Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Future Schlock: Bibi, Trump, and the Rest of Us
“Future Amnesia”: a widespread ailment of human society. To put it more bluntly, our world is suffering from a paradoxical illness: the inability or unwillingness to think (and plan) for what’s coming up the pike, especially mid-to-long-term. I’ll first provide two recent examples from Israeli and American leaders. From there, an explanation as to how and why it’s a general problem inherent in contemporary society.
Israel recently negotiated a (temporary?) ceasefire deal with Hamas with a hostage/ prisoner exchange. Yet, for the past year, the Israeli government has been urged by the U.S. and other supporting countries to start planning for “the day after” i.e., who will run Gaza after the war’s end? As any military expert knows, warfare is but a means to a political end. No one fights for the sake of fighting; there has to be some sort of vision regarding the enemy as to how its political “structure” will be made to work, internally and vis-à-vis its opponent (us).
This, PM Netanyahu has refused to do; as a result, the Israeli government is flailing to find a satisfactory solution to Gaza’s “day after.” That has left the field open to others (President Trump) to come up with “solutions” that might not be ideal for Israel’s interests e.g., millions of Gazans displaced into Jordan, undermining its peace treaty with Israel if (more likely, when) those Palestinian refugees cause turmoil in the Hashemite Kingdom.
Meanwhile, one of the first things that Trump has done as president is to leave the Paris Accords on Climate Change – and instead has doubled down on oil and gas drilling. Here too he’s ignoring clear signs regarding the future: L.A.’s massive fires after a year’s drought, not to mention extreme cold weather that hit Texas and Florida of all places.
Such “present-mindedness” (the term coined by one of the first serious communication scholars: Harold Innis) a/k/a “nowingness,” could be seen as a political aberration, but unfortunately it is widespread among humanity as a whole. To quote the Pogo comic strip: “We have met the enemy, and it is us!”
Why and how? Human psychology is still stuck in the hunter-gatherer age where our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years – not something that several hundred years or even a few thousand annums of “civilization” could easily change. In that State of Nature, you either ate today or starved tomorrow. There was little incentive to think about the future when almost all dangers (tigers, drought etc.) were here and now.
Nevertheless, through the invention of writing humans could begin remembering the past. Starting around 3000 years ago, we even started to create some leisure time to enable thinking about future possibilities. Later, the advent of print (books, newspapers etc.) became a society-wide tool for recalling the past and considering the future.
The advent of electric media (telephone, radio, TV, and finally the internet) slowly but inevitably changed our focus – or perhaps it would be more correct to say “reverted” our attention back to “now.” After one day, newspapers were good for wrapping fish; TV news was (at first) similarly on a 24-hour cycle; radio reduced that to a few hours. Almost all new information now is a product of digital (non-material) communication that can be transmitted instantaneously anywhere and everywhere. Thus, the onrush of “news” has become so constant that a novel phenomenon emerged – FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out); so now we stay glued to our screens minute by minute. Thinking about the future? (LOL) We can hardly think seriously about what we are/were doing two minutes ago, or what will be two minutes from now…
The quintessential example of all this “nowingness” is Google Search. When it started out at the end of the last century it was designed to find the best quality information. A decade later it changed course: for reasons of advertising revenue, it presently works primarily to keep the user “engaged” through “freshness” i.e., the most recent and attractive bit of “news” regarding whatever we’re looking for.
And now that we’re in the age of social media, it’s not just news and information we have to keep up with, but even “more important” – what our family and friends are “doing.” And anyone on social media (that’s plural: Facebook, Twitter/X; Instagram; TikTok et al) has lots of “friends”! In short, virtually all our attention and focus are on the here and now (“Status” in Whatsapp terms). Who has the mental energy to think about the future? Or even read about the past to be able to deal with the future?
Politicians, of course, have an additional problem with the future: for almost all of them, the “next election round” is as far as they are willing to think. But the world doesn’t work on election schedules. Global warming will only get worse if serious policies are not employed; Gaza will continue to fester if realistic solutions are not implemented.
Unfortunately, the future is now.
