The Present and the Future

We know that the past affects the present. We can trace the roots of the present, see how it evolved from those roots, and even learn from history—though we often misinterpret the lessons to be found there. What we cannot do is change the past. There are no second chances in history. It is done, and its results are with us whether we will them or not.

What we often do not see is that the future also affects the present. We plan for retirement. We invest in oil futures. We make decisions based on our predictions, and those decisions turn out well or badly depending on how well or badly we predicted, and how wise or foolish our response was.

This is a series of reflections about how the future might be, how it affects us now, and how we can survive. In most ways, it is hard to see a hopeful future, though we must maintain hope somehow. If we do not, the future will surely be as bleak as our worst fears.

How, then, does the future affect our present? Here are some of the ways:

• Our future is likely to be one of limitations. In a society built on abundance, as is the United States, this is hard to envision. But in fact it is simple common sense. The planet is finite. Supplies of resources are finite. Our population and the demands it makes on resources cannot grow indefinitely. Our response to limitations—which we are already beginning to see in the case of water, and will soon see in the case of oil—will be one factor that determines whether, and how, we will survive.


• Our destruction of the environment will begin to bite back. Most obviously, we will find our lives changed, and in peril, because of global warming unless we redesign our way of life to mitigate it and prevent it insofar as we can.


• Our religious, ethical, and ideological systems will come more and more into question. The growing popularity of fundamentalist religion has so far masked the central problem of religion and philosophy: the shaking of their foundations by changes in the world and in our understanding of it. Yet each of us needs a moral and spiritual base. We cannot, and should not, abandon our search for it; but we must make that search in a different world from the one we have known.

We can respond to a perilous future in at least two ways:

• By protecting ourselves and our families: Even as we look for ways that humanity can survive the future, we have a responsibility to do this. In its extreme form, however, it becomes self-centered and potentially dangerous. At the outer reaches of individual and family survival lies the survivalist mode: shotguns, cellars full of provisions, and paranoia. These reflections reject the survivalist approach.


• By making changes that will make the future less dangerous for ourselves and for humanity. This is what I call the social design approach, for want of a better term. Social design happens whether we do it consciously or not. For example, the mass migration to the automobile-dependent suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, though not planned, was a design decision by default. One of my goals in these reflections is to look at how our design—whether conscious or unconscious—molds the future even as our prediction of that future molds our design decisions.

Not all of these reflections will deal directly with these issues. But in the end, they will be about a future that is likely to be more challenging than any we have known—one in which past approaches will not work without rethinking.