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America's Romance with the Future
The celebrated American faith in the future was matched in the past by a willingness to sacrifice for a better tomorrow. Today, the faith endures but the commitment to sacrifice is in doubt.
When he announced his bid for the presidency back in 1991, the then-governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, spoke movingly of the teacher who had most influenced his thinking, a Georgetown University professor named Carroll Quigley. Quigley was known for ripping apart a copy of The Republic while he denounced Plato as the intellectual father of totalitarianism. But it was not the classroom pyrotechnics that most impressed the future president. Rather, it was Quigley’s emphasis on the future in his foundation course on Western civilization. Clinton never forgot the professor’s preoccupation—and not just because he was one of only two students in the class to receive an A.
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Martin Walker, a former Wilson Center public policy scholar, is the editor of United Press International. His most recent books are America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-Six Lives (2000) and the novel The Caves of Périgord (2002).
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Has Futurism Failed?
The effort to think systematically about the future began little more than a half-century ago, and the results so far have not been impressive. Today’s futurists hope that more sophisticated methods will allow them to provide a better picture of what tomorrow may bring.Doom and Demography
Decades ago, many population statistics seemed to point toward global calamity. Today, the world’s population is indeed much larger—but it is also much healthier, better educated, and richer. Therein lies a lesson in the use and misuse of numbers.How to Think About Terrorism
Will better intelligence and technology allow the United States to anticipate future terrorist attacks? History does not offer much reason for optimism, but there are steps we can take now.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and in no way represent the views or opinions of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This section is moderated by Wilson Quarterly staff.