Bertrand de Jouvenel-Nature 0f Future

This article is on pages 277 to 283 of Toffler's book "The

Futurists", which was published in 1972. Please see

"Introduction-Flechtheim and deJouvenel" article posted

separately for intro of the author.





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ON THE NATURE OF THE FUTURE



Bertrand de Jouvenel



{No book has had a more powerful philosophical

influence on today's futurists than THE ART OF

CONJECTURE by Bertrand de Jouvenel, the gifted

French political economist and philosopher. For

de Jouvenel, there is never a single tomorrow--the

future consists of a fan-like array of possibilities,

alternative futures that man can shape. THE ART OF

CONJECTURE, a book written in classic essay form,

is the source of this article.- Alvin Toffler 1972}



There is a difference between the nature of the past and that of

the future. It should hardly be necessary to emphasize that I am

referring here to the difference that is perceived by the mind

of an active human being.



With regard to the past, man can exert his will only in vain; his

liberty is void, his power nonexistent. I could say: "I want to be a

former student of the Ecole Polytechnique" but this is utterly

absurd. The fact is that I did not go to the Ecole Polytechnique, and

nothing can change this fact. Imagine that I am a tyrant and that my

authority is sufficient to have the school records changed so that

they show me as a member of the class of 1922. This would merely

record a falsehood, not a fact. The fact that I did not go to the

Ecole Polytechnique cannot be changed. The fundamental impossibility

of changing the past accounts for those very important moral

sentiments--regret and remorse.



But if the past is the domain of facts over which I have no power,

it is also the domain of knowable facts. If I claim to be a graduate

of the Ecole Polytechnique, evidence is easily assembled to prove

me a liar. It is not always so easy to determine whether alleged

facts are true or false, but we always consider that they are in

principle verifiable. The impatience and irritation we feel when

faced with conflicting testimony bearing on the same fact are signs

of our deep conviction that this factum is knowable. And in such

a situation we do not hesitate to say that one of the witnesses who

presented testimony must have been lying or mistaken, even

though we may not know which one was actually at fault.



On the other hand, the future is a field of uncertainty. What will

be cannot be attested to and verified in the same way as an

accomplished fact. When I say: "I saw Peter on my way here," I am

testifying, but when I say: "I shall see Peter on my way back," I am

making a supposition. If we are faced with two conflicting opinions

regarding a past event, we try to determine which one is true: if we

are faced with two conflicting opinions regarding a future event,

we try to determine which one is more plausible. For, in the latter

case, we have no way of arriving at certainty.



It seems, then, that the expression "knowledge of the future" is

a contradiction in terms. Strictly speaking, only _facta can be known;

we can have positive knowledge only of the past.



On the other hand, the only "useful knowledge" we have relates

to the future. A man wishing to display his practical turn of mind

readily says: "I am only interested in facts," although quite the

opposite is the case. If his aim is to get to New York, the time at

which a plane left yesterday is of small concern to him: what

interests him is the takeoff time this evening (a' _futurum).

Similarly, if he wants to see somebody in New York, the fact that

this person was in his office yesterday hardly matters to him; what

interests him is whether this person will be in his office tomorrow.

Our man lives in a world of _futura rather than a world of _facta.



The real fact collector is at the opposite pole from the man of

action. One erudite scholar might spend years establishing the

facts about the assassination of Louis, duc d'Orleans, in 1407, while

another might devote his time to tracing Napoleon's itinerary day

by day. Here are _facta that could have no effect on our

judgments concerning the future and on our present decisions.



For this reason these _facta do not concern our practical man. If

he is interested in certain _facta, it is only because he uses them

in presuming a _futurum. For example, he may be worried about the

departure time of his plane. Tell him that this flight has left on

time for a long succession of days, and he will be reassured. He

regards these _facta as a guarantee of the _futurum, which is all

that matters to him. Now let us suppose that this man contemplates

buying a business that holds no interest for him except as an

investment. If the accounts show that sales have increased steadily

every year, he will derive from these figures a strong presumption

that this steady increase will be maintained in future sales.



The case of the business concern differs from that of the airplane

in two immediately apparent ways: first, a much larger stretch of

time is considered; next, and more particularly, the investor counts

on the continuance of the same change, whereas the traveler

counts on a simple repetition of the same phenomenon.



In both cases, however, the only use of the known _facta is as

raw material out of which the mind makes estimates of _futura. The

unceasing transformation of _facta into _futura by summary processes

in the mind is part of our daily life, and thus the undertaking

of conscious and systematic forecasting is simply an attempt to

effect improvements in a natural activity of the mind.



The scrupulous student of fact brands assertions about the future

as intellectual "adventurism": they are, he claims, the business of

charlatans, into whose company the sober-minded scholar should

not venture. Another, sterner critic admits that must perforce,

divert some of our attention from intelligible essences to things

as they happen to be, but proscribes speculation about their future

aspects as too great a diversion. A third complains that our

appreciation of the present moment is impaired when we cast our mind

to the uncertainties ahead. In turn, a moralist warns against a

concern with the future, lest the clear and immediate prescriptions

of duty be supplanted by selfish calculations.



No doubt these objections have some foundation; but the

representation of future changes is nonetheless a necessary factor

in our activity .



Routines help to save us efforts of foresight: if I have an

operational recipe, guaranteed to yield certain results, all I need

do is follow the instructions faithfully. Who would be so foolish as

to waste time trying out ways of cooking an egg or solving a quadratic

equation? It is scarcely necessary to point out that the vast majority

of our actions at present, just as in the distant past conform

to recipes. Accordingly, it should not be difficult for us to imagine

a society tied even more closely to recipes. At school, when we

failed to do a sum, the teacher would say that we had not done it

the right way, meaning the way we had been shown: similarly, we

can assume that, in the past, failure and misfortune were readily

attributed to departures from or breaches of the "right" practices.



Since we cannot live except in a social group, nothing matters

more to us than our relations with other men, and nothing is more

important to foresee than the way other men will behave. The more

their conduct is governed by custom and conforms to routines, the

easier it is to foresee. A social order based on custom provides

the individual with optimal guarantees that his human environment

is foreseeable. It is hardly surprising that the maintenance of a

familiar social order has always been regarded as a Common Good

whose preservation was essential.



Hence, aberrations of conduct were condemned, and change

was feared and regarded as a corruption. The idea of the security

afforded by the routine and familiar was so deeply ingrained that

even extreme reformers appealed to this notion, saying they asked

for no more than a return to the "good old ways." .



Our positive knowledge of our social environment consists of

knowledge of the present state of affairs (or, more precisely, it

is a composite image of more or less recent past states of affairs).

It would remain valid in its entirety, and for always, if nothing ever

changed, but this is impossible. However, the fewer changes we

anticipate, the more we can continue to rely on our knowledge for

the future. If society tends on the whole to conserve the present

state of affairs, our present knowledge has a high chance of being

valid in the future. On the other hand, the future validity of our

knowledge becomes increasingly doubtful as the mood of society

inclines toward change and the changes promise to be more rapid.



We are in the position of a tourist who is planning a journey with

the help of a guidebook that is already out of date. Under these

conditions, it would be imprudent to trust the guidebook blindly,

and we would be better off if we had the intellectual courage to

figure out where it is wrong and how it needs to be revised. As

foreseeability is less and less granted to us and guaranteed by an

unchanging social system, we must put more and more effort into

foresight. A saving of effort is possible in a society whose life is

governed by routines, whereas the exertion of foresight must

increase in a society in movement.



When we foresee or forecast the future, we form opinions about

the future. When we speak of "a forecast," we simply mean an

opinion about the future (but a carefully formed one). When we

speak of "forecasting," we mean the intellectual activity of

forming such opinions (serious and considered ones. but with an

uncertain verification). This needs to be stated clearly and

emphatically, particularly since aspirations the forecaster does

not, and should not, have are often attributed to him.



More than anyone else economists have made forecasting into

an important industry. They commonly use the term "prediction,"

which presents no drawbacks so long as it is correctly understood.

My colleague N. "predicts" that the sale of automobiles will

increase next year by so many thousand units: this means that after

mature consideration of all the relevant factors he could find, he

thinks this figure more likely than any other. But the strength of

the term is suggestive, and there is a danger of misapprehension:

the word seems to provide a completely certain verdict.



Any such misapprehension on the part of the forecaster's

audience is, I think, very dangerous. The persiflage that sometimes

greets the forecaster's work may madden him, but he must fear

skepticism far less than credulity. In all ages men have gathered

about fortunetellers, and when these persons achieve a recognized

position and are able to back their pronouncements with figures,

they will attract a rash of customers who accept their words as

"what science says." The forecaster who takes care to give his

best opinion does not want to make others believe that there is a

"science of the future" able to set forth with assurance what will

be. He is apprehensive of letting this misunderstanding arise. .



Our actions, properly so called, seek to validate appealing images

and invalidate repugnant ones. But where do we store these

images? For example, I "see myself" visiting China, yet I know I

have never been there and am not in China now. There is no room

for the image in the past or the present, but there is room for it in

the future. Time future is the domain able to receive as "possibles"

those representations which elsewhere would be "false." And from

the future in which we now place them, these possibles "beckon"

to us to make them real.



. the future is the domain into which a man has projected, and

in which he now contemplates, the possible he wishes to make real,

the image that is and will be, as long as it subsists in the mind, the

determining reason for his actions.



An assertion about the future is a perfectly ordinary occurrence.

In the bus, I overhear a stranger saying: "I will be in Saint-Tropez

in August." He "sees himself" in Saint-Tropez, although he is now

in Paris, as I could testify; couched in the present tense his

assertion would be an obvious untruth. But the future is available,

allowing him to assert something that is not now the case, but is a

future possibility. In August, an observer will be able to determine

whether the assertion has been proven.



It would be naive to think that over-all progress automatically

leads to progress in our knowledge of the future. On the contrary,

the future state of society would be perfectly known only in a

perfectly static society--a society whose structure would always be

identical and whose "Map of the Present" would remain valid for all

time! All the traits of such a society at any future time could be

foreknown. But as soon as a society is in movement, its familiar

traits are perishable: they disappear, some more rapidly than

others--though we cannot date their disappearance in advance

while new traits appear--traits not "given" beforehand to our

minds. To say the movement is accelerating is to say that the

length of time for which our Map of the Present remains more or

less valid grows shorter. Thus our knowledge of the future is

inversely proportional to the rate of progress.



Now let us consider public decisions. Suppose change is

accelerating: that is to say, an increasing number of new problems

arises in each unit of time (a year or a legislative session), and

questions calling for decisions are exerting increasing pressure on

the responsible men. It seems natural and even reasonable in such a

case to take the questions in order of urgency--but the results

show that this is a vicious practice. No problem is put on the

agenda until it is a "burning" issue, when things are at such a pass

that our hand is forced. No longer is any choice possible between

different determining acts designed to shape a stilt-flexible

situation. There is only one possible response, only one way out of

the problem hemming us in. The powers that happen to be submit to

this necessity, and will justify themselves after the event by

saying they had no choice to decide otherwise. What is actually true is

that they no longer had any choice, which is something quite

different: for if they cannot be blamed for a decision that was in

fact inevitable, they can hardly escape censure for letting the

situation go until they had no freedom to choose. The proof of

improvidence lies in falling under the empire of necessity. The means

of avoiding this lies in acquainting oneself with emerging situations

while they can still be molded, before they have become imperatively

compelling. In other words, without forecasting, there is effectively

no freedom of decision.