I mean in terms of ideas that give people hope for the future and for progress.
Ever since the Enlightenment, if not the Renaissance, it has appeared to many thoughtful people (at least in the Western world) that this or that was the Wave of the Future. The Philosophes foresaw a glorious Age of Reason, the Romantics an Age of Liberation. People got enthusiastic about nationalism, about capitalism, about socialism, most of all and most justifiably about the potential of technological progress. H.G. Wells, it has been said, wore the future around his neck like a millstone, and influenced many of his generation.
In the early 20th Century there was a widespread fascination with The Future, an assumption that it would somehow be more glorious and transcendent than the past – see the welcome page of David Szondy’s Tales of Future Past website for an eloquent description. The Russian Revolution promised the world a new age of freedom, equality and prosperity – less said of that the better. Then the Nazis came along and promised a glorious New World Order of, by and for pureblood Aryan supermen – less said of that the better.
The post-WWII decolonization of the Third World started with such high hopes, but for the most part it just won Third Worlders the right to be oppressed and exploited by people who speak a language they can understand.
Martin Luther King had a Dream – and it has mostly been fulfilled, at least in America; but millions of Americans still live in poverty, ignorance, squalor and violence, and they’re well off compared to most Third Worlders, and nobody seems to have any compelling idea of how to change any of that for the better.
We went through all the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and '70s, the feminist revolution, the sexual revolution – all pretty much reached their maximum potential and petered out. (I’m all for gender-parity in pay and legalizing gay marriage, but those things not going to revolutionize society.)
The post-Goldwater American conservative movement roared, and peaked, and degenerated into its present Ghost Dance moment of Tea Party screaming; the best thing even thoughtful conservatives can hope for, now, is that the screams will gradually grow ever fainter.
Libertarianism does not appear it will ever have its moment, the way socialism did; it is no nearer now than when the LP was founded, to catching fire and making millions believe it is the wave of the future.
Communism and socialism, as ideas, have largely lost their enthusiasm – even the “socialist” parties of Europe are really social democrats, or progressives (as I define the term “progressive” here – i.e., something well to the left of “liberal” and well to the right of “socialist”) – they might still believe in social progress of a kind, but they have mostly lost faith in what has been called “the theology of the final goal.” And the few remaining hardcore Communist states are fossils in the eyes of everyone – including, probably, themselves. The Zapatista rebels in Mexico do not even bother to call themselves “Marxists”; they would have, if their rebellion had started 20 or even 10 years earlier. So far as I’ve heard, not even Hugo Chavez invokes the name of Marx very often; it has lost its power to conjure.
Capitalism don’t look so hot either, at the moment; everybody just sticks with it for lack of compelling alternatives. That includes the post-Communist states. Whatever it is, it ain’t the Wave of the Future, not the way it was in the early 19th Century, nor the way it was when the Berlin Wall fell. Sorry, no End of History, Mr. Fukuyama. Neoliberalism and globalization just mean still more austerity and exploitation and strife for Third Worlders – and deindustrialization and unemployment or working-poordom for millions of First Worlders. And from what I can see, it’s not even much of a fun time to be rich, any more.
The neoconservative dream of a “Second American Century” quickly decayed into an embarrassment of cosmic proportions. Less said, etc.
Technology? We’re so used to continual technological progress, now, that it’s just part of the way things are – outgrowing “Future Shock” also means outgrowing “Future Wow!” Some do expect a Singularity, a “Rapture of the Nerds”; but at least as many people believe technology has run up against its limits or worse, and not entirely unreasonably fear a global “Peak Oil” crisis or “Long Emergency” that industrial civilization will be lucky to survive.
I doubt very much that very many thoughtful Muslims believe, any more, that Dar al-Islam as such has glories yet before it.
Some Christians still expect a glorious Apocalypse, but that’s rather outside the discussion; they were expecting it when some of them could still remember Jesus alive.
Now, here, after the Millennial odometer has turned, the Millennium is not yet here and is nowhere to be seen on the horizon . . . More importantly, nobody, not even a vocal minority, can even plausibly claim to espy in which direction it lies.
What is the Next Thing? What is the Wave of the Future? What is the path to Tomorrowland?
Anything?
Nothing?
I dunno. Maybe it’s better for humanity not to have a Future, in the sense discussed here, not to dream of anything at all that might usher in a glorious New Age. Such thinking, in many different forms, has caused us no end of trouble already. Maybe, even in the broad, collective, historical, civilizational sense, we should just try to muddle along one day at time and wait for Tomorrow to bring what it brings.
But, dammit! I STILL WANT MY JETPACK! :mad::mad::(