The Future Is Not Ours (and Neither Is the Past)

* Let me put my cards on the table.  I’m the guy who started two of his book titles with the phrases “the end of” and “the last days of,” so think of me as apocalyptic by nature.  I don’t believe in God or gods, or for that matter an afterlife.  In all these years, I’ve never discovered a spiritual bone in my body.  Still, I do care in some way that I can’t begin to understand what happens to us after I’m dead, what in particular happens to my children and my grandson, and his children and theirs, too.  Go figure.

* My father’s closest friend, the last person of his generation who knew him intimately, died recently at 99.  To my regret, I was no longer in touch.  It nonetheless felt like an archive closing.  The fog of the past now envelops much of his life.  There is nobody left to tell me what I don’t know about all those years before my birth.  Not a soul.  And yet I can at least recognize some of the people in his old photos and tell stories about them.  My mother’s childhood album is another matter.  Her brother aside, there’s no one I recognize, not a single soul, or a single story I can tell.  It’s all fog.  We don’t like to think of ourselves that way; we don’t like to imagine that we, in the present, will disappear into that fog with all our stories, all our experiences, all our memories.

* Here’s a question that, in a globally warming world, comes to mind: Are we a failed experiment?  I know I’m not the first to ask, and to answer I’d have to be capable of peering into a future that I can’t see.  So all I can say on turning 70 is: Who wouldn’t want to stick around and find out?

* Here’s the upbeat takeaway from this requiem for a foreshortened American Century: history is undoubtedly filled with seers, Cassandras, and gurus of every sort exactly because the future is such a mystery to us.  Mystery, however, means surprise, which is an eternal part of every tomorrow.  And surprise means, even under the worst conditions, a kind of hope.  Who knows just what July 20, 2015, or 2025, or 2035 will usher on stage?  And who knows when I won’t be there to find out.  Not I.

* By the way, I have the urge to offer you five predictions about the world of 2050, but what’s the point? I’d just have to advise you to ignore them all.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, to be published in September, is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World (Haymarket Books).

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