Foundations of Futures Studies: History, Purposes, and Knowledge by Wendell Bell

A great, comprehensive introduction to future studies by Yale University sociologist Wendell Bell.

As an introductory manual on the field, I found that there was nothing too surprising written in the book. Bell's research goes through the history of the discipline from its roots in nation-state planning, think tanks like RAND, and key works and key figures. He discusses the purpose of future studies--"the purpose of future studies are to discover or invent, examine and evaluate, and propose possible, probable, and preferable futures" (p. 73)--and delineates nine major tasks for the discipline. He articulates the key assumptions of the discipline and provides an overview of the various methodologies that futurists have created to study the future. The book is good reference material (albeit outdated) for research done in the field, especially for the section on methodology. I was able to discover academic anthropologists other than Robert Textor who have engaged with future studies.

The most interesting section is probably Bell's section on epistemology. He discusses three theories of knowledge, which are positivism, postpositivism, and critical realism. He notes the influence of postpositivism and post-modernism on the field of future studies, critiques these influences, tries to re-orient the discipline around the epistemological framework of critical realism. Very briefly speaking, critical realism assumes the existence of an objective external world but admits the role of individual biases in the process of scientific discoveries. However, it assumes that intersubjective evaluation can overcome these limitations. Bell seems to frame critical realism as the best of both worlds: it holds onto the positivism's optimism of the progression of human knowledge, while incorporating legitimate postpositivist critiques on positivism.

After establishing the critical realist framework, Bell introduces some terms that are good to think with. He distinguishes between presumptively true/false predictions and terminally true/false predictions. Presumptively true/false predictions are made before the event and are taken as such when they withstand the attempts to refute them. Terminally true/false predictions are assessments of phenomena after the event. These two need not align, obviously, especially since presumptively true/false predictions can alter the course of the future (e.g. research on climate change). Future studies truly benefits from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary spirit--futurists should not be researchers of methodologies and mere technicians.

I found something else interesting while reading Foundations of Future Studies--there seems to have been a great deal of interest in future studies in the past, perhaps more so than in the present. According to Bell, the World Future Society, which was founded in 1966, peaked at 60,000 members in 1979, hit a low of 22,500 in 1985 and rose to 1994 in 30,000. It would not be accurate to measure interest in the field using membership numbers for this single organization (perhaps there's been a splintering in the field or bad management, I am a current member and I do not find the World Future Society very compelling), after all, Bell expresses a general optimism for the field. However, I cannot help but think that perhaps the future was a far more exciting topic for the public imagination than it is now.

In the 1960s, there was the space race, there was Star Trek, there was the Jetsons, and human beings actually landed and walked on the moon (it's strange that thinking about this can be so strange--it was over 50 years ago!). Our cultural images of the future now are mostly in the form of dystopias, stories of environmental collapse, the extinction of all human life--basically, images of the future where the future ceases to exist. Instead of working on flying cars and life-changing technologies, our best and brightest technical minds are doing A/B tests for Facebook and Google; instead of leading lives of leisure, where we can explore our true passions, we are forced into more work, and this is precarious labour that barely sustains life. Meanwhile, everything is done to appease the all-mighty shareholder. With the idea of shareholder value maximization, the "future" is violently and artificially tranched and comes in the form of quarterly shareholder reports. In the contemporary political imagination, neo-classical economics seems to have colonized the social under the rubric of the economic. Why have a whole field of future studies when a priesthood of neo-classical economists can calculate the future?

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