Revisiting the Image of the Future

In preparing for a talk introducing a broad look at the future, I thought of Polak’s Image of the Future, which is the first book about the future that caught my attention way back when. I started glancing through, and before I knew it, was flipping through the whole thing. It’s available as a pdf.  Thought I’d share some of my margin notes:

Polak was writing in the 1970s, originally in Dutch, and eventually translated to English. His concern was about “moment-ridden man trapped in a moment-bound culture. He speculated right up front: “Is man at present a self-willed being who creates his own future; or is he a time-bound creature clinging desperately to today for fear of what tomorrow may bring?” He has a direct style that pulls no punches. He believed the latter. He backed it up by comparing the major upheavals in our history when humanity truly created images of the future – the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the first Industrial Revolution – with today’s indifferent pattern.

An image of the future helps us to make sense of the unknown. Polak notes the role of “ideal values” as a key step in the conscious creation of images of the future. [I suspect that my long-time interest in values derived from this.] The image of the future reflects and reinforces these values. As an example of an image, he cites the resurrection of Israel as preached by the Old Testament prophets as one of the most powerful and persistent images of the future ever evolved.

He developed the interesting idea of images as “time-bombs” that explode somewhere in the future….”although the men and societies who create them have little control over when, where, and how they will explode.”

Six main aspects of images come into play:

1. Images of the future are always aristocratic in origin. The author of the image invariably belongs to the creative minority of a society.
2. The propagation of images, The force that drives the image of the future is only in part rational and intellectual ; a much larger part is emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual.
3. Image-effect, or the relationship between the projected future (whether positive or negative) and the actual future as it passes into history,
4. Self-elimination of images takes place in a natural way through the historical process of succession of images, and through the dialectical changes they themselves provoke.
5. The periodic adaptation to time-change through self-correction, renewal, and change on the part of images of the future in the continuous interplay of challenge and response
6. The loss of the capacity for adequate self-correction and timely renewal of images of the future. It is a main thesis of this work that for the first time in the three thousand years of Western civilization there has been a massive loss of capacity, or even will, for renewal of images of the future.

A key development in images came with the enlightenment, as images – often expressed through utopias – began to take on “an overwhelmingly this-worldly orientation.” The focus shifted from the afterlife to this life.

When he gets to Marxism, which he classifies as a utopic vision, he observed that its failure “dealt a blow to the pure utopia from which it has never recovered.”

A key challenge to utopias an images of the future is that technology began to offer “an unprecedented confirmation of the possibilities of the utopia…thus technology sometimes seems to steal the leading role from reason in an enlightened utopia.”

Thus he concludes that our present age (writing in the 1970s): “We might say that the future speaks a foreign language to us today….The unique aspect of our present situation is the existence of a vacuum where the images had once been. There is a literal aversion to images of the future as such, whether of a natural or supernatural order.” Again, in case you didn’t get the point yet: “We mean by the term ‘defuturizing’ a retreat from constructive thinking about the future in order to dig oneself into the trenches of the present. It is a ruthless elimination of future-centered idealism by today-centered realism.” Okay, I think we got it!

He cites existentialism and dystopias as further reinforcing the absence of positive images of the future. And he believe that this “breakdown” was a radical one, “not simply a temporary wavering of the historical process.”

Yet he remained optimistic: “The task before us is to re-awaken the almost dormant awareness of the future and to find the best nourishment for a starving social imagination.”

I’d like to ponder where we stand today on images of the future. Hmmmm. Have to get back to you on that. Andy Hines