The Future I See for Humanity: Three Scenarios for the Next Fifty to One Hundred Years

Part I: Background and Bibliography

I've been thinking a lot about the future lately. Not just my own future, but -- you know -- the BIG future. Our future as a culture, as a society, as a world or species or what have you. And I must confess, not all of my thoughts have been hopeful and positive.

Obviously this flows out of my own personal context. Being fresh off the boat from a lengthy venture in India and in a prolonged period of transition has both inspired these thoughts, and defined their direction. Our current economic situation as a country has also influenced my thinking, and the recent spike in gasoline prices has certainly played a role. I said earlier that not all of my thoughts have been positive. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that not all of them have been negative.

My angst has prompted me to comb through a vast library of material. It turns out a lot of different people are thinking about the future for a lot of different reasons, and through a lot of different media. Several compelling and well-considered opinions are out there, pointing to several different possible futures for our society. Obviously they are not all correct -- I would be surprised if any of them have more than marginal insight into what things will really be like. But they all have something to teach us if we are eager listeners and diligent students.

There are some voices of despair, and some voices of hope. Some thinkers highlight the enormous problems we are facing, others show us immense opportunities and things to look forward to. One writer has faith in God, another in humanity, another in evolution, still another in little more than his own ability to survive. Some thinkers believe that we need an active intervention to save ourselves, others think Progress and Technology will save the day; some believe that God will descend and sort everything out, others think we are simply doomed. I believe the appropriate thing to do is play these voices off of one another; to hear diverse viewpoints and bring them into harmony. Then, having developed an acceptable sense of the future, stop reading about it and live into it.

After all my reading, I feel like I do have a decent sense of where the future is headed. It's going forward. It's going to unfold. More importantly,I am personally at peace with whatever direction it goes. I can stop being anxious about it and step forward in faith. I feel more or less equipped for the adventure that lies ahead. I am ready, not only to face the future, but to contribute my talents to making it a better place.

I now want to synthesize and share the information that I have gathered. I want to enable others to glean the insights I have developed through much reading and hard work, without having to flip through thousands of pages I have pursued, or going through tremendous emotional and spiritual turmoil I have endured.

This exploration will consist of five parts. Through the remainder of this portion, I will discuss my source material, giving an annotated collection of the different ideas I am drawing on. In part two, I will outline the “optimistic” scenario for our future, in which we manage to solve all of our problems through technology without having to deal with the hardships of economic malfunction or environmental degradation.

In part three, I will examine the “doom” scenario, what could happen if we chronically fail to solve the problems that we are confronting. I will also consider the purpose and limitations of meditation on such a grim possibility. In part four, I will examine a more realistic scenario, where we solve some of our problems and fail to solve others, and so have to endure some “tough times.” And I will indulge in speculating about what toughness those times might be, and what it might require from us.

Finally, in part five, I will reflect existentially on my own encounter with futurism. I will ponder the conclusions I have drawn, and how I am currently living because of those conclusions, and what preparations I am making for living in the future I foresee. Then I will consider in general the fruits of meditation on the future as a human discipline and spiritual exercise.

I hope that these thoughts and reflections are of use. If you do not agree with me, I hope that this exploration is at very least interesting, and provokes additional reflection and conversation. Above all, if you are currently trapped under anxious thoughts about our common future, I hope that this series will help liberate you from that burden, or at very least point a way out.

I do not know what the outcome will be of releasing these thoughts into the wild, but I do so in faith, dedicating my words to the Triune God, my own rock and ballast against despair, and my poor wife, who has sat through innumerable lectures on the inevitable doom of humanity through the adolescence of my thoughts on this matter.

A Bibliography of Futurism

I was first formally alerted to the aesthetic and environmental poverty of American suburbia a couple of years ago, when I read James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler has written several other books I have not read, including a popular novel on a post-apocalyptic world entitled World made by Hand. I have not read any of his other material, but feel generally acquainted with his thinking through Geography of Nowhere, a few interviews, and his blog.

The alarmist website Life after the Oil Crash first showed me exactly how dependent our society is on cheap fossil fuels. I have done “what if oil ran out tomorrow” thought-experiments since the college cafeteria, but LATOC finally gave those thoughts some muscle – and fear.

Dimitry Orlov makes for an enjoyable (if somewhat frightening) read, either at his blog, through one of his articles floating on survivalist sites, or his book, Reinventing Collapse. He is a Russian American who had the opportunity to witness some of the Soviet collapse and sees America on a similar trajectory. Besides developing his “comparative theory of superpower collapse,” he give snippets of what a post-collapse America might look like, and outlines broad survival strategies. And he does it all with a dark sense of humor that makes his grim prophecies surprisingly entertaining.

Internet Monk's three-part series on the Coming Collapse of Evangelical Christianity in America has been well-talked about in Christian circles, and has provided interesting counterpoint to my own thinking. I agree with his thesis, but would go on to say that contemporary American Evangelicalism is having a hard time that strongly mirrors our cultural struggles. In our context, religion has a powerful opportunity to speak prophetically and call people to a better, more integrated way of living. It grieves me that we are missing that chance.

Geopolitical forecaster George Friedman wrote an interesting little book that I polished off earlier this summer entitled The Next 100 Years. He has a pretty positive view of the future. My only complaint is that he interprets the next hundred years unfolding with very similar surprises to those we saw in the past hundred years. I think the next hundred years has very different surprises in store.

I try to stay on top of what techno-futurists like Ray Kurzweil are saying, even though I think that he is crazy. Still, there is no denying that he is a bold visionary – and since none of his predictions violate the laws of physics, they are at least physically possible.

The Long Now Foundation's seminars on long-term thinking (ie 10000 years out) are fascinating. They have provided me with many interesting things to think about, and acquainted me with several of the authors and works listed here.

Recently, there has been a rash of television shows about the future, like Earth 2100 and Aftermath. All of them are pretty doomy, but interesting if you can take your doom. I've seen snippets of several, but I've spent most of my time with “Life after People.” It is fascinating (and strangely cathartic) to watch dramatizations of the earth chugging on without us, and see computer animations of our accomplishments crumbling into nothing. You can watch the first episode on Google Videos.

I just finished Jared Diamond's excellent (though lengthy) Collapse, which details the collapse of several societies around the world, gives reasons for their decline, and extracts lessons that we can learn today. Diamond relies heavily on Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, which I haven't read but have heard is worth consideration for serious students of the topic.

These days, I'm following The Oil Drum blog, which gives a daily roundup of energy/future headlines, and an occasional thought-provoking article. It also connected me with this (link) titillating talk on the mathematics of phase transitions and how that applies to the life-cycle of societies.

I've been reading a number of anarchist / libertarian materials, and appreciate their contribution, imagination, and experimentation in thinking of a different way to live and run society. I am attracted to Freeganism in particular, as a prophetic way of living at this moment against consumer culture. I am working to adopt some Freegan practices into my own life.

I really like the work of the Transition Towns movement. They take the doom of peak oil and global warming and make it into something positive, doing hands-on work in preparing communities for energy descent. Similarly, Michael Pollen, author of Omnivore's Dilemma, manages to stay positive and up beat, even though he is very sensitive to the dangers of environmental degradation and acutely aware of dire the problems emerging in our food cultivation systems.

I've enjoyed getting some different points of view from the Peak Oil Debunked blog, particularly this article, Confessions of an Ex-Doomer. This article helped me push past my latent doomer outlook and start aiming at something more positive and more constructive.

I've also been impacted recently by “emergence thinking” in a variety of fields. Religion, social theory, and biology are all experimenting with networks and emergence as mechanisms for everything from social change and biological evolution. If we're going to solve our problems, I think that emergence will also serve as the mechanism thorough which those solutions appear. (And I as a Christian find emergence to be a hidden form of grace.) Unfortunately (or perhaps appropriately, given the nature of the subject) I cannot remember where, exactly, I have encountered this material most succinctly.

Similarly, I have taken quite a bit from my small participation in the emerging “free culture” on the internet: from switching over to Ubuntu linux to contributing a word or two on Wikipedia. Currently, free culture is limited by our current resource-intensive capitalism. But I think models are developing within free culture projects that will be become incredibly important in the next age, if not the next few decades.

Finally, I would like to read Gunderson and Holling's Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. From what I've encountered of the book, I think it would contribute significantly to the thinking that I have already developed, and resonate with some of the spiritual conclusions I have drawn in pondering the future.