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.
#1 by BGLass on 07/28/2010 - 10:15 am
“…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….”
Dire predictions are just as popular as the Inevitable Future Utopia, maybe even more so, although they are not necessarily true. At least, at first, they seem to base themselves in Reality, showing the logical conclusions of what is happening now, like in the civil war on the South Border of the U.S. v the t.v. image of multi-wonderfulness. Basing predictions in what is happening now in reality, is certainly better than basing in ones own personal mind. But then, new wrenches are suddenly thrown in that change everything.
Tthe ideal-futurist are basing in reality, too; it’s just often technological. Had lunch with a career-liberal in NY who was enthusing about public transportation. Lmao. How could anyone familiar with the grease, rats, puddled water, extreme heat, sizzling electrified tracks on one of those really bad subway-days where they discover a body, or there’s a shooting in the car, while one’s staring at the graffiti and the eddying trash by tracks, or whatever, enthuse on and on about public transport? Cabs are not any better. A car service feels just a little nicer, like a maybe a cab did fifty years ago—(or at least as 50 years ago is imagined by a more distopian, nostaligic soul).
And yet, she lives in the picture presented in this post of Public Transport! We’re just “not there yet.” Hers was a very strange and surreal monologue on the matter.
So, maybe Dire Predictions seem more true b/c the ms is so openly out to lunch. The more insanely ‘out of touch,’ the more dire predictions feel like ‘a dose of much-needed “Reality.’ Still, I cannot help there but think there have been better times for average white people in the U.S., such as myself.
Mommy Professor here wasn’t a lady who lunched, but a lady who was out to lunch, lol.
#2 by Dave on 07/28/2010 - 10:36 am
In life, you always get more than you bargain for.
The world over, nonwhite races have determined to cut a deal with the white race.
They figure that is where the benefits are.
They are as wrong as wrong gets.
And Mommy Professor will blind to this right up until the very moment her lights go out. She will never know what hit her.
#3 by shari on 07/28/2010 - 10:39 am
I often feel that we are in a surreal moment in time, where so many things taken for granted, are actually over and done, but we must still go through the motions. Or we choose to go through the motions because we don’t WANT to look. I’m a believer in a real future, but never the less, this moment is crisis.
#4 by Simmons on 07/28/2010 - 11:06 am
Bill Gross that phony POS should hire Bob, because today he comes out and says that declining birthrates are destroying the Keynsian model of growth and we are all doomed.
Progress indeed.
#5 by Scrivener on 07/30/2010 - 6:40 pm
Bob, I just love that term “Temporal Provincialism.” It makes it easier to discuss things if they have a clear category.
That opener about predictions reminded me of one of my lifetime pet peeves. In 1980, we were told all sorts of fantastic things about the year 2000… by our public school teachers, no less.
Because of this, I spent a good amount of time during my younger childhood thinking that in the year 2000, we would have personal robotic servants, moon colonies, and flying cars. In short, I grew up thinking that we were in a vibrant, expanding civilization.
I even thought that I might have the opportunity to live and work on one of these moon colonies. Now, I just want a safe place to raise a family, because it’s 2010 and it turns out that my civilization was under siege and in a state of collapse the whole time and no one bothered to take notice.