Two Miles into the Future
An old-type oil tanker required two miles to stop. The captain needed constant forethought, always mindful and planning for what would happen, expected and unexpected. Most of the time able to take measured action, alerting other vessels or changing direction early, but sometimes set upon disaster.
History and society share some of these traits. A flash-point ignites a war, but you look ‘two miles’ into the past to find the causes, making the outbreak of fighting, when it comes, appear inevitable to your astute historian. Looking ‘two miles’ into the future is harder but not impossible. You draw upon the evidence from the past and the present and plot a path. Despite the clear trend for increasing life expectancy in the West, it is a fair observation to say we will see a reverse in that trend over the next century. You have increasing obesity, inactive lifestyles, antimicrobial resistance, pollution, global warming and pandemics. Genuine threats to our health and well-being, requiring a long-term, strategic steer of the ‘tanker’ to avoid disaster.
This doesn’t help elected politicians influence things in time for the next election, but for science-fiction writers it’s a great boon. They can learn from the past, burrow into the present and make predictions for the future. Isaac Asimov built this concept into his Foundation series. His character, Hari Seldon, developing mathematical sociology to map out the future.
Despite the genre’s name and fictional genius of Seldon, it is not an exact science and those predictions can be fanciful and wrong. Life expectancy, for example, may continue to rise due to genetic breakthroughs or new antibiotics. But some writers will hit upon an incontrovertible grain of truth, even if their vision keeps one foot in their own time. Orwell looked to the authoritarian Soviet Union as his chief inspiration for 1984. Yet, while the USSR is no more, Big Brother has come alive in this Cyber Age, with technology unimaginable to Orwell. The message from his novel remains as powerful today as when published in 1948.
My up-coming novel, Liberty Bound, draws upon observations of a more insular and fearful society: less cohesive, unable to regulate itself or curtail poor behaviour. Much has improved over my lifetime, but the speed of change has brought uncertainty and instability. Society is a complex ecosystem. Destroying one unwanted element of the structure, or introducing something new, has unforeseen consequences elsewhere.
The individual has replaced the community as the building block: a consequence of greater general wealth and freedom, fuelled by amazing technologies. But it has stolen an important adhesive of reliance and co-operation. You still witness incredible acts of community, as demonstrated during the Coronavirus crisis, but the fact these stick out so much, is due to how rare they have become during normal times. We have witnessed equal acts of selfishness, but do these surprise us anymore?
The individual finds strength and security in the community and civilisation is built upon this. Most ‘primitive’ communities welcomed and cared for the stranger, after all, one day that stranger could be ‘you’. Today the stranger is the antithesis of this, avoided and feared. And fear is the insidious element shaping modern society. In general, children play nearer and nearer to their home with each passing decade, stymied and instilled with their parents’ fear. While elsewhere, in contrast, packs of feral children, some frighteningly young, out at all hours, unsupervised and abandoned, create fear.
The individual’s first concern will be their rights, the community’s its responsibility. To strike a balance between rights and responsibilities, a balance between individual and community is needed. I’ve often thought of adults as being children with responsibility. We now find ourselves with a dangerous class of adults dismissive of their responsibilities, separated from the community, with more in common with the children referenced in the proceeding paragraph, either feared or anxious.
Liberty Bound doesn’t allow these depressing observations of a curmudgeon hamper a high-paced, exciting adventure. But it is in a world shaped by these reflections, looking two miles into the future.