Through a Glass Darkly

Why the Future Isn't What it Used to Be

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better." ~ Ray Bradbury, from Beyond 1984: The People Machine

As I writer who has often written about the past, I often find myself thinking about the future, and not only from the point of view of the present. I like to consider the different ways in which the people who came before us imagined what was about to happen to them and the generations that came after them. I’m interested in the expectations that other societies have had about the future and the predictions they made about it - and the extent to which the future confirmed or defied these expectations.

I have a weakness for Youtube history videos, particularly the colorised footage of a past that once only appeared to us in black and white films. For me at least, the use of colour brings a feeling of proximity, so that I feel closer to the people and places that I’ve previously imagined in black and white.

A lot of these films have been taken of Berlin. One short film shows the streets of Berlin in 1900, from the air and from the ground. You can see the wide avenues and the grand ornamental buildings. There’s hardly any traffic, except for the occasional motor car and horse-drawn carriage and the streets are filled with pedestrians and passengers riding in trams and trolley buses.

As you might expect, it’s clearly a militarised society - the product of an era in which the army was much prominent in public life than it is now, and not only in Germany. You see military bands, soldiers firing cannon salutes or parading before the Kaiser in spiked pickelhaubes. The Kaiser himself can be seen riding around in an open-top carriage.

But most of the footage shows ordinary people doing ordinary things, because this was a period in which the ability to see such things on screen was a perennial fascination that the early filmmakers catered to.

You see women in long black skirts and wide-brimmed hats; stolid-looking men in suits and straw boaters; children playing; policemen directing traffic; crowds waving their hats at some unexplained gathering; a group of young men drinking large glasses of beer.

It’s intriguing, in an era like ours when we are constantly photographing every aspect of our lives, to see how these turn-of-the-century Berliners react to the camera. Some are shy, others are curious or indifferent. A few people frown or smile as they pass it. Some young men strike cheeky macho poses, as young men always will.

The Proud Tower

The cameraman was clearly not looking for individuals or characters. Like many others, this film captured the everyday life of what was already one of the world’s great cities, in the pre-World War I Europe that Barbara Tuchman called ‘the proud tower’.

The apex of this ‘tower’ was a European continent that believed itself to be the centre of civilisation and the font of material and intellectual progress, and whose rulers considered that this position gave their countries the right to rule most of the world.

In fourteen years some of these Berlin teenagers and young boys would be marching to the Western Front. The old and young women who appear in the streets would feel the crushing impact of the Allied economic Blockade. Some people would live long enough to be sent to concentration camps. Some would be wearing Nazi uniforms. Others would experience invasion and bombardment and live to see the ruined Berlin which offered its own fascination to a later generation of documentary filmmakers.

It is doubtful that any members of this 1900 Berlin crowd foresaw any of this coming, because human societies are rarely able to see what the future holds, no matter how hard they try to predict it. As Barbara Tuchman and many others have pointed out, the so-called ‘Belle Epoque’ period was never as beautiful as it seemed to its privileged classes or to later generations. If there was ‘confidence, innocence, stability, security and peace’, Tuchman wrote, there was also ‘doubt and fear, ferment, protest, violence and hate.’

The decades leading up to World War I were filled with intimations of future catastrophes, wars and outbreaks of violence from writers, governments and policemen, who feared the revolutionary potential of the new urban crowds, and saw lone anarchist bombers as the harbingers of civilisational destruction that these ‘propagandists of the deed’ were incapable of.

Science fiction writers described anarchists bombing London from the air. HG Wells imagined the German Zeppelin fleet annihilating downtown New York. Others worried that anarchists would poison the water supply or gas opera goers to death.

Were any of these early Berliners troubled by these possibilities? Probably not, because most of us are not aware that our very brief lives are part of history, except in those occasional moments when we feel ourselves to be part of events that are not just historical, but genuinely historic.

Wars, battles, coronations, the pulling down of statues, the storming of palaces, collapsing towers, even sporting victories or defeats - all these events can make us feel that we are at least witnessing history and occasionally making it.

This is why most of us can remember where we were on ‘9/11’, or on the day Kennedy was assassinated, or the day the Berlin Wall was breached, or when Saddam’s statue was pulled down.

But history isn’t always so dramatic or so obvious. And the media framing of seemingly epoch-shaping events can easily make us forget that we are always part of history, regardless of whether we are present at the big occasions. And we are also making history through the individual and collective decisions that we take - or don’t take - through the governments we elect to rule us, through our action or inaction on the issues of the day, through the injustices that we tolerate and allow to happen, and the ones that we stand up against.

And whether we are conscious of it or not, the history that we are making is always shaped to some extent by the way we imagine the future - or at least the ‘near future’ that 1990s science fictions writers wove their stories around. We know this in our private and our working lives. All of us have aspirations for the future. We make plans for ourselves and our children and we like - need - to believe that the efforts we are making will contribute to making the future a place in which our children can live, preferably, better than we did.

This possibility to some extent makes our lives worthwhile. The idea of the future provides meaning and purpose. We generally hope for a better future if not for ourselves, then for those who come after us.

Even if we aren’t always conscious of it, the idea of the future is always there somewhere on the horizon, and provides a kind of light to work towards and a vantage point that we imagine ourselves looking back from. We take photographs, in part, because we don’t to forget the past and also we hope these pictures will help us - or our children - to remember the moments of our lives we want to be remembered.

From a writer’s point of view, the future is essential, because most of us like to believe that we are writing not just for the present, but for the readers who will come after us, who will see what we saw, and perhaps learn something about the world that we lived through. Who else was Vassily Grossman writing for, apart from a few samizdat readers, after a Soviet censor once told him that Life and Fate would not be publishable for 600 years?

The idea of the future, for writers, offers at least the possibility that our work will survive and perhaps reach people who are not alive yet.

Already-Existing Dystopias

Politically-speaking, the future can also provide a kind of justification for decisions taken in the present. Under Stalinism, the vision of a communist utopia was constantly presented to the Russian people as a justification for anything from Stakhanovite shock worker targets to mass slave labour projects. To some extent, this idea of the future provided a justification for the most shocking criminality and new forms of tyranny, and it also enabled communists to turn a blind eye to Soviet crimes.

Soviet society, from the early period of the Bolsheviks right through to Yuri Gagarin, was inseparable from the idea not just of a better future, but the best future that humankind could obtain.

This may have been an illusion, and as history has revealed, a delusion, but it was not limited to the Soviets. Until roughly the end of the Cold War, social democratic and conservative politicians in Western democracies presided over an unprecedented period of material progress, in which everyday life was believed to be constantly improving, and it was taken for granted that the future would be even better.

Of course there were distant clouds in the skies, because there always are. The prospect of nuclear war hovered in the background. By the early 1970s the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and sci films like Soylent Green and Silent Running were already beginning to imagine a future of ecological collapse.

Few governments paid much attention to these warnings. Even in the early 1990s, when the prospect of ecological collapse was far more widely-accepted, a triumphalist atmosphere reined in Western capitals, which predicted the advent of a ‘borderless’ global utopia of free trade and democratic expansion.

In the run up to the new millennium, Western security analysts became increasingly pessimistic about the future, and developed a variety of ‘megaterrorist’ hypotheses in which cults and terrorist groups with no national affiliations would destroy cities with nuclear weapons, dirty bombs and anthrax.

To some extent, the September 11 attacks seemed to bear out these predictions. If 9/11 seemed to confirm every catastrophic terrorist scenario from the past, it also seemed to up the ante of what was possible in the future. As a result Western governments increasingly presented themselves not as instruments for building the good life, but as the last bastion against chaos and destruction.

This was one reason why the Bush administration launched itself into a disastrous global ‘war on terror’ with no coherent strategic purpose and no end point. Throughout the first decade of the century, the prospect of ‘dirty bombs’, mass poisonings, and nuclear attacks from ‘rogue states’ provided a persistent justification for a state of permanent war.

I have written elsewhere about the ‘new military futurism’ and the way that the US military in particular used sci fi images of the worst possible future - most of which were related to terrorism - to justify an endless investment in superweapons and surveillance instruments, and the pursuit of geopolitical aims that had nothing to do with these imagined threats.

It’s striking now to look back and see how few of these threats materialised, and the supposed ‘cure’ to global terrorism actually helped spread the disease in ways that the architects of the war on terror had not foreseen. Only two decades ago thinktanks like the Project for a New American Century were articulating a neo-imperial doctrine global American military domination, in which the world’s only superpower would bring law and order to a lawless and chaotic world.

Reclaiming the Future

Today America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Its politics are in chaos. Its main opposition party is profoundly antidemocratic and possibly the closest thing in the Western world right now to a white supremacist fascist party.

None of the prophets of the worst possible future saw this coming. If the notion of the twenty-first century as an ‘American century’ has unravelled, so too has the post-Cold War notion of a borderless utopia linked by free trade and new technology, and the final triumph of democracy.

In the last decade the opposite has happened. Old borders have been hardened and new ones have been created, mostly in order to prevent or slow down the movements of Third World refugees and ‘economic migrants’.

Across the world, millions of voters have rejected democracy and turned to authoritarian rightwing populists who have placed the same emphasis on the (white) nation as fascists once did in the 20s and 30s. These voters are all making history, but it is not clear yet what kind of history it will be.

We won’t know this for some time, and the outcome will almost certainly surprise us, because history always does. But even at this point, we can safely say the future is not what it was in 1990, in 2001, or even in 2015. We are now living in an era of seemingly endemic crisis, in which every bad thing that happens contains the potential to become something even worse, whether it’s the election of Donald Trump, a lethal pandemic, or a European theatre war with Russia.

These outcomes are depressing and demoralising enough, and they can make us feel helpless and hopeless about the future. And that’s even before we’ve begun to talk about. It’s worth remembering, though too easily forgotten, that during it was precisely during the period 1990-2021, when humanity experienced its greatest era of material progress, that global Greenhouse gases rose by 45 percent, and more damage was done to the planet and its non-human inhabitants than in the previous hundred years.

The last decade has been the hottest period since records began, in which each year has been hotter than the next. These developments point towards a catastrophic future that is potentially so much darker than any of the crises that we have experienced in the last twenty-two years, or even during the last hundred. They point to the possibility of civilisational collapse and even the extinction of the human species.

Faced with a future filled with so many looming calamities, it is tempting not to think about the future at all. We would certainly be happier - if we measure happiness by our personal satisfaction and ability to achieve purely personal objectives. But ignoring the future and refusing to think about what kind of world we want to hand on to those who come after us has its own consequences.

What is the point of having children if we only intend to hand them a ruined world that we could not muster up the energy or conviction to save? What does it say about our societies if we can’t muster up that energy and conviction? What is the use of culture if we shrug our shoulders in the face of a future in which all our cultural achievements may be swept away? What is the point of politics, if politics cannot - or will not - take the necessary actions to protect our planet? What value do our governments and international institutions have if they can’t work prioritise that protection?

These are questions we need to constantly ask ourselves and each other. Because, no matter how bad things seem, we shouldn’t allow the worst possibilities to overwhelm us to the point when we give up hope for the future. Because we haven’t lost the world until we have finally lost it. Until that happens, the future will always contain more hopeful possibilities, even if we haven’t seen them yet.

But in order to find them, the future must become part of our present, as something we are always working towards and which is always waiting for us, and bear in mind that if things can get worse we can also make them better. In other words, rather than giving up on the future, we need to see it not just as the ‘sum of all fears’, but as the place where our best hopes can be realised.

We don’t know whether this will actually happen. But we owe it to ourselves, to those who are living in the present and to those who are going to be living in the future, to make the effort, so that when people look back on the films we have taken of ourselves, they might be able to thank us instead of cursing us.