Title: A Brief History of the Future
Author: Jacques Attali
The blurb states that Attali is
…an economist, historian, cultural critic, and one of the world's most respected political thinkers. He cofounded and served as the first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He is the president of Pla.Net Finance, an international non-profit organization assisting microfinance institutions all over the world. He lives in Paris.I am sure that Attali is a genial fellow and probably very smart at running non-profit corporations, but it was a risky venture for him to write what is basically another futurist book, because I fear it will end up being an unintended source for future snickering and thus damaging to his savoir faire. For futurist prognostications have had dismal track records, and things seldom come out the way futurists envision. Look around you. Do you see any domed cities on the Moon, or people zipping around town in levitating cars? Rather, black swans can pop up in the sky, and God often has very clever ways of throwing monkey wrenches into the gears of what people mistakenly discern as historical inevitability.
The only one who really knows the future is the LORD. He is capable of being surprising. And He's not telling us everything, but only those pieces that are important for us to know. You can be certain of one thing: the rulers and governments of this world are doomed to pass away. The only kingdom that will last is Christ's.
Nevertheless, Attali's book was still an interesting read, and if anything it could be a good source book for getting inspiration in writing dark and dystopian science fiction. Some of the things that he envisioned coming down the pipe sounded downright hellish to me. For example, speaking of the hypernomads:
The couple will no longer be their principal base for life and sexuality. They will prefer to choose, in full transparency, polygamous or polyandrous loves. Men and women, all collectors, more interested in the hunt than the prey, accumulating and exhibiting their trophies, constantly on the move in search of distraction, many of them will be the offspring of mobile families without a geographic or cultural base. They will be loyal only to themselves, and will interest themselves more in their conquests, their wine cellars, their self-monitors, their art collections, and the planning of their erotic lives than in the future of their progeny — to whom they will no longer bequeath either money or power.Indeed, some of what's in the Attali's book sounds like a roundabout manner of reciting what St. Paul already said in 2 Timothy 3:1-5. Then again, Attali might be describing some people he knows. Of course, I am not insinuating that Attali thinks that the stuff he writes about is what by right ought to happen. But in places he does sound like "if you think it's weird now, just get a load of what's coming."
The books is also full of various buzzwords and neologisms. I don't know what Attali wrote in French, but the English translation by Jeremy Leggatt gets an ample sprinkling of the prefix "hyper-", a little more than I like seeing. Although there are some interesting concepts here and there in Attali's book, which in another context would have been worth exploring, however several sections of the book were actually tiresome and dull, and I ended up skimming over those portions that seemed needlessly repetitive. Perhaps in French it read much better, and this might have been a defect of the translation. Nevertheless, there is one place where Attali gets it wrong and ridiculously so:
Protestant churches will be in the vanguard of these struggles, especially the evangelicals. Originating in several southern U.S. states — the Bible Belt — they muster seventy million American citizens, who include several hundred thousand propagandizing ministers. Evangelism already rules over certain departments of many American universities, where it censors teaching of the sciences and other religions.Hey. Wait a minute. People like Michael Spencer and Jon Meacham just got through explaining that evangelical xtians are doomed to wither away here in America — more or less to an inconsequential and frightened minority huddling in a dank catacomb somewhere, never to show their faces in the public square again. But yet, somehow or another, they're in control of the departments of "many American universities." That would be astonishing news if it wasn't so hilarious. So watch out, you progressive secularists! The Christianists are mustering 70 million people to march on Washington to impose the theocracy that you so earnestly dread. Our infiltrators in key departments in the universities are even now subverting the young impressionable minds of your children, bending them to our atavistic fundie ways. Of course, I'm being tongue-in-cheek when I say this. But my guess is that Attali hasn't been in this country for any extended length of time, and his exaggerated notions about powerful evangelicals probably come from reading too many old articles from Time or Newsweek magazines, probably dating back to the Bush Era or even earlier.
Well, Henry Kissenger called the book "Brilliant and provocative." I guess that's reason enough to recommend it.