Thinking about the future has not always been characteristic of people. Oddly enough, humanity spent most of its existence without imagining it in any way and generally not particularly thinking about it.
“Golden Age” of Futurology
When drawing up a picture of the world, ancient man proceeded from what he sees around in nature, and he saw cyclicality – day and night, seasons, life and death, withering and flourishing, river floods, etc. He had no reason to assume that life could go beyond natural predetermination. The ancients understood time as a discrete process, and not as a continuous connection of events.
There was, however, a certain idea of a “different” life: it was expressed mainly in the ancient Greek legend about the “golden age”, a conditional primeval Arcadia, where people lived in pastoral abundance and eternal peace. However, this ideal world did not lie in the future, but in the past, people moved not towards it, but from it (as academician Alexei Losev put it, the ancient Greeks lived, as it were, “backwards”, developed, while looking into the past, – however, This is still true of some peoples today.
Plato is already writing the treatise “The State”, but at the same time he describes the same “golden age”. His classification of state systems is, rather, an attempt to depict in colors how far people have gone from the ideal, and to offer an option for adapting Plato’s modern society to the original, fair principles of community life.
This myth itself was, according to researchers, a reaction to the agricultural revolution and reflected a longing for a “sinless childhood,” from which humanity was torn out as a result of a catastrophe, a trauma that doomed it to suffering in the form of work. In the XNUMXth century, this idea – already in relation to a single person – will be embodied in the theory of psychoanalysis. In general, the legend fit into the cyclical picture of the universe; the “golden age” was at the beginning of life, and sooner or later it had to come again.
Figuratively speaking, the ancient man lived as if in “winter”, remembering that there was once “summer”, and hoping that someday it would return according to the laws of nature. This is necessary in order to start the story anew, correcting all the accumulated errors.
And for many centuries, all primitive “futurology” was reduced to this concept. The success of Christianity should probably be explained by the fact that a person was finally offered a plausible option for returning to the “golden age”, that is, to Eden, moreover, the return of a personal one and in a completely foreseeable, accessible perspective, that is, after death.
From utopia to guillotine
In the Middle Ages, the situation with predicting the future did not change significantly. In the religious consciousness, the world was already created as it is, in its entirety, man came into it last, and no global changes were expected until the very coming of the Antichrist. The future for everyone was quite clearly outlined in the pictures of the afterlife, within which it was proposed to wait for the Last Judgment and the onset of blissful eternity (that is, the same pagan “summer”) for everyone globally.
But even in such conditions there were those who wanted to speed up the process, so to speak.
In the first centuries of our era, the teachings were quite popular chiliasts, then rejected by the church. If you do not go into the details of the study of numerous branches and heresies, then classical chiliasm, according to the definition of the thinker Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, hoped for “the realization of an earthly paradise in the conditions of empirical, historical existence” on Earth, even before the Day of Judgment.
Naturally, the descriptions of the future “Thousand-Year Kingdom” (the term “chiliasm” comes from the Greek χῑλιάς – “thousand”), the “Third Testament” reproduced the descriptions of the “golden age” among the ancients – without private property, poverty, slavery, wars, social stratification. And this ideal world was already at arm’s length. The founder of the doctrine, who lived in the XII century, the monk and philosopher Joachim Florsky calculated that the “Third Testament” should begin in 1260. He could well, anticipating Nikita Khrushchev, promise his followers that the next generation would live under “communism”, although this term had not yet been invented.
Although Joachim of Florsky was recognized as a heretic, his teaching was of great historical significance – it is from chiliasm that Sergius Bulgakov derives the emergence of popular uprisings, anarchist, communist and socialist theories. From the height of the XNUMXst century, fascist theories should obviously be added to this list. One way or another, this period should be considered a turning point.
The idea began to penetrate into the minds of people that some other structured society is possible here on Earth, you can live up to it, you can contribute to its emergence.
The prerequisites for the emergence of secular thought appeared, and the path to them was very long and thorny.
Over time, secular thinkers began to describe ideal societies, and here one cannot do without mentioning Thomas More’s “Utopia”, Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis”, Tommaso Campanella’s “City of the Sun” (Campanella, however, was a monk, but at the same time a rebel), this is already XVI-XVII centuries. “Utopia” in Soviet historiography was considered to be the starting point for the development of the socialist idea, but it was only a projection of the same pagan, ancient, early Christian ideas about the lost Eden. The utopians already placed their fantasies not in an abstract, but in a completely earthly, geographical world, but they devoted them mainly to questions of moral and social order.
Things did not immediately come to technological insights, although the very fact of the development of technology was already suspected.
More wrote that utopians, “sophisticated in science, are surprisingly receptive to the invention of arts that contribute in any respect to the conveniences and blessings of life,” but, however, he was unable to invent and describe any “refinement”.
Many of More’s social fantasies subsequently came true. The author of “Utopia” managed to predict the reduction of the working day, tolerance for the disabled, nurseries, religious tolerance, elective power, division of labor, and much more.
The first attempts at purposeful remaking of nature appeared: “The forest is uprooted by the hands of the people in one place, and planted in another … so that the firewood is closer to the sea, rivers or the cities themselves” – this “spectacle” Thomas More found “amazing”.
In Bacon’s New Atlantis, which was published in 1627, that is, more than a hundred years after Utopia, we can already read about “complex fertilizers that make the soil more fertile”, the creation of artificial metals, hydro and solar energy, telescopes and microscopes (long before the invention of Anthony van Leeuwenhoek), etc.
Through deism, enlightenment, historicism, industrial and bourgeois revolutions, the church reformation, the development of the natural sciences, the idea of a world that can be rebuilt manually grew and strengthened.
On this path, great experimenters were bound to arise: inspired by the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which in general were a creative development of the same old as the world ideas about the lost Eden of equality and justice, the Jacobins staged a Great Revolution in France; so the Europeans could be convinced that the implementation of futuristic ideas in practice, perhaps, could be far from theory.
They had to be convinced of this more than once, but it was no longer possible to stop the furious and stubborn desire to see the “golden age” with their own eyes. In a chiliastic fever, humanity continues to storm this bastion to this day, with each attempt to win back another span or two of an ideal society – often at the cost of great sacrifices.
The price of the ideal
All futurological forecasts, in one way or another, have the ultimate goal of achieving the primeval goal of universal abundance and idleness. At some point, science began to seem like the means by which it would be possible to defeat original sin and return a person to Eden. In the XNUMXth century, the writer Jules Verne became a powerful messenger of the scientific approach, in whose work social utopias materialized thanks to unusual inventions and mechanisms. This view of things was enthusiastically picked up by many science fiction writers of the XNUMXth century. But their imagination, if you look closely, did not go beyond the goals of the “golden age”. Only to help in this was no longer saving on oneself, but robotization and automation, and idleness was bashfully covered up with the slogans of “self-improvement”.
A world stuffed with atomic planes, automatic factories, robot cooks and robot cleaners, as well as all other self-propelled and self-acting installations, all the same, in the end, it turned out to be necessary so that a person needs less, puts less effort into life.
As a reaction to the rapid development of science and technology, the genre of dystopia arose at the same time, reflecting society’s fear of change.
In the classic Time Machine, HG Wells raises the question of the price of an ideal society: is it really possible for everyone, or does an ideal society always imply the existence of a different, not at all ideal society of proletarian Morlocks, which, in fact, provides the first with a comfortable life?
And here everyone paid attention to the fact that the medieval descriptions of the “golden age” somehow suspiciously contradict themselves – according to the caustic remark of the Strugatskys, there “everyone is rich and free from worries, and even the last tiller has at least three slaves.” Even Plato, without noticing this, described a society strictly divided into castes; his followers fell into the same trap, insisting on a radical division of labor.
It turned out that the inhabitants of ideal societies were deprived of a choice – the key to universal prosperity is the obligation of each member of society to do only what is predetermined for him.
It suddenly became clear that in this case there must be those who distribute duties and monitor their strict implementation. In such a society, the failure of even one element jeopardizes the functioning of the entire system. But can a society be ideal without freedom?
Paradise for your
Today there is no shortage of technical forecasts for the XNUMXst century – they usually relate to the performance of computers, space flights, communication methods, the introduction of artificial intelligence, the installation of electronics in the human body and other inventions. In fact, such forecasts do not differ much from the science fiction novels of Jules Verne and even sometimes are less interesting, as they simply scale the modern reality.
Imagining where else you can stick a receiver and transmitter into a person is exciting, but not the most difficult task. It is much more difficult to come up with the construction of the social structure of the future (which is what the writers of the past actually did), that is, the people for whom all this is intended, and the ways of their interaction.
Many of the science fiction writers gave up, coming to the conclusion that in the future old conflicts will be reproduced with renewed vigor and only governments will receive new tools to control citizens. The insights of wars and total catastrophes were all the more piercing, since the religious belief in the onset of the Millennial Kingdom was already atrophied among these authors, and it turned out that everything would end on the Apocalypse.
Others, falling into solar optimism at first, over time also ran into the problem of overcoming human nature and, in general, also came to rather gloomy conclusions (even Boris Strugatsky was forced to recognize the world described in “Predatory things of the century” as the most probable of the worlds created by the brothers).
God, for example, would have provided for everything in the best way at the Last Judgment, but since we no longer believe in this, we have to look for a solution ourselves. Globalism has greatly complicated the task of designing the future. Since the French Revolution, mankind has tried in various ways to solve the problem of equality, defining it as a necessary condition for the “golden age”, and continues to actively solve it until now. Until relatively recently, the colonialist assumption that Eden was not for everyone was discussed, but when the blood flowed especially strongly thanks to the communist and fascist regimes, these ideas became taboo.
Due to inequality, technological progress does not make all people happy; it constantly generates new stratifications, apartheid and conflicts, which in “Eden” should not be by condition. Whatever Hyperloop Elon Musk invents, it will not be available to everyone – and if it should, then it remains to be figured out how to achieve this.
The optimist will argue that the Hyperloop will evolve over time, just like air travel. In many ways, so, but why then do tens of thousands of people annually risk their lives across the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe by boat? Why don’t they all just buy a plane ticket? And it is clear that the point here is not even the price of the ticket. It doesn’t matter what the minority gets—a castle, a gilded carriage, or eternal youth—what matters is that everyone doesn’t get it. This means that the condition will not be met.
The problem turned out to be like a hydra – after religious discrimination, racial, national, class, gender, technical, etc. appeared, and each gave rise to its own problems. Paradoxically, society only became more complex as the attempts at simplification progressed, as each social group began to insist on its own separate rights, and the leaders of progress had already made a public commitment to satisfy all.
The tools that were seen as a panacea, as it turned out, do not solve the tasks set – more precisely, they solved tactical tasks at the time they were set, but could not cope with new and global challenges.
Industrial automation did not rid the world of sweatshops, but moved most of them to Asia. Dozens of international conventions and treaties were able to stop wars only in a small number of the most advanced countries, and even then they did not eliminate the fear of them. Giant advances in medicine and public health have created the problem of overpopulation and have not eliminated the scarcity of food and water. Thanks to progress, social transformations have become so rapid that society does not have time to reflect on them, falling into depression.
endless spiral
The ideal of the “golden age”, of Eden, remains the same – a world without violence and effort. Over the coming decades, movement in this direction is likely to continue. The main idea (at least publicly) is the idea that everyone deserves a comfortable future, and problems can be solved through intensified development. It is not the technology itself that is becoming more important, but its availability; space exploration has given way to social improvements.
But the timing is very uncertain, and the number of hypocrisy suspects in the developed world community is growing. Wells’ scenario, in which the civilized world draws a hard line from the uncivilized, is still relevant and often reproduced in popular culture, betraying the fear that not everyone will be taken into the “golden age”. Today, it is probably impossible to draw such a border without great violence – the agents of the “third world” have firmly established themselves in the physical space of the “first”.
The thing is that the civilized world itself has not yet decided anything on this score. If earlier it seemed sufficient to overcome racial prejudice and establish standard education, today it is already necessary to overcome gender and age inequality, which never even occurred to the utopians of the past. The problem of economic and cultural inequality of entire parts of the world has risen to its full height, but equality looks vague even within any one society.
We can imagine new experiments, for example, the emergence of societies instead of classical states, divided according to a different principle – professional, educational, ideological, or some other.
The key here, however, will still be the word “separated.” We can imagine that for the sake of efficiency and universalization, humanity will even decide on artificial programming of people, depriving them of their freedom of choice, embodying dystopias. We can imagine that persistent attempts to achieve equality will get to the genetic level. Then biology will become the main science – but it may well be that psychology, because for the sake of such radical experiments, many traditional human ideas about life and justice will have to be somehow “amputated”. But since the violence of the society over the individual contradicts the conditions of “Eden”, this will not solve the final problem either, and such experiments, obviously, will also have to be rejected later with disgust.
Efficiency, however, is determined by the nature of the tasks set: it is quite possible that sooner or later the desire for continuous improvement of the material world will be declared irrelevant. On the other hand, a permanent craving for knowledge is essential for the human brain. A person cannot stop in the dream of universal happiness and will not rest until he achieves it.
Would you say this is an endless spiral? Well, it might very well be.
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