Knowing my interest in Temporal Provincialism a commenter sent me a link showing predictions about 1950 from the view of 1925:

http://www.sadanduseless.com/image.php?n=658

The predictions of 1925 were largely still current in 1950. Even when I was in grad school, the ruling Mommy Professor phrase was “Modern Industrial Society.”

Marx had predicted socialism as class differences grew and the peasants left the land to become part of the proletariat. The Future was already laid out, the farm was the past, the city was the future.

As in the 1925 layout, as people left the only place they knew of at the time as an alternative to city life, people would cram together in the city. I believe it was in the 1950s that Frank Lloyd Wright became Mommy Professor and designed a mile-tall building in which people could live their entire lives.

You see this in the 1925 model of 1950. It is one enormous city center, with everything from grocery stores to shops stacked on top of each other.

When I got to college in 1957 this was still the view of Mommy Professor and Frank Lloyd Wright was his Prophet. I was sixteen and I saw the cities were failing fast, their crime rates increasing geometrically, Social Progress was already devastating city centers.

But that 1925/1950 model was still firmly entrenched on campuses. It had been Marx, Wright, and Progressive Theory for a generation and it was held truest, like most predictions, right when it was visibly failing.

Visibly, but only if you LOOKED.

This is the usual conservatism of Progressivism. From the Marxists down to the democratic socialists and the openly liberal voices, it takes a long time for a given Inevitable Future to spread through the entire giant complex.

Nobody seemed to notice this inertia but me. The Sun Belt was growing by leaps and bounds, but nobody on campus noticed it in 1950. The Future was The Modern Industrial Society, as Marx and the Webbs and the Intellectuals and Idealists, i.e., Mommy Professors, had said for over a generation.

That 1925 model could have been presented to a class in 1960 and been endorsed.

Every single trend was going on in places Mommy Professor simply didn’t look at.

It really cripples you if you have an Inevitable Future firmly in mind, because an Inevitable Future must proceed from an Unchangeable Past. The word “progressive” means that thing can only go one way.

And if you think that things can only go one way, you’re always wrong. You regularly get hit in the back by the historical equivalent of a Mack Truck.