Why do we bother about the future?

A question that has intrigued me recently concerns at what point in the human story we started to become concerned about the future? I think that the answer to this question might suggest why the future is a topic of interest. It is easy to be blithe about the question and simply state that we have an innate desire to know what comes next. But why do we have that desire? And when did we acquire it? Even more importantly, how does that affect us today?

Part of the answer to the question can be found in the treatment of risk and uncertainty. The two concepts are often confused in ordinary conversation, but there is a strict distinction between them that is worth teasing out. Risk refers to a knowable world, in which the future range of outcomes can be identified, even if we don't know exactly which outcome will be experienced. Risk readily lends itself to probabilities and an assessable future. 

Uncertainty, on the other hand, refers to an unknowable world in which the future range of outcomes cannot be readily identified. Uncertainty lends itself to a world of possibilities and plausibilities that are not readily quantifiable. Any probabilities provided for an uncertain world are necessarily subjective. This is the world of preferred futures, which can degenerate into an exercise in wishful thinking. We'll put preferred futures aside for another day and just focus on risk and uncertainty.

I often wonder if early man worried about the future? In a state of hunter gathering, I can see that there would have been a lot of risk, but would there have been much uncertainty? There would have been the risk of encountering a higher predator - such as a sabre tooth tiger - whilst out hunting. Or there would have been the risk of a collectable food source - such as berries - being eaten by birds before they could be gathered. These are risks that would have been known to early man. But what about uncertainty? Would early man have unknowable futures? And would it have bothered them much?

I think that the advent of agriculture is the point at which uncertainty enters the story. As early tribes settled and started to cultivate the land and husband their flocks, they would still have encountered risk. However, they would have also encountered uncertainty as well. The risks would be reasonably well known, such as a poor harvest or sickness amongst their various flocks and herds. Some of these risks could be mitigated and some couldn't. However, they were knowable and manageable.

One of the features of agriculture is the surplus in production. Cultivation, in particular, introduces a time lag between planting and harvest. We can think of this as an investment lag. However, early farmers have to eat during that period, so there has to be a surplus that carries them from one harvest to the next. This surplus is vulnerable to the predation of those who are still in the hunter gather mode. To protect their surpluses, villages, towns and cities emerged. Communal enterprises - such as common defence features - arose, leading to the diversion of some of the surplus into a common fund through early forms of taxation.

This fairly simplistic model is the point at which uncertainty becomes a greater factor. As the complexities of society grew, so did the variety of unknowable factors that could impact upon society. We find this process still at work today. The growth of complex financial instruments has led to a far more uncertain financial environment. When those complexities become too much to resolve, the financial system boils off a degree of complexity through a financial crash. We know the possibility of that, but we are uncertain exactly where it will originate, where it will unfold, and when it all will happen.

This is the key to why we bother about the future. The future contains elements of risk that are concealed from us in the present and uncertainties that originate in an unknowable future. We have a desire to plan and prepare for those eventualities as part of our innate survival strategies. We want to see what is just down the road, or just over the horizon. Partly for comfort, but mainly to be satisfied that we are unlikely to encounter an existential threat in the immediate future. We bother about the future because that is part of the human condition. It's an aspect of our shared humanity.

Stephen Aguilar-Millan

© The European Futures Observatory 2021