In the field of futurology, it doesn’t get much better than that. And at WorldView 2002, the annual conference of the World Future Society, held recently in Philadelphia, this was just the beginning. Next door a futurist from New Jersey was about to begin discussing the colonization of Mars. And over in the Commonwealth D Room, the author of a book called “Male Menopause” was explaining how “males have been taught to define their manhood based on not being a woman,” and how this has left them with no “independent sense of being.” Not to worry: “There’s a fathering movement beginning to happen.”
In a postmillennial world preoccupied with Islamic terror and worthless stock-market portfolios, the 150 participants at WorldView 2002 formed a warm island of hope. Talk of September 11 was drowned out by idealism of an oddly nostalgic kind. Futurology (a term futurists despise), or future studies (the term most prefer), got its start when optimism was easy, and the World Future Society was in the center of it all. In the early 1970s Vice President Gerald Ford was the keynote speaker at its annual conference. As recently as 1986 a delegation traveled to the White House to share thoughts with Ronald Reagan.
That was then. In the past 10 years, membership in the World Future Society has plummeted from almost 60,000 to less than half that. Future-studies departments at institutions like the University of Southern California have shut their doors. The far-out faith in progress, Mars colonies and the like is all but dead. “There used to be a real sense of the future in society and what we should do about it,” says Michael Marien, editor of Future Survey, the monthly publication of the World Future Society. “But [future studies] never developed. It never fulfilled its promise. Now we’d rather spend money and have a good time in the present.”
Futurology was born during the cold war and initially had an alarmist tinge. In the R&D labs of America’s military, scientists began doing mathematical trend analysis of such questions as: how fast will the Soviets develop new submarines? The Air Force set up the Rand Corporation, and a visionary there named Herman Kahn began developing scenarios for what the world might experience in the event of a nuclear war. A foundation, the Stanford Research Institute, began using similar methods to predict trends in general society: what would the future of transportation look like? “It was quite an idealistic period,” recalls Edward Cornish, president and founder of the World Future Society. “America was going to the moon. There was a lot of money.”
Then futurology hit the mainstream, and started to rise on the pop charts. In 1970 a former Fortune magazine editor named Alvin Toffler published a landmark best seller called “Future Shock,” an epic vision of how the “roaring current of change”–job mobility, the decline of the small town, the throwaway consumer society–had left Americans in a state of “shattered stress and disorientation.”
Thousands joined the World Future Society, where they came up with answers and visions, to which Americans listened quite seriously. There were more best sellers, media attention, the Ford and Reagan visits. Sure, their grandest predictions were of-ten wrong. Columbia University physicist Gerald Feinberg predicted in 1960 that in 2000 a baby would be born on an artificial planet for the first time. (See chart for other whoppers.) But in some sense the early pioneers were influential beyond their wildest dreams. The forecasting techniques spawned by futurologists are widely used in government and private business. Many multinationals employ forecasters who predict 10, 25, even 50 years into the future.
But futurology as a kind of faith is gone. Toffler hasn’t had a best seller in years. No futurist of comparable stature has stepped up to take his place. And some of the issues discussed at the annual conference of the World Future Society seem less than relevant or topical, to put it nicely. (One session, for example, explored what impact an increasingly fat and tall population will have on the planet’s oxygen and food supply.) One of the biggest stars of the society is Marvin Cetron, who worked in government R&D labs from 1952 to 1971 and is now a private consultant who answers practical questions for big companies, like what the next generation of cars might look like. The glory days are over. Cetron predicted that the Shah of Iran would fall, by looking at indicators such as military-officer pay raises, the unemployment rate of young men and income disparity. He now expects the Saudi monarchy to fall, based on the same indicators. But who’s listening? Futurists no longer have entree to the corridors of power, which may be sad commentary on our uncertain times.
