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Measuring Our Future
What there is of it
It isn’t easy to view the future with anything but dread. In American culture, the past has often been dismissed as irrelevant, as we believe we own the future. Who needs history when the future is ours to shape and use?
That attitude had significant problems, but they were long dismissed as academic. History, after all, existed only as an academic subject.
But now, there is an insurmountable problem: if the future is the only thing that matters, but we no longer have a future, what do we do? We have never learned to use the past as a significant part of our life story. So what do we look to? Most American universities no longer require a history course for an undergraduate degree.
Collapsing cultures and civilizations are not good places to live. We are learning this the hard way in the modern world, specifically the American Empire. Most people don’t know what’s happening, except that everything seems off.
Cultures don’t collapse overnight, but the process is often hidden until it becomes impossible to hide anymore. That usually requires something like a foreign conquest or regions breaking away. Even then, it may not be accepted as the end. The last version of the Roman Empire did not disappear until 1919, although the major collapses were in 476 for the Western Roman…
