2 - Futurists and Futures Studies

Summary

HOW WE FEEL about the future is important. This determines not only when we decide to start a family, make a purchase, go for a new job, or take some other risk but also our level of political engagement (from apathy to activism) and our mental health and well-being. Until recently, people in the Western world believed that their children should and would live in a better world (whether defined by standard of living or quality of life) or at least have more choices then they had. This is no longer the case. A recent study by the Pew Research Center showed that a majority of Americans expect life to get worse by 2050. In the annual Allensbach poll that has been conducted in West Germany since 1949 (and in a united Germany since 1990), we can see that global events have had a considerable impact on whether we can look to the future with hope. For example, in 1950, at the time of the Korean War, only 27 percent of West Germans said that they were looking to the future with hope. The oil crisis in 1973 (30 percent) and, much later, the Iraq War (31 percent) caused similarly low levels of optimism, while the fall of the Berlin Wall produced a record high level of 68 percent. But how do we know what the future is likely to hold in store?

If utopian thought has led to debates about what the future ought to look like, the futurists’ approach aims to be more dispassionate in anticipating, on some sort of scientific basis, what the future is likely to look like. To be more precise, futurism, futurology, and futures studies are concerned with identifying probable futures (plural) and determining which of them are likely to become reality. As in utopian discourse, one finds a very broad range of competing voices and approaches, reaching from the specialist to the popular, the ideological to the pragmatic, as well as from the transparent and retraceable to the opaque and surmised. But in sifting through the literature, it quickly becomes apparent that futurists are currently as concerned about the future as the utopians are.