Nisbet, Robert A. "The Year 2000 and All That." Commentary Magazine. 1968.

Abstract:

The approach of the year 2000 is certain to be attended by a greater fanfare of predictions, prophecies, surmises, and forewarnings than any millennial year in history. In the past twelve months, at least four books on this subject have appeared, all of them concerned with the probable shape of American and world society in the year 2000.1 How many articles have appeared I cannot even guess. But books and articles are in any event only the exposed part of the iceberg. There are today centers, institutes, and bureaus, not to mention specific commissions, whose principal business it is to forecast or predict the future. There is with us, in short, as part of the already huge knowledge industry, the historical-prediction business; and this business is certain to become ever larger, ever more ramified. Through every conceivable means—game theory, linear programming, systems analysis, cybernetics, even old-fashioned intuition or hunch—individuals and organizations are working systematically on what lies ahead during the next thirty-two years, and indeed during the century or two after that. Nor is this an American enterprise only. In France there is the Futuribles project under the distinguished direction of Bertrand de Jouvenel. In England, the Social Science Research Council has established the Committee on the Next Thirty Years. There will be other forays into the future, in this country and abroad, for the lure of the game is spreading fast. An official of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Frank Snowden Hopkins, has already proposed the organization of an institute in which “rising young government administrators would each year spend some nine or ten months . . . studying the American future in all its aspects,” to which one can only say, nice work if you can find it—the future, that is.

Why the fascination with the future at a time when so many of us are preoccupied with the roots of our not always clear cultural identity? Daniel Bell, whose knowledge of what is going on in this matter is vast, suggests two rather different forces operating in human consciousness today. There is, first, the magic of the millennial number. Men have always been attracted, Bell reminds us, to the mystical allure of the chiloi, the Greek word for a thousand, from which we acquire our religious word chiliasm, the belief in a coming life free of imperfections…

 

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