We’re heard the expression, “the future ain’t what it used to be”, meaning we’re not seeing the marvelous technological developments people anticipated in the 20th century, like personal aircraft, interstellar space travel, intelligent robots, teleportation, etc. People saw the pace of technological development accelerating around 1900 and assumed it would continue accelerating.
Even as early as the 1860s, Jules Verne was able to envision a technologically advanced future (with remarkable prescience), but how did people envision the future in previous historical eras?
I can imagine people in Medieval times envisioning a future of great religions tumults, with angels and demons flying around, but then again, much of the time they may have assumed that life would continue on as it had.
So what were some of the popular notions about what the future would be like during different eras? And at what point did visions of a future altered by advancing technology take hold?
Retro-Futurism is a good name for this sort of thing, with some of the best examples (and most amusing commentary!) being at the Tales of Future Past website…
Technology aside, a lot of writers had some pretty totalitarian ideas of how society would be organized in the future. People on both ends of the political spectrum were enchanted by the notion that society or humanity itself could be engineered by the deliberate application of science. Psychology, genetics, and statistical demographics would in the hands of a wise elite change the world.
The Bauhaus idea of hivelike socially engineered housing for the population (think The Projects, only not just for poor people), along with plans for mile-high skyscrapers, “arcologies” and domed cities, were NOT just engineering feats but visions of the totally urban environment that society was supposedly evolving towards. There was a time when the word “sterile” was considered good. We would leave dirty infectious Nature behind and live in a totally manmade environment.
And engineering our environment was the least of it. Humanity would be engineered. Natural birth would be eliminated and children would be raised by the State. (Eliminating all those primitive neuroses caused by infantile attatchment to parent figures.) People would by physical or psychological conditioning be specialized for their role in society, or at the least testing would infallibly guarantee what roles people were best suited to.
When I hear that phrase I get a different impression. As described above people looked forward to the future as something ‘better’, but now many people look forward and see bad things happening. Thus our (negative) future is different than the theirs was (positive).
Another interpretation is that now that the past’s future has arrived it isn’t what people of the past were expecting.
People . . . especially young people . . . tend to think of the future as an extrapolation of the present, as if the changes (both positive and negative) we’re experiencing today just continue forever. It never turns out that way; there are always big surprises.
We could discuss how visions of a technological utopia gave way to visions of a totalitarian or environmental dystopia, but my questions are, what futuristic visions were popular in the pre-industrial era, if any, and what was the earliest incidence of technological futurism.
I have read pre-industrial visionary poetry in which it was imagined that the entire world would be explored, its forests cleared for farms, its wild animals killed or caged, and all peoples either civilized, subjugated, or wiped out. Oh, and maybe they’d wipe out disease and natural disasters, though they weren’t sure how.
One of the cleverest things that Star Trek: Voyager ever did was its Captain Proton story-within-a-story. It’s based on really old-timey sci-fi B-movies, which the viewers (and the characters) see as a wildly inaccurate prediction of The Year Two Thousand; we chuckle at the ridiculous predictions, and then the show returns to its “serious” story involving warp drives and rubber forehead aliens and food replicators.
Back when Europeans more or less ruled the planet and missionaries were converting the heathen into Christians (while the colonial forces converted the holdouts into corpses), one vision of the future popular with many was Postmillennialism. This was the belief that Christians would gradually establish the Kingdom of God on Earth over an extended periord (whether literally a thousand years or not) at the end of which Christ would return to claim the redeemed world. A sort of fundamentalist Utopia if you will.
Both “1984” and “Brave New World” give dystopian views of the future that, fortunately, never arrived. On the other hand, neither did the utopian views of mid-20th century science-fiction. Then there was Frank Loyd Wright who thought that everyone could have his acre of land and drive absolutely everywhere.
I suspect that in the middle ages, no one gave a thought to the future, since there was little or no idea of progress. The future would have been thought indistinguishable from the present or past. If you have gone 1000 years without much change, there is little reason to expect any in the future.
Seconding this. Ideas of the future of humanity and the wherewithal to imagine and express it are the luxuries of the educated mind. Working 15 hours days as a serf just to make enough calories to work again tomorrow didnt really lend itself to such flights of fancy. Its only when we have the leisure class, industrialization, education, secularism, universities, etc that we have all these ideas of a future thats different from today.
Also, our ideas of the future currently are heavily influenced by our leaders, who want to promote advancement (of all types) as something that they can achieve or at least encourage.
Aside from the serfs who didn’t have the time or the energy to daydream about the future, who in the middle ages was going to promote change of any sort to the general populace? The church and the local kings were the only ones who had the ability to do so and I can’t imagine them wanting anything more from the future than more of the same things they had in the present.
Pretty much just what I expected. That still leaves open the question of whether there were any visions of futuristic technology the pre-dated Jules Verne.
If not, that wouldn’t be suprising, since it was probably around the 1860s that it began to sink in that not only had industrialization changed the way people lived, bu that change brought about by technological innovation was continuing and accelerating.
This view of the future as unchanging extended to the past also. In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer has one set in ancient Greece, with jousting and knights in armor - just as in his time. I think the future was to be much like the present, until Jesus returned in any case.
In the 19th century there were lots of Utopian novels (like Erewhon and Looking Backwards) which moved the society demonstrating the pet theory of the author from another place geographically (like in Utopia) to another place chronologically. Verne’s books (except for that last one) mostly took place in the present, and examined the impact of technology.
I have thousands of examples of future predictions in my collection, and the common theme is either extrapolation of current trends, highlighting something in current society to be stressed in the future as a reduction ad absurdum plot (like Space Merchants), looking at the impact of a single invention, or viewing with alarm, like the population, pollution, and bomb stories.
I mostly agree, but I don’t think that serfs toiling in the field were at a loss for imagination. Imagination is cheap. What they lacked is any real concept of progress. To a serf, nothing much changes over your lifetime. You live the same way that past generations did, and your children will live the same way. It took an educated populace, not to imagine progress, but to actually see the changes that result from industrialization.
I wonder… did the Romans think technology would keep improving and that the whole world would see the same innovations as the capital city itself? (Running water, fluid markets, well-running government.) They did a lot of planning, they created new cities according to their own sort of scientific approach, they were so modern in so many ways. But did they have futurism?
It seems that, in the U.S. at least, the present lifestyle of suburbia got in the way of an imagined future of cities in which everyone was well-fed, well-housed, and got around on monorails and elevators. Inevitably so, since the infrastructure and landscape dictated by suburbia is not something that is easily changed, so it in turn dictates the emphasis of technological progress. We end up with better or more efficient cars and houses rather than innovative mass transit and apartment blocks. In a recently built automobile there is a wealth of computer-based technology under the hood that was unimaginable 30 years ago, but the essential functioning and purpose of a car has not changed in 100 years. The shape of life goes on unchanged.