3 - Cautionary tales: on foresight

Summary

Introduction

The future appears to be out of favour today, having seemingly become the province of mystics and scientists – a realm into which the rest of us rarely venture. Mere mention of the idea of farsightedness, of trying to understand what may occur in our wake in order to make sense of the here and now, conjures up images of fortune-telling crystal balls and doomsday prophets, or of eccentric pundits equipped with data-crunching supercomputers spewing forth fanciful prognostications about how human beings will eventually live. This curious situation goes back to a founding paradox of early Western modernity, which sought to replace pagan divination and Judaeo-Christian eschatology with its own rational systems of apprehending time. Thus came into being the philosophy of history, according to which human destiny unfolds teleologically by following a knowable and meaningful set of chronological laws leading to a final state of perfection. Condorcet, Kant, Hegel and Marx, to name but a few, are the children of this kind of historicism that expresses an unwavering faith in the Enlightenment's credo of inherent progress over time.

Yet in our post-metaphysical age, where the idea of discovering universal and stable temporal laws has become untenable, the philosophy of history lies in tatters (Heller 1993). What has stepped into the breach is a variety of sciences of governance of the future, ranging from social futurism to risk management.