Foresight capabilities rely on the human capacity for manipulating abstract thinking and generating multiple scenarios. Science fiction literature can be a way to explore this, especially through alternative history. [11] The most evocative stories of this sub-genre reveal that the dynamics of history are not pre-ordained but influenced by chance and hazard.

While it's common knowledge that many Golden Age science fiction writers were advocates, the fact that key stories were shaped by Futures Studies discourses is less appreciated. Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (1951-53) featured Hari Seldon's psychohistory (a predictive tool of civilization evolution, drawing on socio-economic baselines and mass group behavior). Asimov's vision was shaped by late 1940s operations research, cross-impact assessments, and statistical methods of time/series analysis and statistical regression. Novels by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle reflected the application of Futures Studies by planners for nuclear warfare scenarios and macro-economic/monetary policies. J.G. Ballard's mythopoeic future was imprinted by his Shanghai childhood and World War II internment by the Japanese, the 1960s media and Apollo space program. Science fiction literature's ability to re-shape Futures Studies became clear when William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) created a social space that accelerated the Internet's emergence. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) influenced a generation of Futures Studies advocates, including Jack Sarfatti and Esalen's Physics-Consciousness Research Group.

Speculative fiction hones our social imaging abilities and, provided that we read and actively reflect, can shift our perspective from the micro to macro-view. It provides a laboratory to re-examine the cultural evolution of the human species. As the Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry) and Star Wars (George Lucas) series have shown, speculative fiction can provide the artificial mythologies that transmit Futures Studies to a mass audience. Speculative fiction that taps Futures Studies research also deepens our collective cultural memepool.

Institutionalizing Foresight

The dystopian strain of science fiction reflects our civilization's critical path of macrohistory. The 19th century's progressive industrialism gave way after World War I to the 20th century's regression and insecurity. Slaughter envisages that the 21st century will be a catastrophe period, because unresolved systemic problems will create instabilities: "environmental and cultural systems could 'flip' very suddenly from one state to another." [12]

As a vanguard against this scenario eventuating, Slaughter has advocated the creation of Institutes of Foresight. He co-founded the Australian Foresight Institute at Swinburne University in 1999. He also profiles the major Foresight/Futures institutions, including the Congressional Clearing House on the Future (US), Eric Drexler's Foresight Institute (US), the Council for Posterity (UK), and the International Futures Library (Austria). Each of these institutions have survived funding problems and governance/political upheavals, and unlike the Middle Ages model of universities, are implementing Foresight techniques. Their work ranges from highlighting dangers and publicizing the near future to helping organizations evolve appropriately and facilitating workshops for people to overcome fears and dystopian social conditioning. Slaughter also explores the QUEST technique, [13] which blends environmental scanning with strategic workshops.

Foresight and Education

Predictive types of Futures Studies have often failed to predict the long-term implications of decision-making and policies. The Strategic Defense Initiative, for example, imprinted some Generation Xers with a fatalistic worldview, creating receptivity to Romantic-influenced Darkwave and Goth imagery. Slaughter's extensive background in education brings a unique viewpoint to how Futures Studies can create positive realities for young people.

While he raises concerns about violence and the power of images directed at the subconscious mind to mould behavior, [14] Slaughter carefully avoids the shrill moralism that defined the Culture Wars of the early 1990s. Instead he contends that young people's anxieties reflect the uncertain transition from industrial to post-industrial society. "Those trapped within the transition process," he observes, "are often unable to grasp the new picture, only the old one is being lost." [15]

The solutions that Slaughter outlines are designed to shift a person's loci of control from being affected by external problems to the ability to cause positive change and re-connect with society. They range from metaprogram changes (changing fear into motivation) to new resources (Futures concepts and ideas) to time-lining (the future is part of the present) to life-span re-scripting ("design your way out of the industrial era"). [16]

Cultural Recovery and Regeneration Civilizations

The final chapter of Slaughter's book gives a brief overview of Transpersonal research as a method to regenerate civilizations. Ken Wilber's comprehensive and integral map of knowledge offers futurists a broader lens to examine civilization/culture cycles than pop futurism. Slaughter also cites Charles Laughlin and Sheila Richardson's 'Homo Gestalt' (a person able to tap transcendent insights and new cognitive/perceptual processes to envision new realities) as a possibility of where the human species might evolve towards. [17]

Slaughter's final section is an annotated 200-book bibliography, featuring authors such as J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Ken Wilber, Riane Eisler, Jacques Vallee, Gregory Bateson, and Fritz Schumacher, amongst many others.

Clearly written with insight and passion, Richard Slaughter's Foresight Principle enhances the knowledge-base of Futures Studies. The principles and practical techniques that Slaughter outlines will help readers to transform a "world-sensing" technique that has been "an implicit unconscious process" into "an explicit conscious process" central to everyday life.

Endnotes:

[1] Richard A. Slaughter. The Foresight Principle: Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger Press and London: Adamantite Press Ltd., 1995. 52.

[2] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. xvii.

[3] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. xvii.

[4] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 11.

[5] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 17-20.

[6] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 38-39.

[7] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 52.

[8] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 53-55.

[9] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 59-60.

[10] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 88.

[11] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 84-85.

[12] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 94.

[13] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 78-82.

[14] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 119-120.

[15] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 117.

[16] Richard A. Slaughter. Ibid. 118-132.