Larry Taub is a historian of the future -- a futurographer. At a time when history has been declared at an end, when politics has lost its legitimacy, and the future has become increasingly uncertain, Taub has boldy created a grand, unifying theory that explains the past and predicts the future.
 Historical models are out of fashion. That's because they
resemble "grand theories" that neatly explain history and find
meaning in every event, and make predictions based on the explanation. People
today distrust "grand theories." Until recently the most popular grand theories were the
religious ones. The Christian grand theory, like the Jewish and Muslim ones,
explains history as a struggle between good and evil. It predicts that one
day Jesus will return again and there will be a Day of Judgment. The good
and the believers will be rewarded; the bad and the unbelievers will be
punished.In modern times, as science replaced religion as the new
religion, secular grand theories replaced religious ones as fashionable,
especially in the 19th century. For example, Auguste Comte came along with
his positivist Law of the Three Stages, a grand theory that saw society
as passing from a prehistoric theological stage to a metaphysical stage
to a final positive or scientific stage.Later in the 19th century Marx and Engels presented their
grand theory of history as a series of economic stages: Starting out with
primitive communism, humanity progressed through slavery, feudalism, and
capitalism, and will experience worker revolution and dictatorship, the
withering away of the State, and finally a worldwide anarchist classless
society.But in the 20th century, such grand theories went out of
fashion, either because they no longer rang true, or had too many holes
in them, or seemed too rigid and "masculine" in tone. Grand theories
were also rejected for political reasons. Even before the holes in Marx's
grand theory became obvious, the influential political, business, media,
and academic elites in the industrialized capitalist countries, feeling
threatened by the theory's political directions, used their great influence
to make the Marxist theory even more unfashionable and unpopular than it
deserved to be. The problem with grand theories -- and thus models -- being
out of fashion, is that, since they're the only kind of ideas that give
a sense of order, meaning, coherence, and predictability to history, we're
left with the attitude that history is random and meaningless and the future
totally unpredictable. This is why most historians spend all their time
and effort just analyzing their specialized study areas in greater and more
meaningless detail, rather than look for "the big picture," and
why futurologists, without any big picture to go by, simply analyze current
trends to predict future ones. They thus fail to foresee the trends that
suddenly, unexpectedly, arise against all the evidence that the current
trends indicate. So events like the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the breakup
of the Communist Empire always catch them -- and so us -- by surprise. Unfashionable though models may be, however, the truth
is that some of them are basically true. The attitude, therefore, that history
is totally random and meaningless and the future unpredictable is too extreme.
Chaos theory shows that processes that seem random on the surface show unrandom,
predictable patterns on deeper levels. Likewise, though everyday historical
events seem to happen at random, the broad basic trends, or "deep structures,"
of history have meaning and pattern, and by knowing the meaning and pattern
we can predict a great deal. Models deal with these deep structures. Alvin Toffler's
"three wave" model, for instance, the subject of his book, The
Third Wave, shows how history progressed through three waves -- an agricultural,
an industrial, and now a post-industrial one. You can't really argue against
the truth of that model, and it's a good example of how a model describes
one of history's deep structures and helps us make fairly accurate predictions.In my book, Sex, Age, and the Last Caste, I explain
history and predict the future from even deeper structural levels -- the
three deepest in fact: age, sex, and caste. Every person has three "coordinates"
that are completely or greatly determined the day he or she is born: their
age, their sex, and-their caste, or station in life. History and the future,
as the book shows, have the same three coordinates: the age, sex, and caste
development of the human race as a whole, determined the day the human race
was born. This book is important because its three models -- of age,
sex, and caste -- answer most of the important questions troubling or threatening
us today, such as: Why are so many formerly secure middle-class employees
getting laid off, never to refind their security? How will this problem
be solved? Will capitalism survive? If not, what will replace it in the
21st century? How strong will the U.S. be in the future? What will happen
to the American-Russian relationship? Will China become a great power? What
about Japan? What will be the future political, economic, and social position
of women? Will Israel and Palestine, the Middle East, find peace and prosperity?
What will be the role of Islam and of fundamentalism? What will be India's
role? Who will be the great powers of the next century? What will be the
future religion? How will men and women love and relate to each other sexually?
What is Africa's destiny? And most important, what are the chances of human
survival beyond the 21st century? Not only do the models answer such questions, the new and
clear view of history they give us help us understand and intuit -- predict
-- seemingly unexpected events. The sudden reunification of Germany, the breakup of the
U.S.S.R., the economic rise of Japan and the Far East, the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process, and a militant animal rights movement, caught many people
by surprise. But a close observer would have spotted the indications leading
up to these events.In 1983 I published an article in Flux, an English-language magazine based in Tokyo, which predicted the above and other events as part of deeper trends still to materialize. For instance, it predicted the reunification of Germany and the breakup of the Soviet Empire as part of the deeper trends toward the forrnation of a greater European bloc and of a Central Asian Islamic bloc. I used no crystal ball. In fact, many of the factors that
went into my thesis were being discussed by scholars of history, theorists,
politicians, and journalists. What helped me come up with what turned out
to be these and other correct predictions was a close observation of how
the forces of history -- the historical patterns and megatrends described
by the three models -- interplay. In using the models to explain the future,
I follow four guiding principles inherent in them, that create scenarios
of the future different from those proposed by other future writers.The first principle is that, instead of limiting themselves
to the "possible" futures predicted by scientific studies and
analyses of the present, the models anticipate the unexpected -- what such
studies and analyses say is unlikely to happen but happens anyway. Second, instead of just dealing with general worldwide
or purely local future trends in the usual Amero-Eurocentric way, the models
emphasize the unique role each of a wide variety of countries, regions,
and peoples will play. Third, the models help us probe beneath the surface economic,
technological, business, and political trends, which other future writers
tend to concentrate on, to cover the religious, cultural, sexual, and other
layers that suddenly surface to drastically change these trends. Fourth, instead of relying on religious prophecy and revelation
on the one hand or on modern scientific methods on the other -- the two
methods traditionally used--the models rely mainly on ancient wisdom, especially
that of India, China, and the West. The book uses this wisdom to describe the "chaos"
of past history in an orderly, meaningful way and to predict the likely
political, economic, social, and religious directions over the next 105
years. The first model is the Age Model. It shows how the spiritual
development of the whole human race corresponds to that of the aging of
a person, to the apparent different spiritual ages of the individual's life
cycle. It then "predicts" the future based on our current "adolescent"
level of spiritual maturity; specifically: what are our chances of survival
in the face of population, environmental, and nuclear threats, and what
will be the future "adult" religion we will practice? The second model is the Sex Model. Derived from Chinese
yin-yang philosophy, it presents the stages of history and the future as
corresponding to different sexual ages: a Yin Age, a Yang Age, and an Androgynous
Age. It then "predicts" that whatever is either "too male"
or "too female" in today's Yang Age will become sexually balanced
in the upcoming Androgynous Age. This model therefore makes predictions
related to the environment, medicine, animal rights, the nature of God,
homosexuality, hunting and cruel sports, feminism, the role of women in
politics and society, and male-female love-sex relationships. The third model is the Caste Model. Derived from Hindu
caste philosophy, it breaks history into five large "caste" ages,
starting from a "brahmin" prehistorical age, followed by a period
that can be characterized as a Warrior Age, followed by the age characterized
by the rise of the traders and industrialists, followed by a technocratic
society. What will be the fifth and last age? Read the book and find out! The Caste Model predicts especially the rise and fall of
old and new great powers according to which caste they "belong"
to. It also predicts the worldwide political, economic, social, and religious
consequences of this caste struggle, which will ultimately create the future
spiritualized/religious economic system. Since the purpose of the three models is to serve as ground-breaking
historical theory that exposes a new way of looking at history, the book
is aimed naturally at historians, futurologists, and others directly concerned
with history and the future. It is not written in a scholarly tone, but
in an accessible, popular style similar to that of Toffler's The Third
Wave and Naisbitt's Megatrends. Since such futurology is "all
the rage" and almost everyone will want to know Que Sera, it
will appeal to a broad cross-section of the reading public. |
FORECASTSNEAR FUTURE:
FURTHER FUTUREe
FORECASTS ALREADY COME TRUE OR ON THE VERGE
Larry Taub's book, Sex, Age, and
the Last Caste, is available from:
|
has lived in France, Israel, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka and still travels continuously. Now based in Japan, he roams the world teaching and thinking about the past and the future.
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