Best Hopes of a Generation
It’s fascinating to see the leading luminaries of their day daring to articulate their very best hopes.
- Rene Dubos, who popularized the phrase “think globally, act locally,” saw a 2024 with new sources of energy and “sound environmental policies.”
- Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau wrote of “new and terrible risks, and also of new hopes,” in “a future worthy of our great aspirations.”
- Norman Podhoretz, then editor of “Commentary” magazine, predicted that “literature will survive experimentation, activism, and boredom.”
- The Rev. Theodore Hesburgh addressed the question, “Will there still be a God?”
Not every prediction came true. For example, in the essay by Emmet John Hughes, a former Eisenhower speechwriter and foreign correspondent for “Time” magazine, Hughes stated that “the odds are not overwhelmingly against a French secession from Canada, spurred by the passions of Quebec province. In that event, could the province of Ontario control the impulses of Canada’s prairie provinces toward union with the United States?”
And a former U.S. Education Commissioner even imagined a 2024 paper to “Madam President.”
But living in a time when women made up just 39% of the U.S. workforce — a country with no female Senators or even governors — writer/activist Clare Boothe Luce disagreed. She envisioned the working woman of 2024 “making a little more money than she is making now. But I see her still trying to make her way up — in a man’s world — and not having very much more success than she is having now.” (Though perhaps America would have a female president by 2074.)
And arguing that “Tomorrow’s world needs a sense of interdependence for survival” was Kurt Waldheim, who was then the Secretary-General of the United Nations. This was before the public revelations in 1986 of Waldheim’s involvement during World War II with a German army unit that committed war crimes.
But in 1974, with the U.N. entering its 27th year, Waldheim urged that “in looking to the future, we make use of the accumulated experience of the past.”
How They Saw Computers in 2024
Isaac Asimov’s piece placed news clippings from 1974 next to imagined clippings from 2024, seeing the manager of the New York Mets challenging a computer’s predictions for their upcoming game against the Tokyo Suns. (“The computers have been wrong before. They can’t predict every lucky hop or just the way a batter feels at a particular moment. The game is still won on heart.”) Computer-generated injury forecasts were now legally required — in order to prevent their occurrence.