The Messy Junk Drawer

Or, Futurology with Novelists

A few days ago, I tried to open a messy junk drawer, but it was stuck. It was one of those drawers where I toss stuff I think worth keeping but want out of sight. One day I just might need that key chain or those balloons or that small wrench or those worthless pennies. And where did that plastic business card holder come from? I must have brought it home from the office when I retired and into the drawer it went.

To release the blockage, I had to empty the entire drawer and haul out the offending object by contorting my hands and arms in yogi-like positions. I discovered the obstruction was an upended box of fridge-poetry magnets. I am fond of fridge-poetry magnets, but my fridge is made of a material to which no magnet sticks. When I received the fridge magnets as a gift (maybe eight or ten years ago), I stored them for safe keeping in The Drawer. After all, one day I might get a new refrigerator upon which I will be able to create magnet poetry to my heart’s content.

Why do I think all this stuff in the drawer will come in useful one day? Partly, experience. A couple of days after the blockage incident, I was looking around my house for an eyedropper so my grandchild and I could do a science experiment. There was no eyedropper to be found in any nook or cranny. The Messy Junk Drawer could have earned its keep, but it failed. Or rather I failed. I had let an eyedropper drift out of my life with no thought for the future.

How can we predict the future, though? Good household management involves having a sense of what will be soon needed—a good supply of toilet paper, for example. Businesses, governments, and institutions of all kinds also try to predict the future. I spent much of my working life contributing to five-year plans and staring in horror at what we called The Spreadsheets of Shame that laid out the budget and enrolment predictions for humanities and fine arts programs.

My dad, who had an MBA and worked in both the private and public sectors, was always interested in “futurology.” I inherited several books from him that tried to predict where society was going. These are old books now: Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) by Alvin Toffler (and apparently his uncredited wife Adelaide Farrell) and one called The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener.

Randomly opening these books is always interesting, and a flashback not only to memories of conversations with my dad who liked this sort of thing, but also to watching The Jetsons TV show from when I was a kid. Where are those personal flying saucers?

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/jetsons.jpg

Obviously, predicting the future is not always reliable. Still, reading these books is a bit eerie, in a Nostradamus sort of way. Did the 1980 Toffler book The Third Wave really make this observation?

"This craving for a masterful, macho leader is voiced today by even the most well-meaning of people as their familiar world crumbles…. As a dangerous decade opens, …long-forgotten dark forces are stirring anew in our midst…. small but influential right-wing groups are again seeking the intellectual limelight, expounding theories on race, biology and political elitism discredited by the Fascism in World War II” (p. 379-380).

Going further back, did The Year 2000 in 1967 really warn that “criminal or political conspiracies can bring civil government to a halt through disrupting the computerized networks upon which it will depend, the only alternative to a new feudalism... may be forms of surveillance and control far surpassing any now in existence” (p. 347).

Where do these frighteningly accurate predictions come from? No one has an infallible crystal ball, but sometimes clusters of trends can reveal patterns. Margaret Atwood’s research behind her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which now seems like a handbook for the manosphere, is a good example. Atwood wrote the book before the existence of the Internet or Google, but nevertheless by combing newspapers, she found a bevy of news stories that her Spidey sense informed her were important misogynist and Christian-nationalist trends.

Toffler and company were social scientists, and it was their job to analyze social trends. But novelists are uncanny in what they do with the trends they perceive. Uncanny and way too scary. I was on BlueSky the other day and a guy posted this:

Some of the best ideas for rich people wanting to destroy America can be found in science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, The Parable of the Sower. This book has stayed with me ever since I first read it back in the 90s. I recently re-read it and unlike the dry futurology of the academics, it’s an in-your-face, vivid prediction of the future. And I was horrified to find out the novel actually takes place in 2025! In the book, climate change is ravaging the United States with hurricanes and fires, and the U.S. is becoming a nation of gangster corporations, drug-addicted criminals, and a nearly decimated middle class. When you read this book and its sequel, The Parable of the Talents, you constantly experience a sinking feeling that Butler’s 2025 is our 2025. Here are a few chilling quotes pulled from the book:

“Donner [the presidential candidate] has a plan for putting people back to work. He hopes to get laws changed, suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental and worker protection laws.” p. 27

“Tornadoes are smashing the hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern Midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles!” p. 54

“Food prices are insane, always going up, never down.” p. 80

“My God,… This country has slipped back two hundred years.” p. 305

And scariest of all…. “Help us make America great again,” says a nasty Christian-nationalist type senator in The Parable of the Talents

Yikes!

Butler, Atwood and Toffler et. al. are reminders that scary trends have been lurking in the sewers of our society for decades. Predictions about terrible human behaviour are often fairly reliable as humans tend to do the same stupid things over and over again. Atwood says that in The Handmaid’s Tale she “put nothing into it that had not been done at some time or in some place.”

So, history is a great predictor. Once again, the dictators and their henchmen are in our midst destroying institutions, our flawed but precious democracies, the natural world, and human beings. So, can the futurologists and novelists help us figure out how to stop these forces of destruction?

Where are the novels that show us how to de-fang dangerous old ideas? How do we learn to discuss things so we don’t further alienate ourselves? Personally, I was crap at figuring out how to respond to The Spreadsheets of Shame, paralyzed with resentment and fear. I can’t even plan well enough to keep an eyedropper in my house. And that business card holder? I know that in my retirement, I will never have business cards to dole out again: I allow states of delusion to guide my decisions.

And what about those fridge-poetry magnets? The magnet “theme” is Jane Austen. My cousin got these for me as I am a Jane Junkie. Jane Austen is not usually cited as a political philosopher nor a speculative fiction writer. She never wrote a novel that imagined England taken over by the dictator Napoleon, for example. However, she is intensely concerned about how to break bad trends and work for a better future.

In every single Austen book, the past is replete with bad marriages, and the heroine has to avoid personal disaster by not making one herself. She has to consider the future very seriously. The marriages around her are often so bad (and often in her family), they serve as warnings and alarm bells. The heroine surveys current trends—an array of single men and suitors— and must figure out, based on not a lot of certainty or evidence, the best choice for a husband. The heroine struggles to be guided by moral sense and intelligence, she educates herself through observation and listening, she confronts her own weaknesses, and she must learn to admit when she is wrong. Along the way, she juggles hasty judgements, emotional reactions, and stubborn prejudices. Sometimes she fails to speak up and endangers others (Wickham); sometimes she speaks up but the endangered person is entrenched in a decision (Charlotte Lucas). Not many people in her novels make good marital decisions, but the heroines learn enough to safeguard their future from self-inflicted tragic turmoil.

Marriage is one of those common situations where predicting the future is required of us. We’re not great at it. Between 30 to 40% of marriages end in divorce these days. However, apparently the U.S. has twice the divorce rate as Canadians. This gives me a glimmer of hope. If we are slightly better at predicting the future than our former BFFs, maybe we’ll be able to protect our society from the ravages of dictatorships and fascism in our upcoming elections. Who knows? There are trends and there are uncertainties and there are no guarantees. But maybe we can avert the worst with sense, listening, avoiding hasty judgements, rejecting toxic emotion, and overcoming prejudices. And maybe going out and canvassing for the least offensive political parties.

Meanwhile, I will put the Austen fridge-poetry magnets back in the Messy Junk Drawer. They are worth keeping. This very week, the box popped up to remind me of the good lessons of Jane Austen, Futurologist

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