No one thinks about the future anymore. People invoke it in the near-term almost nonstop these days, looking two or three weeks ahead or even past virtual party conventions to the first Tuesday in November, but this falls short of anything we might call futurism. In a crisis of unprecedented scope and stakes, it is only natural we would be blinkered – it is a healthy defensive reaction. But that does not mean there is only darkness ahead.
In the middle of the 14th century, few in Italy were imagining how the 15th century might be different than what we now call the Dark Ages. Then came the bubonic plague, the Black Death, spread by fleas, which in three years killed nearly half of Europe’s population.
In time, the Italian labor force, much diminished, saw wages and standards of living rise; in the north, feudalism expired and social mobility increased. Laborers became merchants and merchants became new elites, supplanting nobility. Wealthier people became competitive patrons of the arts. After a brief revival, the Church saw a decline and there was a rise in secular education. Reason replaced orthodoxy. Interest in science and humanism grew. And these converging trends ignited the Renaissance.
No one who lived through the Black Death could see great change for the better would come eventually, but at a ghastly cost.
In 1899, however, France was preparing to celebrate all that had been achieved in the 19th century – the telegraph, the steam engine, the automobile, electrification – and to look ahead, at the 1900 world’s fair in Paris. Organizers commissioned a series of cards by artists who glimpsed a year 2000. Taken together, there are airships like zeppelins with gondolas firing cannons; contraptions for mass transit that resemble birds as much as airplanes; a white explorer in an airplane causing spear-armed, grotesque-looking African natives to flee; armed, winged policemen shooting in the sky at a smuggler in an airship; a man in a mechanical winged apparatus delivering mail to a woman on the upper floor of a building (why she could not go downstairs to get her mail the regular way is not explained); people “hearing the newspaper” read through a gramophone; people on battery-powered roller skates; deep-sea divers riding giant sea horses; an electric floor scrubber, an electric train and a farmer tilling his field with electricity; sea-divers capturing seagulls with bait from below; winged children robbing an eagle’s nest and threatening to beat a concerned eagle; war motorcycles; and students learning via electrical wires attached to their heads.
Asked to imagine the year 2000, the artists could see little but everyone merrily flying or being underwater, using a great deal of electricity, with much policing, war and imperialism. It would be a future, in other words, a lot like what we got, with technological revolutions in communications and transportation that by the turn of the 21st century were leaving many to wonder what the point was and to worry, pre-pandemic, we would extinguish ourselves.
Visions of the future often seem bleak in retrospect, especially as we confine our imagining to the material and technological world. Crises circumscribe our imaginations because the alternative, our native hope, can be gruesome. But improvement comes nonetheless, through contingencies it may take ages to grasp. Perhaps that is why it is better to leave the future to historians.
