Contemporary Futures

Perspectives from Social Anthropology

Sandra Wallman, Sandra Wallman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134919413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In industrial societies imagining the future is a serious business; our assumptions about the future govern the present management of domestic, national and global resources, and are projected, some would say inflicted, on societies whose visions are different. Contemporary Futures focuses not so much on whether the future can be known, but on interpreting the way we and others picture it. The contributors, all social anthropologists, explore the effects that this picture has on the present, on group identity and belief in the self and its survival, on our relationships with other cultures, and on the future itself. They provide a cross-cultural perspective on a range of futures visualised at this time and discusses the implications of

Part I
Perspectives on industrial society

Chapter 1
The death of the future

David Lowenthal

My title echoes the historian J.H.Plumb’s The Death of the Past (1969). Plumb assailed coercive precedent—the power of the past embedded in property, place and privilege. For centuries if not millennia this malign influence had ‘seeped through the interstices of society, staining all thought, creating veneration for customs, traditions and inherited wisdom’, and acting as a ‘bulwark against innovation and change’.

That past was now dying, Plumb believed, and ‘so it should, for it was compounded of bigotry, of national vanity, of class domination’. It was being replaced by history—an objective chronicle of what had actually happened, creating ‘a new past as true, as exact, as we can make it’. But Plumb’s true and exact past, even then a dubious ideal, today seems a quaint anachronism. Anthropologists more than most scholars recognise that history is bound to be partisan, imprecise and ephemeral (Tonkin et al. 1989). History no less than the past it chronicles is a cultural artefact continually refashioned to accord with new needs.

Yet if Plumb’s tyrannical past had not died, it had been severely savaged by academic historians and by the advance of populism. Antiquity no longer automatically conferred power and prestige; primordial origins had ceased to be the sole key to destiny’s secrets; and the new history Plumb extolled had ‘undermined, battered and exploded’ the old exemplary use of the past.

These changes were indeed significant. But they were not so revolutionary as to justify Plumb’s autopsy. Unlike ‘commercial, craft and agrarian societies’, he argued, ‘industrial society…does not need the past’. Consequently, modern modes of life

have no sanction in the past and no roots in it;…the strength of the past in all aspects of life is far, far weaker than it was;…few societies have ever had a past in such galloping dissolution’ as ours. And the need for personal roots was likewise waning away.

(Plumb 1969:14, 44, 66, 115)

My Past Is a Foreign Country (Lowenthal 1985) showed the past Plumb had striven to bury surging back to life—in fact, it had never really been dead. Intense preoccupation with former times features individuals and institutions all over the world. Genealogical yearnings swamp registries; nostalgia pervades popular culture; traditions are ceaselessly recycled or invented; museums and historic houses become tourist meccas; appetites for antiquities seem unlimited. Heritage is alike a popular crusade among the dispossessed and a growth industry for the privileged. No longer exclusive to an élite minority, the past now shapes the identities and feeds the fantasies of the populace at large. Icons and images of bygone times console millions uprooted or upset by what Paul Connerton (1989:64) terms ‘the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment [and] the ceaseless transformation of the innovative into the obsolescent’. And the past offers solace against present failures and forecasted horrors that imperil hopes for the future.

Hard on the heels of Plumb’s premature obituary of the past came Reyner Banham’s (1976) epitaph for the future. For at least a century the future had been a bright and shining presence. Scientific progress, faith in social engineering, and impatience with tradition had engendered countless cornucopian forecasts. The advances of technology, the visions of architects, and the dreams of science fiction had made such scenes familiar since the late-nineteenth century. The fame of Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) touched off a flood of future utopias that peaked with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and H.G.Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). That the conquest of nature had enormously enriched the globe was conventional wisdom; and continued scientific progress seemed to ensure ever greater control over human destiny (McGreevy 1987). These turn-of-the-century futuristic visions largely survived the First World War and the Great Depression.

Not all technologically inspired futures were roseate—Lang’s film Metropolis exemplified a darker, Frankenstein monster strand of thought— but most of them were upbeat villes radieuses. And they were as elaborately detailed as the schemes of modernist architects. Planners saw the future as almost ‘another country, which one might visit like Italy, or even try to recreate in replica’. Banham (1976) termed futurism ‘suspiciously like a period style, a neo-gothic of the Machine Age, as revealed in the Art-Deco skyscrapers of New York in the twenties’. The archetypal future was ‘a city of gleaming, tightly clustered towers, with helicopters fluttering about their heads and monorails snaking around their feet; all enclosed…under a vast transparent dome’. Life there, one sceptic mocked, would be ‘unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human nature’ (Stapledon 1930:15).

The ecological fears and social upheavals of the 1960s put paid to this confident vision. The flower people did not plan ahead, they looked back; their rural communes expunged machinery along with money (except for remittances from home). In the mid–1970s Banham got posters ‘from some Futures operation and they were all hand-lettered!’; he knew then that the future had had it.

Pictures of windmills and families holding hands…what kind of future is that? Where’s your white heat of technology? Where’s your computer typefaces and those backward-sloping numerals that glow at you out of pocket calculators? Where’s that homely old future we all grew up with?

(Banham 1976)

It had vanished with the wind of hope, Technological paradise succumbed to the Second World War, Hiroshima, and post-war planning. Of the modernist future only nostalgic memories now remain.

Environmental alarms and the pace of unloved change make the demise of utopian visions hardly surprising. ‘At worst the future is to be feared, for it will be a time when familiar objects…will disappear’, concludes Billig (1990:78). ‘At best it is a continuation of the present; [few] talk of a future which is qualitatively different’.

So anachronistic is the utopian future it is already ‘olden’. A 1956 ‘This Is Tomorrow’ exhibition at Whitechapel resurfaced in 1989 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, its quaint machine-age wonders juxtaposed with less passé harbingers of apocalypse.

The vanished progressive future is satirised as well as museumised (Gibson 1988). Projecting his well-earned retirement in the year 2020, the Nature Conservancy Council’s director-general envisages an outing to ‘Center Parc’,

a wonderful, enormous dome, under which private enterprise conserves rare and representative re-created countrysides and stunning holographs of romantic landscapes now lost. On the way back, I visit the small thatched mock Tudor cottage…with blown up photographs of some striking buildings the National Trust used to run before they were either inundated or made way for the wonderful motorway. I sail over to a splendidly landscaped golf course for the senior Japanese businessmen whose microchip factories stretch to the horizon. Packed densely behind them lie corduroy stripes of Sitka spruce with an inviting notice to ‘Pick Your Own’; I…garner some genetically manipulated bananas.

(Hornsby 1989)

This future is doubly nostalgic; it both mourns the loss of traditional amenity and deplores the fraudulence of artificial substitutes.

How and when did the late-lamented technological future come into being? And what had the future previously been like? Prior to the Enlightenment, Europeans had viewed past and future alike as ordained and predictable. Prognoses of times to come rested on the same religious chronology as annals of times past. History ran from the Creation to the End, whose coming was certain. The past was recounted and the future prophesied in definitive scriptural texts; ‘the Bible was not only a repository of past history, but a revealed pattern of the whole of history’ (Yerushalmi 1982:21). Circumstances and motives were seen as constant over the entire sweep of mundane time. Since history was static, it could be exemplary; past, present, and future were considered wholly analogous. Repeated prophetic failures—such as predictions of the end of the world—never disconfirmed sacred prophesy. Instead, each failure was held to increase the likelihood that the foretold end would come next time.

This grand eschatological framework had little bearing on day-to-day secular experience, however. Everyday affairs were beset by uncertainty. Though diurnal and seasonal rounds were expectably cyclical, risk and insecurity marked both the physical environment and the social milieu. Yet human and natural, like divine agencies, were presumed to be unvarying and predictable, at least in principle. The assumption of eternal sameness bolstered conclusions about the future drawn from the past. Secular prognoses were based on exemplary historical evidence framed within a constant human nature; sub specie aeternitatis, nothing really novel could arise. Whether the future was deduced from faith or from sober calculation, it was foreseeable because processes would continue to be what they always had been. ‘He who wishes to foretell the future must look into the past’, as Machiavelli put it, ‘for all the things on earth have at all times a similarity with those of the past’ (Koselleck 1985:280).

Because their futures concerned utterly distinct realms, the gulf between sacred and secular hopes disturbed few. ‘Long-term, worldly, everyday experiences never collided with expectations about the End, [for they] were not related to this world, but to the Hereafter’ (Koselleck 1985:278). As long as things stayed much the same, worldly change did not contradict Christian prevision. In the secular short term, prediction replaced prophesy without eroding sacred anticipation. And in both realms the future was certain.

This sense of the future was predicated not only on a faith in the constancy of human nature and human agencies, but on the general abhorrence of change common to most philosophers from Plato through to the French Revolution. Although visions of ultimate stability differed, ‘everybody equated happiness with absence of change and considered change, even change for the better, to be intolerable’. Only when it presaged its own cessation was change acceptable (Munz 1985:314).

This traditional future, on the one hand comfortingly familiar, on the other depressingly foreclosed, gave way between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to the technological utopias described above. The primary impetus for the change was the displacement of religious faith by ideas and ideals of secular progress. While the new future was more confident and optimistic, it was less knowable and more mysterious than the traditional Christian morrow had been. Future forecasts were transposed from the next world to this one; worldly experience, not sacred faith, now confirmed or denied such expectations. History was no longer divinely foreordained, but man-made, hence accessible to science and social engineering.

The pace of history also accelerated, as witnesses of the Napoleonic era especially observed. Social stability was one victim of this acceleration. Intellectual security was another. Unprecedented change eroded faith in the teachings of history. As the present no longer predictably emerged from the past, neither could the future be foretold from the present.

These new ways of viewing past and future, sacred and secular chronicle, did not come all at once nor entirely replace the old. As early as Luther, time’s acceleration had seemed to bring forward the Final Judgement. (It was ill-advised as well as wrong to anticipate it, as an early rabbi remarked: ‘Blasted be those who calculated the end, for they say that since the time has arrived and he has not come, he will never come. Rather, wait for him’ (Yerushalmi 1982:24–5).) Resisting such previsions as heretical, the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire clung to an annalistic conception of the past and a static view of the future, with sacred destiny repeatedly delayed. The last papal prophecy (1595) of the End of the world put it a long, safe time ahead—at least as far off as 1992 (Koselleck 1985:9).

With human experience now bereft of constancy, the secular future became hard if not impossible to ascertain. Acceleration of the next world’s advent was now applied to the future of the existing world. Horizons of expectation shortened; people grew more used to giving voice to what they wanted, and they wanted it soon, within their own lifetimes. No prospective improvement was any longer inconceivable; to many, Rousseau’s vision of the perfectibility of man seemed a reasonable and realistic agenda. Historic change led towards a shining future of free and happy men, as Robespierre put it (Koselleck 1985:7); but this future was otherwise vague and formless. Accelerated change left a foreshortened past ever less relevant as a guide to the future. New faith in progress made all historical events unique, and all unlike the present. As past examples lost their virtue, annals based on stars and planets, rulers and dynasties, gave way to narratives of self-generating change. The quintessential rejection of the old past was the French Revolution’s abolition of the Christian calendar, so that history could begin afresh with the year One.

All this detached the future from past experience. What lay ahead was no longer pre-ordained. But since progress seemed certain its features could be partly surmised: ‘The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot’ (Koselleck 1985:6–18, 32–8). But like the past, that future would consist of unique rather than repetitive events. Just as history now had to be explained anew by each generation, so progress severed the future from whatever the present might anticipate.

The Industrial Revolution and European overseas expansion seemed to confirm these previsions. But in the wake of technocratic hubris came fears about the future’s social and cultural impacts, and nostalgia for a past now seen to be irretrievable. The rupture of continuity following the momentous upheavals of the French Revolution signalled a pace of change felt as psychologically and socially disastrous. Ominous harbingers generated new prophesies of catastrophe, now not divinely but technologically ordained. ‘The series of events comes swifter and swifter’, judged Carlyle (1887–8: 590), ‘velocity increasing…as the square of time’. Anxiety over an unimaginable future culminated in Brooks Adams’s (1896:292–5, 307–8) prognosis of imminent societal dissolution. For the first time in history progress felt within reach; yet beyond that bright promise loomed a perhaps unbearable future.

Ambivalence towards that future and the past it was supplanting spurred the memorial occasions and commemorative icons that festooned European and American landscapes of the late-nineteenth century (Hobsbawm 1983). These ceremonies and monuments ostensibly honoured great men and great deeds. But their purpose was not just to remember the past but to commend it to future generations. Like a knotted handkerchief, plaques, flags, tombstones are intended less for present recall than to fasten future recollection (Radley 1990). Lacking such reminders, our successors might take catastrophically unpredictable courses. Only the persistence of the past could rein in a galloping future otherwise beyond control. In one country after another, historic preservation became a national creed embodied in legal codes to protect the public patrimony against the vicissitudes of man, nature and time.

These memorial and preservationist impulses had their precursors, to be sure: early seventeenth-century English sermons commemorating the Gunpowder Plot aimed ‘to imprint an eternal memento in the calendar of our hearts, [of]…a deliverance and a preservation never to be forgotten by us, nor our posterity after us’ (Cressy 1989). But late-nineteenth-century commemorative acts had a far wider range and amplitude. They seemed designed to hallow the memory not simply of some single extraordinary episode but of the past in toto.

As environmental impact further eroded faith in technology, preservation sentiment expanded to embrace nature, too. Fears of annihilation unleashed by Hiroshima soon became widespread. Every environmental incident engendered alarm—a fall of red dust in Baltimore was rumoured to be radioactive fallout or the harbinger of a new dustbowl. While some welcomed satellites as a technological triumph, an American congressman echoed many fears ‘that we are too smart and that the world will be destroyed by the machines and weapons created by our own mind’ (Congress-man Dewey Short (Missouri) New York Times 30 July 1955:9). As the unknown future becomes ever more fearsome, mainstream scientists join ecological gurus in dire warnings of a technological Armageddon.

Growing pressures on the biosphere now presage incalculable damage. The public has learned to fear radiation and toxicity that mount over time, yet whose risk can be assessed only when precautions would be too late. Scientists are chastised for being unable to predict adverse effects with speed, precision and certainty (Hays 1987:182–4).

What now makes the future most frightening are changes that may be irreversible. Such fears are not solely ecological; they are also aroused by the wholesale renovation of historic buildings and works of art, which restoration often ‘saves’ at the cost of their essential quality. But irreversible impacts that put ecosystems at risk are of paramount concern, for they are seen capable of extinguishing human life, even all life.

The sheer magnitude of what is unknown makes today’s future parlous. How much and what kinds of aerosol emission might irretrievably open the ozone hole? How depleted can an ecosystem get before degrading totally? Slow bioaccumulation, the lengthy half-life of many radioactive disintegration products, the prolonged ecosystem effects of species extinctions, the differential pace of various natural processes, the incommensurable acceleration of technological impact—all generate alarm about futures we ourselves set in train but whose outcomes we cannot predict (Randall 1986:86–7).

Science and technology also raise more general doubts about the future. By the nineteenth century the cumulative and progressive reshaping of the globe was not only essential to general wellbeing but had become the normative mode of Western understanding. Optimism about the benign effects of science was accompanied by faith that future discoveries would reveal the final secrets of nature.

The malign effects of progress loom larger not simply because they seem more noxious and dangerous, but because the attendant benefits have already been discounted. And as new conquests of nature come at ever greater expense, institutions will find it harder to resolve existing environmental problems or respond to new ones (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987). Even if ...