My wife was telling me about something that she read in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. The assertion was that Middle-easterners are focused on history and Americans are focused on the future. My wife believes \that history should play a part in the decisions we make, and that those decisions are for what will happen in the future.
I thought about what she said about history and future, east and west, Muslim and Christian. I believe that Science Fiction has always appealed to me because it is a way of hoping for a better future (and sometimes showing a worse future to avoid). I think in some ways, it is my theology.
The problem is that either option, a person that only looks to the past, or a person that only looks to the future is like someone with only one eye. Using both eyes, you have binocular vision and you can focus on something and take in it's depth (actually, you have depth perception with binocular vision, so the analogy comes close).
New technology is a double edged sword. If you charge toward the future with a new innovation you have to keep in mind the effects. If you do not have a good idea of what happened up to now, or what usually happens when someone makes a similar change, you can have unintended consequences. Ignoring the past can cause problems, either with the technology itself or with society's resistance to change.
Only through being grounded in the past can you learn from it and move confidently into the future. This isn't just introducing technology, but in politics and diplomacy, too. Look at Iraq for instance. If we paid the slightest attention to Viet Nam, we would have known that it was not going to be easy, but instead, we just looked at securing oil for now. Sometimes politics are short sighted.
The problem with many people that are focusing on the future is that they are focusing on the future of next month or next year, and not 5, 10, 50, or 100 years from now. In a way, it's not even fair to say that they are looking toward the future, they are looking toward their immediate short term needs. This country used to do things like buy the Louisiana purchase because they knew there would be a time when it would make sense to control all the land between the seas, this during a time when a trip of 100 miles could be a week long ordeal, and there wasn't even a way to get across the country yet. That's foresight and vision. What we do now that passes for thinking about the future is the equivalent of wondering what's for lunch.
We're getting a little better with science in analyzing long term impacts of current decisions. Climate change science is helping to focus scientific thinking in this respect. Evolution, Geology, and Astrophysics all teach us to think about things in the long term. In science, it's easier to predict things. Certain principles can be studied and replicated, most fields of study have similar patterns that can be expected.
This vein of thought when focused on politics is not very satisfying. Politicians are not rewarded for looking at the long view. The current news cycle is the predominant focus, and the 2 year election cycle prevents anyone from thinking beyond the immediate future. True leaders had a sense of the length of history and their place in it. Many people do not realize that Abraham Lincoln was horribly unpopular in his time, but his steadfast focus on mending the Union saw him through some terrible times and kept him working through all the setbacks until he succeeded. Now he is considered the best President we have ever had. John Kennedy put us on the moon, in a time scale that was beyond what he could have hoped to still be President, if he had lived and been re-elected. We need this kind of leadership today when we look at the way we will use energy and what we will do with our nation's debt in the future. Because one thing is for sure about the future, stick around long enough, and it will come to pass.
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