Editorial 27 August 2001

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Harry Robinson Squints his Eyes to Look into the Future.

"The Futurist" is an impossible magazine. We cannot know the future until it arrives and becomes the present, so why fool with it? The response of the World Future Society is: "We can see trends from the past, see how they stand in the present and try to project them into the future." That's the basis for the magazine published in Bethesda, Maryland, land produced by American intellectuals with their usual ponderous verbosity.

To clear the ground, The Futurist is not one of those gaga sheets given to telling you that by 2027 you will be able to order Martian lettuce from your own private space platform. Nor is it a  dull fact sheet about crops, yields and prices.. It concerns itself with intellectual advances and  some likely consequences.

Formidable! But if you take a fire hose to the ponderosity and a shovel to the verbosity you often uncover some sharp, bright thoughts. The July-August issue contains some heavy dross and some kooky notes - Lube Jobs for Nanomachines and The Webcentric University. It  also holds a stimulating essay by the society president and the magazine editor, Edward  Cornish. His theme promises much: How We Can Anticipate Future Events. It takes him a  while but he does get down to his central thesis which is that "The core of studying the future is ideas."

Cornish is no dope. He admits that all ideas are not equal. Most are worth little and will go  nowhere. Some are dangerous. They range across good, elusive, outright bad and  treacherous, physical like cars and abstract like democracy. All that said, Cornish holds to the view that ideas are the most powerful factors in the life of nations.

"The Japanese and Swiss proved that impoverished people with few natural resources can create great wealth once they have acquired the necessary ideas...

"At the end of World War II, Germany's cities, factories, and transportation systems lay in ruins, but a few years later The Germans were prospering as never before because the war had not destroyed the ideas in their heads."

So much for his broad view. He also applies it to homely, personal and individual lives.

"Most of us recognise that we may not be able to do something due to lack of money or time or physical strength or skill or connections, but we often fail to realise that our biggest limitation is likely to be in our ideas. We lack good ideas or we can't get rid of bad ones. When we are in school, we may have the idea that we are stupid, so we decide it's hopeless to study... When we flunk, it confirms the idea that we are stupid."

The Cornish observations are not original but they are expressed with clear force and they  apply to Australia. Our future will not come out of our ground or material factories but out of our  heads, out of our ideas.

Suppose there is a thing called the national psyche, and suppose we can read it. What are  our motivations, our chief ideas? Probably that we want to make our civil society more civil  and just, that we want to produce enough wealth to keep us in the style to which we are  accustomed, that we want to thrash the world at sports. Oh yes, and that we want the  Australian Defence Force to continue to protect us in our comfortable isolation.

All fine, all desirable, but they are static notions. Not one takes us forward to greater strength or greater wealth or greater achievement. They're "steady as she goes" values.

Not good enough on two grounds. One: the world won't let us stay still and will demand that we advance to greater strength or we will fade away. Two: second-best aspirations aren't worth having.

If Cornish were here, it's dollars to cents that he would say that only increased education can lead us up the path of achievement, and the core of the education will need to lean to science and the scientific mode of thought.

Education is expensive, but how much more expensive not to educate.


Harry Robinson  is a free lance feature writer who has contributed to many of Australia's major publications over the past 35 years. "You could call me a tramp...I have tramped across media and from place to place so wantonly that my reward is a media swag." He can be reached at Harob@Internet.net.au.