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Daniel and David Bell

the breakfast table
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from: David Bell

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 1999, at 3:39 PM ET

Dear Dad,

For as long as I can remember, more than 25 years, reporters have been asking you to make predictions about the future. And you have always given an answer along the lines of what you told the ABC producer yesterday. It's convincing, and sober, and intellectually responsible, and it frustrates them to no end. Just once, perhaps, you should give them what they want. "Watch for the invention of flying cars in 2006, which will drastically affect the course of World War III when it breaks out in 2008. There'll be a Mars colony by 2020. And by the way, make sure to sell all your Xerox stock by next Wednesday."

More seriously, I have one question for you about all of this, and one demurral. The question concerns patterns of technological change. As a lot of commentators have been noting recently, the future isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid, visions of the future were heavy on, yes, flying cars and Mars colonies and the like. Everyone was confidently predicting that by the year 2000 the human race would be well on its way to settling the solar system, while at home we'd be casually buzzing from continent to continent in our cars, and the robot servants took care of cleaning the house.

These seemed reasonable enough predictions, actually, given the pace of change up till then in the 20th century. It's hard to believe that in just 66 years, less than a lifetime, we went from Wilbur and Orville Wright on the beach at Kitty Hawk to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. 66 years! If that pace of change had continued, I would probably have been sending you this e-mail from Jupiter orbit. But it didn't continue. In fact, it's hard not to think that in a lot of areas, technological change has slowed to a crawl, with incremental improvements around the edges, but no great leaps forward. We are 30 years past Apollo 11, and have gone from a Moon landing to ... the space shuttle. Thirty years ago we were flying on 747s, and now we are flying on ... literally the same airplanes. In the United States, at least, transport by car and train is mostly slower than it was then (trains are one area in which the French have beaten us hands down--if we had their high-speed TGV train, you could come down from Boston to see your grandchildren in Washington with a two-hour train ride, instead of the seven-plus Amtrak currently takes). The same is true of other sectors: generation of energy (where we've stepped back from nuclear power), and even, with the exception of computer-guided bombs and the like, weaponry. Where are the stun pistols and blast rays we were supposed to be using by the year 2000? (The NRA has missed out on a great slogan here. "Personal blast rays don't destroy whole city blocks. People destroy whole city blocks.")

But on the other hand, obviously, some technological sectors have been holding to the same, incredible pace of change that aeronautics went through earlier: information technology and biotechnology, first and foremost. Why is this? And how does it relate to the broader structural changes in the economy that you talked about in your message?

Here's my demurral. Is there really such a thing as "primordial identities," in the way you suggest? This is certainly what the present-day nationalists would like us to think. They would like us to imagine that for 40 years, every Serbian mother put her children to bed whispering, "We must put up with this regime for now. But someday, someday, Serbia will awake!" I'm sure some of them were doing exactly that, but lots of others adjusted just fine to the communist regime. It was only when the regime collapsed that certain people saw an advantage for themselves in highlighting ethnic and linguistic differences, and in, not so much resurrecting eternal, unchanging, primordial identities so much as creating new identities based on the old myths and loyalties. And I think they would probably abandon these new identities easily enough if it suited them. If the people of Serbia could vote freely and had the choice between possession of Kosovo and membership in the European Union, which do you think they would choose?

Love,
David

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: David Bell

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

Posted Tuesday, Dec. 14, 1999, at 3:39 PM ET
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Daniel Bell is professor emeritus of sociology at Harvard and the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was recently re-issued (click hereto buy it). David Bell, Daniel's son, teaches history at Johns Hopkins University, and is the author of the forthcoming The National and the Sacred: Religion and the Origins of Nationalism in France.
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