THE NEW SYNTHESIS
In politics, parties lose the allegiance of their members at the precise moment when key issues—technology, for example—are becoming more politicized than ever. Meanwhile, over vast reaches of the earth, nationalist movements gain power—at the exact instant that the nation- state comes under intensifying attack in the name of globalism or planetary consciousness.
Faced with such contradictions, how might we see behind the trends and counter-trends? No one, alas, has any magic answer to that question. Despite all the computer printouts, cluster diagrams, and mathematical models and matrices that futurist researchers use, our attempts to peer into tomorrow—or even to make sense of today— remain, as they must, more an art than a science.
Systematic, research can teach us much. But in the end we must embrace—not dismiss—paradox and contradiction, hunch, imagination, and daring (though tentative) synthesis.
In probing the future in the pages that follow, therefore, we must do more than identifv_jmafor trends. Difficult as it may be, we must resist the temptation to be seduced by straight lines. Most people—including many futurists— conceive of tomorrow as a mere extension of today, forgetting that trends, no matter how seemingly powerful, do not merely continue in a linear fashion. They reach tipping points at which they explode into new phenomena. They reverse direction. They stop and start. Because something is happening now, or has been happening for three hundred years, is no guarantee that it will continue. We shall, in the pages ahead, watch for precisely those contradictions, conflicts, turnabouts, and breakpoints that make the future a continuing surprise.
More important, we will search out the hidden connections among events that on the surface seem unrelated. It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one’s own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is-fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others.
Second Wave civilization placed an extremely heavy emphasis on our ability to dismantle problems into their components; it rewarded us less often for the ability to put ili«-
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