A Reason to Riot

Tom Friedman has put his finger on a key reason for the underclass revolts occurring in Arabia, Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere this year.  They differ in format, but share some In a few words, here it is:

"There are multiple and different reasons for these explosions, but to the extent they might have a common denominator I think it can be found in one of the slogans of Israel’s middle-class uprising: “We are fighting for an accessible future.” Across the world, a lot of middle- and lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and they are letting their leaders know it."

 Read the rest of his column in today's New York Times by clicking on the link in the "Like Minds" column on the left of this screen.

Is the U.S. Hearing Voices?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/business/global/china-a-big-creditor-says-us-has-only-itself-to-blame.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25

Already U.S. legislators are arguing that Standard and Poor doesn't have the depth or the right to downgrade the nation's vaunted credit rating.  Washington's high-lifers have proven their inability to listen to each other time and again since President Obama put the medicare issue on the table.  Now they want to deny the obvious consequence of their inability to agree on anything important except another declaration of war.  Nobody is ready to invest the same level of trust in America that has driven its economic juggernaut since the Second World War.  At least they didn't start that one, so maybe they were entitled to benefit from some of the socio-industrial fallout that it generated. Now even -- and maybe especially -- their own voters are fed up.

China, the U.S.'s largest creditor, has weighed in with some harsh words about America's addiction to debt.  The Chinese should know, since they hold more than a trillion dollars of it.  Undiplomatic as their message may have been, the Chinese seem to be learning that the only way to be heard in America's bellicose political culture is to shout.  If so, this is going in the wrong direction, for the escalation of rhetoric between superpowers can have only one likely outcome.           

Waking Up is Hard To Do

Jeffrey Simpson has entered a dialogue that will occupy a generation. The dream being what it is, it is a background debate that will go on while low interest rates and short memories continue to obscure the reality. The dreamers have been content to live on the backs of others for more than a century. But now it is all beginning to break down, with the latest rupture occurring throughout the Middle East. Check out his latest column for a perspective on the quandary of our age. The question is, what are each of us doing about it?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/wake-up-americans-your-economic-dream-is-a-nightmare/article1913689/comments/

Passing the Buck

A friend who saw the Irishman's explanation passed this long:.
He thought it was a simple but clever explanation of how a bailout happens:


"It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the town, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel. The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the pub. The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him "services" on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

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.

1 The World of Tomorrow

The credit crisis has seen a spree of name-calling as investors seek to lay blame. What was it about the psyche of North Americans that started this world-wide cascade of value? According to the popular view, pure top-down greed among the barons of Wall Street infected the markets with false hope. Sure, Wall Street crafted the financial instruments of the sub-prime collapse. But somebody had to buy all those houses and by doing so inflate the value of shelter beyond the ability of America’s financial giants to backstop a crash.

Some people reached unsuspectingly for the brass ring. But many others must have heard that little voice whisper “ … if it seems too good to be true, it probably is .” How did America’s celebrated common sense get so skewed that this could happen? The answers lie in the expectations that were imbued in mass culture – in the mindset that media-abetted middle class comforts instilled. This is the first in a series of postings that look at how North Americans were carpet-bombed with messages leading to the conclusion that prosperity was limitless and excesses would be endlessly forgiven.


With the benefit of hindsight, the panorama that lit up the Seattle skyline in 1962 seemed to have been preordained. By the end of the 1950s there were 20-million families in the United States elevated to middle class status by what Fortune magazine called an "economy of abundance". America's success at evening the score with the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race had catapulted imaginations into the stratosphere and the great beyond of the 21st Century. Each of those families was a unit of consumer activity primed to shower in the cascade of goods and services spun off from the space race. Fittingly John Glenn, the first man in orbit, was on hand to greet his fellow Americans as they swarmed over the site of the Century 21 Exhibition, more widely known as the Seattle World's Fair.

Thirty-eight years before the end of the century, exhibitors embraced the exhibition's bold theme: The World of Tomorrow. By then, anything seemed possible when viewed alongside Glenn's astonishing accomplishment. The theme had a subtext: the triumph of science and technology, which was reflected in the style of exhibitry that gave a whole new collateral look to the toil of physicists and aeronautical engineers. Visitors were invited to ride the "Bubblelator", a spherical Plexiglass elevator that rose from the floor of the Washington State Coliseum into "floating" clusters of backlit, silvery boxes, depicting life in the 21st Century. The Utopia of the next century was represented by push-button appliances, apartments suspended above marine basins, monorails, climate-controlled micro-enviroments and, paradoxically, a family of crash test dummies living in a well provisioned bomb shelter. Towering over it all was Seattle's 606-foot Space Needle, replicated in the Eye of the Needle restaurant by a foot-tall, white plastic cocktail container as tacky as vinyl shoes.

The United States Science Pavilion housed what National Geographic meaningfully called "the largest exhibit devoted to a single theme ever assembled by the U.S. government." The Science Pavilion's exhibit, described as a vision of white with Gothic arches and crystal pools, presumed to display "the past, present and future of science" all in one very finite space. Explaining his creation Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, Commissioner of the exhibit, said science isn't magic, but a tool to meet human needs. "In our pavilion, we try to tell how the tool has been used in the past, so that America can decide how it should be used in the future."

The Seattle World's Fair was a celebration not of achievement, but of the future. It was conceived and organized as a showcase for the benefits of North American applied technology that would be revealed and enjoyed in the next millennium. World's fairs have served a similar purpose since the concept was moved out of the barnyard before the turn of the 19th century. But if Seattle wasn't the birthplace of marketing by special events, and it wasn't, the technique of mass marketing by commercial prophecy hit its stride there.

The leaders of U.S. industry were represented in 72 exhibits. Visitors to the Boeing Spacearium took a tour of intergalactic space that spanned two billion light years. Standard Oil visualized rocket-powered, glass-topped airliners that would take off vertically and cross the Atlantic in an hour. General Motors imagined electronically-controlled turnpikes on which cars would be steered, accelerated and braked without any interference from their less competent drivers. AT&T featured many innovations in home communications that have come to pass already, including satellite TV, fibre-optic transmission of signals, and cordless telephones. RCA's home entertainment predictions are all in common use. These include colour TV and sets that range from book-size to wafer-thin big screens with remote control. RCA's exhibit didn't foresee the advent of the couch potato, but it did prove the wisdom of forecasting from ones' strengths.

Within the long but finite shadow of the Space Needle, Standard Oil set a new continental standard for hyperbole with its catalogue of fanciful images. In addition to the airborne family car with the vertical takeoff option, the company foresaw climate-controlled farms enclosed in enormous plastic bubbles, inflatable submarine freighters, and large-scale underwater agriculture. Naturally, most of Standard Oil's visions required the consumption of oceans of fuel.

On the surface, Seattle's futuristic theme suited a buoyantly optimistic era. But there was a subliminal price to pay, hidden in the cost of every gadget and appliance that the era produced. The underlying message was one of profound change based on a growth mentality with little thought to costs in social and environmental dislocation. As it turned out, it took three or four more decades before that change began to take its toll on the lifestyles of post-modern America, which Robert Heilbroner once described as "the striking loss of global economic leadership of the United States". But for the time being, Seattle helped to stir the imagination of consumers in a way that had seldom occurred in the history of humanity.

World's fairs were just one of many powerful influences on the consumer culture that developed after the Second World War. Other spheres included the news media, popular entertainment and advertising, to name just three. In the end, commercial prophecy of many kinds left post-war consumers with the feeling that anything was possible in the marketplace and, most importantly, that everybody would benefit. As a consequence, the willingness to be misled was profound. Many of Seattle's more extreme visions have not been realized, although some may yet be. But what the Space Needle accomplished was to symbolize the moment when the surrender to the consumerization of life in America became complete.

The post-war embrace of commercialism took many more years to run its course. In the summer of 1996, commentators treated the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta as though the corporate ideology of America was discovered there. The media frenzy that greeted the Atlanta Games was more of a comment on the forced naiveté and short memories of the media than an exposé of trade show commercialism, given the longstanding tradition that it honoured. Many records for Olympic grandeur fell under the weight of two million spectators, 10,700 athletes and 197 participating countries. Eleven million tickets to Olympic events were sold, enough to overwhelm the city's housing and transportation plans. So many vendors and "ambush marketers" descended on Atlanta to capitalize on the games that International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound, who was responsible for the IOC's marketing arm, called their tactics "unethical and unacceptable”. A brass medal for crassness should have gone to sports shoe giant Nike for achieving a low point in sportsmanship with the company's repulsive TV tag line: "You don't win silver, you lose gold". It was a slogan that created 10,000 instant losers among the contestants, by Nike's subterranean standard.

Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta was described by one news magazine as "a theme park for consumerism" -- that was, until a pipe bomb went off killing one person and injuring 111 others. Dick Pound worried that over-commercialism at the Atlanta games could diminish the value of Olympic sponsorship in the future. If the market value of sponsorship is sustained, it will not be due to any last-minute streak of self-discipline in Atlanta, nor because the IOC got control of the situation, because it didn't. Sponsors had the bomber to thank for taking the media focus off commercialism, shifting it to security for the remainder of the games and in post-mortem media coverage. The Atlanta Games may have been over-booked and overwhelmed, but in truth the `discovery' of corporate America's role in inspiring and underwriting world-class spectacles wasn't just another media phenomenon triggered by petulant journalists irritated by poor accommodation. By the 1990s, the fallacies of breakneck consumerism had begun to dawn even on mainstream journalism.

The New York Times reported in February of 1997 on the transformation of a North American icon brought about by the realization that visions of a commercialized future have lost their marketing lustre. When Walt Disney World was conceived in the central Florida swampland of the 1960s, its focus was to be Walt's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Disney himself explained his concept in a promotional film in which he said EPCOT " ... will never be complete -- it will never cease to be a blueprint of the future and there will always be new materials, new systems and new ideas introduced." Disney's Epcot concept was distorted after his death in 1966 into a permanent facsimile of a world's fair, more static in its execution than its creator had imagined. Many of its futuristic exhibits have been realized, or overtaken by other ideas. Inside the dome, tourists rode through a technological spectacle, from the papyrus scroll to the telegraph, winding up with a view of schoolchildren using video conferencing equipment. But the overall effect was decidedly deja vu.

Increasing public indifference to Walt Disney's overheated vision of the future was cited as the reason for a reversal of the "Magic Kingdom's" futuristic theme. Disney's vision was transformed from Orwellian to Rockwellian in a 1995 makeover of Tomorrowland. The `new' retro look was described by the New York Times as "an antique remake of The Jetsons", focused around a "green, gray and purple canyon of neon, oversized bolts and swooping arches of anodized steel." Designers of Celebration, the town that Disney built nearby, took their cue from the market researchers and did a U-turn. The community of 20,000 was modelled after a late 19th Century town. Disney’s exhibitry wasn’t singularly responsible for the late-century emphasis on futurism. But it was symbolic of what was happening throughout mass culture at the time.

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.

The whipsaw effect of the Great Depression and the war effort, followed by explosive productivity of affordable goods and services, created a North American psychology of mass expectations that went way over the top. The Thirties' contribution to this mentality was undeniable. Buckminster Fuller's biographer, Hugh Kenner, called the Thirties "the decade when `the future' was popularized." Ancient prophecy was born out of adversity, offering either a New Jerusalem or a Second Coming to inspire hope. Hope begat the notion of progress, which in turn begat the growth assumptions of modern capitalism. This inexorable progression continued, despite the setback of Depression-era deprivation. J.B. Bury wrote that "the idea of Progress was becoming a general article of faith" by the late 19th Century. "There was nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect of steady and indefinite advance," Bury observed. Not even the Crash of '29 and its aftermath.

Sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that there was no real focus on the future between the 1920s and 1950s. This would have come as a surprise to two writers of considerable repute from the period, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. By the Time Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, the hegemony of science and technology over literary imaginations had not yet reached its peak, but doubts had already begun to occur to some people. Huxley's novel, portraying technological anarchy, was set in the year A.F. (After Ford) 632. This willingness to challenge the prophecy of science carried over into William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the story of a party of British schoolboys shipwrecked on a boys' island paradise after the outbreak of nuclear war. Huxley was more skilled than Orwell at anticipating biochemical, pharmaceutical and genetic trends, which he experimented with in his fictional Central London Hatchery of humans with mechanistic traits. Huxley used this skill to warn others about the consequences of short-sighted use of technology.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, written between 1945 and 1948, is not a book about the abuse of technology. It is a dystopian vision of political collectivism, taken to oppressive extremes. As such it was seized upon as a propaganda tool in its own right by post-war capitalists striving to discredit the Soviets' Marxist experiment. In developing his scenario, Orwell says emphatically that all scientific research has been banned except for that which is useful in war, propaganda or surveillance. Realizing that his vision of the future would inevitably be scored for accuracy and smarting from early controversy over its bleakness, Orwell ordered his publisher to issue a statement in which he denied that the book was intended to be predictive. Instead, it was a warning against totalitarianism of any stripe, more preventative than prescient.

Despite his denials, Orwell was a passable prophet, whose most celebrated work envisioned helicopters hovering over the cityscape and intrusive state surveillance by two-way telescreen. He forecast state-run lotteries, stupefying pop music lyrics, continuous warfare of the migrating kind the world has experienced from Vietnam to the former Yugoslavia and now to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is just as well that Orwell made his disclaimer when he had the chance. In the west, at least, state propaganda has not reached anywhere near the level of thought control that Orwell believed possible. Only in the marketplace, where advertising has been laid down like carpet bombing, has social engineering succeeded to the extent that Skinner depicted in Walden Two and Orwell simultaneously predicted. The promise of computers and information technology was not well developed. But the novel's most striking oversight is Orwell's indifference to the development of consumer capitalism after the Second World War. Instead of vivacity, over-abundance and sexual freedom, Orwell described a society of drab, puritanical, unimaginative, mechanistic creatures subsisting in a sensory vacuum. Rather than conspicuous consumption, Orwell's 1984 was a wasteland in which there was no place for free choice and where prophecy would have been unthinkable. Easy credit terms would have been totally out of the question.

To be continued ....
*****

Selling Out the Future

Mass communications has been used to over-sell the future for more than a century. Over time this blog will show how an inflated vision of the future has generated excessive optimism, leading recently to the credit bubble that is crippling the real economy. The latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly (December, 2008) contains an example. Author Henry Blodget is a chastened former investment broker who gives his version of what went wrong in Why Wall Street Always Blows It. According to Blodget, the reason is in our DNA . We are programmed for optimism, no matter what evidence exists to the contrary. On page 86, he offers this encapsuled explanation: "The future is always uncertain -- and amid uncertainty, all sorts of faith-based theories can flourish, even on Wall Street."

On the opposing page is an ad by a major U.S. energy supplier. "Tomorrow Begins Today" is the tag line. It is one of the oldest themes in American commerce, and one of the most misleading. In fact, for the generation whose hopes are being dashed in the collapse of the stock and housing markets, the most blase forecasters don't see a turn-around for at least a year or two. Others think it might take the best part of a decade for that to happen.

The lesson is brutally simple. Once in a while the future runs out and -- like a demented game of musical chairs -- we are stuck in the reality of the present.

A Chorus of Ones

Obama relied on social networking technology to win a stunning victory over his Democratic and Republican opponents. Now he's using it to govern prematurely as the president-elect. On the weekend he used the Web to spread the message of his infrastructure plan to rescue the U.S. economy. With the emphasis on interactive technological solutions, Obama may be remaking the bond between Americans and their president. This kind of short-term action will help to strengthen the constituency for dramatic change, even in the face of economic instability that is unprecedented in the lifespan of a couple of generations. Rapid-fire measures, conveyed directly in real time, will certainly revolutionize communications between the governors and the governed. In time, it may even produce valuable momentum on the path to a resurgent economy. No doubt it will also excite expectations that technlogy can be relied on to do the heavy lifting instead of expending the human capital that has always been required to move the mountains. That is not an adequate lesson for the long term. We North Americans have come to believe that somebody or something else will pick up the tab for our extravagance. What other message can the people of developing countries be getting when we persist in the lifestyle that created our current mess and expect them to ride bicycles? We need to devise solutions that work because they are facilitated by technology. But we cannot duck the onus for change. It is on each one of us.

Amen Emanuel

The pre-Christmas Wallmart shopping stampede is just the latest example of a herd mentality among North American consumers that is unbecoming of cattle. This is what decades of mercantile propaganda has wrought in a society that would kill for the sake of a big enough bargain. Six people were trampled in the rush, including one 34-year-old man, Jdimytai Damour, who died from his injuries. And nobody was being charged because there was no way to assign responsibility for the death. But it is unlikely that the spectre of such frantic acquisitiveness will change much. After all, how many shootings will it take to stem the media-induced high school death toll? People who value liberty over human life will continue to shoot each other over nothing and trample the rest as long as they can. Having proved its unwillingness to stamp out gun violence, what are the odds that government will restrain rampant consumerism. Only the markets can restore a common-sense balance. And maybe the debt crisis will make the point, for once, that there should be some some limits beyond what people can get away with. Hopefully Rahm Emanuel had that in mind when he said we shouldn't let any crisis go to waste.