IT IS QUITE A WHILE now since we began hearing about a new science, or alleged science, called Futurology. Futurologists claim to predict what is in store by a study of present factors and trends, in the light of experience. I do not know whether they have yet tried predicting the future of their own ‘science’. They might find that it hasn’t got any. Herman Kahn, its most widely publicized spokesman, is already a pricked balloon even if the deflation is incomplete. In a way I could wish it otherwise. If Kahn’s prognostications for British capitalism do happen to be correct, the outlook is very hopeful indeed. But I see no reason to trust them, or to trust Futurology in general.
l rend-thinking, and prophecy based on it, were in vogue long before Futurology. By now the whole business really ought to be given a rest. Before 1914 the civilised world was all supposed to be on the march to parliamentary democracy under Anglo-Saxon tutelage. Then came a phase when it was all on the march to Socialism instead. During the 1930s dictatorship was the In Thing and we were all going to be, under one name or another, Fascists. Later it was Communism that was destined to sweep forward, if not perhaps all the way. Mean while there was an alarm over declining population (in the thirties) followed by an alarm over exploding population (in the sixties). And always there was the trend of fuel supplies, which, every few years, were either on the verge of exhaustion or assured for untold centuries.
Obviously some of these expectations may yet be fulfilled, but they can’t all be While I suspect that we are in for some sort of apocalypse, I also suspect that its nature will take everyone by surprise, futurologists included. In all the effort to find techniques for prediction, it seems to me there are two lines of inquiry which might be genuinely worth following, but I have yet to hear of a futurologist following either.
The first approach would be to look back over the journalism, speeches, broadcasts and books of the past fifty years or so, and see whether any particular group of people was more often right than most about the way things were going. To take a concrete instance, Neville Chamberlain was wrong when he 2
said the Munich Agreement of 1938 meant ‘peace for our time’, and so were the many Tories who echoed him. That is a fact, because war broke out the following year. But who did better? Did members of one political party (for example) have to eat their words, in general, less often than members of another? Or, to shift to a different level of ideas, were Christians (for example) more often confirmed in their expectations than atheists, or vice versa? In such a survey it would often be difficult to measure rightness and wrongness, but it would at least be interesting to try, and see who came off best, and whether we can infer anything about the sort of ideological context in which foresight is likeliest.to occur.
Recently some historian claimed that one major British politician of the thirties and forties was nearly always vindicated by the course of events: Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour Prime Minister who conferred independence on India. This would agree with a feeling of my own, that if you classify people by conventional politics, the moderate Left has shown the most insight; at least in the short term. But I am not sure of that, and with other classifications I am far less sure. A few cases speak for themselves, of course. The predictive record of economists is appalling. So is that of military experts in time of war. Among individuals, George Orwell, a Socialist of honesty and goodwill, was a very bad prophet (I am not thinking only of Nineteen Eighty-Four). H.G. Wells, the spiritual father of Futurology, scored various hits in detail but was never so farseeing in depth as the maverick Catholic G.K. Chesterton, or - in his younger days —Chesterton’s mentor Hilaire Belloc, author of The Servile State. To come nearer to the present, the chant of Tariq Ali militancy in autumn 1968 —
We shall fight and we shall win, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin has scarcely been borne out by events. To say that the militants have not won is putting it mildly. They have not, perceptibly, fought.
There are simply no clear conclusions. However, patient research might suggest a few.
The other mode of approach would be to make a collection of really striking specific predictions, and see if they show a common factor. An instance in politics was the forecast made by Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader, that a Jewish state would be founded in fifty years. He said this in 1897 and the state of Israel was founded in 1947. The notable point here is that ‘trends’ had nothing to do with it, No futurologist would have made such a prediction. The causes working towards a Jewish state could not have been computerised. Herzl was dismissed by the rational politicians of his day, including Jewish ones, as insane. Even much later, the bulk of enlightened Jewish opinion viewed Zionism as romantic troublemaking with no political future. The most enlightened Jews of all, the most antiZionist, the most intelligently studious of civilised ‘trends’, were those who remained in Germany assimilating . . . and whose superior wisdom led to the gaschambers. , I can think, offhand, of a few other cases of conspicuous foresight besides Herzl’s. One occurs in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Bouvard and Pecuchet. At his death in 1880 it was unfinished, but his notes show that the last part was to include a debate on the future. Flaubert saw the three ultimate contenders for world ascendancy as the Vatican, an authoritarian Left, and a commercialised society dominated by America. For a decade after World War II his prevision seemed fully justified. Though new factors have entered since, it would still not be easy to pick out anyone else in 1880 who did so well. To most educated Europeans Catholicism was a fading superstition, left-wing revolution had died with the Paris Commune, America was remote and without influence. Flaubert saw further. Yet he was no sociologist or economist. He was an ivory-tower literary man, best known for the almost morbid pains he took to perfect Lis style.
Or consider another kind of prophecy: science fiction. Space flight was foreshadowed between the wars, in some technical detail, by such magazines as Amazing Stories. The writers foresaw liquid-fuel propulsion, rockets built in detachable stages, space-stations in orbit, space-suits for exploration outside, the problems of escape velocity and zero gravity. Indeed Jules Verne had foreseen some of these things much earlier. But during the heyday of Amazing Stories it would have been hard to find more than a handful of actual scientists willing to admit that manned lunar flight was feasible, and hard to find any at all willing to believe that a flight could be made by 1969. The prophets of what has actually happened were not the logical scientists but the romancers —people who were crazy like Herzl, and cut off in their literary dream-world like Flaubert.
Should we draw any conclusions? Again, no. As Mr. Spock used to say in Star Trek, “insufficient data” . For the moment the only moral is that we shouldn’t be hypnotized by alleged trends, or conned by futurologists in whatever guise. Nobody knows what lies ahead. Or if there are any people around who do know, they are most unlikely to be among the experts.
