what appeared to be flecks of chapstick on a corner of his mouth.   He clearly has a political future if he wants one--the previous generation of Kennedys for one reason or another withdrew from political life after a time.

Joe Kennedy is an heir to Kennedy concerns (he served in the Peace Corps) but is also tech savvy (graduate of Stanford) and serves on the House technology committee, as well as foreign relations and energy committees.  But he will be only 40 in 2020, and hasn't generated the buzz needed to be a serious presidential candidate so far.

Yet Democrats know they need some younger prospects, and the time is getting short.  Immediately after this November's congressional elections, the media will focus on presidential possibilities.  Right now the Dems don't have clear choices.

Senator Bernie Sanders also gave a rebuttal to the state of the union, which was much more specific in response to the actual speech.  (Joe Kennedy's sounded as if it was written much earlier.)  But Sanders will be 79 in 2020.  Another likely candidate is Joe Biden who will be 78.  Even Elizabeth Warren, not talked about so much these days, will be 71.  (It was in a Harvard class taught by Warren that Joe Kennedy met the woman he would marry.)

There are a number of other names that insiders and media mention as potential presidential candidates next time, especially of women and Latino men, but none has emerged with the kind of support that Barack Obama had by the time he declared for the presidential primaries in February 2007.  He'd been talked about since his 2004 Democratic Convention speech. So there's still time but it's getting short.

It also strikes me that the pure Obama message of inclusion and change is probably not going to be enough.  That positive message is ultimately unifying, but already we can see how degraded our politics and our country has become due to the current administration.  That's going to have to be acknowledged somehow.  The right balance that at least acknowledges if not expresses anger and pain suffered by many these days is tricky.  It's going to take somebody special--as Barack Obama was--to heal these wounds and move the country forward.  Not to mention winning the primaries and the general election.