The Future of Humanism*

I must summon up my courage to discuss the future of humanism—indeed of any field of human endeavor. Doubtless I could set up shop as a prophet—this is open to us all—but it is extremely difficult to truly assess the present, and to extrapolate from it a possible guide to worlds yet to come. One is never sure they will come for one tends always to read the present into the future. H. G. Wells, who spent much of his life as a “futurist,” found a good phrase when he spoke of “the shape of things to come.” We can, in truth, only try to look at “the shape.” But shapes take many forms; they express in large measure the known rather than the unknown. I think the safest statement we can make is that the future never turns out to be quite what we imagine it will be. Even the business world, which must allow itself as little imagination as possible, since it depends on close and desirably accurate estimates and measurements, has to bow its head before the unforeseen and the continual cosmic roll of the dice. We do what we can, however, and a whole new science, called “futurism,” has developed a word-breaking vocabulary to propound what in effect is simply old-fashioned utopianism. Futurism is usually designed to make industry feel less anxious and even a bit smug about its daily rape of the world. Certain social scientists recognize that our ecology is being fragmented and eroded and that technology is in a state of anarchy and contradiction. Yet some of them murmur soothing phrases, sweet to the ear of the industrial complex, such as man's potential for developing a “new set of regenerative abilities.” They point out