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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

11. Futurology and the Imaging Capacity of the West (1970)

Author : J. Russell Boulding

Published in: Elise Boulding: Writings on Peace Research, Peacemaking, and the Future

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

With professional futurists crowding to the microphone to announce the outlines of the future, it is of some interest to examine today’s futurology in the light of the work of one of the first post-World War Two futurologists, Fred Polak. When he sat down at his desk in The Hague to write The Image of the Future in 1951, he felt driven by a sense of extreme urgency to point out to his colleagues in the West that their visioning capacity was becoming seriously impaired. Many great European thinkers had suffered, gone underground or died, and he himself emerged from years of continuous hiding as a Jew in the Netherlands determined to show that young men could still dream dreams.

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previous chapter Witness to Islam’s Creativity: A Scholar’s Reflections on the Islamic Contribution to Peace Dialogue Among Faiths (2003)

next chapter The Dynamics of Imaging Futures (1978)

This text was first published as Elise Boulding, “Futurology and the Imaging Capacity of the West”, World Futures Society Bulletin III(12):1–21, December, 1970. Copyright © 1970 by World Future Review. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Inc. A fuller version by the same title was published in 1971 in: Magoroh Maruyama and James A. Dator, eds. Human Futuristics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, Social Sciences Research Institute).

References to Fred Polak’s Image of the Future (1961) are to the original, unabridged translation, but the wording is taken from the abridged edition published in 1972.

The supernatural, which is used in several different ways by Polak, may in general be thought of as a kind of governor on the total ecosystem of the earth, standing outside that system even while partaking of it.

Questions may be raised concerning the nature of relationships between man and the supernatural which are not dealt with in Polak’s theory. This relationship is formally specified as non-hierarchical, but the specification is exceedingly fuzzy given the difference between the dimension “human” and the dimension “supernatural”.

Rousseau, Confessions; Rabelais, L’Abbaye de Thélème; Defoe, Essays of Projects; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Fenelon, Les Adventures de Télémaque; Holberg, The Underground Journey of Nicholas Klim.

Owen, Signs of the Times, or the Approach of the Millennium, and Book of the New Moral World; Saint Simon, De la Réorganisation de la Société Européenne; Fourier, The Social Destiny of Man, Theory of the Four Movements, and The Passions of the Human Soul.

There is some danger of over-emphasizing the role that contact with other people’s “differentnesses” has in generating a sense of transcendence. Such contact may simply extend the range of an invading culture’s manipulative abilities rather than stimulate the envisioning of totally new kinds of social structures. If there were a direct correspondence between contact with other cultures and transcendence-generation, the West would not now stand accused of having done so much harm to the world.

Every reader is bound to feel that his favorite futurists have been left out, but a high degree of selectivity is unavoidable in a short paper. Polak’s Prognostics, published by Elsevier, deals more fully with the topic.

From a July 1969 mimeographed report from the Secretariat of Mankind 2000 in London, England. Since 1971 the headquarters of Mankind 2000 is located in Rome.

Agape can be translated as love in the sense which that word is used in I Corinthians 13.

The term “higher things”, for those not accustomed to this mode of discourse, may be taken to mean “as yet unspecified potentials”.

Even the concept Euro-North American is an illusion, since this culture area contains a number of non-white cultures such as Eskimos, Indians, Aleuts, Lapps and Gypsies.

Hampden-Turner (1970: 340) cites research in the performance of different categories of people on Terman’s Concept Mastery Test, which measures “… verbal intelligence, breadth of knowledge and interest, the capacity to deal with ideas at an abstract level, to associate meanings, think divergently via analogies, and to converge logically.” Creative writers are far out ahead, and engineers, military officers and independent inventors (Edison types?) at the bottom. It is attractive to contemplate what might ensue if we turned over government policy making to our most creative science fiction writers!

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Title: Futurology and the Imaging Capacity of the West (1970)
Author: J. Russell Boulding
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Elise Boulding: Writings on Peace Research, Peacemaking, and the Future
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30986-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-30987-3

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30987-3_11