DECISIONS

 

Although each of the scenarios assumes the same factual premises, the events in each may vary depending on decisions that are taken within the scenarios to cope with unanticipated matters. I have italicized those critical decisions in order that the reader may ponder them in a way that would not necessarily be available to the decision makers. Some are defining moments, some are turning points, some illuminate one future while casting other possible worlds into the shadows. Yet each may come accompanied by such urgency and such noise that its true significance is not apparent (the decision in the early 1970s to float the dollar is an example). Or it may come so gradually that only when one looks back can one see that a great turning has occurred and the past is no longer visible (as occurred with American immigration policy after the mid-1960s). Or dominant ways of looking at the world may assimilate a new development for a while obscuring its power to change the way we look at things (the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan in the mid-1940s was just such a decision, taken more or less routinely as an orderly continuation of the campaign of strategic bombing). All these decisional environments are present in the scenarios that follow.

Taken together the italicized decisions in each scenario make up the unique style of that particular world: The Meadow with its impatient and ruthless naturalism, The Park with its bureaucratic Cartesianism, The Garden with its understated but iron insistence on harmony. Taken individually, these decisions show how essential human agency is to any account of history (even an historical account of the future) and yet how confined our choices can become as a consequence of precedent-setting decisions taken on matters that seemed, at the time, not to present much difficulty. Each scenario suite that follows will comprise three subject areas: security, culture, and economics.