Whatever else it is, the past is an archive of futures. We are used to thinking of it, in spatial terms (“The past is a foreign country…”), as a place where things have happened. But it is also a place where visions of what would happen, or what will happen, are littered like the wind-smoothed bones of animals imagined and never born.
Ask yourself now: What will the future hold? Your head is filled with images. Of techno-utopia? Of climate apocalypse? These are two futures, two visions of what might be, that belong to our present. One hundred or one thousand years hence, whether they have come to pass or not, they will remain two of the futures that belonged to this time, which will have become past.
The student of the past, otherwise called the historian, should attend to these futures just as she attends to the other relics of that blasted landscape: yellowed administrative documents, old photographs, cracked amulets, unsent letters. Reinhart Koselleck, the late German historian, is credited with giving these “futures past” a theory and category of their own. We live, he said, at a point between two temporal spans, the “space of experience” behind us, and the “horizon of expectation” before us. And because people have always lived this way, our space of experience itself contains a near infinity of defunct horizons of expectation, most of which never came to pass. And so our own present can be understood as a “former future,” along with its many parallel, unlived lives.
Koselleck’s insight is that we can learn a lot about a given moment in time by the futures that it once conjured for itself. Today our visions are typically of a burning planet, whose inhabitants trudge endlessly in sweltering conditions from half-sunken wastelands to the border walls of more fortunate territories, where a panicked conservatism bars their entry and dooms them to expire breathlessly in the outlands. Before the turn of the first millennium, in medieval Europe, certain monks like Beatus of Liébana held a similarly fiery horizon of expectation: in the thousandth year after the birth of Christ, Judgment Day would be upon the Earth.
Saint-Sever Beatus. (Beatus of Saint-Sever[30][58]). Illustrated by Stephanus Garsia (and other unnamed). Kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. c. 1038.
Yet these two futures, endemic to times more than a thousand years apart, are vastly different in their structure. Climate apocalypse is figured as a slow and uneven violence, the world drowning and disintegrating in agony over the long skein. The Rapture is instantaneous: there is the broad horizon of the present, until the eternal future arrives — suddenly and definitively.
Koselleck argued that our futures underwent an epochal shift during what he called the Sattelzeit (‘saddle time’), the period of technological and social development between 1750 and 1850. Before this time, expectation of the future was largely bound by a quasi-natural horizon of experience within which nothing fundamentally new was expected to occur. The past provided lessons for the future based on the assumption that things would remain structurally similar. But then something changed. Something allowed Tocqueville to claim, famously, that “as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.”
I believe we are wandering still. The least we believe of the future is that it won’t be the same as the past — that, whether it comes bearing delight or dread, it will appear as the New. Only, by then it will no longer be new. It will be a former future, belonging to the time in which I write this sentence. And it will draw for us horizons we cannot even dream of.