330. The Writing Of The Future

As we discover more of the world and ourselves, the norms we usually follow begin to feel stagnant and outdated. We feel an urge to replace these norms with ones more compatible with the life and culture we feel we need. By cooperating with others, this change gradually occurs and along with it, our form of life changes.

Some of the new norms we create are norms of language. We are always coming up with new words and idioms that allow us to express more of what we see and feel. When we write, we tend to follow our shared norms as we currently understand them, unless we are intentionally trying to imitate a past form of life.

But to write for the future would be to write for a form of life that does not yet exist. We would then have to imagine what the cultural and linguistic norms of the future might be like. Obviously, we can’t go too far with this. If we do, we risk creating a text that is incomprehensible to present-day readers who are rooted solidly in our present-day form of life.

This doesn’t mean that we couldn’t teach a reader to understand a future culture, but they would have to be led there carefully. They could not simply pick up the writing of the future and immediately grasp its meanings without a guide that maps their existing normative structure onto the future one. Without this, the future text would appear to say and do things that would seem absurd, inappropriate, or even morally wrong.

A text created today might be part of the writing of the future, but we cannot know this in advance. Perhaps the culture and norms that we imagine will not be the ones that actually arrive. The scope of possibility is always wider than even our grandest imaginings, so it is likely that the future will differ from our predictions of it. Still, a text that tries to show us a future form of life can demonstrate at least some of these possibilities, and might itself provide some inspiration for their eventual realization.