A History of the Future

Does history have to be only about the past? "History" refers to both a subject matter and a thought process. That thought process involves raising questions, marshalling evidence, discerning patterns in the evidence, writing narratives, and critiquing the narratives written by others. Whatever subject matter they study, all historians employ the thought process of historical thinking. What if historians were to extend the process of historical thinking into the subject matter domain of the future? Historians would breach one of our profession's most rigid disciplinary barriers. Very few historians venture predictions about the future, and those who do are viewed with skepticism by the profession at large. On methodological grounds, most historians reject as either impractical, quixotic, hubristic, or dangerous any effort to examine the past as a way to make predictions about the future. However, where at one time thinking about the future did mean making a scientifically-based prediction, futurists today are just as likely to think in terms of scenarios. Where a prediction is a definitive statement about what will be, scenarios are heuristic narratives that explore alternative plausibilities of what might be. Scenario writers, like historians, understand that surprise, contingency, and deviations from the trend line are the rule, not the exception; among scenario writers, context matters. The thought process of the scenario method shares many features with historical thinking. With only minimal intellectual adjustment, then, most professionally trained historians possess the necessary skills to write methodologically rigorous "histories of the future." History, according to Kevin Reilly, is both a noun and a verb.' By this Reilly means that "history" refers to both a subject matter-a body of knowledge-and a thought process, a disciplined habit of mind. This bifurcation of history into subject matter and cognitive process has increasingly informed the thinking of history education reformers over the last decade. The National Standards for History recommended, in addition to specific subject matter content, that elementary and secondary school students learn the process of "historical thinking" in their classes. The authors of the national standards state that in engaging in historical thinking students should be able to participate in the sorts of activities all historians perform: "to raise questions and to marshal solid evidence in support of their answers"; to "create historical narratives and arguments of their own"; to "thoughtfully read the historical narratives created by others"; and to "examine the interpretive nature of history" by examining the evidence marshaled by other 1. Kevin Reilly, The West and the World: A History of Civilization (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), xi. A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE historians and the interpretive weight they assign to their selection of sources.2 We must separate the process of historical thinking from the subject of that process, and in turn remind ourselves that one meaning of the word "history" is "inquiry." One of the more important trends in twentieth-century historiography was the extension of history-as-thought-process to subjects beyond politics, diplomacy, war, and the decisions of Great Men. Historians today are more likely to write narratives dealing with women, workers, Brazilian slaves, or the mentalities of revolutionaries. Historians imaginatively have extended the thought process of historical thinking to these wider domains of inquiry, all the while maintaining the basics of that thought process. In understanding history as a thought process first and as a body of data second, historians have expanded the domain of inquiry beyond the boundaries of elite culture and those with power. The purpose of this essay is to explore the idea of extending historical thinking into a domain historians traditionally have avoided: the future. I will argue that, in using the process of historical thinking, historians may inquire into the future in the way we traditionally have inquired into the past. Rather than writing predictions, however, historians might employ scenario writing, a method for thinking about the future that relies on many of the same techniques historians use when writing about the past. In the same way that an earlier generation of historians asked if history had to be only about politics, we might ask "does history have to be only about the past?" I. HISTORIANS AND THE FUTURE Historians have avoided writing serious inquiries about the future because we have generally been skeptical about our ability to make predictions. Those historians who have thought about the future-or whose ideas others have used to think about the future-have tended to be speculative philosophers of history, a special class of historian. Vico, Hegel, Marx, Toynbee, and Spengler discerned patterns in the human past that they thought they could then project forward. Lest we think that universal histories are a nineteenth-century phenomenon, there have been more recent efforts to see patterns in the past as a way to think forward about the future, as evident in the works of Robert Heilbroner, Arthur Schlesinger, and William Strauss and Neil Howe.3 In all of these instances, think2. National Standards for History, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/nchs/standards/thinking5-12.html, accessed August 21, 2002. See also Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). 3. Robert Heilbroner, a historian and economist, similarly wrote about the future, alerting Americans in the 1960s to "the grand dynamic of history." Indeed, Heilbroner observed that attention to "this grandiose design" of historical forces would guide American actions in the future. See The Future as History (New York: Grove Press, 1959). Arthur Schlesinger identified "the cycles of American history," and offered a guide for thinking about how those cycles might continue to unfold into the future. See The Cycles of American History [1986] (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999). William Strauss and Neil Howe, although not professional historians, have identified patterns in the characteristics of American generational cohorts. They have developed an elaborate schematic that predicts 73