Disposable Lit Reviews

Bloomsbury, 2000
276 pp.
ISBN 1-58234-108-7

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This book suffers terribly from the unfulfilled expectations of the readers. Partly, that’s the fault of the publisher: the cover photo shows a man dressed in a decades-old conception of what “the future” would look like. Partly, though, those expectations come from the subtitle, “The Future, Past and Present,” over which one assumes that author Margolis would have had some control. (And by the way, can someone identify the uncredited cover image for me?)

The impression thus fostered is that this book will survey the erroneous futurology of the past — what former generations expected of the future, why, and why it (usually) turned out differently. That kind of overview of failed predictions would be fascinating, and it’s what I thought I was getting when I bought this book. Unfortunately, Margolis covers all of that area in a single introductory chapter.

The rest of the book is largely the run-of-the-mill futurology survey, looking from today forward. One chapter raises questions about the ultimate utility of futurological forecasting given the way in which history seems to surprise us as it happens, but leaves the subject without making much of a case for the necessity of the rest of the book. Ensuing chapters cover the standard subjects of prediction: environment (with some refreshingly healthy skepticism toward the doomsday cries of human-precipitated global warning), cryonics and other schemes of life extension, robotic and bionics, housing and employment, leisure, politics and society, and travel. Nothing Margolis explains should be utterly novel to a reader who’s been hearing about the future forever, although he does sometimes offer opposing views which are a refreshing change from the tone of inevitability which usually and without justification infuses forecasts of this kind.

The fact that politics and society occupy a discrete sixteen-page chapter highlights the major deficiency of Margolis’ aims, an era-specific one which shows just as much myopia in thinking about the future as any utopian vision from the early 19th century:

This is not to say that war will become obsolete, nipped in the bud wherever it threatens. But the late twentieth-century trend for conflict to be concentrated into isolated hotspots will, most experts concur, continue. “For the foreseeable future, a third world war seems unlikely; there is no major ideological fracture severe enough to sustain it,” says James Mayall, director or the Centre for International Studies at the London School of Economics. (p.214)

This book was published in 2000, the year before a certain confluence of airplanes and skyscrapers reminded the Western world that a forward-thinking mindset of progress is not an inevitability of history. Margolis gives some small lipservice to radical Islamicism alongside Christianity in this chapter, but he fails to realize the enormous, possibly overwhelming influence which cultural forces have on the adoption and use of technology. Extrapolation of technology did not and could not have predicted the counter-culture movement of the 1960’s, or the crumbling of the Soviet Union, or any of the other social and cultural earthquakes which have shaped our present fully as much as the steady advance of the microchip. Ignoring or pigeonholing the influence of culture and instead envisioning a future shaped entirely by technological innovation leaves this and most other futurology books as quaint as artifacts of their time as the cartoons from the turn of the 20th century which portray rocketcars alongside women in full skirts and bonnets and men in bowlers and full moustaches.

The initial chapters thus remain the most insightful and informative, because it is only when noting the wrong directions of earlier predictions that Margolis really acknowledges the way in which the future seems to come out of left field. This book simply becomes one more cultural artifact, one more record of the blindered-thinking which seems to govern futurology in any decade.