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Abstract
Concern for the future is vital to individual and social existence, but its nature and intensity vary from person to person, culture to culture, and epoch to epoch. Some exhibit primary interest in their own longevity or afterlife, others in that of their offspring and descendants, still others in humanity or all life, the earth or the cosmos as a whole. This article traces the history of feelings about the future. Christian and medieval apocalyptic preoccupations with the world to come gave way to the secular concerns of Enlightenment and Victorian times. As the known history of mankind and of life on earth reached ever farther back into antiquity, devotion to civilized progress expanded to embrace an ever farther future.
Since the mid-20th century, however, future horizons have shrunk to the shortest imaginable term. Primary among the causes for this is anxiety about the far-reaching effects of our military and industrial technology, which threatens to poison or even exterminate all life. Having lost faith in progress, we dwell increasingly on the immediate present and the solaces of a nostalgized past. I discuss the parlous consequences of this trend and argue that a concern for posterity is essential to contemporary well-being.
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Notes
1. Bank of England notice, 20 February 2001; David Lowenthal, letter, ‘From here to eternity’, 27 February 2001; Father Jonathan A. Hemmings, letter, ‘From here to eternity’, 1 March 2001; all in The Times (London).
2. Pfizer advertisement. International Herald Tribune 9 October 2003, p. II; NTT DoCoMo advertisement. International Herald Tribune 11–12 October 2003, p. II.
3. I discuss this transition in The Past is a Foreign Country (Lowenthal 1985) and in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Lowenthal Citation1998, Chapter 1).
4. On Paine's and Jefferson's sovereignty of each generation see Lowenthal (Citation1985, 108).
5. [Editorial] 1968. Futures – confidence from chaos. Futures 1:1, 2–3.
6. K. Erikson (1994, 203–225).
7. James K. Glassman, 22 September 2003, cited in Stagnaro & Mingardi (2003).
8. Azar & Schneider (Citation2000), for example, charge that studies deploring carbon abatement policies as economically crippling vastly over-inflate actual costs.
9. Sonia Roccas and Neil Gandal, Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper 3660, cited in ‘Greed by degrees,’ in New Scientist (14 December 2002, 26). Similar views of economists emerge Barker (Citation1974).
10. A precursor to Brand's Long Now Foundation was Gerald Feinberg's The Prometheus Project (Citation1968).
11. In the astronomer Martin Rees’ version of this anecdote, the sun burns the earth to a crisp 6 billion rather than 6 million years hence (Rees Citation2003, 182). A standard current estimate for the extinction of life on earth is 500 million years (Ward & Brownlee Citation2003).
12. Thomas Sieger Derr, Ecology and Human Need, first published in 1972 and, reprinted in his ‘The obligation to the future’ (1981).
13. I address this presentist trend in ‘The forfeit of the future’ (Lowenthal Citation1995), and in ‘The disenchanted future’ (Lowenthal Citation2002).
14. Daniel Hillis quoted in Brand 1999, 2–3.
15. Pew global attitudes survey (International Herald Tribune 5 December 2002, 8). Widespread pessimism about the future was confirmed in a June–August 2004 Gallup poll covering 60,000 people in 60 countries (International Herald Tribune 19 November 2004). See also Dennis Morgan (Citation2002), and Galtung & Wiberg (Citation2003), assessing the accuracy of predictions made a generation back by Ornauer et al. (Citation1976).
16. Populus poll cited in ‘Generation Ex,’ The Times (London), 30 October 2003.
17. These negative futures are explored by E.H. Erikson (Citation1958, Citation1969).
18. James Surowiecki, ‘Leave no parent behind’ (New Yorker 18–25 August 2003, 48), citing Warren & Tyagi (Citation2003).
19. For example, Valamoor & Heydon (Citation2000). The brief flurry of future interest triggered by the approach of the new millennium has left little trace (Gould et al. Citation2000).
20. John Trumbull, ‘McFingal’ (1782), canto II, lines 121 ff; The Spectator No. 583, 20 August 1714.
21. Burke's significance was noted in a 1972 essay exhorting ‘reverence not just for the political, or even the social, order but for an inheritance so great that we have scarcely noticed it until recently’ – that of nature (‘Notes and Comments: Concerning Conservation and Conservatism,’ New Yorker 13 May 1972).