Dan Hannan states into the future...

...and finds himself standing shoulder to shoulder with a Europhile French intellectual

FIRST POSTED APRIL 22, 2009

It's a dangerous business, forecasting. Kelvin McKenzie, the pugnacious tabloid editor, once sacked his horoscope writer in a letter which began: "As you will already know..."

Predictions, especially those which seem banal at the time, often condemn their authors to the ridicule of generations. "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" demanded HM Warner of Warner Brothers. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," said the chairman of IBM in 1943. "We will bury you," Nikita Khrushchev assured the capitalist world in 1958.

The prophecies which seem most risible in retrospect were often received opinion in their day. Those who are most convinced that the world is overheating were warning us, in the 1970s, of a new ice age. In the 1930s, almost everyone assumed that a growing role for the state was both inevitable and desirable. Science fiction of that era envisaged a future in which mankind would be directed by a benign technocratic elite.

The future has turned out better than expected - democracy survived past 1950The Second World War caused people to question the state's beneficence, but not its power. The post-war period was the age of the dystopian novel: 1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange – all still predicated on the idea that people would be told what to do by an all-powerful state. Happily, things didn't work out that way: the thing that almost all futurologists of that era missed was the rise in consumer-driven freedom.

By and large, the future has turned out better than expected. One especially enjoyable example of misread entrails was a book published in 1936 by John Langdon-Davies entitled A Short History of the Future, which confidently assured its readers: "Democracy will be dead by 1950". You can see why he thought so in 1936. But human resilience has a way of confounding pessimists.

Three years ago, Jacques Attali wrote a book with – apparently by sheer coincidence – the same name: Brève histoire de l'Avenir (Arcade, £16.99), which has just been published in English. I was all set not to like it. Attali is one of those semi-state-funded intellectuals who cannot exist outside France. He had been the first head of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which is meant to help struggling firms, but often ends up giving soft loans to Europhile multi-nationals. In that role, he caused a small scandal by spending millions of pounds on marble cladding to glorify his headquarters. Just the sort of Establishment Euro-enthusiast, I thought, who would be utterly assured in his opinions and utterly wrong.

Well, he's assured alright. He foretells our future with sublime confidence. The end of the American empire will be followed by planetary empire, then planetary war, then planetary democracy. His tone, thoughout, is that of a French philosopher, dealing with abstract nouns because empirical reasoning is beneath his dignity. And yet, for all this, the fellow has a point. Unlike past futurologists, he is neither unduly alarmist nor unduly pessimistic. His

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Taking nothing away from the man, the current economic crisis (recession/depression/credit crunch, call it what you will) was forewarned by quite a number of commentators, with good basis and quite some time ago. For example, see Fred Harrison at 'renegadeeconomist.com' to name but one.

Posted by The Anti-Pawn at 1:01pm on April 23, 2009

The very idea of any futurist coming to conclusions that are correct is a fanciful flight into the world of 'imagine.' Why we should listen to one person and not the other is beyond me, any futurist can come up with a 'future lifestyle' that will protect and serve, whether whatever they protect and serve is the state or the individual. Their personal opinion and viewpoints come into play in any prediction that is made, personally, some of the worst predictions made are spouted by the politicians and pundits that inhabit the world of television and journalism. I would rather put my time to good use and not listen to these supposed 'seers of the future,' and work towards making the future a better place to live.

Posted by nrobi at 3:19pm on April 24, 2009

'The end of the American empire will be followed by planetary empire, then planetary war, then planetary democracy'. What utter tosh. But then Hannan's statement 'Those who are most convinced that the world is overheating were warning us, in the 1970s, of a new ice age' is yet more of the same old nonsense trotted out by the hard of thinking who don't want to admit the greens [hippies even, ouch] were right all along. Actually, those warning of the [possibility of] a new ice age, were not the same people that are 'convinced the world is overheating' it was just a few scientists speculating, followed by tabloid sensationalism, but I expect they impressed the [very young] Daniel, who is obviously unconvinced climate change is reality, putting him in the 0.001% of doubters. Perhaps he should get out more, he might notice the climate is changing. As for Hannan's penultimate paragraph, well, I've been saying exactly the same thing for years [so do I have the right to be heard also?], and I can't see why it wasn't blindingly obvious to everyone including Daniel, or perhaps he too was caught up in the greed mania of making a fortune from housing and didn't have time to think too deeply about how first time buyers could continue to fuel the profiteering frenzy. But I'm not a fat Eurocrat, so my opinion isn't worthy of his attention. Along with most politicians, he's just noticed online media, so we should be grateful for that.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 1:54pm on April 27, 2009

Hannan, like other Thatcher children, just can't acknowledge that the 80s greed-is-good (when he was supposedly growing up) was never a viable option and, like all spoilt brats, keeps fingers in orifices shouting ''nyaa nyaa, can't hear reality a'knocking". I have even less time for french sophistry but even a broken clock is correct twice a day. As they say in Oz,"yer ain't wrong" but that is far from the same as being correct. Unfortunately, like PeterS, I gotta live with the idiocies that anyone with a basic understanding of arithmetic saw coming decades ago.

Posted by allan kessing at 1:35pm on April 29, 2009