I’m definitely happier since we’ve moved down here. I feel more relaxed, more laid back, and I find that I think about the future more than I ever did when I was writing about futurist topics. I suppose that’s why a show like Battlestar Galactica doesn’t resonate with me. Let’s face it: Battlestar is Star Trek for Emos. And just so no one gets their noses too out of joint, I’ll concede that it’s Star Trek for Emos – done very well. But even though my interest in science fiction, technology and the future of culture and humanity is still as strong as it ever was, I find very little of contemporary sci-fi and futurism resonates with me because it’s just not congruent with how I feel. And right now, I feel happy and upbeat and optimistic about the future, however unfashionable and un-postmodern that feeling might be. To be honest, you couldn’t pay me a higher compliment than to accuse me of not getting postmodernism.
It’s not like moving to Guadalajara caused this change in my mood. It had been building for a long time. Part of the happiness I’m feeling right now might be my contrarian nature at work. You’re not supposed to be happy. You’re supposed to feel guilty, ashamed of your culture and its history, ashamed of your lifestyle, your gender, your ethnicity, your consumption habits, and your spiritual beliefs. Refusing to accept that burden of unearned guilt and refusing to adopt an unproductive cynicism seems as good a way as any of symbolically slapping a lot of really annoying people in the face.
And it’s not like optimism about the future is something new for me. It’s the default attitude imposed on me by my psychological makeup. I just lost my way a bit over the last few years and allowed myself to become influenced by a culture that’s, well…not terribly happy, frankly. I don’t exactly know why Canada, the States and the U.K. tend to show up in the top slots of Unhappiest Countries Indexes, but we do, and our aggregate vision of the future is both affected by, and arises out of that miserabilist pessimistic streak.
Futurism is less of a crystal ball than it is a mirror – we can never really invent or imagine a future that is at odds with our own sense of self and internalized worldview. So people who think that technology is the most important thing in the world can’t help but create futures that are dominated by technology, while people who are obsessed with morality are only able to think about the future in terms of how it will deviate morally from world in which they live. You could say that a lot of conservative pundits are futurists in the sense that they can’t stop imagining the dire future consequences of letting men get married or become pregnant or letting Mexicans into the country and so on, according to their endless lists of anxieties. I used to read a lot of political blogs on both sides of the fence, but I had to stop because I just got tired of the sustained scream of fear and outrage that is essentially all political commentary is about these days.
Futurist Alvin Toffler was obsessed with the idea that the pace of change in society was escalating out of control, taking us to a kind of cultural and psychological singularity in which the ability of the human psyche to deal with change would break down. In the prologue of his 1970 book Future Shock, he begins with the sensible warning that the first sin of futurism is to assume that if something exists today, there will be more of it tomorrow, and even more of it the day after that. Then he goes on to do exactly that for the rest of the book!
So it’s not that I’m not interested in the futurism, just that I tend to be much more skeptical of futurist thought than I used to be. I find myself less interested in whether Ray Kurzweil is “right” or “wrong” about the future, than I am in the psychology underlying his vision. Why does he want to live forever? Why does he want to upload his consciousness into a machine? How does that psychology differ from the frame of mind that inspired Walt Disney or Gene Roddenberry’s visions? Once you get past the obsession with whether this or that prediction is accurate, you get into the really interesting meat and potatoes of why that particular prediction was made by that particular person in the first place.
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