Bonus Episode: Glenn Adamson on A Century of Tomorrows

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

In this bonus episode of 'History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps,' host Peter engages with his brother, art historian Glenn Adamson, to discuss Adamson's

Key takeaways

• Futurologists often make extreme claims about the future, driven by a need to offer transformative insights rather than mere continuity.
• Religious models of futurology—like those seen in Wovoka's Ghost Dance or Billy Sunday's evangelism—rely on revelation and radical breaks from the present, framing the future as either utopian or apocalyptic.

Main topics

• The evolution of futurism from religious revelation to scientific prediction
• Religious and cultural visions of the future (e.g., Ghost Dance, Billy Sunday)

Notable quotes

'The future is inherently unknowable—yet futurologists claim to overcome that intuition.'

'There's a disjunction between the present and the future: not an extrapolation, but a radical break.'

Conclusion

Futurology, as explored through Glenn Adamson's 'A Century of Tomorrows,' reveals how humanity has consistently sought to shape and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:12) Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode designed to tide you over while we're on summer break from the podcast. The next episodes will be released in September. But in the meantime, I have a special guest who's been on the podcast before to do another bonus episode. My brother, Glenn Adamson, who is an art historian, curator at large, and man about town. Hello, Glenn. Hey there, Peter. So good to be back. And we're recording this on our birthday. So happy birthday, Glenn. Happy birthday, Peter. We are going to be talking about your latest book, which is called what? It's called A Century of Tomorrows. Great title. And this means what exactly? Well, that's what we'll talk about. It's a book about predicting the future in the 20th century. And so what I've done is to look back at people who were trying to look forward. The idea being that if you understand how the future is working for people in a certain time and place, you understand a lot more about that time and place. And it was fascinating to me while working on the project. particularly to think about how futurologists, as I call them, so these are people who assign themselves the responsibility of explaining the future to everyone else, what claims they make about their knowledge. And I guess I thought that might be of philosophical interest, or it might just fit into your podcast here. Yes, absolutely. And also, I read the book while you were writing it and had the privilege of actually even giving you feedback on it. Sorry, how sweet. Yeah, it's really good. And... I hope that the audience will think it's an interesting enough book to seek out. As you say, it covers the 20th century, so this is sort of the history of the future, as it were. Yeah, so I really pick up in the very late 19th century as shifts are happening in the way that people understand the future and particularly the way that they go about the art of prediction. And one interesting thing about the book is the chapters have sort of eye-catching titles. which are more thematic. So it's not just like 1905 to 1915 or something. So the first one is called Heaven and Hell. Right, exactly. So this is looking at the very early 20th century, as I say, coming out of the 19th. And here, what I'm trying to do, I suppose, is get a handle on how people understood the future in a pre-modern context. So here, I guess by modern, I mean the creation of this kind of technocratic way of thinking about knowledge. of all kinds, but that would very much include knowledge about the future. So the first chapter, Heaven and Hell, looks at what you might call the earlier or, you know, surviving ways of thinking about the future, which are often, although not always, couched in religious terms and generally tend to make extreme claims about the future, i.e. it's either going to be perfection or it's going to be perdition. And a lot of the models or conceptual models for that kind of futurology are really based on, for example, last judgment imagery from the middle ages. So these are things that go way back. And generally speaking, this kind of futurology also doesn't assume that you would be able to do much to affect the future because it's in God's hands, let's say, or fate. So here you might be thinking about someone like Wovoka, very interesting Native American. activist, I guess we could call him, that I write about at the beginning of the book, who is associated with the origins of the ghost dance. And so what he's trying to think about is the way that Native American people have been treated at the hands of colonizing America and the coming, I suppose, rapture, you might call it in a Christian context. So the complete shift of reality that will occur when Native Americans recover their lands. So that kind of utopian thinking. That's what I was very interested in, looking at these late 19th, early 20th century futurologists of all kinds. And in this period, is the claim going to be, we know for sure what's coming down the line, we can tell you, we can warn you, or is the claim, who knows what's happening because it's up to God? So the claim is on the part of the futurologist, because remember here, I'm always focusing on the futurologist as a person. So the person that is going to explain the future to you, because that knowledge has been. somehow made clear to them in a way that it hasn't been to the rest of us. And in this case, that future is made clear for revelation. So Wovoka, for example, has a vision. Or another person I write about, totally different cultural context, but weirdly similar in so many ways, is Billy Sunday, who's an early evangelist. You know, we think of evangelism now as being like a television thing, or I suppose these days an internet thing. But obviously it goes way back earlier than that to these so-called great awakenings. where you have religious leaders like Billy Sunday, by the way, his real name, he was born Billy Sunday. Too good to be true. Yeah. And he becomes this incredible barnstorming phenomenon in the 19-teens, 20s, also makes a lot of money at it. So there's also this question about futurology of the business, which I come back to again and again in the book. But I suppose from a philosophical point of view, and... I see lots of correspondences here with many episodes that you've presented on the podcast. The nature of the truth that's being presented is somehow a gift from God or is being made available only through God through revelation. So it's not operating on the basis of logic or rational argumentation. And you're also not necessarily extrapolating from the present, right? I mean, one interesting thing about the future is that it's by definition unknown, right? It hasn't happened yet. You might think that either it hasn't been determined yet, so there is nothing to know, or you might think that whatever determines it is not accessible to us, right? So there's a fundamental epistemic problem about the future that in some sense doesn't apply to the past, right? So, I mean, we often lack historical evidence about the past, something else we've come up against on the podcast many times. But the past isn't in principle unknowable, you might think, in the way that the future is, right? Yes. And so the futurologist's job is to overcome that intuition that I think we all share that the future is inherently unknowable. And in the case of these revelatory models of futurology that I am talking about in the Heaven and Hell chapter, maybe the key thing to observe is that there's a disjunction. So as you say, rather than the future being an extrapolation or an intensification or continuation of certain trajectories that can be identified. Instead, you have a radical break between the present and the future. And again, that will be often presented in design terms. So Waboka would be a good example of that. And also might be worth saying that for many of these futurologists, the question is not so much what happens down here as opposed in the afterlife. So we also have this metaphor, which is also for a religious person quite real, that there's a state change or a kind of paradigm change at the point of death, where you go to heaven or hell, literally, if you're a soul. an individual soul, but that same model could be applied to society at large. And there are many, many examples of this, especially in America, not only, but the shakers who've been in the news recently because of the Testament of Amity, that film that came out, that would be a really good example of a whole sect that understands itself according to a second coming. So how do things then change when we go forward into the 20th century? Presumably there are lots of new scientific and technical models you can use to predict the future. And I guess futurologists are basically never in the business of saying, well, it's going to be pretty much like it is now. So just get ready for more of the same, right? So they're always trying to use these new tools to tell you how things will change going forward, right? That's right. And that's partly built into the business model, because if you were only advising people that things were going to stay constant, that you wouldn't really have much to offer them. either to a business or a government in a more practical sense, or in terms of the general population, a more psychological sense. So futurologists do tend to make extreme predictions, even outside of the context of this revelatory model, which is interesting. It maybe says a lot about us as people. I think you could say that applies to political dynamics as well. You know, extreme politics often have a lot more consequence or a lot more impact than their likelihood or kind of... rationale would indicate. And often the path that the status quo has a lot of staying power tends to be underrated both in futurology and politics in general. But anyway, to get back to your question, and this is where I think really things get interesting, frankly, when you think about 20th century futurology, you start to have a whole array of different tactics, strategies, and as you said, almost scientific or quasi-technical ways of understanding the future. And if we take a step back into the 19th century just for a second, you can understand why this happens if you think about the instance of weather prediction. Because it really was the case that before around the middle of the 19th century, nobody ever knew what the weather was going to be like within certain parameters. Obviously, we had almanacs. You'd be colder in the winter than in the summer, but you didn't know when it was going to rain. And that was only a matter that God knew. And of course, you had to kind of folk. customs of, you know, does your knee ache or that kind of thing. But, you know, sailors, myths about the sun, that kind of thing. But lo and behold, some scientists at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. set up a network of weather observation and connected it to the new technology of the telegraph. And they were able to suddenly start predicting the future simply by virtue of the fact that the weather in America generally moves from west to east. And so if it was raining in Oklahoma on one day, they could state pretty certainly that in the states