vor some time ago we discussed getting older. One complained: “Now I'm in my mid-fifties, imagine that, in ten years I might already be dead.” The Catholic friend at the table replied laconicly: “Maybe as early as this evening.” Anyone who can be persuaded to do so, about the future writing to society must keep this dry remark in mind. We don't know the future, neither our own nor society's. The disasters of the futurologists who claim the opposite are simply not taken into account. One of them has always foreseen something, because talking pointlessly all day always results in one or two hits. Yet we do not know when the future begins or a future ends, perhaps as early as tonight.
Nobody predicted the eleventh of September and nobody the seventh of October or Corona, nobody predicted us a present with Tiktok thirty years ago. At least in the SPD and the Merkel government, no one wanted to imagine a war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine until recently, and Rolf Mützenich reprimanded Robert Habeck in 2021 for his plea to provide Ukraine with defensive weapons. Not even the fall of the Wall was predicted in the year in which it occurred. In the most important social theory of our time, that of Niklas Luhmann, the everyday effects of digitality play no role, simply because the theory was completed in 1997, ten years before the iPhone came along, but four years after the first web browser was available for free.
The extent of the errors is significant
Nature may not make leaps, but society does. That's why it continues to surprise us, especially the scientists who rely on predictions. The extent to which economic forecasts are wrong is significant and only goes unnoticed because we are very tolerant of very small numbers, even though the difference between one and two percent economic growth represents a hundred percent error. That would be like someone tipping 1. FC St. Pauli as champions of the coming season. And yet in 1998 1. FC Kaiserslautern became German champions. As long as there are profitable betting shops, there is much to suggest that future research will not achieve much there.
We therefore speak of an open future and can draw conclusions about society that is characterized by such openness and such surprises. What is meant first of all is the improbability that traditional facts will simply be passed down into the future. Young people, for example, no longer reliably take up their parents' professions, and at some point the butcher's daughter, who went to school barefoot, teaches political economy at the London School of Economics. “On average not!” sociologists rightly interject, because the probabilities for this are actually unevenly distributed. But no one lives an average life, no one can just let probabilities carry them through their lives. Statistics may give us retrospective (!) information about the future prospects of large groups of characteristics, but they cannot say whether the professions that we think of when we think about educational advancement will still exist when the time comes.
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