The future, of course, ain’t what it used to be.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I took it as read that by the year 2020 (in fact, by the year 2000, that mythical benchmark of all things futuristic) we would be living in glass domes and wearing space suits, that we’d all have robots to do everything for us around the house, that we’d be teleporting everywhere instead of walking, that you’d be able to catch a rocket to the moon every half hour and that we’d have colonised Mars.
All the old buildings would have gone, there’d be no trees and countryside, just a kind of scorched alien desert, even in Caithness where I grew up (which, admittedly, was flat and almost treeless, except for the little square wooded clumps that various celebrities had planted on their land as a tax dodge, though it did have a futuristic dome: the bleached, globular nuclear fast reactor Dounreay, where my dad worked and which had drawn us North in the first place).
It was, of course, a very Space Age idea of the future. Even as the 70s turned into the 80s and we progressed steadily towards the millennium without the remotest hint of humanity even returning to the moon, never mind inhabiting the rest of the cosmos, as my clothes remained only the slightest variation on the t-shirt, jumper and jeans combos I’d been wearing since toddlerhood, and as my mum continued to dust, clean and hoover with no sign of a domesticated android’s arrival anywhere, I still retained the conviction that by 2000 we’d be living in a Sci-fi film set.
Did I actually want that? Would I have been disappointed by 2020, by 2000 for that matter?
Looking back, I don’t have a strong sense that I either desired or feared that future: I just assumed that it was coming.
So, I think I’d be amazed at how little had changed, physically at least; that buildings, people, clothes, landscapes, would still look broadly the same as they had in the 70s and 80s, that even Caithness’ own space age dome, that beacon that had seemed to presage the future, would, together with the nuclear industry generally, be falling into redundancy by the time my dad took early retirement, somewhat disillusioned by the fact that thirty five years of his working life appeared to have been all for nothing. That the big change was one I hadn’t really contemplated: the computerisation of everything, giving us instant access at the touch of a screen to oceans of information for which you formerly had to trawl – probably vainly – through dusty tomes in libraries. That we’d be in thrall to portable miniature computers all day and, often, all night.
There is much to criticise in the tyranny of the smartphone, analysis to be made of what it has done to us as social beings, how it has affected both public and private discourse, the quality and truthfulness of the information which we both absorb and distribute.
But, in the end, I suspect I’d be relieved that the old buildings were still there, that the landscapes, no matter how much we might be damaging them, are still fundamentally recognisable and that our household domestic schedules are not organised by automatons (indeed, as a child, I had a recurring dream of hiding under the kitchen table from our own robot, which always bizarrely culminated in it bending down and discovering me, then somewhat incongruously – and somehow terrifyingly – eating an orange in front of my face). I’m not even bothered that we can’t catch half-hourly rockets to the moon (how it would have astonished people on July the 20th, 1969, eight days after I was born, to learn that, fifty one years later, we would only have returned five times, and never since 1972).
And there are great changes in terms of ideology and attitudes, especially when I think of the sitcoms and stand up comedians on the telly when I was a child, with their barrage of casual and fully accepted racism, sexism and homophobia. It astonished and delighted me, for example, how quickly same sex marriage was legalised. Yes, I know, it should never have been illegal in the first place and was the righting of an age old wrong. But even twenty or so years ago I would have assumed that homophobia was so entrenched that no government would dare to so incur the wrath of public opinion.
Also, for all the huge environmental challenges we face, at least there is far more awareness, on both an individual and governmental level, than there was in my childhood, the height of the disposable plastic age, when single use bags and bottles seemed like proof of what a utopia of convenience and freedom we now inhabited.
At the time of writing we are living in a situation, of course, like none of us have ever encountered. As for its impact on the future, it could go either way. The thought of long term social distancing and semi-lockdown is grim, then again there’s the potential this all might pave the way for restructuring how we live our lives and how the world is run in a good way, with greater emphasis on the vulnerable, the provision of welfare and social care and less on excessive accumulation of wealth by small numbers of inordinately powerful individuals, though I wouldn’t want to pin too many hopes on that. It may take more than a virus to achieve that kind of change.
Nonetheless, even as we peer uncertainly ahead, I think back to my childhood vision of domes, deserts, rockets and robots and I think, no, the future ain’t what it used to be.
Good thing, too.