Does the future have a future?

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.

AS SCIENTIST and author Arthur Clark once put it, "The future ain't what it used to be." Our life in the present is fraught with worry about what kind of future we and our children will have. While it once offered hope and purpose, it now triggers foreboding.

The 1978 mass murders and suicides at Jonestown in Guyana were prompted by cult leader Jim Jones, who saw no hope for his people on Earth. The David Koresh-led Branch Davidian cult at Waco likewise did not believe that life could be happy on Earth under present conditions.

In both cases and in countless others, there is manifest today a loss of hope, a loss of a reasonable expectation that things will get better. This issue of the future even found its way into a seminar of Biblical scholars debating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Knowing the burden of proof always is upon the one who makes the assertion, they could find only subjective belief--not hard objective evidence--for affirming it. As one put it, "If Jesus was not resurrected from the dead, Christians have no hope for the future." The notion of heaven and its rewards would go by the boards.

With the loss or diminishment of hope for the future comes a deep sense of despair. One even might say that there is an inverse proportion between optimism with respect to technological progress and the commonality of psychological depression experienced by people today. There is increased alienation and what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called an "oceanic feeling" of total drift. Accompanying this is a profound sense of helplessness. It is one reason why so many youths have taken to drugs and alcohol as a means of escaping from the real world.

The government senses this, but believes the problems can be remedied by establishing still more bureaucratic agencies to help those not in the mainstream. What it fails to recognize is that those in dread and on the verge of despair are in the mainstream! Witness how aspirins are being replaced by tranquilizers, as Prozac reigns supreme.

The Unabomber caught this prevailing mood and capitalized on it by blaming increased technology. In effect, he is a 20th-century Luddite, but he has a point. For all the good technology has accomplished, there nonetheless are enormous social evils attendant upon it. As Edward S. Cornish, former president of the World Future Society, noted, "Every action radiates forward in time and outward in space, eventually affecting nearly everything."

Corporate restructuring...