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the ProGressive aPocalyPse aNd other futurismic deliGhts
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Harvard clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book,
Stumbling
on Happiness
. Our memories and our projections of the future are
necessarily imperfect. Our memories consist of those observa-
tions our brains have bothered to keep records of, woven together
with inference and whatever else is lying around handy when we
try to remember something. Ask someone who’s eating a great
lunch how breakfast was, and odds are she’ll tell you it was deli-
cious. Ask the same question of someone eating rubbery airplane
food, and he’ll tell you his breakfast was awful. We weave the past
out of our imperfect memories and our observable present.
We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning
and evidence to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up
against uncertainty, we fill the void with the present day. Hence
the injunction on women soldiers in the future of
Starship Troop-
ers,
or the bizarre, glassed-over “Progressland” city diorama at the
end of the 1964 World’s Fair exhibit “The Carousel of Progress,”
which Disney built for GE.
Lapsarianism — the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace
that makes each year worse than the last — is the predominant
future feeling for many people. It’s easy to see why: an imper-
fectly remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of
adulthood and physical senescence. Surely the world is getting
worse: nothing tastes as good as it did when we were six, every-
thing hurts all the time, and our matured gonads drive us into
frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive behavior.
Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Or-
thodox Jewish friend whose tradition holds that each generation
of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came
before, since each generation is more removed from the perfec-
tion of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any
of his forebears’ wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter
than him.
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