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Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto

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i knew him personally many years ago..he was a briliant author, and a most interesting man...he dealt with the possibility of imortality and the prospect in the future. his books are ingenuous in that he delves in the unknown,. for the inquisitive reader in sociological phenomena i highly recommend it....sidney maurer...if anyone knows where he is ...i would appreciate it if you can get in touch with me rdm719@aol.com

I knew F.M. Esfandiary slightly, and I even got to meet him in person at a conference in 1995 after he changed his name to FM-2030. FM published two books under his new name: Are You a Transhuman?: Monitoring and Stimulating Your Personal Rate of Growth in a Rapidly Changing World and Countdown to Immortality, both of which develop themes he presents in Up-Wingers.

Reading this book now makes me realize now how far off track FM's view of "the future" has gotten. He published this tract in 1973, and as I recall he would have considered our mysterious, far-future year 2012 part of what he called "the middle future" at the time.

Well, have things changed that dramatically in the past 40 years? I can remember what we used to call stories set in a year like 2012: We called them "science fiction."

Yet this afternoon while making my weekly shopping trip to Prescott Valley, AZ, I chuckled at the banality of so much of our lives now in 2012. I didn't see any flying cars, or robotic servants, or clone armies, or what FM called "mobilias," or emancipated children free to wander around the world, or many of the other things FM and the last century's science fiction writers thought we would have by now. Oh, I suppose my iPad would have looked futuristic to me in my childhood; but I drive a 1989 model car. I've long enough to see a whole lot of "the future of X" outcomes which have turned into illusions or ashes, from X = "the space age" to X = "artificial intelligence" to X= "nanotechnology."

I can see now one of the reasons FM got things so ridiculously wrong: He came of age in the middle of the 20th Century when the intellectuals promoted environmental and behaviorist views of human nature, and they assumed that deterministic central planning, like in that cool utopian civilization called the Soviet Union, provided ways to predict the future, control social outcomes and create "new men."

We've learned since then that human nature and mass social behavior don't work that way. If we had to invent "futurology" now, it would incorporate modern neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, chaos theory, drunkard's walks, Hayekian notions of distributed and tacit knowledge, black swans and other considerations which teach us that we don't really know what to expect about "the future."

Which gets me back to FM's work. His books and other writings you can find online deserve reading still as object lessons in why we shouldn't take "futurology" all that seriously. Though to FM's credit he did stumble across one defensible insight: He insisted throughout his career that violence has declined throughout the world, but without much in the way of evidence until Steven Pinker came along last year to argue the case for that idea, without crediting FM, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.