Futurologists' hard task

Never before has it been so hard to make reliable forecasts on our future. The past too numbers resounding blunders, but unknown factors are even more today.

What will the world be like in 2010? And what about 2025 and 2050? Never before has futurology undergone a similar crisis and the forecasts we read in many specialist websites could not differ more. Some steadfastly believe in scientific progress and that mankind has calmed down, while others announce cataclysms of every sort ranging from the rise in the level of the oceans to nuclear wars. The most reliable experts have become very reticent because blunders have been too many in the past thirty years and fate has reserved us far too many surprises.
Do you recall? When Nikita Krusciov predicted that the USSR ‘on the mend’ from Gagarin’s space enterprise would have surpassed the United States of America, many believed him. Very few instead foresaw that the Berlin Wall would have fallen in 1989 and that the Communist system would have been crushed and even less imagined that the Soviet Union would have melted away in 1991.
There was a spell in the ‘80s when all foretold that Japan would have continued its triumphal march in the wake of Toyota, Sony and Mitubishi’s triumphs till it became the No. 1 industrial power. There were good reasons to believe it: the Empire of the rising sun was the only leading nation to be spared the 1968 revolution; it knew neither strikes nor social conflict and its powerful conglomerates seemed to interpret modern capitalism better than all others. At the peak of their economic power the Japanese even started invading America by purchasing the Rockefeller Center and many other symbols of the stars and stripes, establishing their factories in Europe and hoarding all the major works of art, which entered the market, at leading auctions. Then the great speculative bubble burst, the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Nikkei Index fell to one fourth its maximum values and though Japan has remained the second economy in the world during ten years of recession, it is considered the “great sick man of Asia” since it cannot implement the necessary reforms and runs the risk of being increasingly obscured by China on which nobody would have bet a cent at the time of the chaos of the cultural revolution, which took place less than 40 years ago.
After the break up of the USSR Francis Fukuyama, the famous American politologist, published an essay, which gave rise to extensive discussions: “the end of history”. He foresaw that liberal values would have triumphed in the whole world at the end of the bipolar system and the antithesis between communism and capitalism, between planned economy and market economy, and that a generalised phase of peace and prosperity would have followed. When Bush senior launched the Gulf War to punish Saddam for the Kuwait invasion, he announced the forthcoming establishment of a “New World Order”. Needless to say, he did not even imagine what would have happened ten years later on September 11 2001.
More wrong forecasts? We are only spoilt for choice. Some predicted that the steep rise in the price of oil would only have been momentary because oil reserves are still plentiful and it is in the best interest of producing countries to exploit them to the utmost: the result is before our eyes whenever we ask for a full tank and future perspectives are, if at all, even worse, after the massive arrival in the market of new “clients” like India and China. Some announced that this would have been the decade of Africa, the most backward continent of all, which is instead increasingly sucked into a vortex of famine, tribal wars and unrestrained corruption. We could say that failed forecasts are even more crushing. With the exception of some experts like Samuel Huntington, who announced a conflict of civilizations with the Islamic world ten years ago, at the close of the last century nobody anticipated that the third millennium’s first decade would have been experienced in the shade of Al Qaeda’s terrorism, the shadow, which darkens both politics and the daily life of citizens. In the same manner, when the machine of the European Constitution started moving, nobody realised that it ran the risk of being sunk in the finishing stretch by the very country which had wanted it - France.
Then there is the chapter of scientific forecasts headed by the age-old issue of the greenhouse effect. The majority of experts who swear on gradual global heating and the subsequent gradual rise in the level of oceans are contrasted by a minority, which believes that this theory and invention of environmentalists is exploited by unscrupulous characters, even documenting that the average temperature has not undergone changes outside those which the earth has always cyclically undergone (see Michael Crichton’s book, “State of Fear”). The above means to say that futurologists’ profession is charged with risk and that it is extremely hard – if not impossible – to answer all the abovementioned questions. It does not suffice to analyse the trends and study the dossiers; we must also have a good dose of instinct to perceive whether we are at the eve of important changes in the route. Let us make a few examples here too. What lies in the future of the European Union? Modern analysts are almost equally divided in those who believe that Europe has reached the end of the line in the integration process with the choice of expansion and the rejection of the Constitution, and those who are instead convinced that we are only facing a development crisis, which can be overcome, if not within 2005, certainly within 2025. Both parties bring valid argumentations to support their theses. Europe, which is by now unable to continue its progress towards political unity, is supported by the general disaffection of public opinion towards a “superstate”, by the opposition of a growing number of member countries and by the very difficulty to form an agreement between 25 (and soon 27) governments, which are moved by extremely diverging interests. A new leap forward towards unity is backed by the argumentation that, if Europe still wants a leading role in the international scene, it must necessarily speak up with one voice, and the almost long-standing point that treatises, which followed, have triggered a process that cannot be stopped and hence must unavoidably flow into a Federation. The problem is that the equation has too many unknown factors. How will Europe react to the economic involution, which has struck it, and which could become irreversible if the guiding countries lack the skill to implement painful but necessary reforms? Will the many states of the Union succeed in coming to an agreement on a reasonable immigration policy, which clamps down on the yearly arrival of hundreds of thousands of non-EC immigrants who are then joined by wives, children and various relations and who in a generation or two will doubtless make us loose our identity? Will the Union find a leader like Adenauer, De Gasperi ad Schumann in the early phase, and Kohl and Mitterrand in the second phase, who skilfully pushed it almost despite itself towards a greater unity but who are conspicuously absent today? Nobody can give a decisive answer to these questions today, hence it is practically impossible to guess the Union’s configuration in twenty years time (when controversial negotiations with Turkey should have also been concluded).
Another million dollar question concerns America. How long will the United States, which is now the only global superpower committed with its massive military forces from the Middle East to the tip of Africa and from the Caribbean Sea to Eastern Asia, feel like being ‘policemen’ and “exporters of democracy” to the world? The Iraqi events (but not only those) have shown that it is a costly and heavy role to play, which can doubtless please the ego of leaders but which the people – who by culture and tradition are all but internationalist – are appreciating ever less. The constant tribute of blood the country is called to pay to the Iraqi enterprise has the effect of bringing about a rebirth of deep America’s old isolationism, though even in Cocomo, Indiana, people realise that after September 11 the challenge has become global and the US withdrawal from the most exposed positions could only make room for hostile forces. But the financial issue too requires due consideration: not even a superpower’s resources are without limits and to face the many international emergencies the country has ended up by falling excessively into debt, even placing the solidity of the dollar at risk. Now that the New Orleans’ tragedy will absorb many other billions of dollars, revealing at the same time the superpower’s many deficiencies and weaknesses, George W. Bush’s successor – whoever the person – could decide to put an end to the so-called “imperial era” and to its too many obligations to focus on solving internal problems. How would the other great candidates - ranging from the European Union to China - behave in this case? They have so far been torn between the perspective of accepting the American umbrella forever and that of attempting to compete with Washington in their respective geographical areas. And who will have the necessary strength to prevent old and new “Rascal nations” from equipping themselves with mass destruction weapons, thus making the world more dangerous than what it already is today?
This leads us fatally to analyse the perspectives of the main crisis the world finds itself facing today: Islamic terrorism. How long will it last? Will it extend to other countries? Will it make the West adopt defensive laws, which limit our freedom and human rights as we see them? Will it close with the defeat of Al Qaeda or will it really develop into a conflict of civilizations and into the defeat of the West feared by Oriana Fallaci, just to mention a name? Those who have not studied the trend very well may find it absurd that the large rich industrialised nations cannot find a solution to a trend, which is doubtless rooted in a certain Islamist culture (and not generally Islamic) and which probably has the more or less hidden support of tens of millions of Muslims, from East Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. But, as proved by the four years, which have elapsed since the Twin Tower attack, military and repressive power alone are inadequate to solve an extremely elusive enemy, who can hide in a thousand different places and equally strike tens of thousands of targets. At most, the terrorist threat is not so dangerous for the direct damage it can inflict, as for the damage induced: however vulnerable western societies may seem to be, a few hundreds of dead a year (a hundredth, or even less, than those who die on the streets) should not put them on their knees. But there is what we could call the induced factor: the fear of travelling, which has thrown airlines into a crisis, the fear of terrorist attacks, which hinders the hoped for relaunch of nuclear energy, and the fear that the enemy will succeed in blocking or even in reducing the regular flow of oil towards industrialised nations from time to time.
One of the characteristics of this first decade of the Third Millennium is in fact a certain prevalence of pessimism. Not even at the time of the Cold War, when we repeatedly risked World War 3, were men so worried, probably because at the end of the day the conflicts of the time were ruled by laws, while the protagonists of current ones are crazy bloodthirsty persons like Abou Mussa El Zarkhavi, who even boasts about the massacre of innocent civilians. Even scientific progress is at times viewed as a danger to mankind’s future, as controversy on genetically modified organisms or on the use of stem cells clearly shows.
In perfect good faith, many today say that mankind’s current priorities are war against poverty and lifting billions of human beings, who are daily fighting hunger and diseases, to an acceptable standard of life. It is doubtless a noble cause, which could also reduce the rate of unrest in the world. But the goal industrialised nations have set themselves - to halve poverty within 2015 allocating 0.7% of their GDP to humanitarian purposes - seems quite unrealistic, especially if we consider that even the richest countries lack resources today and that when the cash till is empty the money allocated for foreign expenses is always the first to be cut down. If everything goes well (in other words if there are no other wars, other pandemic diseases like AIDS, other natural catastrophes on a vast scale and many other ifs) some results can be achieved in this field not in 2025, but in 2050.
We need not tear out our hair: however it seems unavoidable that the new generations will have a harder and more uncertain life than those which are currently shifting towards the end of their active life; besides history tends to increase its pace with unpredictable changes round the corner.

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