Allow me to ask you, then, how man can govern if he cannot plan for even so ridiculously short a span as a thousand years or so, if, in fact, he cannot guarantee his own next day?” M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (translated by Mirra Ginsburg, Grove Press, 1991)
In the early pages of Bulgakov’s novel, Woland pokes fun at Berlioz, casually tossing out foreboding comments while Berlioz staunchly refuses to believe the strange “foreigner” and his cryptic predictions. In his inimitable way, Bulgakov points out a universal human trait: in our desire to know what is to come, we are easily manipulated and eager to believe anyone who promises a happy future. For millennia, priests and prophets, philosophers and theologians, politicians and artists have tried to craft a perfect prognosis of the future that would give them power over people’s minds. Even today, we live with a constant desire to know what tomorrow will bring. But to catch a glimpse of the future, we have to step back into the past.
From philosopher to priest
At the dawn of humanity’s earliest civilizations, visions of future were the purview of high priests with a direct link to the gods. Each revelation was a divine gift, a tiny peak behind the veil of time only the gods could penetrate. The history of divine prophecies stretches across many thousands of years. Probably the oldest known prophets are Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, and the Sibyls, who managed to predict, among other things, the fall of Troy and Constantinople. Curiously, these priestesses dealt mainly in calamities and wars – and were often correct.
Philosophers of antiquity were the first to come up with a fundamental vision of the future, using logic to map the direction of human development and the changes that would define society. People of Plato’s stature commanded great respect among their contemporaries, serving as de-facto architects of their society’s humanitarian norms. To ancient Greeks, the future looked like a more refined version of the present: the same old world where philosophers ruled and the plebs labored.
Aristotle took this vision to a new level. His man of the future would combine the knowledge of all generations that came before him. And though Aristotle, like Plato, believed that virtue was inextricably linked to the ideal of a higher good – the domain of some exalted scientific theory of state – their future society would still move along the same predetermined road of higher reason.
While ancient philosophers saw the future as an extension of the past, various eschatological theories took the future as their starting point, then sought to organize the present life based on that future. The concept of individual afterlife had existed as far back as ancient Egypt. Later, it was joined by the global vision of the End of Days.
Arguably the first reasoned-out and easily accessible “projection” of the future was the Bible, which united a wide variety of ancient texts. It maps out the future of humanity on the whole, while not forgetting the fate of individuals. Many people turn to the Bible for help with big philosophical questions and mundane everyday problems. According to the New Testament, the most important event of the future is the Second Coming of Christ, though the book is quite vague on the time frame. Once again, simple humans remain powerless to predict the future – or, indeed, their own fate. For Christians, much like for ancient followers of the Sibyls, no one but God, creator of all things, can know the future, because only God has unlimited control over the course of history.
Every religion offers its own understanding of the finite nature of our existence, and every religion creates its own version of what happens after death. Though religions and philosophies of the East break rank by introducing the idea of cyclical existence through reincarnation, they also offer a concrete goal: to break free of this endless cycle of death and rebirth. Meanwhile, the Western mind has already made peace with the idea that the world is not eternal. This phantom of End of Days drives people in the West to create limitless bliss in the here and now.
Visions of life after death added a new dimension to the present, imbuing it with a deeper significance. For many centuries, this predetermined nature of existence espoused by most religions served as the main framework for the way people saw and understood their world.
Utopia vs. dystopia: things will turn out fine… or very, very badly
Early Christians believed that the Second Coming was just around the corner. Many expected it to happen in their lifetimes. But the Apocalypse kept getting rescheduled, and eventually, philosophers and writers began offering their own visions of the future, of our descendants and their social structures.
Through the prism of centuries, Thomas More’s Utopia seems childishly absurd. For 1516, the year it was published, it was a huge creative breakthrough of the human mind. The full title of the novel was A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia. More, who despised the inequities of his native England, built his Utopia as a virtually perfect socialist state: it had no private property or exploitation; the government had a monopoly on foreign trade, and everyone had everything they needed. And though Utopia still had a king, its political structure was fully democratic. All officials were elected, and every citizen could run for office, with the author reserving the highest leadership positions for the intellectual class.
It’s easy to see why over the years the name of More’s perfect state came to mean an unattainable ideal. As time went by, literary visions of the future grew less optimistic. The turning point was Jonathan Swift’s scandalous novel Gulliver’s Travels, which exploded onto the literary scene in 1726 and went on to be an astounding success. On his last journey, Swift’s hero discovers the Yahoos – disgusting human-like creatures who embodied every possible vice, enslaved by the virtuous equine Houyhnhnms. The Yahoos were Swift’s warning to his contemporaries: this is what man would become if he remained a slave to his base instincts, and the beasts of burden that once served him would be his masters.
Gulliver’s Travels signaled the beginning of a new literary tradition. One after another, writers rushed to offer their own bleak visions of the future. One of the most prominent members of this new cadre of oracles was H. G. Wells, who sent one of his heroes all the way to the year 802701. His novel The Time Machine, written at the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, presents a future society that consists of two distinct races: the leisure class of Eloi and the working class of Morlocks. Over millennia, both species had all but forgotten how to use their minds, devolving into slow-witted animals. Without their intellectual curiosity, these future humans cannot survive. When the hero goes further into the future, he finds no trace of past human civilization.
Not all books look this far ahead. In other stories, Wells managed to glimpse a less distant future. He saw a world where highly developed countries would be split into four distinct classes. The rich – land owners and wealthy heirs living off their dividends – had few responsibilities and no interest in politics. The creative class was comprised of thinkers: highly educated people working to use their knowledge and scientific advances for the benefit of all. Non-productive, but still necessary, functions like government and trade, were undertaken by the management class: government bureaucrats, clerks, secretaries, and even artists. The dregs of society – the uneducated masses often incapable of learning – had lost their menial jobs to high technology, and had turned into a parasite class that provided fertile ground for the criminal element.
This highly stratified society will doubtless seem familiar to any 21st century reader. A cursory look at any developed country of today will tell you just how prescient Wells had been.
Jack London (1876-1916) was another architect of future societies. For most readers, the name of Jack London calls forth images of Alaska gold miners, California frontiersmen, or sailors battling the Pacific Ocean. It’s no wonder why his visions of the future were so accurate: London was among highest-educated and best-read people of his time; his circle of friends included prominent scientists, philosophers, and politicians.
In 1908, London’s novel The Iron Heel attempted to paint a realistic picture of the future. The book is written as a 20th century autobiography, discovered by a scholar in the 27th century – the era of the Brotherhood of Man. The premise of the novel is that rather than be destroyed by internal conflict, capitalism will push the ruling classes to give up their privileges and create a somewhat socialist society.
Acclaimed Russian science fiction writers Strugatsky brothers chose to examine a less distant future. In their Noon Universe cycle of ten novels (1962-1986), Earth is the most technologically advanced civilization in charted space. The planet is united under one government, made up of humanity’s best and brightest: scientists, philosophers, historians, and strategists. But while the Strugatsky brothers’ future state was a technocracy, their descriptions of daily life often smacked of communist idealism.
In the alternative future of the Noon Universe novels, the Soviet Union has succeeded in building a perfect Communist society, spreading it around the world by peaceful means in late 20th century and uniting the planet under one set of goals and ideals. Wars have become a distant memory, and the world has entered a utopian era. This version of the future begs a question: was this a real literary experiment, or were the writers simply toeing the party line?
As the 20th century drew to a close, predictions took on an increasingly realistic tone. In his 1962 novel The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess pegged overpopulation as the main problem of the near future. As Earth’s resources dwindle, Burgess’ future governments begin to offer incentives to childless families – and when that fails, humans resort to cannibalism.
Prophecy or lucky guess?
It’s hard to judge utopian and dystopian writers. After all, each vision of the future, each model of human society has the right to exist, no matter how outlandish. Some ideas even found reflection in 20th century regimes, totalitarian and otherwise.
Often misunderstood by their contemporaries, the following visionaries, managed to rise above their time and see the world of the future, projected the future into the present, and predicted, if not triggered major scientific, technical, and artistic breakthroughs.
Leonardo da Vinci, easily the most prominent figure of the Renaissance, is the embodiment of the term “Renaissance man” – a man whose talents extend into every sphere. Centuries after his death, interest in his inventions, sketches, and writings is as strong as ever. His painting technique, the depth and realism of his imagery put him a head and shoulders above the art world of his time. Those who have seen his diaries and drawings are not surprised to find sketches of parachutes, airplanes, bicycles, tanks, projectors, and even robots casually interspersed among still life studies and messy notes. Even the advent of communications technologies and television wasn’t beyond da Vinci’s imagination:
Man will be able to converse with people in most distant countries. He will travel without moving, talk to those not present, and hear those not speaking.
Great authors, whose talent spanned centuries, allowing them to see the hidden patterns in society’s development, put forth their own convincing versions of reality. The 19th century visionaries, whose keen ability to foretell the future was supported by their excellent education, took da Vinci’s abstract visions and imbued them with painstaking technical detail. The most successful models of the future were firmly anchored to the contemporary direction of human development. Jules Verne, a favorite of adults and kids alike, predicted scientific discoveries and inventions from the electric chair to videoconferencing and television, from planes, and helicopters to space flights to the Moon. He even came close to pinpointing the center of future space travel: the location from which his heroes take off is a stone’s throw away from Cape Canaveral.
But no one was more spot-on in their predictions than H. G. Wells. The English writer’s science fiction novels and stories are peppered with surprisingly accurate speculations about the future of science and technology. In the 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon, he foresaw space travel, albeit by dubious means. In The World Set Free, written in 1914, he predicted nuclear fission and warned against nuclear war. And what is the Martian Heat-Ray from The War of the Worlds if not a laser? One of Wells’ short stories talks about a television broadcast from Mars. This prediction has also recently come true, as space probes reached the Red Planet and send the images back to Earth.
Wells’1901 nonfiction work Anticipations laid out technological advances of the 20th century and described their effects on human society. The book described automobiles, planes, central heating, air conditioning, and electrical kitchen appliances. Wells noted the special significance of the telephone: Imagine what will be made possible by the wide use of the telephone. You will no longer have to go from store to store: you will simply pick up the receiver, and the items will be mailed to you in London from hundreds of miles away.
Analysts and prognosticators: who got it wrong?
As 19th century drew to a close, not all prominent scientists and writers were brave enough to envision 20th century’s torrential scientific and technological development, which seemed to grow exponentially with each year.
One of the most glaring examples of scientific shortsightedness comes courtesy of Dmitri Mendeleev, who couldn’t imagine a more dire problem than what to do with excess manure from the world’s growing horse population. At the start of 20th century, George Bernard Shaw believed that Germany would soon all but cease to exist, replaced by “a host of Soviet or near-Soviet republics stretching from the Ural Mountains to the North Sea. ” And Albert Einstein was convinced that it would be at least a hundred years before nuclear energy could be used for practical purposes – yet only 10 years after he made this statement, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
How could such seemingly indisputable visionaries be so shortsighted? Were these simply unguarded comments misunderstood as prophecies?
Even the first Moon landing failed to dispel people’s mistrust of future technologies. In 1971, at a public presentation of the first version of his new operating system, Bill Gates – the modern Zeus of computer Olympus – told his audience that computers would always be too large for personal use.
Others dared to dream big, and history went on to prove them right. A few years later, in 1976, Apple invited American students to envision the personal computer of 2000 and enter their ideas into a competition. The winning entry came from Illinois: Computers of the near future will look like a box the size of a school folder. One side of the box will have a full-color liquid crystal screen. It will have no keys or buttons other than the power switch. Instead, people will be able to type by touching the image of a keyboard on the screen, as well as access any television program.
In five paragraphs, these Illinois students managed to describe the basic features of an iPad or a PC Tablet. They were off by a mere decade. In the race to predict the future, the winners were kids who let their imaginations run wild. The mere act of dreaming the future made it real.
Designing the future
Much like these Illinois students, artists, architects, and fashion designers dared to create the future they imagined. Much of our 21st century clothing, lifestyle, and worldview was shaped by the cultural heritage of the preceding century, turned upside down by the futurist movements in poetry and art, the functional direction of architecture and design, and the revolutionary changes in the world of fashion.
Italian poet Filippo Marinetti was among the thinkers who gave birth to this artistic futurism that sought to erase the past and its traditions. His Futurist Manifesto champions “telegraphic” style; rejection of traditional grammar; and a poet’s right to create his own spelling, words, tempo, and rhythm.
These ideas blew the field wide open for experimentation, pushing the boundaries of creative freedom in poetry and beyond. But while Marinetti and his compatriots were convinced that it was the way of the future, today this futurism of negation seems rather like a distant event of the early 20th century. Marinetti’s futurism failed to take hold in the mainstream: conventional literature proved to be immune to artistic revolutions.
In the visual arts, futurism became one of the ways to examine the essence of a given phenomenon; to capture an immediate emotional expression of changes sweeping the modern world. Though futurism is a thing of the past, it left a legacy of great genius, giving the world Matisse, Picasso, and Braque.
Credit for the true breakthrough in morphing the present into the future belongs to those who captured the spirit of the times – the zeitgeist of the Space Age. It is a short list, topped by the fashion designers of the last century. The golden age of science fiction fashion (which shared its name with the futurist art movement) coincided with the Space Decade – the 1960s, the era of the youth revolt, the period of artistic and cultural upheaval. Spurred by the consumer boom, the moon landing, and science fiction literature, the future had seeped into fashion. New fabrics were developed, giving couture the ability to embody science fiction ideas. At the same time, the restrictive world of high fashion cracked open: high-end clothes became cheaper and easier to manufacture and flooded the mass market.
Pierre Cardin, already crowned as the leading avant-garde fashion artist who tended towards abstract, geometrical designs which rarely reflected people’s day-to-day styles, answered the call of the times with a line of unisex clothes, which had first originated in 1958. As he often said, “Fashion gives me the opportunity to travel through a futuristic world.”
In 1959, Pierre Cardin was the first designer to unveil a series of prt-a-porter (ready-to-wear) collections, giving the world pantyhose, miniskirts, and high boots. His work with French and German wholesalers taught him that the future belonged to mass market fashion. Cardin was the first to realize that he was sitting on a giant business opportunity – an opportunity he didn’t hesitate to take.
Paco Rabanne also took note of new materials. He began using metal, plastic, and metallized fabrics. Following Cardin’s lead, he started producing fashion videos in a bid to popularize his designs. These early videos feature models, still uncertain of the unfamiliar medium and suspicious of the camera, posing on the roofs of Paris dressed in Rabanne’s futuristic creations.
Not so long ago, these experiments had seemed like a nave attempt at “playing future” – but 2010 brought with it the triumphant return of futuristic imagery to the catwalk. This time, paradoxically, the future was borrowing from the past. However, the space-age direction of ‘60s fashion was no longer designers’ only inspiration: they drew on the evolution theory, using reptile lines and texture, and hinted at the now all-too-familiar dystopian visions of modern literature. Karl Lagerfeld went back to the source of 20th century futurism: an abstract hymn to new technologies. And in January 2011, Armani presented a collection that’s nothing short of future personified: its iridescent fabrics glow and shimmer like liquid metal, and its lines and angles would look perfectly at home on Princess Leia of Star Wars.
What is the reason for fashion’s newfound interest in the future? Is it nostalgia for a long-gone time when people had blind faith in a bright future? A desperate need for a distraction from our drab post-crisis present? Or a search for new designs that will redefine clothes for the future?
Contemporary fashion and beauty industry is constantly hungry for new technological advances. Exploration continues. Who knows what tomorrow might bring: genetic engineering might allow us to change our body shape, remain forever young, or, as Ivan Yefremov predicted in his 1968 novel The Bull’s Hour, switch eye color by taking a hormone pill. It seems science fiction and the beauty counter are made for each other.
The future holds a mirror to the present
From the earliest motion pictures experiments, cinema has been trying to peek beyond the veil of time. In 1902, Georges Mlis became the first of many film directors to visualize the future when he sent his heroes on A Trip to the Moon, giving a humorous spin to novels of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Future provided a perfect cinematic backdrop for an exploration of the present.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptations of sci-fi novels, much like their literary sources, were rooted firmly in the present. They explored human psychology, the audacity to dream despite adversity, and the complicated relationship between humanity and its symbols. Tarkovsky’s monochrome, minimalist visual style infused these philosophical musings with an otherworldly, timeless quality.
The future of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey is much more bright and lively. Kubrick enlisted NASA to help him create a realistic version of space – then went a step further, accurately predicting aspects of the future that seem almost quaint today: televisions in the backs of airplane seats, computer chess, liquid crystal and plasma flat screens, pocket computers, magnetic credit cards, and even microwave ovens. Along with Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay, Kubrick foresaw advancements in biometrics; guessed that the BBC, IBM, Aeroflot, and the Hilton hotel chain would survive into the 21st century; and even dared to imagine that Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts would one day work together.
Some things, however, were beyond Kubrick’s and Clarke’s imaginations. By the time 2001 finally arrived, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and space exploration was nowhere near as advanced as they’d predicted. We’ve yet to colonize the Moon. The deep reaches of space remain uncharted. And artificial intelligence remains the purview of science fiction.
Science fiction blockbusters thrive on global conflicts and staggering catastrophes, with a generous helping of special effects. Earth’s dwindling mineral resources (Moon 44), the Maya apocalypse (2012), global warming and the resulting flood that would wipe out humanity (The Day After Tomorrow) – these films by screenwriter and director Roland Emmerich can hardly be called optimistic, but they all deal with urgent problems of today. Whether the global warming is a real threat or a conspiracy, it’s hard to ignore the direct emotional impact of the Empire State Building buried in snow. New York is a wonderfully photogenic city, and Hollywood filmmakers like Stephen Spielberg love finding creative ways of destroying it. Emmerich manages to devastate the city in four different movies.
Will our descendants be caught in intergalactic wars (J. J. Abrams-directed screen adaptation of Star Trek), or will they have to flee the disintegrating planet (Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E)? Hollywood’s predictions for the next few millennia are not encouraging.
A world with no future?
In early ‘90s, Norwegian writer and philosopher Jostein Gaarder wrote a short story Scanner of the Epoch, in which scientists invent a scanner that allows them to access any point in time and space: all they have to do is type in the coordinates, and the events appear on the screen. Crime has disappeared. The police has become obsolete. People no longer have anything to hide. Humanity has stopped wondering about the future – and the future has ceased to exist.
So what about the present? Our thoughts, desires, and dreams are nothing but echoes of the past. We are the grand total of our experiences – and those include the past’s ideas about the future. Try as we might to catch a glimpse of the future, it’s always just out of our reach. It won’t be analyzed, predicted, or controlled. The future is an imaginary point on an imaginary line of an imaginary concept man invented in his all-encompassing desire to quantify existence. That imaginary concept is time.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the Pacific, not far from Papua New Guinea, locals have no use for months or years. They live in the moment, unencumbered by hours and schedules and appointment books. We could learn something from them. After all, sooner or later, the future will be here.
Text Dariko Tsulaya and Eugene Birger.
Illustrations Leonid Gurevich.
