Past Future: Anticipations

“…Wells was a prophet, not merely in the popular sense of having predicted space travel, processed food and the Common Market, but in the wider sense of being able to think in a completely new way about the future---to be, as it were, at home in the future.”
Roslynn D. Haynes

“Something in us pursues information and data with some passion, but the soul is always eager to hear another story.” Thomas Moore

To remember the future, anticipate the past...

The idea of applying scientific principles to anticipate the future was not new when 1970s futurists claimed it as their defining and innovative procedure. Nor was it new when RAND and Herman Kahn started up their computers in the 1950s.

This approach to the future, re-discovered in the middle of the 20th century, had been proposed and applied as the century began. At that time it was the work of one man: H.G. Wells.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Wells was known for his novels and short stories, many of which he described as “scientific romances.” These include the classics for which he is most remembered in the 21st century, such as The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

But he became famous in his own time as the result of a series of magazine articles on the future. They were published in England and the United States in 1901, and collected the following year in a book, titled Anticipations. It was a surprise success, outselling any of his novels.

Wells described a future dominated by big fast cars, long-distance buses and fat trucks traveling on wide asphalt highways, passing mega-cities and prefabricated suburban communities of air-conditioned homes filled with labor-saving appliances, along a solid sprawl spread unbounded from Boston to Washington, D.C.

Futurama 1939

This was still the future in 1939, when Futurama showed it at the New York World’s Fair. But Wells foresaw it before Henry Ford had sold a single Model T, or London had a single motorized bus.

Wells foresaw electric appliances and other labor saving devices in homes, when English homes were lit by coal gas lamps, or even oil lamps and candles.  He also saw social ramifications: the end of house servants, the beginning of keeping up with the Jones.

He saw darkness in the future as well: a series of major and highly mechanized wars. The next war would feature the “land ironclads” (or tanks, also not yet invented.) As soon as mid-century, war would be dominated by aircraft, flying in formation in large numbers. He was writing two years or so before the Wright Brothers demonstrated a successful airplane.

Victory will depend on expertise and planning, but he also envisioned the ghastly consequences for soldiers, with a vocabulary that eerily anticipates words later written by poets and novelists who were soldiers in World War I: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen.”

But in the far future Wells saw nations coming together in common markets and then in a world state.

These were not wild prophecies, but based on Wells’ wide reading. The book covers economics and class, forms of government, education, science, journalism and structures of social relationships and families, including improvement in the status of women. From the perspective of the actual future he got a lot wrong, and a few things wrong-headed (his advocacy of eugenics, for instance) that he needed to correct later. But in terms of the study of the future, Anticipations sets several standards.

“What made the book so successful was the willingness of the author to look at alternative futures,” writes Wells biographer David C. Smith, “to discuss his ideas with his readers, and to invite them to participate in his work of future-making.”

So Wells presaged alternative futures and participatory or democratic futures all at once. Even more basically, he made a case for the scientific study of the future, long before the 70s futurists.

He articulated this argument most elaborately in a speech, also in 1902, that was subsequently published as The Discovery of the Future.

He developed a daring thesis that the future can be foreseen, with at least the same accuracy as we know the past. “And the question arises how far this absolute ignorance of the future is a fixed and necessary condition of human life, and how far some application of intellectual methods may not attenuate even if it does not absolutely set aside the veil between ourselves and things to come. And I am venturing to suggest to you that along certain lines and with certain qualifications and limitations a working knowledge of things in the future is a possible and practicable thing.”

We can know as much about the future as about the past, he argued. Our knowledge of the past depends on partial information, inference and interpretation. As new information is uncovered, old information given new weight and relevance, and as interpretations change, so does our picture of the past.

This is especially true, he said, of the 19th century’s exploration of the remote past, such as the geological ages. Evidence is sparse, yet inferences can be made.
“...it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward,” to see the future as well as we see the deep past, using the same basic inductive methods. Such a vision of the future would be “infinitely more important to mankind” than even the view of the past that transformed 19th century thought.

It would be a scientific undertaking, he insisted. He reminded his audience that all science is ultimately about the future: a theory of gravity predicts what will happen when someone throws an object into the air, anytime in the future. The theories that result from scientific analysis of facts are tested by their ability to yield “confident forecasts.”

The key to forecasting the future is to combine scientific predictions of separate phenomena—including even “so unscientific a science as economics.” If “first-class minds” did something like that, couldn’t they create “an ordered picture of the future that will be just as certain, just as strictly science, and perhaps just as detailed as the picture that has been built up within the last hundred years of the geological past?”

Such forecasts would be useful in guiding present actions. There is “no reason why we should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and serviceable generalizations upon countless important issues in the human destiny.”

“I must confess that I believe quite firmly that an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility,” Wells asserted as his lecture reached its climax. “I believe that the time is drawing near when it will be possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future.”

Wells’ speech was widely praised, and together with Anticipations, made him “a mind and a force to be reckoned with,” biographer Smith wrote. “He had become a great man.”

But no one seemed to take up the challenge to develop a scientific study of the future—not until the idea was rediscovered a half century later.

Wells himself wrote many more non-fiction books, all of them in one way or another expressing his vision of things to come. He had announced this commitment that guided the rest of his long career in The Discovery of the Future. He divided those who find their direction in the past, from those who look to the future. The past-oriented look for causes, the future-oriented for possible effects. “…the main dispute even in most modern wars…will be found to be a reference, not to the future, but to the past…”

The difference defines divergent ideas of a person’s purpose in life. One sees it as ”simply to reap the consequences of the past,” while the other believes “our life is to prepare the future.”

It was clear which Wells was going to be. “Yet though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference to consequence to our morality, it is still the past that dominates our lives. But why? Why are we so bound to it? It is into the future we go, to-morrow is the eventful thing for us.”

But in championing the future Wells did not restrict himself to articles, commentaries, non-fiction books and speeches. He returned to fiction, including many novels about the future. Some of his fictions were also eerily accurate about the future within his lifetime, but he did no more systematic forecasting as he began to do in Anticipations.

One reason could be that in fairly short order, he realized there were limitations to a scientific study of the future.

Partly because of the stir that the Anticipations articles created in the United States, Wells was invited for a lecture tour. He went, and subsequently wrote a book, The Future in America, published in 1906. There he retreated on his claims for a “scientific sort of prophecy,” admitting that his The Discovery of the Future lecture “went altogether too far in this direction.”

" Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts and will of unique incalculable men,” he wrote. “With them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to be not 'scientific' at all for all the greater issues, the humanly-important issues, but critical, literary, even—if you will—artistic. Here insight is of more account than induction and the perception of fine tones than the counting of heads.”

The artistic method he often chose—the method he returned to—was storytelling. In addition to the “perception of fine tones” there are other decisive features of stories that make them our portals into alternative futures.


Story, writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist as well as an English professor, “is the fundamental instrument of thought.”

Story is also “our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, of explaining.”

“We look for stories in everything. If stones are thrown on the ground, they make a story," observed novelist Brian Kitely. "Consciousness is a story. It is a condensing of the world’s details into narrative.”

“Knowledge is stories,” writes Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Explanations in science itself tend to be narratives, even beyond the basic story of the if/then statement. “Science is the storytelling of our time,” asserts William Irwin Thompson. “By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here.”

As worthy and useful as futures studies might be, they are not what "the future" means to most people. Neither jargon-propelled generalities nor carefully couched projections and matrices quite get to the texture of life, to the quality of the future, the smell of it. Nor can they set up a realistic dynamic that makes room for behavior, emotion, creativity, spontaneity, instinct, dedication, insight, perception, perverseness, influence, aspiration, faith, courage, learning, intent, love, hope, imagination…in a word, soul.

Producing that kind of scenario is not really the futurist's role. That's the job of the storyteller.

In envisioning a future, stories can better provide the human element through characters and their emotions. This adds a necessary complexity to these futures.

Story can provide motivation and points of view. They can expose various self-interests. By showing effects on characters it adds the crucial condition of emotion, of human reaction and response.

Stories can explore consequences on the individuals and groups they tell us about. Stories can dramatize challenge and costs to society and individuals, and suggest qualities of mind and spirit needed to confront those consequences, to meet those challenges.

Stories can place a future in several layered contexts—the personal, interpersonal, cultural, and societal. They can place the future in the context of time—of present and pasts. They can suggest the context of an entire world.

In his fictions, H.G. Wells exemplified all of this. In her study of the influence of science on Wells’ writing, Roslynn D. Haynes concluded, “Thus Wells tends not to examine scientific principles per se, but their effect on individual characters and their causal implications for society or mankind as a whole.”

Since stories appear to be how we think and how we learn, they also have the advantage of seizing our attention, and remaining in our memories. Reports clotted with number and levels of probabilities, snowstorms of data plowed with arcane instruments of analysis, plus charts and graphs of dubious usefulness, aren’t likely to give many people a picture of the future. Nor much hope for the future either, beyond anticipating getting to the end of them and going out for ice cream.

But something that reaches almost everyone is a story. Stories may provide a sense of one alternative future, but more than that, stories suggest meanings. When we experience a story, feel what the characters feel, we get some sense of what the complex essence, what the soul of such a future might be.

Stories can’t do it all, any more than a scientific report or a comprehensive description. Stories are limited by their form, and by the skills of the storyteller. They have beginnings and endings, and concentrate on significant events. They may use analogy, irony, paradox. Or they may be quite a bit cruder in their effects. But they have definite advantages in considering the future.

They link with other stories and archetypal themes that suggest humanity’s deepest desires, fears and aspirations. In bringing us into the story and helping us to identify with characters, they offer the possibility of empathy, not only with our potential future selves in a given alternative future, but also with others.

That is a crucial element in the kind of systems thinking that was a cornerstone of 1970s futurism. According to one author on the subject, “the systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another.”

Some stories hope to tell us what future to avoid. Others suggest how we need to change to get to a future we need. Futurist Willis Harman noted: “The most carefully designed social measures will not achieve their desired goals unless they involve not only rationally designed programs and structures, but also changes in deep-rooted beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns.”

“There is only one crisis in the world,” wrote futurist John Platt. “It is the crisis of transformation.” Stories can help us get to where we need to be.

In the end, all we actually have of the past or future are the stories we tell ourselves. So stories also reflect back to us what we feel about the future in general, or one or another alternative tomorrows.

The rest of this series will concentrate on such stories, their contexts and ramifications, as reflections of how we think and feel about the future.

Most of these stories are widely known and shared, many have historical significance, and a few are lesser known but just as indicative. They tend to be foundation stories—the first or best known, in print or as movies or television—of a particular kind, representing a significant view of the future. In many cases, other stories like them followed, including those still being told.

But fair warning: even the well known stories may not always be ones that usually get classified as foundation stories of the future, or of particular approaches to the future. Analysis of the literature, for example, doesn’t always include bug-eyed monster movies of the 1950s, Star Trek: The Next Generation or the American Indian Ghost Dance movement of the 1890s.

We begin with the foundation story of “the future” itself. For several years before he wrote the now forgotten Anticipations, H.G. Wells proposed and dramatized the basic idea of “the future” we have accepted ever since. Not in any essay or exegesis, but in a story that has been read and remembered for well over a century. Before Wells invented futurism, he invented the future.

This future begins with the personal. Its roots are found in a dingy house in an obscure village outside London, where Bertie Wells was born in the mid-19th century. So why did the son of two former servants start thinking about the future?

 Because his life depended on it.

to be continued...

But Of Course! Blame It On the '60s

Not that it matters all that much these days, but I haven't been so annoyed by such a wrongheaded and overreaching piece in a long time as by Kurt Andersen's opus in the Atlantic, "How America Lost Its Mind."

It's frustrating because the piece makes a case--an easy-to-make case--that the minds of some Americans are conspicuously untethered to reality, and that this has political consequences.  But his analysis why this is happening right now is either glibly nebulous and unconvincingly supported or just oversimplified to the point that it's simply wrong. The question of "How America Lost Its Mind" is therefore in reality unanswered.

It really goes off the rails when he attributes much of the phenomenon to that grand bugaboo of our time, the 1960s.  Of course!  Why be original when you can be popular? He tries to lend his thesis credence by noting that he was a child then.  Well, I was a young adult at the end of the decade, and I saw things a lot differently.

I don't deny that some of what we are seeing now constitute perversions of cultural phenomena of the 60s, but not only of the 60s or after. The '60s also did not invent ignorance and isolated cultural myths.  He does mention some of this history, but always we come back to the 60s.  In many ways the 60s are just a target of convenience, not to mention a right wing bugaboo popularized by Newt Gingrich in the early 90s, that still plays well in certain quarters today.

Nobody denies there were excesses in the 60s.  But there were reasons for those excesses.  What happened in the 60s relating to conventional wisdom didn't happen all on its own. Much of it was in reaction to the failures and limitations of the conventional wisdom, and the fact that these failures were causing real harm, from stultified and despairing lives, to dead Americans and Vietnamese.  As well as threatening the planet with the thermonuclear logic of the Cold War.

In fact the major critique made in the 1960s was: underneath this mask of rationality, America is already insane.  If America lost its mind, it was already gone by the premier of Doctor Strangelove.

Andersen writes that the 60s fostered crazy conspiracy theories, and anti-science attitudes.  He mixes politics and New Age assertions as the reasons.

But let's separate a few things.  First, conspiracy theories of any kind did not begin in the 1960s.  Nor did the belief in UFOs, etc.

Second, let's remember the political situation.  The critique against the Vietnam War was begun, not by ideologues or conspiracy theorists, but by scholars.  The teach-ins of the mid-60s showed how the conventional wisdom in Washington was wrong about history, geopolitics and warfare in Asia.  They also asserted a different set of values and moral calculations, but their point was: the conventional wisdom was wrong.

Later in the 60s it was asserted, documented and proven that in addition to being wrong, those in charge of the conventional wisdom about Vietnam were lying.  There was in fact a conspiracy to keep facts from the American people.

Also, among the "conspiracies" that protestors talked about were that anti-war groups were being infiltrated by government agents and government provocateurs, and that lots of people were being monitored for their anti-war activity.  All of that turned out to be true.  Just as the later conspiracy 1970s theory that there was an organized coverup of ongoing authoritarian crimes in the White House.

Or the 1950s conspiracy theory that there is a military-industrial complex that perpetuates a certain conventional wisdom in foreign and domestic policy.  I believe that was started by that noted nutcake conspiracy theorist, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Anderson apparently sees the roots of today's anti-science crowd in the New Age movement, tracing it all to the Esalen Institute.  And the justification for believing anything counter to science is the fault of the 60s philosophy: "Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative." 

Anderson appears to have no idea of the meaning of those phrases in their contexts.  Breaking out of the strictures of convention, not settling for mind-numbing, soul-destroying conventional careers, especially those that were actively destructive, and not being afraid to live creatively,  were the references.  "It's all relative" and reality as a construct were philosophical--and scientific-- statements about the nature of reality.

Yes, it was about questioning authority.  It was fundamentally about questioning authority.  Which science is supposed to do, but not only science.

The excesses of New Age thinking (which didn't get formalized by that name until the 70s) have been individually critiqued, often by prominent participants of the time.  But Esalen was also home to Gregory Bateson (author of Steps To An Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature) and others who developed concepts crucial to systems thinking and cybernetics, as well as ecology.

Exploring relationships of mind and nature, science and spirituality, the individual and society, fact and value, and well as bravely exploring areas that may yet find a place in explaining reality, remain relevant.  As messy and goofy as some of those explorations may have been in the 60s.  (At least we had some fun.  Maybe that's behind all this.  We had too much fun.  Well, don't worry.  We also had a lot of pain.)

Some of those "unscientific" explorations are, fifty years later, accepted within the body of science. Esalen developed or introduced therapies that explored mind/body connections, and the application of nonwestern practices such as yoga, that are part of holistic medicine as practiced today, including by certified physicians who integrate it into their conventional medicine practice.

Even some of the apparent excesses Anderson "exposes," like R.D. Laing's approach to mental illness, were responses to the corruption of the conventional treatments of the day, yielding insights that today are themselves conventional.

Lynn Margulis, a hero of science who
questioned conventional evolutionary
science--and won.

And that's really the problem that pieces like this share with others that try to explain the origins of today's attitudes towards certain scientific findings.  They tend to be all or nothing, either/or.  Either you adhere to the conventional wisdom on evolution, say, or you must be an anti-science creationist.

Or in another common formula, you must accept all conventional conclusions--extremely well-founded ones based on years of results taking numerous approaches such as climate change--as well as others that are more narrow, and dubiously aligned with corporate interests--or you are anti-science.

  Or the big one: if you believe that science may not be up to explaining everything about reality, then you are an anti-science bigot.

There are people who are anti-science, at least in one area or another (they don't "believe" in evolution but accept medical science) and then there are people who don't believe in bad science.  The 60s revolted against inadequate narrowness in the conventional scientific wisdom of the day--and there is always very powerful conventional scientific wisdom.

Some of what people in the 60s came up with remains fringe if not disproven, but other ideas have become quite respectable.  It used to be believed that people couldn't intentionally change body states or brain activity.  Now the results of brain scans on Buddhist monks in deep meditation have proven they can.  Again, mind/body relationships are now part of medical practice.  Much of what today is called preventive medicine was dismissed by scientists back then.  Maybe even called pseudoscience and New Age anti-scientific drug-addled hippie nonsense.

Others aspects of Anderson's piece are equally maddening, as in the 60s elevation of fantasy (without the context of its cultural critique, and suggesting that it implied no operational difference between fantasy and reality) as the reason that fantasy movies and television are so prevalent, and so many people are deeply involved in those worlds.

Well, people have been deeply involved in fantasies, and at some level believed them to be true, for not just fifty years but thousands of years. The history of drama, from myths chanted around the winter fire to medieval mystery plays and so on, all suggest such involvement is hardly new.

 Story-telling is a human cultural expression and product, with all kinds of functions.  Quite a few cultural observers explore why fantasies are prevalent, and why particular fantasies are prevalent at a given time. It's an entertaining and at times enlightening game.  I play it myself.  But it requires a less blunt instrument than this piece brings to bear.

We might suggest, for example, one reason for the prevalence of fantasy stories might be the novelty of how they are told, especially the special effects and the relationship to gaming, social media and fandom.

Moreover, many of these fantasies inevitably explore reality through metaphor or character, as stories and especially myth always do, if only in the responses of some of their readers or audience.  They may be as much an escape from the noise of the moment into the nub of reality, or at least other possibilities, as an escape from reality itself.

Anderson makes other remarks about the 60s that also miss the mark.  He skeptically critiques The Greening of America (a 1970s best seller) as if what he has to say is a revisionist expose, when in fact that book was largely laughed at in media of the time, particularly in the alternative press.

 I hope that future writers looking for a cultural fall guy will restrain themselves from choosing the popular target of the 1960s.  But I'm not counting on it.

Stories for the Future

There's a nice little piece at the Atlantic by Jennifer Vanderbes that argues for storytelling and imagination as important to human survival, in the evolutionary past and for the future.  Her citing of the function of storytelling in Paleolithic times, when humans evolved to be essentially the humans there are today, is rudimentary (when compared for example to Paul Shepard's work in the later decades of the 20th century) but entertaining and relevant.

Her argument is that imagination (or in her words "counter-factual" stories--what if? imagining about yesterday's hunt) enhanced survival because the imaginer (and those he told) were more prepared for new opportunities and nasty surprises they'd thought of, and perhaps even figured out how to respond.

 Good stories that urge listeners to imagine what it felt like to be another person or animal enhanced empathy. "An imaginative foray into another person’s mind can foster both empathy and self-awareness. This heightened emotional intelligence might, in turn, prove useful when forming friendships, sniffing out duplicity, or partaking in the elaborate psychological dance of courtship ... which brings us back to the second Darwinian evolutionary imperative: Getting laid."

 A good storyteller also enhanced his or her genetic survival because a good story is sexy.  So storytelling becomes culturally as well as maybe genetically important.

Imagining the consequences of present actions, anticipating the effects of future actions, dreaming up the future and plans to make it happen, are all part of the dreaming up we do and need to do daily in order to apply our best human capabilities to saving the world and making a better future.  Of course, this all must be tested by reality--by probabilities, facts and experiments. Imagination is not the same as delusion governed by projection and prejudice.

The author suggests that our fascination with stories might be what we need to survive the oncoming tests of our survival-- as long as we choose the right stories.

“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s American Time Use Survey, the average American spends almost 20% of his or her waking life watching television. Add to that movies, gaming, books and magazines (reading alone consumed less than 3% of the waking hours of those surveyed), and you can postulate that almost a quarter of our waking lives are spent in imagined worlds.

Evolutionarily, that number is off the charts. Thanks to Gutenberg and the inventions of film and television, we immerse ourselves in more narratives than our ancestors could have imagined, which means we’re cutting back, along the way, on real-life experience. This means our choice of which stories to consume is more crucial than ever. They need to be as useful as lived experience, or more so, or we’re putting ourselves at a disadvantage.

Today we can pick up the books of the most dazzling, intelligent storytellers in the world. From all time. We can tune into the primetime masterpieces of the Golden Age of television. And if we can soak up their wisdom, and make ourselves a little bit smarter, we might just all make it to the next Ice Age.”

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“We look for stories in everything. If stones are thrown on the ground, they make a story. The stars, entrails, tea leaves. Neuroscientists and philosophers seem to be edging toward this notion of the human brain as being hardwired for narrative. Consciousness is a story. It is a condensing of the world’s details into narrative.”
Brian Kitely

The Daily Quote

"There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs free."

Louise Erdrich

The Story of the Future is a Story with Soul

Star Trek is the example, but the future is the story. Why is it that stories like Star Trek (made by coffee shop novelists and Hollywood producers) are the visions of the future we remember, and not the considered forecasts of scientists and professional futurists?

Stories in general were denigrated as fancy lying, until recent decades, when a prominent psychologist and a philosopher found they could unlock empathy and inspire moral imagination, even in medical and law students.

Others began to see even more basic functions for story. Neuroscientists realized that human memories are stored in stories, and soon, that all thinking involves stories. "Narrative imagining-story-is the fundamental instrument of thought," writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist as well as a Professor of English. " Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining."

"Knowledge is stories," wrote Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Narrative is explanation, and explanations are narratives. So in the age of science, writes William Irwin Thompson, "Science is the storytelling of our time. By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here."

But not all stories are created equal. As we know, some stories are better than others. That becomes clear when we go back to the future.

MORE HERE