Futurology

When we think of the world's  future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value p.3e

Futurology is the attempt to predict how the future will turn out. As opposed to less respected forms of fortune telling, it generally attempts to predict sociological and scientific changes, rather than particular events, although it occasionally makes stabs at predicting world wars and similar globe spanning events.

My subsumption of futurology under the category of fortune telling may suggest that I am opposed to it. I am not. We all predict the future all the time. Implicit in undertaking any action is the prediction that one will have time to do it, or at least make headway on it. There is also the prediction that if I do this, then something I want will result at a reasonable cost. If futurology based its guesses on events which had no natural connection with how things will turn out, then there would be a problem, but it instead attempts to extrapolate from current trends.

The task of extrapolating is often done poorly, however. That is the point of the opening quote: we tend to extrapolate linearly. We tend to think in terms of either progress or decline, and see these as both opposed and lacking internal resources for any reversal. It is hard, even when one notices this fact, to resist this tendency. If one looks back at my posts about current culture, one will likely see me falling into this error.

The twists in history come from the fact that not everyone is going the direction of the masses, and not all the masses are unequivocally going the direction of the herd. The herd is an abstraction. Each individual in the herd feels dislocated from the herd. Most people dissent in some way with respect to some view of their group. Some twists occur because there comes to be enough of a certain kind of dissent to crystallize into a new movement. Other twists occur because people change their minds, often because they see their views as conflicting in irresolvable ways.

What should give us hope in the present time, when it seems as though both the left and the right are providing only predictions of decline, is that these twists and turns occur, and are likely to occur. Neither political party is as unified as it seems, and both seem to contain views which conflict with each other. These two elements provide resources for both parties to change direction. In the culture at large and in various sub-groups the same holds, although it is less clear--because the groups are less well defined--where the fault lines may appear.

A responsible futurology must provide an account of the forces which are presently driving the culture, what the forces which are operating at a level that is not efficacious are, what new forces may be produced, what produces and demolishes such forces, and how all these forces and force effecting processes interact. The lazy futurologies which merely continue a trend linearly or expect history to repeat itself the same way every time must be done away with. Cultural and scientific trends are unstable, and history rarely repeats itself the same way twice.