The Future Is Not Binary

My friend Peggy is 87, in ill health, and tough minded. She says she’s ready to die, but one thing bothers her: she wants to come back 50 years from now to see how it all works out. She’s talking about our current struggles over climate, democracy, racism, women’s rights, and the great imbalances between rich countries and poor.

She worries about her great-grandchildren’s prospects for happiness when dystopian headlines loom. Peggy is smart and tuned in despite having ceded control of her schedule to healthcare workers. I am 78 and in good health, but I share her wish to see into the future, and I believe I have a handle on what to expect.

The French Attitude

When I graduated from college, I spent a year as a teaching assistant in the south of France, helping 17- and 18-year-old girls improve their English. It was the first time I’d lived outside the U.S., and I kept stubbing my social toe. For example, two teachers at the high school where I was assigned immediately invited me to dine.

One, a single woman, took me to a café for ice cream and coffee. The other took me to her family home and used the familiar form of address. I didn’t know how to respond in either case. Eventually I learned that the two teachers had warring politics (pied noir and communist, respectively), and each wanted to grab the newbie for her side. The non-fanatic teachers took their time making friends.

When I first met my pupils, they would ask questions calculated to suss out whether I was “égoiste” or “sympa.” Meaning, was I self-centered or considerate. I soon discovered that it wasn’t only me they were judging. They used that dichotomy to categorize everyone, including fellow students, by examining their words, gestures, actions, and reactions in order to lump them on one side or the other of the compassion divide.

The girls who were on the university track made their binary judgments and then went about the business of being good in school. The girls who were on the vocational education track simmered with resentment against everyone from whom they anticipated getting a raw deal. Many of them spoke with the low-class, southern accent that limited their options as far as the French teachers were concerned.

(The best student in the voc-ed track, however, spoke colloquial English just as well as the best in the college track.) At the time, I thought that in America, where people can jump tracks if they wish, we didn’t harbor such resentment. We did (we do), but it was not obvious to me, a white scholarship winner from the Bronx.

 Variations on the Theme

“Égoiste or sympa” is an oversimplification, of course. A given action rarely belongs purely on one side or the other, neither wholly self-serving nor wholly altruistic. Yet we humans tend to think in binary. We talk about capitalism vs socialism; cowboys vs Indians; male vs female; Republican vs Democrat; and the biggie, good vs evil. Binaries pervade social media.

Contemporary authors seem hung up on presenting visions of a future in which something bad, according to the author, has overwhelmed society and the good guys struggle against it. The former don’t always win.

Dystopian thinking is not a new phenomenon. Wikipedia says dystopian literature can be traced back to the French Revolution of 1789 and the prospect that mob rule would produce dictatorship. Until the late 20th century, the genre was usually anti-collectivist, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World being among the best known novels of the cohort.

More recent dystopian fiction expands the evils addressed to include pollution, climate change, infection, reproduction, and technology run rampant. The trend seems especially strong in young adult media (think of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and the video games Fallout and Bioshock, for example). Are YA authors more frustrated with society than in past years, or are there simply more of them? Certainly, their marketing is more pervasive.

Predictions

I read a recent dystopian novel set in the near future in which, after a pandemic, motherhood is being controlled by a combination of technological and political forces—people are cloned in incubators for the benefit of the post-catastrophe infertile. Much as I appreciated the author’s imagination and literary skill, I couldn’t find a throughline from today’s practice of invitro fertilization to the landscape of exploitation the novel depicts. Of course, the author didn’t intend to draw such a line; she’s just saying that society had better watch out when it comes to reproductive technology. She’s trying to scare us straight.

George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949 shortly before the author’s death at age 46, imagines a totalitarian society in which the individual’s thoughts and feelings are controlled. I doubt any early reader expected real life conditions in the year 1984 to resemble those in the book, but the way Orwell conceived of mind control has permeated western culture: Big Brother, newspeak, Thought Police, doublethink.

The adjective “Orwellian” has come to mean “draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, . . . and manipulation of the past” (Wikipedia). Dying of tuberculosis, Orwell left us language to describe what it might feel like if a Stalin or a Hitler were to take over. He couldn’t have predicted whether or how the real Stalin would.

What Can We Say?

I’ve decided to advise my friend Peggy to ignore dystopian headlines because, being binary, they only reflect one pole of the story. For every dire prediction, someone’s working on the antidote. For every antidote, someone’s trying to sabotage it. For every would-be saboteur, someone is preparing to sue.

Consider abortion in my home state of Arizona. The Republican-led legislature voted to kill a law from 1864 banning the practice in order to deflect support for a grassroots initiative that would enshrine abortion in the state constitution. The legislators may place several other abortion-related propositions on the ballot this coming November to further confuse the voters. What’s going to happen? An unpredictable, non-binary struggle that may last for decades.

I’m going to tell Peggy not to worry about her great-grandchildren. They’ll have plenty of worries of their own, and plenty of joys.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you worry abundantly over current state of affairs, local or global? How do you deal with your worries? Do you wish to see into the future and see how things will resolve?