FUTUROLOGY

   The word "futurology" is a neologism coined in 1943 by a refugee German professor of sociology, Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching in a US college. He argued for a concerted effort by sociologists, historians, psychologists, economists and political scientists to examine social and technological trends as a means of learning the true shape of coming things. He sent his proposals to Aldous HUXLEY, who took them up with enthusiasm, and thereby conveyed the word into the language. Now futurologists are everywhere except perhaps in the very poorest countries. History shows that human beings are ab origine future-directed animals.Ever since Homo erectus began the long trek out of Africa and into Eurasia, the horizon-watchers have known that their survival might well depend on what they found over the hill, in the no-man's time of the day after. But the literature of proposals and projections about future things appears as a mere blip at the end of civilization's 10,000-year record. It is strange, too, that UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS, forecasts, projections and sf are in origin, and still largely, a Western intellectual activity. All these future-oriented activities may have begun with the first modern utopias to present the other-history of the better society. Thomas MORE's Utopia (Part Two 1516 in Latin; trans Ralphe Robynson with the later PartOne 1551) and Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627; 1629) contained ideologies which had already worked their benign effects in the could-be of imagined lands, and might serve as guides for achieving a more perfect way of life in the real world of a reformed England. In the beginning, then, the future was another place, and the VIRTUAL REALITY of word-generated social systems and behaviour patterns in the utopias made for a most effective connection between today and tomorrow.There was still a long way to go before considered forecasts. The world had to wait for the new ideas about the progress of mankind that, in the mid-18th century, were to mark out the base for a calculus of probabilities. In his very influential Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind (1750) Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), then a student at theSorbonne, provided the historical evidence that allowed him to indicate the main lines of human progress. Since, he argued, mankind had advanced from primitive beginnings to the glorious days of Louis XV, it followed that the human race would "go on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection". The details of this march forward awaited the work of men like Adam Smith (1723-1790), who in his Wealth of Nations (1776) reduced the entirety of ECONOMICS, industry and commerce to aNewtonian universe of actions and reactions.At around this time the great divide between fiction and prediction began to narrow, as the first tales of the future spread their message of the centuries ahead. The most important was Louis-Sebastien MERCIER's L'an 2440 (1771; trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772), which described a better future world in which the social ideals of the Enlightenment had prevailed: constitutional monarchs, deism the universal religion, education for all. The most telling register of expected change was in the technology of the future: a Suez Canal, rapid BALLOON transportation between continents, and "all sorts of machines for the relief of Man in laborious works".Still the would-be predictors awaited the theories and techniques that would help them provide for the whole of society what Adam Smith had provided for a part. New means of assessment and measurementswiftly arrived. In 1798 Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) published his notorious Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he pessimistically linked the future of humanity to the potentially geometrical growth of population and the merely arithmetical growth of the rations that sustained it, a situation that could be balanced only if vast numbers died. A tremendous debate about humankind's future followed, partly because this early example of Future Shock had coincided with the publication by Edward Jenner (1749-1823) of his paper on the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, which provided the first marvellouspromise that the future would be different. By that time James Watt's steam engine was providing power on an unprecedented scale, and the Industrial Revolution was on the point of transforming the world.It seemsstrange, with change so rapidly manifesting itself, that it was almost a century before straightforward forecasts like Dans cent ans ("In 100 Years") (1892) by Charles Richet (1850-1935) came to be published. But inthe 19th century the "certainty factor" persuaded everyone that change and technological development could be accommodated within the known social system. The same, but better, was the slogan - or, in the Tennysonian phrase, the great world would "spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change". So people invented new methods to measure the changes they considered most important. The first decennial census of 1801 began the continuing measure of population; the Belgian mathematician Lambert Quetelet (1796-1874) adopted the Laplace probability theory to produce thecrucial concept of the Average Man. Also significant was the first attempt to analyse the new literature of the future in Le roman de l'avenir ("The Novel of the Future") (1834) by Felix Bodin (FRANCE). Another sign wasthe inauguration of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831.The flood of forecasting literature did not take place until around 1890, beginning with sustained discussion about the next great WAR (a discussion catalysed by the War of 1870). Its first major predictionwas the work of Polish banker and statistician Ivan Gottlieb de Bloch (1836-1902), who produced the classic analysis in The War of the Future inits Technical, Economic and Political Relations (1897). His findings, ignored by the generals, led him to forecast a great war of entrenchment. Soon forecasts became part of popular writing: weekly magazinesoccasionally featured articles with illustrations of flying machines, motor cars and television. Some two dozen books were published at this time about the future, including George Ermann on the imperial German future in Deutschland im Jahre 2000 ("Germany in the Year 2000") (1891), the influential Esquisse de l'organisation politique et economique de la societe future (1899; trans P.H. Lee Warner as The Society of To-Morrow 1904) by Gustave de Molinari (1819-1911), and the collection by EdwardCarpenter (1844-1929) of the expectations of 10 eminent socialists in Forecasts of the Coming Century (coll 1897). The most widely read of them all in the Anglo-Saxon world was the series of articles by H.G. WELLS in Fortnightly Review in 1900, published as Anticipations (1901).The nextadvances in the investigation of the future followed two major innovations between the two world wars. In the 1920s the publishing house Kegan Paul, Trench \& Trubner brought out a series of 86 monographs in their Today andTomorrow series, in which scientists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and others set down their expectations of the future. One was J.B.S. HALDANE's Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), whichaccurately forecast advances in biology that gave Aldous Huxley important ideas for BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). The series was widely reported and did much to publicize thinking about the future. More important, however, was the first major state initative in this regard. The US President, Herbert Hoover, in 1930 appointed a National Resources Committee "to examine andreport upon recent social trends in the United States with a view to providing such a review as might supply a basis for the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase in the nation's development". The committee, drawing on the resources of field-survey techniques formulated at the University of Chicago, presented their conclusions in their report Recent Social Trends (1932), which provided a model for the USA and an example to the rest of the world.The development of techniques for investigating the future accelerated during WWII, especially the Operational Research procedures borrowed from the UK by the US Army Air Force. These proved so successful in the air war that GeneralHenry Arnold established a research centre to investigate possible developments in warfare. This had the codename RAND (Research and Development), and in 1948 the project team set up an independentnon-profit organization known as the RAND Corporation. It had immense influence on military planning and on presidential decisions about the manufacture of nuclear weapons; it was the first "think tank", and from it came the System Development Institute and the Hudson Institute. The latter gained world notoriety when Herman Kahn (1922-1983) published books such as On Escalation (1968) that took the hardest of looks into the future. Indeed, this was a period of rapid growth in futurology, with a great manybooks and journals published on the subject. Kahn's books were among the best-known, but futurology's limitations as a science can be seen very clearly in his Things to Come (1972), a book about what to expect in the 1970s and 1980s. The index has no entries for oil, gasoline, energy,resources or power; Kahn's only remark about the Arabs is to say that, because the West is their only market, we need expect no problems of supply. Sf writers, too, were unsuccessful in predicting the energy crisis, but few as blandly and so close to the time when it happened as this.A very influential, albeit flawed, work of futurology was the report of the Club of Rome on OVERPOPULATION and diminishing resources, excerpts from which were published as The Limits to Growth (1972). Alvin TOFFLER's book Future Shock (1970) was a bestselling work of SOCIOLOGY rather than futurology; it documented the increasing rate of change in the 20th century, but was comparatively cautious in making specific predictions about the future. At the other extreme were books of popularization like The Next Ten Thousand Years (1974) by Adrian BERRY, a work oftechnological optimism packed with "what-ifs" and predictions rather than futurology per se. There are many of these.The modern "science" of futurology is the forecasting of the future (usually the NEAR FUTURE) by projection and extrapolation from current trends, statistics, population figures, political groupings, availability of resources, economic data, etc. It cannot be called a science proper, since too many of the factors involved are imponderable (and often unknown), but its tools are statistical analysis and the computer simulation of various models.It may seem that the futurologist and the sf writer are involved in the same trade, but they share a certain unease about one another. Futurologists work primarily on what can be quantified, and to a large degree their projections depend on the future being the same as the past. Population projections for the UK, for example, were for a long time too high because demographers were unable to quantify the factors that persuade people to have fewer children. Sf writers are not actually in the prediction business, but when they deal with the near future they normally write a "what-if?" scenario, which may involve discontinuities with the past. Inpractice, this is only to say that the factors sf writers deal with include a good deal of guesswork and invention. What makes sf writers unreliable as predictors is the nature of that "what if?". It may appeal to the writer because of its intrinsic interest or its function as a warning symbol, rather than for its likelihood. Writers often do not believe in it themselves; they are writing stories, not prophecies. Also, the sf writer is often ignorant of the mechanisms, such as those of ECONOMICS, which must play an important role in any realistic story offuture cause and effect.Where sf writers have an advantage is in the ability to adopt a multidisciplinary approach; they are often good at what is sometimes known as lateral thinking. In a sense the advantage sf writers have is their very irresponsibility: they cannot be held accountable for the nature of their scenarios; the details do not have to be justified. This allows sf writers to survey a far greater range of possibility than the comparatively restricted futurologist. The writer can take the unexpected into account, and history tells us that the unexpected does indeed often happen. Sf itself may give direction to change, through a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, by presenting images of the future which grip people's minds; e.g., the US space programme, which could not have been funded without popular support, or the multistorey apartment blocks that were built by local authorities in such disastrously great numbers in the UK after WWII, designed by a generation of architects reared on the utopian-sf visual imagery of the 1920s.Neither futurologists nor sf writers have done very well at PREDICTION, though perhaps the writers' emphasis on the lives of individuals seems more humane than the futurologists' statistical projections about the masses. Many examples of sf about the general area also covered by futurology can be found under TECHNOLOGY, ECOLOGY, NEAR FUTURE, OVERPOPULATION and WAR. John BRUNNER isone notable writer who has written novels of this kind. Often, of course, Brunner and others are not so much predicting as trying to avert; theyhope their ghastly scenarios will be influential as a kind of early-warning system. Arthur C. CLARKE, on the other hand, has used much optimistic futurological speculation in both his factual books and his fiction.Sf itself has also produced futurologists as characters, the best known being the exponents of PSYCHOHISTORY in Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation series.

   IFC/PN