Future Studies - A Question of Time

Futurists as a rule overlook the social understanding of time. In the West, we tend to view time as linear. This is a result of the Bible, once a bedrock of our civilization. The Bible starts with Genesis, or Creation, and ends with Revelation, or Apocalypse. The Bible teaches us we are on a line, a continuum, which has a beginning and an end. Therefore, if we take step A, we can take step B and so forth through step Z. In short, we can create building blocks from the ground up to the tip-top steeple. We can make progress. Our notion of progress, the idea that we can build for the future, flows from this bedrock Biblical social understanding of the dimension of time in which we live. In Asia, we, however, encounter a different social understanding of time - reincarnation. In bedrock Asian thought, Hindu and Buddhist, time is cyclical, not linear. It is like a rubber band. If we stretch it, it snaps back at some point. In Asian thought, regardless of how hard we work, struggle, or fret, sooner or later, we will come full circle and snap back to our starting point. It is easy to see how the social understanding of time, Western or Asian, shapes our view or sense of the future and its possibilities. Futurists as a rule are too fascinated with technology as the decisive factor in how we shape the future. They overlook the importance of the social understanding of time. For instance, because of the Apocalyptic legacy in Western civilization due to the Biblical view of how time is moving, every hint or global warming or global cooling - depending on which day you turn on the TV - becomes Apocalyptic in its implications. We are culturally predisposed to view dislocations as signs of a secular version of the Book of Revelation or Apocalypse - and as a result we become hysterical and over-react. Future Studies need to become sensitive to the social understanding of time. Perhaps we can learn from the Asian social understanding of time. It would help to reduce our hysteria and stress in the West. Or as an Irish poet James Stephens (1882-1950) put it: "What's the use of my abuse? The world will run, Around the sun as it has done, Since time begun. So what's the use of my abuse?" Now, that is a relaxing restatement of the Asian social understanding of time. I thank my stint as a junior/senior high school English teacher for finding this gem from Stephens. In it, East meets West.