In one of his regular "Viewpoint" columns in The Irish Timesin the 1980s, poet and critic Anthony Cronin outlined a dystopian vision of the future around the concept of "future shock", which had been popularised in the 1970s by the futurologist Alvin Toffler in a best-selling book of the same title. – JOE JOYCE
THERE IS, in case you haven’t heard, a phenomenon known as “future shock.” It is analogous to culture shock, but less escapable. We have all, willy-nilly, been transplanted to the future and we do not like it. Or, even if we think we like it, it is having a deeply traumatic effect on us all.
And there is also, in case you haven’t heard either, another phenomenon known as “future loss.” The assured, predictable futures that people once had are no longer there. This is partly the bomb and the threat of annihilation, but not entirely so.
Besides the bomb and the holocaust that may or may not be to come, the future has been wiped out for people by mass unemployment, general uncertainty, the speed of technological change and the breakdown of values.
The middle-class evolutionary ideal of ever better lives for ever brighter and better educated children has proved a delusion. But, on the other hand, there is no use knowing your station in life and being determined to make the best of it either. Your station in life is simply not there any longer, whether to accept or reject. Worse still, perhaps . . . is the fact that even those who are doing well at the moment do not look forward to the future with any sort of hope or confidence.
Even advertising agents, data processing managers, stockbrokers and marketing executives are filled with an interior dread. It is not just that they feel threatened by the prospect of ever deeper recession and perhaps ultimately revolution. It is that they don’t even want more of the same, for themselves or for their children. In fact, the prospect of more of the same gives them deep interior heebie-jeebies.
And to all this, of course, the powers that we have offer no answer . . . And anything that it is in their nature to do will only produce more future shock and future loss, plus the grim increments and bonuses that come with them – grannie-bashing, drug abuse, football and pop riots, suicide, murder, mayhem and ever-sillier television programmes.
In which case, it might be first thought, it behoves somebody else to do something. It is quite understandable that those whose only belief in the future is as an ever more obscene carnival of obscene selfishness . . . should keep quiet about it, but what about those who do believe in a rational future for humanity and who may even hope that they are in some sense working to construct it? Do they not see that a humanity which is deeply sceptical, pessimistic or despairing about the future, and possibly any future whatever, is unlikely to join them in the making of it, if only out of sheer scepticism?
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