THE FUTURE...WELCOMED OR NOT!!!

Why is it that we welcome progress but fear the future? Advancements in technology are looked forward to eagerly, new gadgets are drooled over,

and we live in a state of continuous thrall waiting for the next big thing. As an economy, we are focused on growth and we measure this progress with an enormous amount of seriousness and whenever the pace slackens as we are seeing right now, there is much heartburn and breast-beating.

And yet, when we are asked to imagine the fruits of our labour by looking ahead and visualizing the future, the most common response is to see it in dark and somewhat forbidding terms. Science fiction representations of the future tend to follow a dystopian trajectory, Matrix and Dark Knight being good examples of this trend.

Visually, we see the future in dark and metallic hues; futuristic design is angular and unfamiliar, deriving its inspiration from a bratty incompliance with the present rather than a genuine reading of the future. Politically, we fear what the future will bring in terms of surveillance and control, a theme we visit again and again in popular culture all the way from 1984 to Minority Report to the mandal commission. It is as if the future is in some ways a denial of the present, and exists in our imagination as smthin which cautions us..

Of course, there are enough reasons to fear for our future. Global warming, terrorism, nuclear warfare, worldwide epidemics - the list is worryingly long and scarily plausible. But then, there are enough reasons for optimism - advances in medicine post the Genome project, ever increasing abilities to process information, the exciting promise of nanotechnology to name just a few. The issue seems to be a more fundamental one. It is as if we are somehow compelled to act in the present out of hope and imagine the future out of anxiety. We use the vocabulary of more-better-faster right now but somehow the place it takes us to is cold and scary.

Perhaps our imagined future is an accelerated magnification of our feeling of anxiety about today. The future becomes a vantage point from which we can critique our present with much greater clarity. It allows us to rise above our concern with ourselves and see the future from a neutral vantage point.

From this perch, we can se the larger themes that dominate our world more vividly. We worry less about what progress means for us as individuals today and look at what it means for us, as a collective over a period of time. Of course, since there can be no neutral vantage point, and the only terms of reference we have are rooted in the past, we can only imagine the future in terms of our past, most often as the opposite of what we see as our past.

It is interesting how the past or the idea of the past which is really all that it ends up being in our mind gets so easily spread with nostalgia. We look upon the many inadequacies of the past with fondness and consume a reprised version in the form of things retro while the future remains a place where people forego humanness in exchange for technological stuff. We fear that we will inhabit a world of mechanical perfection which will leave no room for human imperfection.

Seen from the perspective of an individual the past is a pleasant conspiracy that results in her being born while the future is what happens to the world when she dies. Could our imagination of the future be an articulation of our anxiety about our gradual erasure from this world? For after our passing we distribute our selves in a maze of descendants; in that sense we cannot feel the sense of continuity we do when we retrace our past when we imagine the future. The past converges to a single source - we can locate our origins while the future vanishes in a dispersed, diffused spray.

Or perhaps, our anxiety about the future comes simply from our inability to know it or be there when it happens. We can know the past or at least construct a model of some kind about it based on some evidence. We can loom over the past armed with knowledge and transient existence. The future dwarfs us by its enigmatic persistence. It leaves us bereft - all our knowledge, our accomplishments, our progress mean very little when cast against the awesome infinitude of the future.

We are dissolved in our own future while the universe is a thing to our past. A famous writer famously wrote that its not that I am afraid of dying, it's just that I don't want to be there when it happens. It appears that we might well be afraid of the future precisely because we won't be there when it happens!