The Invention of the Future
Issue 202
History comes with a lot of blank space, hardly any changes, for a few thousand generations, beyond the story of birth, toil, and death. A tragedy for those nearby. A commonplace for the species. For every moment of newness, novelty, discovery, however minuscule, there’s at least a few generations of stasis. What the child sees and does is pretty much indistinguishable from what the distant ancestor saw and did. The occasional servant becomes an emperor, the occasional emperor loses a head, but the social structure, the society in which the human game is played, stays relatively static for thousands of years, without any need for words like progress, development, or advancement—which are ubiquitous, expected concepts in the contemporary mind, even though the common condition, for nearly all of history, is stagnation.
The belief that your position will be different tomorrow from what it is today is more revolutionary than what most people assume. Perhaps there’s a failure to comprehend that nearly every single person in human history lived a life that was identical to their grandparents, without any changes in technology or living standards. Of the roughly one hundred billion humans to live, a tiny, almost laughable percent break this pattern—and if you’re reading these sentences, then you’re in that fortunate and unrepresentative group.
Yet the paragraph above does overlook one crucial point, the one inescapable, looming potential, the one life trajectory that has always been visible: downward. Even though people may not have perceived any potential for improvement, they certainly perceived a potential for calamity, with penury and hunger and sickness forever a threat. To the contemporary sensibility this is an absurd situation—endless stasis, no hope for progress, a potential for disaster. At best, a life of stagnation, though this quiet life occurs next to a volcano. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that our negative biases and tendency to fear the worst more than chase the positive comes from thousands of years of priming our nervous system with this dynamic. The choices, for nearly everybody, were stasis, or downfall. And the former certainly sounds a lot better once you start worrying about the latter.
In some ways stories from not too long ago provide an interesting window into how people imagined the notion of individual progress in a stagnant world. Victorian literature often has a fortune as part of the plot, but that fortune doesn’t increase, there’s no upward slope in the value of a portfolio—the character either receives or doesn’t receive the prize, in a zero-sum contest. Jane Austen’s characters want a steady income, one that pays a dividend and provides a comfortable life, but there’s no hint of the very modern idea that the income might grow over time, that a character with a small amount of money can work upward and gradually become more successful. You can inherit or marry for a fortune, or, just possibly, if you’re truly a dreamer, earn a new title or position and move up socially, but these are all binary outcomes in a game of musical chairs. When your position increases, someone else experiences a decrease. There’s not even a hint that the amount of chairs might multiply, or that new positions might be created, that wealth might somehow grow, that something that’s small today might be larger tomorrow. Either you succeed in earning the title and the fortune that already exists or you end up failing.
You can see this mentality in Dickens and Tolstoy and Brontë, too, although the characters hardly notice this atmosphere, it is simply a truism, where one person’s gain is someone else’s loss, where the amount of resources remains fixed. Shakespeare, a few centuries earlier, reveled in the intrigue and conspiracy and drama of royal courts in his most famous histories, but you might notice that there’s a fixed amount of positions for the characters: nothing new is ever developed or created. If you’re trapped in a Shakespearean drama, you are either busy killing someone because you want a position or someone is busying killing you because they want a position.
A word like fate—which is a crucial word for understanding classic tragedy yet almost never used today—also reveals how much this dynamic has shifted. In the first act of Macbeth, the three witches startle Macbeth, telling him that he will be King, though they also prophesize that his reign will be a disaster. A contemporary interpretation might focus on how the witches peer into the future. They observe, mystically, the unknown. The world is ever-shifting, complex, but these witches see what’s coming. Another interpretation, however, using an old fashion word like fate, might focus on how the witches actually peer into Macbeth. They are able to discern Macbeth’s future by observing his character. But this type of fate only works in a fixed world. When there’s a stagnant hierarchy, a rigid social atmosphere, then character foretells destiny: who you are determines what you do. There’s no space for the unknown as conceived by a contemporary mind, there’s no space for innovation, progress, or creativity.
And it just might be possible to reduce many of our ancient stories to this concept of fate, to the notion of a destination that’s foretold, to the notion of character as the determiner of destiny; and you might even reduce our contemporary stories to the concept of transformation, where a character grows or adapts or emerges, where the likely destination at birth proves escapable. Our oldest stories come from a stagnant, cruel world, while a dynamic, growing world defines our contemporary stories. The distinction is subtle but it permeates the air we all breath. To believe in fate today is to believe that this world is not only solidified but also eternal—there’s no potential for improvement, there’s no agency, what’s inherent about the present is what foretells the future. You won’t find any room for causality or change. But that’s not what people believe nor how they act in our world.
Today, whether you’re a schoolchild in Beijing or an office worker in Boston, there’s a belief in change. People expect a future, one that’s almost unimaginable, to arrive. They expect a child that’s born today to experience the unprecedented. This isn’t necessarily an articulated thought, but it manifests in the contemporary mentality, in how the typical person makes an assumption and constant of transformation: In the potential for growth. In the necessity of growth. In the certainty of growth. Not simply for society, not just for the economy, but for the individual. So the typical individual of today acts, anxiously, in a way foreign to most of that individual’s ancestors. Striving to improve. Getting stronger. Moving faster. Developing new skills. Trying to increase memory. Learning a new mindset. Racing to be more productive. Wanting to exercise and eat and sleep better.
Which is a mentality that’s only possible if you believe in change. The world can’t be stagnant, nor can it be determined by fate, if you’re striving to create yourself into someone new. So that mentality also means that the current world feels contingent, uncertain, and haphazard, which probably does sound quite familiar, and that all this striving toward the future gives a good view of our rather shaky present. If you believe that standing in one spot means that you’ll eventually fall behind—which most people do—then you’re certainly not in a fixed, fate-filled world. You are, instead, in a world that sees the future as vast and unknowable.
To live in a Victorian novel or Shakespearean drama is to fight relentlessly for your seat, to win your fortune or crown, to ensure that your fate is secure, in a world that’s rigid and cold and deterministic; to live today is, for some, to fight relentlessly to improve, it is to make personal transformation the expectation, because you sense that a new you will be required to confront what looms in the future. Perhaps it is a bit underrated, or even completely overlooked, how much this mentality is new.
Good one. Thank you.
I love history. And I love when someone shines a light on a view of history I had not appreciated. The point you make that in literature of the past “There’s not even a hint that the amount of chairs might multiply, or that new positions might be created, that wealth might somehow grow, that something that’s small today might be larger tomorrow. “ Thank you for the new idea to ponder.
While modern society thinks they control fate, we have hidden birth, serious illness and death. Instead we worship money, youth and ultra fitness. We ignore the poor and the suffering. I think the belief that we can change includes the belief that to do so means stepping over (and perhaps on) other people.