Good morning. Welcome to the future. Or, welcome to now.

If anything sounds more pompous than ‘welcome to the future’, it is ‘welcome to now’. This is probably one of many reasons why the former is favoured by rhetoricians. Oliver Hyams has explained why the Stern Review causes problems for policy-makers who need to act in all the tenses, in his essay for gnome. Charlie Brooker suggests poisoning the water supply with LSD as a short-term solution.

These problems are not confined to the present day. The early modern past also got into trouble with the future, so much trouble that Lucian Holscher refuses the past even so much as a conception of the future. Holscher’s notion of Zukunfstaat (state calculation of and planning ahead – see the Stern Review) is, he says, an ability of the modern world.

Richard Burke disagrees with this in his foreword to The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe (Brady and Butterworth, 2010).

This collection of essays finds the future in everyday wills and the spare-time fiction of canonical giants.

Futures ‘were intended to stimulate critical reflections on the present that would lead to changes’, not dissimilar to the metrics of political philosophers today.

This applied whether these futures were probable and mortal or indulgent and utopian.

‘Utopia was transplanted from a remote place (or ‘nowhere’) to a new age,’ says Bolchum. But Burke’s argument says that these are not different places or spaces in time: the future is something that we can anticipate and change. This idea provides comfort to our ancestors, as well as those of us alive today. Though sometimes it might seem difficult to plot our future, we should be confident that it is on its way.

posted by Ossie Froggatt-Smith