Monday brought us several articles about the way "the future" used to be. I predict that we will see more of the same...

I couldn't help but notice several articles in several different places referenced in yesterday's pile of email on the subject of "the future". One was Jason Fry's Real Time article in the Wall Street Journal Online, comparing the way we thought the future was going to be with the way it actually turned out (invoking the name of George Jetson as a point of comparison). Another was eminent science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke's hypothetical view backwards from the year 2500. Clarke waxes... um, pre-nostalgically (???) about his imagined future, complete with the usual impractical pragmatism (yes, you read that right) associated with most science fiction future history. His conclusion about the nature of religion, that "All religions were invented by the Devil to conceal God from mankind", is vividly true but typical of scientific atheists' tendency to preach to the choir on that subject. Preemptively (or pre-post-cognitively) calling his own coinage a "famous saying" may ultimately and self-fulfillingly have had made it so, in a tense artificially manufactured for use in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Like The Jetsons, Clarke's track record in accurately predicting the future isn't exactly stellar. He had us living on the moon in 2001, taken there by Pan Am space shuttles with difficult-to-use toilets, stopping off along the way at giant spinning orbiting Hilton hotels. In some sense, as Jason Fry notes, The Jetsons may have been closer to the mark than Clarke: we do have treadmills at home on which we could walk our dogs (if we really wanted to—and you know someone has surely tried, probably with results similar to George Jetson's), and robot vacuum cleaners, though not quite Rosie the robot maid, do exist.

The big sticking point, though. seems to be the flying cars. Where the hell are the flying cars? ("Where's my jet pack?" is an alternative question in a similar vein.) OK, we're not living in domed colonies on the moon or Mars, and the time machine with which we could right all our wrongs from the previous day (or, if necessary, from our entire life in high school) hasn't been built. Fine. But why can't my car fly? Why am I still stuck behind some dweeb in traffic when I ought to be able to take off and fly right past him? (HINT: If people don't signal now when they're changing lanes horizontally on the ground, imagine the collisions when people "change lanes" vertically.)

These articles got me thinking not about the consequences of ex post facto 20/20 hindsight retrofuturism, not about Christopher Lloyd drawing multiple alternate timelines to explain how the future isn't what it used to be, but about the way the history of the way people have thought about the future. Historically speaking, most people from the Babylonians and the Hindus to the Romans and the Mayans believed time was cyclical. The notion of a changeable malleable future, according to Thomas Cahill, came not from any of these civilizations but from the Jews. (See his book The Gifts of the Jews.) While it may be a stretch to credit Judaism alone with this (for its time) new and different way of looking at change and at the future, these contrasting ways of doing so have historically been in conflict. It could be said (perhaps flippantly) that this is the difference between conservatism and liberalism—one having the view that time runs in circles and nothing really changes, the other asserting that change is inevitable and progress over time is possible.

On the other hand, check out Nassim Nicholas Taleb's article, also at Forbes.com, which is in one sense the usual conservative apologia for unbridled capitalism, this time based on the notion that change is inevitable and the future is unpredictable and it should all be welcomed with open arms... or more precisely with massive deregulation. ("American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows us to capture the randomness of the environment"—never mind that this particular kind of progress is made at the expense of that environment in the end.) Its message resounds with the same tone as that most fantastical magnum opus of conservative science fiction, Atlas Shrugged. He touts "trial and error" as a virtue of American capitalism, but how much error can we afford in the long run?

Perhaps this all belongs in one of Conan O'Brien's "In the Year 2000" segments. Just after the millennium, as we startled ourselves with the fact that we were in the future we had long been awaiting, that schtick was funny. Now, as the realization that the past-tense present of our present-day future will not come to pass finally comes to pass, it just isn't anymore.