Being a futurologist means never having to say you're sorry. Our predictions
always come true eventually - or, if they don't, well, how quickly people
forget. Look at Newsweek's George Will. He predicted that the Berlin Wall would
endure, and in an article published on the very day in 1989 that the Germans
were tearing it down. That should have been enough to revoke his futurology
license and demote him to sportswriting. But no, almost three decades later
he's still peering into his crystal ball.
Never apologize, never look back: that's our motto.
But this time - think of it as the exception that proves the rule - I
really screwed up. We all did.
If you look back at the predictions we made in 2008 about the United States and
the world, you'll see just how wrong we were. Today, in 2016, it's time for a mea
culpa on behalf of the profession. Both camps, you see, were wrong. The
Chicken Littles who predicted dramatic catastrophe were just as far from the
mark as the Panglossian utopians who predicted dramatic change for the better.
Of course we have our excuses. Our minds were clouded by eight years of the
Bush administration's foreign policy - if you can even call it that - which
obscured our vision like a stinging sandstorm. In those days, it was natural to
believe one of two things. Either the world was going to end with a bang (and
soon), or a new administration would come into office in 2009, open up all
Washington's doors and windows, and give the place a good airing out.
No one anticipated what would really happen over the two terms of the Obama
administration, even though that's the job of us futurologists - and I was one
of the best paid in the profession.
Where did we go wrong? How could I have been so blind? That's what I'm going to
try my best to explain.
Hope versus the abyss
Maybe you don't even remember the summer of 2008 any more. The last period has
not, politely put, been easy, so who can be blamed for a little memory loss?
Aren't we all suffering from a bit of post-traumatic stress disorder?
Let me take you back to that summer when the Panglossians were saying: sniff
the air, change is just around the corner - and the Chicken Littles were
replying: sniff the air, you can smell the approaching flames.
Certainly, the pessimists had the weight of history on their side. The Bush
administration, they were arguing, had so transformed the United States and the
world that it simply wasn't possible to undo the damage. If not by water, they
warned, then the fire next time would scorch the earth free of us. And that
fire had the potential to come from almost any direction.
We had only a narrow window of opportunity to deal with climate change, and the
Bush team made sure to slam that window shut. We needed to go all out to find
sustainable sources of energy, and instead the administration was all about
oil. If the Middle East was not exactly the Garden of Eden when George W came
into office, the president had unfortunately taken his inspiration from the
Book of Revelations, not the Book of Genesis. The result was: Iraq, Iran,
Lebanon, Syria, Israel-Palestine, and let's not forget Afghanistan.
And then there were those budget deficits. In 2000, the United States recorded
the largest budget surplus in its history: US$230 billion. In 2002, even before
the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration had already swung the country
completely around and $159 billion into the red. By the summer of 2008, we were
averting our eyes from the ugly truth that the year would end with the largest
budget deficit in US history: $425 billion. Some things are too big to fail, we
are told. But what happens when the biggest of them all goes down in flames? No
one could save the Zeppelin industry when, in 1937, the Hindenburg crashed and
burned.
What could the Panglossian optimists offer in response? There was talk of hope.
There was talk of change. A new administration would bring the United States
back into the family of nations. The cowboys would go back to their ranch. The
adults would be back in charge. There would be pseudo-Manhattan Projects and
Marshall Plans and New Deals. It would be morning again in America, but this
time we would be waking up to the voice of reason in the White House, not the
voice of The Gipper.
And the optimists won. Against the odds, just like a Frank Capra movie, hope
grabbed the White House in November 2008. Sure, there were some folks who were
aghast at the election results. But the rest of us - including me since, hey,
even futurologists have feelings - were euphoric.
At the height of all this euphoria, that's when I published my first foolish
prediction of the future.
Not exactly Kool-Aid
It's hard now to believe our collective giddiness back at the end of 2008. I
wouldn't be surprised to learn that the optimists had spiked our water supply
with Ecstasy. The new crowd that came to Washington - okay, it was actually
mostly the old crowd from the Clinton years - seemed to possess unlimited
energy and good feeling. And it was as if we futurologists could see for miles
and miles and miles into a sunlit future.
Some of you who are old enough or have prodigious powers of recall might
remember back to 1992 when the Democrats ended 12 years of Republican rule.
That moment, too, generated its share of vaulted expectations. I was a mere
novice futurologist at a small Midwestern paper at that time, just learning the
ropes. But who knows: if I'd only learned from my mistakes then, maybe I
wouldn't have flubbed it so bad in 2008.
In any case, right after the 2008 elections, I sat down and wrote my first
report on the new world to come. And you can tell, in retrospect - more than a
few bloggers said so at the time, but who was paying attention? - that I'd
drunk deep from those drug-laced waters.
The new team in Washington, I wrote, would move quickly to clean up the worst
messes created by the Bush administration. They would close down Guantanamo and
reverse the US position on torture. They would begin the long process of
withdrawing troops from Iraq. They would initiate dialogue with Iran and
continue engagement with North Korea. They would sit down with Chavez and
Castro and even Hamas and Hezbollah. They would sign Kyoto. They would defeat
the Taliban and finally capture bin Laden. They would repeal the tax cuts for
the wealthy and renegotiate the free-trade agreements, and launch an
Apollo-style program to develop alternative energies.
Disputatious bloggers aside, the article was well-received. I read positive
assessments from inside and outside the Beltway, from both sides of the aisle.
Of course, my pessimistic brethren in the profession countered with their own
"end is nigh" predictions. The new team wouldn't be able to fulfill any of
their promises. It was too late. We stood one minute before midnight on the
Doomsday clock, and when that moment passed we wouldn't be at noon, and there
would be no Hollywood endings.
As it turned out, we were all wrong.
The Goldilocks apocalypse
My predictions of what the new team would do in their first 100 days was pretty
much spot on. They didn't end up talking with everybody or withdrawing troops
quite so rapidly or renegotiating all the free-trade agreements, and the energy
program was more fireworks than heading for the moon. But they came close
enough.
So, if my predictions were reasonably accurate, why am I beating myself over
the head eight years later? Because I let personal euphoria turn me into a
professional optimist. Somehow I really did convince myself that the new team
could turn back the hands on that Doomsday clock. In fact, I thought they could
recalibrate calendars as well, and bring us back if not to September 10, 2001,
then at least to September 12 - and that the world would give us another chance
to respond, this time with grace under pressure.
But that should be the first, and most obvious, rule of futurology. You can't
change the past. The Greeks were right: we walk into the future backwards, our
eyes fixed on an unchanging past. When we futurologists turn our heads, Linda
Blair-style, to make our predictions, we sin against nature. And sometimes we
forget that what lies behind us is indeed immutable.
The new administration did make a lot of changes in its first 100 days. The
sheer number and the sheer pace fooled everyone into thinking that change had
indeed come to Washington. I thought that the country's trajectory had actually
been altered, that a new direction had been set in US policy.
It turns out, though, that apocalypse comes in many different forms. There are
the dramatic effects of sword and fire and famine. And then there's the
apocalypse of muddling through. That's what happens when you just carry on with
the same old, same old and before you know it, poof, end of the world. It's an
apocalypse that's neither too cold nor too hot, neither too hard nor too soft.
It's the apocalypse of the middle, the Goldilocks apocalypse.
The politics of muddling through
You remember when we finally signed the Kyoto agreement. The new administration
made a big deal about it. The president gave the pen to Al Gore, who said that
it meant more to him than the Nobel Prize and the Oscar combined.
But the time was already long gone when abiding by Kyoto limits would have been
sufficient. Cutting carbon emissions by about 5% of 1990 levels by 2012 - well,
that wasn't a bad target when Kyoto was first negotiated, but that was the
1990s. As we all
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