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Marketing and University Communication UW-Green Bay, CL 815 2420 Nicolet Drive Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 (920) 465-2626 E-mail: hildebrs@uwgb.edu Last update: 10/3/06 |
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In
the News Archive - Year:
May 13, 2006 Commencement Address Presented by Martin H. Greenberg, UW-Green Bay professor emeritus of Urban and Regional Studies
First, let me tell you how the future was, how the future used to be.
When I first arrived here in the summer of 1969 UWGB had a unique academic plan, one that was predicated on the perceived failures in higher education up to then. It featured an interdisciplinary curriculum, team teaching, and courses not found anywhere else.
In the summer of 1969 I team-taught with Don Gandre and Bill Kuepper the first Freshman Liberal Education Seminar — to students who had put enough courses together over their lifetimes to be seniors. At 28 I was the youngest of the 20 or so people in the room.
It was an ambitious and innovative academic plan, and I would strongly urge the current faculty to keep developing the curriculum — it's never too late for a second wave of innovation.
I owe my non-academic career to this academic plan, for which I will always be grateful.
A chance comment by a colleague, Professor Patricia Warrick, led to the publication of a textbook using science fiction short stories to illustrate concepts in political science, which led to my meeting and becoming best friends with the late Isaac Asimov, which in turn led to a current total of 1,856 published books.
If it were not for UWGB's academic plan, I might still be the world's leading authority on the Mexican bureaucratic system, which, in true academic fashion, I knew nothing about but wrote the only book on.
There's a lot more to tell — if you'll buy me a drink, I'll tell you the details.
So when I first arrived at UWGB in the summer of 1969, the anticipation of the future was in the air. It was a very exciting time. Everyone was focused on the future. Not just here, but everywhere.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Future Shock was but one year away. It made a tremendous impression with its emphasis on "information overload" and the inability of people and groups to cope with the pace of change. And this was before the Internet and before the roll-out of cable television.
Our government had established the Rand Corporation which was populated by forward looking thinkers like Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter and issued studies about what the future might hold for our country, most of them rather chilling.
They pioneered the "scenario," that attempted to show what might happen given certain assumed factors — a little like some of the gaming that is being conducted in places like the Pentagon and the National Defense University even as I speak.
Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb published in 1968 predicted widespread world starvation beginning in the 1970s. The book caused a sensation and was widely believed. It stated that the U.S. could only support a population of 150 million, proposed luxury taxes on diapers, and never mentioned energy depletion. In fact, very few of the futurists I read in those years really expressed any serious concern about running out of fossil fuels.
The World Futurist Society was a major organization with thousands of members that published a serious journal called The Futurist, and the World Futures Studies Federation was organized to raise public and private money to further the study of the future.
So we had all this activity and they and almost everyone else missed many of the major trends, developments, and social movements of the next quarter century including some of the most important. The lesson here is that it is really very difficult to get the future right.
Take for example, our academics.
• One of the foundational beliefs of social science was that totalitarian systems like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union could only be transformed from the outside; this was one of the core teachings of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. And then the USSR collapsed with a whimper and we didn't see this coming.
• Social science in general and the members of the Middle East Studies Association in particular missed (with a few exceptions) the rise and importance of fundamentalist religious movements, whose emergence (as my students can tell you) was there for everyone to see.
• The consensus of demographers and others in the academy was for rapid sustained population growth which would lead to food shortages and even widespread famine in Africa and Asia. They could not have been more wrong — large areas of the world now face an aging population and even negative population growth. And some governments are paying their people to have more children, not paying them to have fewer children.
And how about our intelligence community, charged with knowing what is going on and what is likely to happen? A community formulated after World War II with the specific task not being surprised by future developments, especially as we were at Pearl Harbor.
The intelligence community (a community where I have a number of friends) failed to predict the North Korean invasion of South Korea, it failed to predict the Chinese intervention in that war, it failed to predict the construction of the Berlin Wall, it failed to predict or even know that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba (the Air Force found them), it failed to predict the fall of the Soviet empire, it failed to predict the rise of fundamentalist Islam, and it completely missed the Indian, Pakistani, South African, and Taiwanese nuclear programs.
And what of my beloved friends in science fiction? They are supposed to know what the future holds. And in certain areas they were very good. Anyone could have predicted the automobile in 1890, but only the science fiction writers predicted suburbia and traffic jams. Science fiction writers examine the social consequences of technological change — this is what drew me to the genre.
And they prepare us for rapid change — for example, my old friend Jack Williamson, still with us at age 98 and still writing, moved by covered wagon with his family from West Texas to the area around Portales New Mexico in 1910, when he was two years old. Fifty-nine years later, he was watching in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena as the first man landed on the moon — and he wasn't surprised that he lived to see it.
From covered wagon to the moon in 59 years, and the pace of change is only now really starting to accelerate.
And science fiction writers help prepare us for the worst — the awful warning story made famous by 1984 in the mainstream and by hundreds of examples in science fiction stories and books. This is the "if this goes on then this will happen" category of story.
And they motivate people — virtually everyone in the space program that took us off this planet read science fiction — at least in their youth.
Unfortunately, the science fiction writers tend to write about social phenomenon only after it appears in the general culture. 1984 is a wonderful and important book, but when it was published in 1951 its subject matter and warning was already all too apparent. We didn't get much guidance about the future from science fiction writers because they were frequently late to the party.
Nevertheless, and I'm sure you saw this coming — in spite of this rather horrific record, let me tell you what your future will be like.
Here goes:
• Some of you in the class of 2006 are going to live to be 120, but that means that some of you will work until you are 95. This would even surprise the most farsighted science fiction writers, none of whom saw this happening so quickly.
• So you will live in a world whose population is much older on the average than this one, and one in which countries like Germany, Japan, all of Eastern Europe, and Russia will have declining populations. Russia may have a population that is 40 percent Muslim by the time you are my age.
• By the time you are my age one-third of Americans will be what is called "the dependent elderly." So make sure your children make a good living — you are going to need it. But you will be lucky — the figure for Germany will be 50 percent.
• By the time you are my age, the world will be even more intensely religious than it is now — all the major fundamentalist religious groups have high fertility rates — here's just one example: by 2050 a majority of the Latino population of the United States will be Pentecostalist, not Catholic.
• By 2030 Iran (if it still exists in its present form) will have extracted all of its crude oil.
• By the time you are my age the number of political parties in the United States regularly receiving at least eight to ten percent of the national vote will be five.
• By the time you are my age the number of countries in the world with nuclear weapons will be 16 if we're lucky.
• By the time you are my age, many if not most of you will spend very little time away from your home. You will be able to earn a living, your children will get an education, and you can go on vacations, all without leaving your living room.
Virtual reality machines will enable you to visit the Taj Mahal, the remaining glaciers in Alaska, or any museum in the world and make you feel that you are really there. Or you could visit any time in the past if you chose to.
And, if this prediction comes even partly to pass, the energy crisis will be over.
• By the time you are my age, some of you may not be human — if by human we mean consisting primarily of flesh and bone. If you think the sports world had a hard time coping with steroids, just wait until they have to be concerned about artificial organs and limbs that exactly replicate (and do a much better job) than our natural ones.
In professional sports the issue will not be the use of performance enhancing drugs, but the use of performance enhancing body parts.
Of course this assumes that by the time you are my age you are still around, because we are entering a period of great danger in human history, where individuals and small groups with the assistance of the Internet can cause enormous destruction via chemicals, germs, and radiation.
Keep in mind that so far, the greatest emotional effect of the Internet has to rapidly and profoundly increase the amount of anger and hatred in the world. To paraphrase the great science fiction writer and mathematician Vernor Vinge: "We could wake up one morning and find that civilization has been destroyed by someone with a bad hair day."
• Which brings me to my final prediction — write this one down — the score of Super Bowl 100 in 2066 — the Green Bay Packers of the North American Division 24, the Shanghai Panthers of the Eastern Division 7. And you thought the Panthers would still be in North Carolina.
Let me conclude by quoting Alan Kay, the man who created what became the basis for the first Apple computer — "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
So my charge to you, graduates of the class of 2006, is to go out and create the future. And make it a good one!
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