Post #136: No Future

4 Sep. 2024

     I can remember, vaguely at least, the atmosphere of doom and gloom (“No future” really was a common slogan at the time) that hung like a dark cloud over the Berlin in grew up in, before I was ten or so. The reasons are not hard to reconstruct, even if I could make only very limited sense of them at the time: Vietnam and its aftermath, the Oil Crisis, Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, and so on—and hovering around it all the fears of nuclear annihilation that abounded on the German left.

     These bleak atmospherics could not have left me completely unscathed, but I don’t believe they proved especially formative either, because, on the one hand, the long shadow of the world wars loomed much larger still than the late-1970s malaise, and on the other, Europe was about to enter, from the mid-1980s on, a period of perhaps unprecedented hopefulness in its long and troubled history—a time when historic wounds really did close up and heal for a while, with an almost miraculous effect on the observer. (See also my last note to #68.)

     Though far from perfect, things were for once going rapidly in the right direction, and not only in Europe either: think of the turn in South Africa. With jailed dissidents like Mandela or Havel become presidents of their countries, it is easy to feel hopeful, for a time—and if those years happen to be your most impressionable, from the early teens on, then they will probably leave you with a relatively optimistic sense not of what is to be expected in the world, but what is at any rate possible when the stars line up.

     The rampant anxieties before the Great Thaw, then, had cause enough and could not be dismissed as mere hysteria; and yet the doomsayers got it wrong. Whether one agrees that morning was coming to America and that the Soviet Union was forced to its knees (or else that the change was largely Gorbachev’s doing, or some combination of the two), the fact is that a great European Spring really was just around the corner—the end not just of a long winter, but of a veritable Ice Age. And the return of the green shoots to wide swaths of a troubled continent was a spectacle to behold that no one who witnessed it is likely to forget, even decades later.

     When I hear similar notes of doom being struck today, after forty more years of almost unbelievable leaps and bounds in just about every quantifiable measure of human progress, I do not rush to dismiss the dirges as mere histrionics; again, it is easy to see where the fears are coming from. But I also suspect, once again and even more than before, that the rampant rumors of our impending demise are greatly exaggerated.* We are a resilient species and there is much ruin not only in nations, but even more so in mankind, especially at a time of such stupendous affluence as ours.

     That human life is likely not only to continue, but to keep improving by most measurable standards, does not mean, by any means, that everything will keep getting better indefinitely, or that the most important things are in any way guaranteed to improve. The prospects for any particular boon in life, however time-honored, may not look so bright at all—say a particular kind of mental culture that requires reading to sustain it, for example, or the dwindling number of cafés in the world where a matching mental atmosphere can still make itself at home. Indeed, one of the regular features of broad-based progress, whatever specific forms it might take, has always been to take certain traditional refinements away, or at least to make them marginal and expensive, if not altogether inaccessible. Even if by more objective, mass-oriented standards such losses may appear trifling, familiar things will be missed in part just because they are familiar—a pain felt more sharply by those of a broadly conservative temperament as Michael Oakeshott defined it in his famous essay on the theme (“On Being Conservative,” see briefly #109 and #120), that is to say, those more temperamentally inclined to enjoyment of what is than with fascination around what might be. And perhaps time and ageing tend to make conservatives of us all, in that respect at least.

     Whenever I’ve declared that I do not believe in the future, I was not talking about these personal discomforts with how the continuing evolution of the human world might further widen the gap between me and my contemporaries. Nor did I mean to express any profound apprehensions about the future prospects of mankind at large. Least of all did I wish to ring the bells for some kind of end-of-days merrymaking: the end is nigh, so let us all party as if there were no tomorrow. Not at all.

     A cautious optimism about our collective future looks as rational to me as a reasonable level of self-restraint and the making of provisions for the future. Planning ahead and taking out insurance are excellent things do, up to a point (contrary to common usage and perception, it is entirely possible to over-save and over-insure)—not, however, because we know what the future will bring, but on the contrary, because we can never be sure. Saving for retirement, say, or getting into a private health insurance plan while there is still time, are usually sensible propositions not because we can count on being around tomorrow, but rather because we cannot safely rule it out (assuming we are not under more than the usual deferred death sentence, or determined to cut ourselves off prematurely—dire scenarios that I am not concerned with here).

     I am not willing to predict even so much as another post after this one. Granted, the flow of the past couple of weeks and months makes it seem likely; but past events cannot actually be used to predict there future with any kind of causal certainty. For the most part we ignore this problem of induction and take the correlations we have observed in the past as guides to  the future; but doing so is simply a deep human habit, Hume concluded, not something we have warrant for upon closer scrutiny. We look at things in this deceptive light, one might say a little facetiously, much as the drunkard who has lost his keys searches for them under the streetlights—not because he lost them there, but because it is too dark anywhere else to see anything.

     I would find it bizarre myself to contemplate at much length the odds of my departure from this life before I get a chance to put this post online, say; even apart from my instinctive distaste for that morbid angle (a rare point of disagreement with Montaigne, who found contemplations on death bracing and heartening**), the likelihood appears too negligible to merit much thinking about. But that may be just another entrenched habit most of us share. Presumably, even if my last hour had in fact already struck, I would continue to feel, until the end was staring me in the face, that it should still be pretty far off, unless it had come with a little advance warning. I expect that when I shall be disabused of that vital confidence, I will probably be saddened and taken aback by the seemingly untimely advent of my last moments, in this world at least. But then again, even that much is pure speculation: quite possibly, instead of grief and reluctance, I would feel relief, upon arrival at the River of Forgetting, at having at long last shuffled off my mortal and error-prone coil. I really have no idea.

     Can I foresee with any confidence that I will still feel like writing tomorrow, or find something more to write about? Of course not. It seems likely enough, for the moment, but who really knows? For many years I either did not have the impulse to write publicly at all, or else there was nothing I had to offer that I felt needed saying. Not that the quality of my writing, such as it is, has changed much since then; what is different now is mostly my greater willingness to make my stuff public and keep going with it whether anyone takes notice or not. And where did that come from? I have no idea.

     Over the past decade, I have thus put out, at various degrees of accessibility to the public, close to a million words—excluding all casual scribbling and an extensive correspondence. These writings have found a few appreciative readers here and there, and every one of them counts; still the overall impact, individual exceptions notwithstanding, has been negligible. My younger self may have written as much, privately, over the preceding twenty years; but he would not and could not have persisted with his publications on such terms of obscurity as I have come to consider normal. Not that I am altogether thrilled with my insignificance, but I can now accept it, with a bit of grumbling, as a defining feature of my writerly condition, and I can shrug it off without undue disappointment most days. How long that will last is another open question.

     But never mind something as strange as writing: can I say for sure whether I will I rise from bed tomorrow refreshed and eager for another day, or wary and weary? Will my life continue more or less on the current trajectory, inwardly and outwardly, or are there major turns ahead, for better or for worse? If the latter, will these unexpected twists prove boons or banes, whatever aspect they may bear initially? All these questions do not present themselves to me as materials fit for prediction at all, but as mysteries, shrouded from view until they actually happen. “What time is it?” someone asked Yogi Berra. “You mean now?” he answered. It’s always now, it seems to me, and we will never know anything looking ahead, only in hindsight, no matter how much of our lives we spend imagining that we can see anything of the future, when all we are doing is looking at reflections in a mirror, at best.***

     Hold on, you may say: as a good Buddhist should I not be more confident of the future, in the sense of feeling sure that I will reap the harvest of the karma I have sown? Very clever. But you forget, dear reader, that I‘ve never said peep about being a good anything, let alone a good Buddhist. I may see the world through a Dhammic lens of sorts, but it is not a certified model, and karma in the future tense is something that I have repeatedly put on the list of imponderables that call for suspending my judgment, whatever others might think. I do believe that on some level, more internal than outward, we really will reap largely what we sow; but I know nothing of either my own or anyone else’s more specific karma, so I have no idea what the eventual harvest might look like.

     Consequently, I do not feel that there is anything definite for me to look forward to, or to dread, for that matter.† It is simply a blank sheet to me, and I do not presume to know more about it than Socrates  said he did at the end of his life (Apology 29a). One may always hope for the best, of course, but one should not expect it as if it were assured or even probable just because one would prefer it. As to the possibility of future lives, the Buddhist orthodoxy has not succeeded in dislodging my doubts, only my confidence to the contrary. Once again, it is not something on which I presume to make any judgments. I might speculate a little here and there, but that’s all just bubbles on the water.

     Does any of this fairly radical uncertainty about what may or may not lie ahead impede or impair my ability to act and make decisions between alternatives today, in the moment? I don’t see why it would. I can still weigh possible scenarios against each other with a strong sense, in most cases, of which I would prefer; it’s just that I would take these imaginary alternatives to be little more than projections, mental sketches of what could happen, perhaps no likelier to turn out as I anticipate than not. If this means that I can never be sure of making the right choice when one is presenting itself, at least I cannot be sure of the contrary either. Who knows how it might all turn out and look eventually (see also #109 about the elderly father and his injured son)? As Socrates and Kierkegaard remind us so aptly, either way there will be cause for regret—and probably cause for gratitude as well (#14).

     I can see how such denial of control over our fates may look very strange, possibly even like an abnegation of responsibility, to some critical eyes. But I am not denying that we must answer for our actions to others, only that any reference to the future, while it still is nothing more than an anticipation, always looks dubious to me. Perhaps it is a strange outlook, but what could be stranger than the dreamy fictions that so many take for the future, without the least doubt and without ever catching themselves in the act of blowing bubbles? Certainly I still prefer some possible futures to others, and by a very wide margin in many cases; but since, in the end, I know nothing of what really lies ahead, at least I do not need to consume myself with worry—or if I do, I can shake myself awake, on a good day, and remember that I am just having a bad dream.

     Not that I am dismissing nightmares as irrelevant: they can be highly instructive and salutary, such as when they prompt us to guard more vigilantly against dangers that are otherwise not vivid enough to spur us into action. More positive and constructive dreaming, too, I don’t dismiss: visions of glorious possibilities, whatever form they may take, are bridges to the future, and may lead to important things actually being brought about. What I object to in all these cases is not the forward-looking perspective per se, but our inclination to treat what we see as the future itself, when it is nothing but animated projections—some of which may indeed come true, but most of which never will.

     Nightmare scenarios—horrendous potential futures becoming current—can never be fully ruled out, whether for me personally, for any of my contemporaries, or for all of them and the human world at large. I take the possibility of sundry calamities as seriously as anyone; but whatever such apprehensions I might form in advance, until they really happen, I will remind myself that they are, as yet, mere figments of my imagination, though perhaps with probabilities attached, and even more uncertainties. Most of the things we worry about never happen, as Mark Twain pointed out, at least not in the expected form; it’s the unanticipated ones (“black swans” and such) that have a way of striking us most devastatingly, seemingly out of nowhere. We should probably be more worried about them, if worry we must, even if they lie in the darkness around the streetlight, where we commonly do not think to look.

*The late Hans Rosling, a Swedish pediatrician clearly not in the pockets of big business or anyone else, pushed back with particular vigor and valor against the blatantly unfactual ways in which the state of the human world is often described—in much bleaker colors than what is warranted by just about anything measurable—as well as against the way in which the stupendous advances of the past thirty years often escape notice amidst the sophisticated doom-mongering. As I keep cautioning my students when I share excerpts from Factfulness (Sceptre 2018), I cannot guarantee that Rosling is right to be so broadly optimistic; but while we are all of us entitled to our own opinions, nobody is entitled to his own facts, as Patrick Moynihan used to say. Yes, facts too depend on being collected, selected, and interpreted, and this can be done with varying levels of skill and care; but whatever one may think of Rosling’s conclusions, he is very scrupulous with his data.

     It must be granted too that even the most rapid and astounding material and technological progress may improve only the necessary foundations for human life; whether we will use the newly created resources and opportunities wisely, setting ourselves up for truly better lives at the cultural, intellectual, psychological, spiritual, or moral levels, is quite another, much more intractable matter, and one that rarely admits of so optimistic an appraisal. Then again, any such grand judgments are fiendishly difficult to make, and skewed almost unavoidably towards the familiar.

     It’s probably an unanswerable question whether the advances whose fruits we are enjoying are really making us happier than our forebears, or putting us at a genuine advantage so far as a fully well-lived life in all its complexity goes. A good dose of adversity goes into a meaningful life, almost to the point where one could speak of a dialectics of happiness and misery. Paradoxically, having it better in obvious ways is not always tantamount to having a better life on balance, all subtleties considered. More opportunities can also mean more dangerous traps—more rope to hang ourselves with, as the macabre saying goes. I do not presume to pronounce on the balance between the two, only to point out that that factual case for drastic and vital improvements in our outward human condition, very nearly throughout the world over the past thirty years especially, is overwhelmingly strong, and that there is no indication that it must come to a halt any time soon, despite our mighty choirs of naysayers.

     The negative confidence that such a boon cannot possibly last—in part because of its likely sinful provenance—has been there for as long as the unprecedented growth-spurt of the past two hundred years, and the pessimists’ warnings today look no more compelling than those of the past, so long as one does not treat them as articles of faith, or agrees with the premise that economic man will despoil anything he touches (patent nonsense, however widely it may be believed). Which is not to say that things will keep going in roughly the right direction, materially at least. What is going to happen remains to be seen; until then, we can conjecture about it, more or less plausibly, but we can never pin it down in advance.

     As for the debate about the grand narrative that pits the (relative) optimists against the inveterate pessimists, I would not dare to pronounce on who is right or wrong: such global judgments are too big and bold for a Pyrrhonian like me. What I can say is only who sounds more convincing on what point and by what evidence; and there I must insist that the case for a moderate and rational optimism has been rather convincingly made by a host of individuals who cannot be easily dismissed as simpletons, reckless wretches, or mere Panglossians—Julian Simon, for example, a deeply serious individual with great integrity, who struggled with much fierce opposition and very dark moods throughout his life, and learned to overcome them (#115); or Matt Ridley, despite the fact that he is an Old Etonian and a Magdalenite, a Tory, and even a peer; or Bjorn Lomborg, or Steven Pinker, or Michael Shellenberger, to name just a few of the usual suspects. It’s not a matter of endorsing anyone (what does it matter of whom I approve?), but of acknowledging that this body of contrarian opinion (not exclusively factual, but intelligently and responsibly incorporating hard evidence) exists and is worth taking seriously.

**See Part I, Essay 20, “To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die.” I don’t disagree with Montaigne’s method or his conclusions, I just do not share his comfort. Apparently he too “felt the sting” when he first took up the habit of contemplating death wherever it might present itself, or so he reports; but then the disconcerting effect soon gave way to a reconciled curiosity. I am not sure how much the prospect of death still bothers me, but it is far from something I relish thinking about. There was no morbidity in Montaigne’s meditations on the theme; there would be some in mine.

***See Kierkegaard’s pronouncement in the epigraph to #41.

†Goenkaji does, in the evening discourse for the fourth day of his 10-Day courses, suggest that serious Vipassana meditators who keep up their hours can be sure of a “promotion” when they breathe their last—that is to say, a favorable rebirth—and that this should take away any worries or fears about death. He may have accesses to sources of information to which I am not privy. For my part, although I am not aware of dreading death particularly, I would not dream of looking forward to it on those grounds, which look exceedingly tenuous to me, with all due respect to my teacher.

P.S.: Modern man has come to imagine himself facing the future, with the past behind his back, and this perspective is so commonplace that it may come as a surprise to hear that anyone might see it differently. I at least was astonished when I first encountered the idea (once more in Robert Pirsig’s Zen, or rather at the beginning of his Afterword) that the ancients pictured themselves with their backs to the future instead, and looking towards the past.* This makes much better sense in light of what I argue above, that the future is never actually visible to us, and that we should look to the past not because it is a reliable guide to the future, but because we can know it at least imperfectly, and learn important, though not necessarily fully predictive, lessons from it.

     For a contemporary expression of this ethos, with which I agree entirely, especially as a matter of educational outlook, see the recent piece by Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland on what freshmen need to read (The Atlantic, 24 Aug. 2024): “Liberal education requires that students, like rowers, face backward in order to move forward. If they are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities—an always unfinished tapestry of admirable and shameful lives, noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods. But they must also allow themselves to be inwardly formed and cultivated by the classics—what the English critic Matthew Arnold called ‘the best which has been thought and said.’** A classic is an exemplary instance, a work with imperishable cultural vitality. The Hebrew Bible is a classic, as is Homer’s Iliad. They are taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization. A liberal education must begin at the beginning, where strange, beguiling voices of the distant past speak with authority of what it means to be human.”

*My postscript written, I  looked up Pirsig’s exact words and was a little shocked at how deeply they must have sunk in, more than thirty years ago, since they express more or less what I say above, with no conscious reference to the book. There you have the magic of reading. Pirsig writes: “The ancient Greeks saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?”

**I looked this one up, too, and found a lovely definition of culture that underlines my claim to have more in common with other centuries than my ostensible own, because I would trade Arnold’s version for the current with gladness and joy in my heart: “Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” (From the Preface to Culture and Anarchy, 1869)