Thinking about the future has not always been human. Oddly enough, mankind spent most of its existence without imagining it in any way and in general without especially thinking about it.
"Golden Age" of Futurology
Ancient man, composing a picture of the world, started from what he sees around in nature, but he saw cyclicality - day and night, seasons, life and death, wilting and flowering, flooding of rivers, etc. He had no reason to suppose that life could go beyond natural predestination. The ancients understood time as a discrete process, and not as a continuing connection of events.
However, there was a certain idea of the “other” life: it was expressed mainly in the ancient Greek legend about the “golden age”, the conditional primordial Arcadia, where people lived in pastoral abundance and eternal peace. However, this ideal world lay not in the future, but in the past, people were moving not towards it, but away from it (as Academician Alexei Losev put it, the ancient Greeks lived as if "backwards", developed, while looking into the past, however, this is still typical of some peoples).
Plato is already writing his treatise "The State", but he still 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 propose a variant of adaptation of modern Plato's society to the original, just principles of community.
This myth itself, according to researchers, was 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 suffer in the form of work. In the twentieth century, this idea - already in relation to a single person - will be embodied in the theory of psychoanalysis. On the whole, 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.
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 version of a return to the "golden age", that is, to Eden, and a return of the personal and in a completely foreseeable, accessible perspective, that is, after death.
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From utopia to guillotine
In the Middle Ages, the situation with forecasting the future did not change significantly. In the religious consciousness, the world was already created as it is, entirely, man came into it last, and no global changes were expected until the very advent of the Antichrist. The future for everyone was quite clearly outlined in the pictures of the afterlife, within the framework of 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.
Although Joachim Floorsky was recognized as a heretic, his teaching was of great historical significance - it is from chiliasm that Sergiy Bulgakov deduces the appearance of popular uprisings, anarchist, communist and socialist theories. From the height of the 21st century, fascist theories should obviously be added to this list. One way or another, this period should be considered a turning point.
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 "Utopia" by Thomas More, "New Atlantis" by Francis Bacon, "City of the Sun" by Tommaso Campanella (Campanella, however, was a monk, but at the same time a rebel), this is 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. Utopians have 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.
More wrote that Utopians, “sophisticated by the sciences, are surprisingly susceptible to the invention of arts that contribute in some way to the comforts and benefits of life,” but, it is true, he was not able to invent and describe any “sophistication”.
Many of More's social fantasies have since come true. The author of "Utopia" managed to predict a shorter working day, tolerance for people with disabilities, nurseries, religious tolerance, elective power, division of labor, and much more.
The first attempts to deliberately remodel nature appeared: “The forest is uprooted by the hands of the people in one place, and is planted in another … so that firewood is closer to the sea, rivers or the cities themselves” - Thomas More found this “spectacle” “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.
On this path, great experimenters inevitably had to appear: inspired by the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which were, in general, the creative development of all the same old, like the world, ideas about the lost Eden of equality and justice, the Jacobins staged the Great Revolution in France; so the Europeans could be convinced that the implementation of futuristic ideas in practice, perhaps, can be far from theory.
They had to be convinced of this more than once, but it was already impossible to stop the furious and stubborn desire to see the "golden age" with their own eyes. In a chiliastic fever, mankind continues to storm this bastion to this day, with each attempt conquering an inch or two of an ideal society - often at the cost of great sacrifices.
Ideal price
All futurological forecasts one way or another have the ultimate goal of achieving the primitive goal of universal abundance and idleness. At some point, science began to seem like a means by which it would be possible to defeat original sin and return a person to Eden. In the 19th century, 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 taken up by many science fiction writers of the 20th 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 indolence was shamefacedly covered with slogans of "self-improvement".
A world crammed with atomolets, automatic factories, robotic cooks and cleaning robots, as well as all other self-propelled and self-propelled installations, all the same, in the end it turned out to be needed so that a person needed less, made less effort for life.
As a reaction to the rapid development of science and technology, the genre of dystopia emerged at the same time, reflecting society's fear of change.
And here everyone drew attention to the fact that medieval descriptions of the "golden age" somehow suspiciously contradict themselves - according to the scathing remark of the Strugatskys, "everyone is rich and free from worries, and even the very last farmer 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 guarantee of universal prosperity is the obligation of each member of society to do only what is predetermined for him.
Suddenly it became clear that in this case there should also be those who distribute responsibilities 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 friends
Today there is no shortage of technical forecasts for the 21st 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 predictions are not particularly different from the science fiction novels of Jules Verne and are sometimes even less interesting, since they simply scale modern reality.
Imagining where else you can stick a receiver and transmitter into a person is exciting, but not the most difficult thing. It is much more difficult to come up with a construction of the social structure of the future (which the writers of the past actually did), that is, the people for whom all this is meant, and the ways of their interaction.
"Ave Maria", Paul Gauguin, 1891.
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 into wars and total catastrophes turned out to be all the more piercing, since the religious belief in the coming of the Millennium was already atrophied among these authors, and it turned out that everything would end at the Apocalypse.
Others, at first falling into solar optimism, over time also came up against the problem of overcoming human nature and generally also came to rather sad 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).
For example, God would have forethought everything in the best way at the Last Judgment, but since we no longer believe in it, we have to look for a solution ourselves.
Globalism has greatly complicated the tasks of constructing the future. Since the Great French Revolution, humanity 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 to this day. Until relatively recently, the colonialist assumption that "Eden" was not meant for everyone was considered discussed, but when the blood poured especially strongly thanks to the communist and fascist regimes, these ideas became taboo.
An optimist would argue that the Hyperloop will evolve over time, just like air travel. In many ways, this is so, but why then tens of thousands of people every year, at the risk of their lives, cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe by boat? Why don't they all just buy a plane ticket? And it is clear that the point is not even the ticket price. It doesn't matter what the minority gets - a castle, a gilded carriage or eternal youth - it is important that not everyone gets 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. As attempts were made to simplify society, paradoxically, it only became more complex, for each social group began to insist on its individual rights, and the leaders of progress had already made a public commitment to satisfy everyone.
The tools that were seen as a panacea, as it turned out, do not solve the assigned tasks - more precisely, they solved tactical tasks at the time of their setting, but did not cope with new and global challenges.
Endless spiral
The ideal of the "golden age", Eden remains the same - a world without violence and effort. Over the next decades, movement in this direction will most likely continue. The main (at least publicly) idea remains that everyone deserves a comfortable future, and that problems can be solved by intensifying development. It is not the technology itself that becomes more important, but its availability; space exploration gave way to social improvement.
But the timing is very uncertain, and the number of people suspecting the community of developed countries of hypocrisy is growing. Wells's scenario, in which the civilized world draws a hard line with the uncivilized, is still relevant and often reproduced in popular culture, betraying the fear that not everyone will be taken into the "golden age". Nowadays, it will probably not be possible 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 prejudices and establish standard education, today it is already necessary to overcome gender and age inequality, which the utopians of the past never thought of. The problem of economic and cultural inequality of entire parts of the world has risen to its full extent, but equality looks vague and within any one society.
The key word here, however, will still be the word "divided." We can imagine that for the sake of efficiency and universalization, humanity will even decide to artificially program 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. Biology will then become the main science - but it may well be that psychology too, because for the sake of such radical experiments it will be necessary to somehow "amputate" many of the traditional human notions of life and justice. But since the violence of the society against 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 to constantly improve the material world will be declared irrelevant. On the other hand, a permanent craving for cognition is inherent in the human brain. A person cannot stop dreaming of universal happiness and will not rest until he reaches it.
Say, is this movement in an endless spiral? Well, very likely.
Author: Mikhail Shevchuk