Questions for the Ages

How did the post-modernists become so influenced by commercial prophecy, a practise modelled on the inspirations of biblical prophets?  The staying power of old time religion provides one answer.  The reach of the ancient prophecies provides another.  St. John's apocalyptic visions still held sway over those Christians who were awaiting His return at the turn of the millennium.  A third answer lies in the subtle process that has transformed old line biblical prophecy into a practise that, except for the actions of sects and cults on the fringes of religion, has become almost exclusively secular. This transformation of prophecy, from biblical, to scientifically secular, and then commercial, parallels the evolution of western culture.  In this century, it is distinctly traceable through several phases in the development of science fiction, futurism, and postwar industrialization.  Prophets of Boom traces the evolution of this process from the two world wars right into our post-millennial reality.  


Anyone old enough to remember the rotary telephone has witnessed the transition in their own lives.  Why not take a few minute to post a comment?  Tell us about something you observed that confirms or contradicts this blogger's version of our common history.  How have you managed to deal with its effects?     

U.S. Comptroller-General Says It All

3 What Would Bucky Say?

The iconoclastic spirit of the Age of Aquarius initially found its way into the futurist movement. It is an affectation of youth to make light of serious matters, as if to impress others with the easy grace one has with difficult things. This mentality affected the work of futurists in the early years. Buckminster Fuller labelled his creation of a global resources inventory "The World Game", while many of his contemporaries treated their own forecasts like childs' play. The variety and audacity of the predictions that ushered forth was breathtaking.

Nothing seemed impossible. Rand Corporation conducted a Delphi study on space travel involving a wide range of experts who were queried repeatedly on the subject. Eighty-two scientists agreed that a permanent lunar base would be established long before the turn of the century. They also predicted that men would fly past Venus and land on Mars by then. By the same time, planes carrying 1,000 passengers, flying just under the speed of sound, would be commonplace. Hovercraft would be in everyday usage shuttling commuters, 90 per cent of whom would be living in supercities. Rand's experts foresaw seashore aquaculture, a current reality, but overshot the mark with their description of underesea farmers tending huge fields of kelp, living for months in submerged bunkhouses. Though their undersea crop would taste indifferently at harvest, it would be readily treated to taste like anything from steak to kidney pie.

Some of the early predictions have come true. Transplantation of organs from live donors, or the recently deceased, is now a routine medical practise. In the Sixties, medical researchers accurately foresaw the widespread use of in vitro fertilization. Although Dolly the Scottish sheep's clone was still not conceived, they also foresaw the manipulation of DNA molecules in order to tinker with human characteristics like eye color, hair tint and various other cosmetic adjustments.

Too much of a good thing can indeed be intoxicating. This homily was never as true as when it is applied to the technological visions of the early futurists. As a result, much of the forecasting that occurred in the Sixties was the work of over-achievers. Some of it was downright frivolous. A cycle of one-upmanship seemed to take hold of otherwise prudent men and women. For example, GE's TEMPO scientists imagined building a nuclear generating station atop Mount Wilson, above Los Angeles, so that the heat it produced could raise the inversion layer that hangs over the city, ridding L.A. of its smog.

Morris Ernst started one of the longest-running and most emotive swells of expectation in the postwar period with his 1955 prediction that by 1976 the average work week in the United States would be 30 hours. The most errant of predictors attempted to forecast not only technological innovations, but the social change that would follow. Buckminster Fuller's ability to block out all but his own vision was prodigious. No surprise, then, that he was ready to predict the elimination of any need for politics in the wake of the widespread affluence that he saw on the horizon. Fuller was not alone in his optimism. In February, 1966, Time magazine reported that by 2000 A.D. machines would be producing so much that: "everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy".

The truth, as it has turned out, is stranger than non-fiction. The Y2K "crisis" was the ultimate acid test of techno-futurism. Yet its lessons didn't deter millions from mortgaging their futures on the technology bubble that followed.

Despite mounting evidence throughout the Nineties, runaway public and private debt was allowed to undermine Western economies. As an unthinkable result the banking industry, especially in the U.S., has withdrawn from its role as engine of economic growth by refusing to extend credit to viable enterprises. Governments have bought back mountains of “toxic” debt, throwing billions in good money after bad. And now, despite taxpayers having swallowed the poison, there is talk of another major slowdown.

A five-year research project that scanned every available source of techno-futurism from WW11 to Y2K produced less than a handful of volumes that saw this coming. Authors like Lord William Rees-Mogg, of The Great Reckoning, were decried as eccentrics. In another era, people who swam that far from the mainstream would have been locked up.

It’s beginning to look like Robert Heilbroner was right when he wrote in 1992 that the U.S. would lose its global economic leadership. It may turn out to be worse than that. More than losing face, the U.S. may be surrendering its very sovereignty a billion dollars at a time by borrowing from Chinese peasants to support its expensive habits.

2 Target 2000 A.D.

The year 2000 had a special attraction from the beginning of the futurist movement. Herman Kahn and Daniel Bell were just two futurists who used the end of the millennium as a conveniently distant time horizon on which to hang their reputations. A vision is a collection of predictions with pretensions of greatness. The early futurists understood the distinction from the outset. The year 2000 was far enough into the future to inspire visions, at the same time as it defied evaluation of their component predictions during the working lives of their originators. To cap it off, the target year had an inherent and deeply apocalyptic mystique about it.


The good name of prophecy was rehabilitated by futurists in the last half of the twentieth century. The ancient practise was subsumed into the mainstream of commerce and culture under many other pseudonyms. Physicists, inspired by their own successes in the Second World War, led the way. One of them, Charles Darwin's grandson, wrote in 1952 that "With our present knowledge of the world ... we can foresee the general course its history is almost certain to take over a long period." Other scientists began extemporizing on the limitations of average people acting individually within their own, immediate frame of reference. The concept of systematic, cross-disciplinary analysis of possibilities for the future began to take hold. The American Association for the Advancement of Science entertained a proposal in 1955 for the establishment of Chairs of the Future. Before long, the notion of forecasting as a legitimate scientific activity had gained such currency that it inspired behavioural scientists to take it up. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences encouraged sociologist Daniel Bell to chair a Commission on the Year 2000 in 1967. Bell's commission foresaw an America dominated by three megalopolises: Boston, Washington and New York would be collapsed into Boswash; Chicago and Pittsburg would be cinched together as Chipitts; and a hip, new left urban metropolitan utopia would be fashioned out of San Francisco and San Diego. As if to foretell the amalgamation of two infirmaries, the region would be called Sansan.

Simultaneously in the Fifties and early Sixties, an assortment of think tanks and foundations sprouted offshoots to speculate on the future. Several of them were enthused enough to set their sights on the year 2000 as a suitably distant yet imaginable planning horizon. Harrison Brown, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology, was influenced by the same sort of ambition as Darwin's grandson, claiming to know more than Malthus did about "the extent, the potentialities and the limitations of the world in which we live", as well as about the "potentialities and the limitations of our technology." Brown and his fellow editors prepared The Next Hundred Years as "a discussion for leaders of Amercian industry". The analysis was based on the belief that specific long-term trends, including population, could be adduced and the earth's resources should be of interest and importance to America's industrial leaders. They were right to the extent that 30 conferences were held with the top executives of as many corporations, and the result was published in 1957. The objective was laudable: to make an assessment of the future of ... scientific-technical-industrial civlization.

This sort of early work quickly caught the attention of the cadre of managers who took charge of America's postwar industrial assets. Success was so sweet, and the prospect of losing it all so disturbing, that the captains of industry latched onto this new field of enquiry in the hope of finding a way to secure for their industries a future that would ensure perpetual profitability. The New York Times quoted an early futurist, science fiction writer Frederik Pohl's explanation for the enthusiasm American businessmen had for the futurist movement. "It's all happened rather suddenly. The reason, I think, is that businessmen have begun to recognize the accelerated rate of technological change ... and they are a little unnerved by it," Pohl told The Times in 1967.

In Britain, Unilever commissioned Ronald Brech in 1963 to conceive a corporatist vision for 1984. Brech forecast the replacement of coal-fired heat with warm air pumped from storage systems. Brech foresaw coal being reserved for the production of chemicals and the replacement of natural building materials with synthetic products of molecular engineering. This was the transition that substituted plastic pipe for copper plumbing in a majority of new homes. The use of pipelines, highways on stilts, nuclear-powered ships and two-way personal communication by "walkie-talkie" would become commonplace, Brech predicted, He also perceived the transformation that was then coming over the professional management class, which would discard guesswork and supplement hunches with empirical or quasi-scientific analysis. "His management information will have built-in probability calculations enabling him to see the likely result of decisions even before he has taken them." This search for certainty in the midst of ambiguity forged an alliance between "industrial Isaiahs" and the analysts of postwar technological trends, the futurists.

The pace of technological change drew them together at a moment when the dividends that would accrue from collaboration were widely apparent. Trend lines for technical innovation and for gross national product were on what was apparently a limitless growth curve, indicating previously unimaginable prosperity. Collaboration seemed not only natural, but predestined to be one of the greatest joint ventures of all time. Naturally enough in the North American context, the exploration of the future became a sizeable business in itself. General Electric set up its Technical Management Planning Organization (TEMPO) in Santa Barbara, California, where 200 physical scientists, sociologists, economists and engineers imagined the future with slide rules and adding machines. The U.S. Armed Forces financed the Rand Corporation (Rand was an acronym for research and development) and the Hudson Institute to think about war, peace and the future in general. Out of their work came the idea that the trends of scientific and technical developments could be used to get a fix on social change before it occurs. What the automobile did to the urban landscape is just one example of this relationship. The other notable revelation that ensued from this military-industrial alliance was the value of multi-disciplinary teams to interweave their individual knowledge into predictable, comprehensible patterns.

The "futurist movement" as it came to be known, arose in the Sixties like the energetic output of some new alchemy. Think tanks with research funds had a cachet that drew ambitious academics to the light, building uncustomary alliances with military and industrial partners. The Commission on the Year 2000, headed by Harvard's Daniel Bell, brought out a host of establishment intellectuals to fashion a methodology and some scenarios for the rest of the century. They were joined by people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, head of the National Security Council, and Herman Kahn, whose interest in the movement had been tweaked by his work on technological forecasting in the realm of nuclear weaponry. Their collaboration infused the new movement with respectability. Together, Bell's Commission report and Kahn's The Year 200: A Framework for Speculation on the Next 33 Years comprised the founding charter of futurology in America.

About the same time, the movement began to take shape around an obscure journalist. Edward Cornish saw the future in futurology and the organization, along with some Washington area acquaintances, soon became the World Future Society. Cornish began publishing a bulletin in 1966, which quickly evolved into The Futurist, a magazine whose subscription list still defines the movement to this day.

Early prophets of the postwar boom included all the players who gravitated to the new arts of forecasting and planning. The Sixties was a time for breaking down barriers and the futurist movement seemed to be an establishment-sanctioned testing ground for the new ethos. Physical scientists shared insights with sociologists, academics with cold warriors and they all compared notes with a legion of newcomers from every discipline, who styled themselves as visionaries in the Age of Aquarius. Small wonder that prudence was sometimes overcome by this volatile mixture.