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On this page: {Intro} (including keys) {Seeing the Future} {Properties of Futurists {What will you do?}
Intro
Keys: {Time: Past/Present/Future.} See also: -[Time Travel]- Futurisim is the concept of....
Futurist akeyis: The Concept of time
(past/present/future) See also: -[time]- (scientist perspective) -[time]- (spiritualist perspective) -[Time Travel]- via: Fut x Abs (time) Note: There is NO absurdist, artistic, fractalist, humanist, or jazzist perspective of time; everything is "just" is; that is, "is is" -- (commonly refered to as "the is that is now"). -[(map entry)]- To the futurist the future (and even the past and present are NOT the immutable things that they generally are "taken as".
Futurism: Seeing the Future
The concept of futurism is closely linked with "far seeing", "remote viewing" (as well as other astral phenomena), "speculation", as well as "wondering". In terms of the "labels" applied to futurists, these include "seer", "prophet", "scientist/philosopher/spirtualist", "shaman", "seekder", "visionary", "science fiction author", "peace-nik", "gaist", etc. Adjectives include: "speculating", "guessing", "new age", "not living in the real world", etc. Despite these, futurists are constantly asking the question "What if?" -- and they aren't lovingly gazing at the balance sheet of a megalithic corporation with expectations of next-quarter returns exceeding projections either. Futurists include many claimig to having seen "visions" (hence the term "visionary"). For instance, Joan of Arc (approx 1430) claimed to have heard the voices of St. Michael and St. Margaret who guided her to take charge of France's army to restore Charles II to the thrown as opposed to the British who had taken the thrown and control of much of France. The fact that these "visions" led to an almost complete rout of the British and but for an il-fated attempt to retake the city of Paris, proved her brilliance and bravery as a leader. Skeptics of course point out that if her "visions" had been well and true, then she should have been completely victorius. This is a constant problem in reductionist thinking. -[see entry in Scientist[- Its adherence to the priniciples of consistency and rational explantions for everything cause it to rejct things that most reasonable people might accept. That is not to say, that in many cases fraud, tricks, and other entertainments are not often portrayed as bona fide (Latin: in good faith) thngs. It is one thing to "see" things before they happen, it is yet another for a young boy to climb a rope in the middle of a desert (at night) and made to vanish. Setting skeptical arguments asside, i must point out that in the end analysis (even from a reductionist point of view), the utility of an event, power, etc. CAN be demonstrated in the material world in many cases. Let us now turn our attention to futurism. One the one hand, the clear and present "now" often blinds most of us to the potentials for change. For example, for countless centuries the huns (raiders, etc) annoyed the emperors of China. Until finally, after a series of smaller walls had been built, the Ming dynasty emperors (approx 1350-1six00ce) began the massive work on the so-called "Great Wall of China" (one of the few man-made objects that can be seen from space). Despite the charge by skeptics that the wall did not end the raids, the sheer scale of such a project had not seen the like since the buidling of the pyramides in Ancient Egypt. Also, the scale of the project might have had a profound affect upon the casual raider seeing as its seemingly endless expanse allowed people on foot to climb over it, but any horseback raider would have to find their way around the over 2200km (1400 miles) long barrier. This is visionary thinking at its best. Other examples of construction include the Hoover Dam, the Pannama Cannal, the Acropolis of Greece, the multi-generational cathedrals of Europe, etc. Nor do such acts of the visionary have to have such a large scale. For example the "Book of the Tau" (purportedly written by Lao Tse, but more likely the work of several) prides itself of consisting of only 5000 characters -- making it the shortest "religious" work on the planet Earth -(see map)-. Note that i make no distinction between what we might call "reality-based" speculation (eg, science fiction, scientific projections, etc) and fantasy (eg, works of pure fiction, fanciful tales, etc). Again the attempt here is return to reductionist thinking since the "proof" of the prediction is in the future -- which from a reductionist POV (point of view) will clearly BE; ie, the predicted event either will or will NOT occur -- and thus settle the matter. Two of the most celebrated examples of fantasies coming true are by informed, western-thinking writers. Johanes Kepler (who guided by Galieleo's mathematical ideas and the astronomical observations of Tyco Brahe was able to derive his "three laws" of planetary motion), wrote a story about visiting the moon. In the story, he partook of a potion made by his mother and was thus able to travel to the moon. Later the charge of "witchcraft" was leveled at his mother (the same crime of which Joan of Arc was accused of, leading to her being tortured and killed by the British -- her "fortunate" predictions from the Saints which aided the French were seen as "un-fortunate" deviltries by the British). The second example in a bizarre twist of life copying art was in the work of Johnathan Swift. In one of his stories, he "predicted" that Mars had two small moons. Later when it became possible with the aid of the newest and strongest telescopes, the two moons were found. They were appropriately named "Phobos" (Greek: Fear) and "Demmos" (Greek: The Demon). Passing from the world of fantasy to the world of speculative fiction, we find things such as "science fiction writers". Oddly enough, one criticism of the "thinness" of sf writings comes from the writer C.S. Lewis. It should be noted that his "Tales of Narnia" are but thinnly cloaked moralistic tales of properness of Christianity. Regardless, he is well known for having said that people who read the sf stories that included the much-over worked themes of a love story, a detective story, and other "hack" plots of the cheap, pulp fictions. The response has always been the same: It is precisely because the story IS told in the sf genre that we are interested in them. For exmaple, the controversial film "Guess Whose Coming to Dinner?" brings the idea of inter-racial dating (and sex of course!) to the fore-ftont. SF had already gone far beyond that with the idea of inter-species dating. An example of the culmination of this can be seen in the film "Galaxy Quest". Thus, while the "plot" of a science fiction work might be rather "thin" in traditional sense and therefore fain to be even refered to as "literature", we see that many of the ideas that CAN be explored tradtional literature are NOT. Take for example, the common theme of transformation of humans. In the story "StarBurst" by Frederic Pohl a common theme of "transscendent evolution of the mind" is thoroughly explored. In the story, eight astronauts leave for Alpha Centauri on a 20 year trip to settle a new world. Being cut off for humanity for so long actually ends up forcing them evolve simply to survive. They (among other things) solve here-to-fore un-solvable mathematical problems, advance physics a hundred years in less than just five, evolve language itself far beyond the pathetic thing that we "get by with", etc. Note that the last of these "language" is one of the most imporatnt developments of humans. We have now even taught sign language to chimps and gorillas -- who have in turn taught it to their children. The biologist/futurist John Lilly was one of the first humans to attempt to "speak with" dolphins. -(see map)-. Setting asside the "fact" that chimps and gorillas may never be able to understand the calculus of variations, chess, or even concept of evolution itself -- many humans apparently will never be able to understand these things either -- we must realise that THE lesson here is: Someone had enough vision to evey TRY to teach chimps and gorillas language in the first place. While it is tempting to embue futurists with absolute psychic powers, this should again just be seen as yet another attempt at absolutist, reductionist thinking. From the scientific POV, if something isn't repeatable then it ISN'T science. See -[Religion vs Science (in Spirituality)]- The late, great writer/futurist Isaac Asimov pointed this out in an essay where he underscored the idea tha sf writers are for the most part un-able to predict the future. He pointed out in one of his novels he "briefly" touched on the problem of so many people living in a city that it might become crowded. He introduced the "futurist" concept of a moving sidewalk (which we see in many air ports today). And yet he insists that the clearest possible prediction would be the idea of "rush hour traffic". That is, he (living in New York) "missed it". All the signs were there: The growing number of people in a city, by the very nature of all of the buidlings, the streets in a mega city CAN'T be widened, more and more people are driving cars, and more and more people are living OUTSIDE the city but oddly enough want to work INSIDE it. The solution would (as he put it) have been a brilliant work of SPECULATIVE fiction and he could have named it "Crunch!!" -- alluding to the fender benders and of course the inward vieing of such a mass of humanaity and metal that utlimately some sort of "chain reaction" must occur. The point here, is there is indeed a fundamental difference between "speculative fiction" and "science/fantasy fiction". When we look at the works of Jonahthan Swift (most notably "Gulliver's Travels") we see that he is using fiction (in the form of supposedly true travel narrative) to hold a mirror to existent society that he saw around him. By the same token, in ??name?? Bellamy's novel "Looking Backward" he was trying to see how things around him might turn out. Even the works of (arguably) the "fathers of Modern Science Fiction", H.G. Welles and Jules Vernes, i think must be placed in the realm of speculative writers rather than science fictionists as such. But, first... Note that we must exclude the work of seers in generatl as their works are NOT those of fiction. A notable example is the "Quatrains" (also known as "The Centuries") of Nostradamos. We reject his work as "futurist" not because he may have been a fraud (as many of a scientific nature maintain), nor that he may have actually had psychic powers, but mainly that AS a seer, he was not trying to SPECULATE or GUESS or CREATE what the future was to be (as do futurists), but that he sought actually SEE the portions of the future that were already laid down. That is, he attempted to see through those portions of the shifting sands of time, to find and understand the un-changing bedrock of the future. For example, when he saw a man which he mysteriously refered to as "Hister" who would bring the world to the brink of destruction, what he was doing (however you look at it), was fundamentally DIFFERENT than the obsucre physician in "Darkest Africa", Albert Schweitzer who had already written letters warning that this "little corporal" who at the moment was a nobody trying to gain a seat in the Weimar Government was more dangerous than he looked. Scweitzer as an informed and educated man of his times was making a speculation (yes, a prediction if you will), but he was making it based on the facts, observations, and even rumors of his time. The psychic goes (or puports to go if we MUST wear our skeptics hat) far beyond that. I once (in a sort of odd trance) predicted the end of the world in 2003. How little did i undersatnd that such a prediction would in fact come true; albeit, only for me did the world end then -- not by any sort of tragedy, but that by that point in time (some 30 years in the future) i had become an artist. When 9/11 occured, i thought that it was the end of the world. But, alas it was only a marker of the end of one century and the beginning of a new -- and the new one doesn't really look at all that different from the previous. In fact it reminds me of the crusades of almost a thousand years ago. It has been finally recognised that much of the work of Jules Vernes has indeed "come to pass". One example, was his story "Twenty Thousand Legues" under the Sea" which of course introduced us to Captain Nemo. (Please don't get me started on the two horrible movies made out of Vernes' wonderous novel "The Mysterious Island". It so thoroughly disgusts me that such a beautiful work of literature should be so "monstrasized" by people who should know better, that i am speechless; well, almost. The colosest example is that if we were to take Charles Dickens' "A Cristmast Tale" and change it "just a bit", so that now Ebeneezer Scrooge became the AntiChrist, Bob Cratchet became one of the Old Testament Prophets, and Tiny Tim was in fact Jesus returned for the "final battle" -- that is to so pervert the original writing into Christian appocolyptic thinking in the same way that "The Mysterious Island" has been perverted.) Regardless, Vernes' work on submarines has found its wasy into modern practice. This was mainly due to his being well informed in terms of science and technology of his time and using his literary talents as a speculateur. Even his more fanciful "From Earth to Moon" follows (for the most part) strict guide lines of science; eg, the concept of "free fall", as well as knowing that by placing the "launch cannon" near to the equator that it would get a "boost" from the rotation of the Earth itself. For the most part, Vernes despised H.G. Welle's "flights of fancy" that were clearly impossible. While Vernes (like Mark Twain before him) speculated on the use of a hotair Balloon as traveling to distant lands, Welles took off into time. Pre-dating Einstein's work by ten years, he viewed time as the analogue of space. That is (as Soderbach LINK) has pointed out) when we travel in time it is the same as if we had traveled in space. While Welle's time traveler (protrayed quite well in BOTH films based on the story) travels some 800 thousand years into the future (our future), he might just have well travled to a distant world. I must now addrss why i view Welles as not a science fictionist, but as speculative fictionist. In the first place, the time traveler doesn't come back to our century to change something in the "here and now" to change the future, he goes forward to change THEIR future. We need only mention his use of metaphor in speculating how the so-called "blue and white collar" worker mentality might evolve in the future. Even in his story, "The Invisible Man", it is more about alienation of the individual (in much of the same tradition as Robert Lewis Steven's "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hide" ??sp?? as well as Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphsis"). In almost every case was NOT the science fiction write such as Isaac Asimov, but the speculative fiction writer. And as such (like H.G. Welles, Mary Shelly, Bellamy, Jonahthan Swift) a futurist is the clearest sense of the word. Thus, when i speak of Philip K. Dick as "the author/futurist" i do so with his clear "agenda" as to where he not only thought we were going, but also where he thought we were. He was one of the few sf writers of his time (or of any kind of writing) who didn't think that the future was that rosy. And while many worry of the same oppinion and published, they were if not merely swept aside by more imaginative writers feeding the public the pablum they so desired. For example where-as the very successfull Robert Heinlein gave us (in his story "Farnhan's Freehold") a view of the future when black people would be the dominant species and eat white babies as a dellicacy, Dick in his mirraculoouly un-successful writer gave us a BLACK captain of a rocket that would rescue a religious group of misfits from a vengefull government in his very first novel, "Solar Lottery". I need not put it to you who was the real futurist and who was the exploiter. Dick's introduction was well known to everyone who had ever sought out the "dark side" of the future instead of the glowing "onward and upward" twaddle that most writers, films, etc were turning out. I like to think that producer/futurist Gene Roddenberry had been prompted by writers such as Dick when he placed Nichel Nichols as one of the top officers on the "Enterprise". Not that i want to denigrate Heinlien too much (he like most of us are the product of their time) and he did take on the ideas of an evolving future. Similarly, Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) did so, as did Asimov and others. If futurists weren't ignored, they were often attacked. Herbert ??name?? oil usage, Rachel Carson, I think that it has come time (not that i think that time exists) to say what futurism is (list-wise)...
Properites of Futurists
1. Futurists do not accept the present as REQUIRED. That is, unlike the deists of the romantic era, they more often than not view the world as NOT "the best of all possible worlds". This is only briefly touched upon in tradtional works. Even in the film "The King and I", the tragedy of the King not being able to change is held up against an implied backdrop that "England" (read as the modern world) is if not perfect, then at least much more of an exemplar to the world. It doesn't matter that it is England (it could be the United States, Russia, or even Argentina). The implication is that the "backdrop" is used for colour and as a recognisable reference point against which the PLOT can be advanced. Thus, while in even both the Disney and non-Disney versions of Huck Finn, we get a "sugar-coated" pablum. The key to Twain's story is (among other things) this: A black man (a slave; supersticious) goes on a journey (forced by events to escape to the outside world). In the process he learns what freedom is, and in the end becomes an actual human being -- while nearly being killed by a little white boy's "fun and games". THAT is why they routinely BURN the book, not because of the antics of to side-show men, not because of the "boat of death", and not because of a trip on a raft. The book is FEARED because of the ideas that it embues. That is, that Twain as futurist saw the present and speculated about the furture. His story of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" another example of casting about his skeptial eye about the "Guilded Age" and using time travel as both metaphor and distancing element. Futurists ask questions of the present; often uncomfortable or odd ones. 2. Futurists must necessarily speculate, guess, or even use absurdity to accomplish what they want to say. Again, in a backward looking view, the futurist may not even in the present know or understand things that have just happened. But, they feel compelled to "tell the truth" even if it means resorting to fiction or absurdity. For example, following "The War to End all Wars" (commonly refered to as "World War I"), the major general of the Allied forces remarked that the "Treaty of Versailles" was not a treaty of surrender, but only a temporary cease fire and that in less than 20 years France and Germany would be at war again. When General Foche wrote that he was both a futurist and a historian as well as very much a particpant in the events that occured. It was if nothing else "an informed guess". Similarly, the group of futurists, The Dada'ists, reacted using absurdity. They had seen countless suffering in the first modern war and with no real change in the status quo. Their "manifestos" ranged from well reasoned treatises to responses to the question "So, What is Dada?" in the manner that "Dada is a form of Fire Insurance." Similarly, the poets in Italy under the editorship of Eugenio Montale published their "Cuttle Fish Bones" papers with poems and such using anti- or total il-logic. 3. Futurists find the odd side out and are not affraid to explore it. One of the clearest examples of this is the consistently excellent work of the British sf writer/futurist D.F. Jones. Jones is best known for "Collasis: The Forbin Project" made into a suprisingly excellent film of the same name. The series consists of a trillogy revolving about an "ultimate computer" called "Collosis" whose task is to prevent World War III by predicting and controlling nuclear weapons. Thus, forming an invincible power and thus assuring the continuation of nuclear stalemate and thus preventing nuclear war. Of course, in the best of sf tradtions, things do not go as planned. In Jones' other work "Implosion" the story line follows the use of a sterilising agent released against England by an un-disclosed "Eastern Block" country. The express point being to take the lovely sceptered isle by a war of population attrition; hence the name "implosion". Jones in the best tradition of the un-relenting UN-happy ending (George Orwell's "1984", as well as Aldrous Huxley's "Brave New World" spring to mind). I can only hope that the similarly-themed film "Children of Men" makes us think at least half as much -- maybe even leaving us more than just a little disturbed. Futurists look at the half full/empty glass and ask questions about glass, water and who owns the future of the glass or the water? 4. Furturists are not affraid of failure. If the work is about a dark future, then if those events fail to occur, then who could be happier than the author?
What will you do now?