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CIAO DATE: 03/01
Foreign Policy
Global Newsstand: Future Imperfect
Amanda J. Watson-Boles
*
Futuribles: Analyse et Prospective (Futuribles: Analysis and Forecast), October 2000, Paris
"The best of prophets of the future is the past," wrote Lord Byron. But if the past predicts anything, it is that humans are often wrong about the future. Consider the contents of the October 2000 edition of Futuribles: Analyse et Prospective, a brainy monthly founded almost 40 years ago by the père of French futurology, Bertrand de Jouvenel.
In the first of several articles on the "futures of yesterday," French Ethnology Center researcher Patrick Prado explores the historical search for a future of island utopias, recalling James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas More's Utopia, and Paul Gauguin's richly painted Tahitian paradises. But the hunt for perfection always gives way to "the fantasy of purity, the fantasy of similarity, the fantasy of isolation, heralding the current solipsism of certain nations." The seemingly noble search for an ideal future, Prado argues, has provoked some of history's most horrendous acts of abuse, from the Holocaust to ethnic genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda.
By the early 20th century, so-called perfection lay not on isolated isles but in new technologies that could take humanity to the far reaches of the universe (and turn a big profit). At the end of the 1920s, writes Jean-Pierre Mercier, scientific counselor to the French Comic Strip Museum, the American public was glued to dime novels, pulps, and radio soap operas. Not to be left behind, newspapers began publishing comic strips like Flash Gordon, where futuristic superheroes triumphed over evil with technology and good old American hard work. These comics, Mercier argues, "offer a vision, distorted but fascinating, of American society, its aspirations and fears." Ultimately, their predictions reveal more about their particular era than about any future they can depict.
Today, with so much attention on the world's economic future, the quintessential superhero has morphed from Flash Gordon into Alan Greenspan. But can the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, benefit from the U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman's economic wizardry?
Professor Michel Godet of the French National Conservatory of Industrial Arts and Crafts argues that today's seemingly unstoppable new economy will go the way of such fantasies as jet packs and time travel. In the same way that utopians in search of perfect islands confused sameness with perfection, so have current experts confused the new economy with new technologies: Godet trots out the usual cautionary analysis that tech companies are seriously overvalued, and that while e-commerce may be a convenient and novel way to buy books and clothes, economic soundness still rests on principles that the new economy has not changed, namely the organization of production and distribution.
Godet's more profound concern, however, is a Europe whose population cannot keep up with the rest of the industrialized world. In 1975 in France, for example, there were 1.7 million more people under the age of 20 than there are today. In Italy, the birthrate has fallen to less than one child per woman; a rate of 2.1 is needed to keep the population stable. Meanwhile, population growth continues in the United States and developing countries like Brazil and Indonesia. In the end, Godet believes, "the gray hairs are going to breed a weak and fluctuating [European] economy....Technology do what it may, when there are no more men, there is no more future!" A harsh warning indeed-one we will have to wait for the future to judge. Byronic, isn't it?
Endnotes:
*: Amanda J. Watson-Boles is assistant editor of Foreign Policy magazine. Back.