As I am nearing the concluding pages of your lengthy essay on the future of the human species through the end of the first century of the third millennium,[1] I would like to thank you for the opportunity to send you my comments directly to your electronic-mail address made available in the last paragraph of your Acknowledgements. A nice touch on your part, by the way. I would only wish it were so easy to get in touch with other thinkers on key issues we face today.

Having been educated in the Anglo-Saxon world, where I have also taught for much of my life, I have not expected to enjoy as much as I actually have an essay of this length without a single reference. Although this approach strikes me as uniquely French, which is not exactly a compliment in view of my intellectual upbringing, I am not exaggerating my appreciation of your endeavor. I have read your book quite avidly.

Now, I believe that much of what I have read in your essay about the future suffers from two interrelated problems. To begin with, I think that you rely excessively on demographic projections that have been made in the recent past, which can be characterized by considerable stability following two global conflicts. Perhaps more important, I think that you rely on a gradualist understanding of climate change, which allows you to rely on these demographic projections to an extent that I find questionable. In particular, if you relied on a growing literature on abrupt or dramatic climate change, you would find these demographic projections, as well as your own expectations, too optimistic by half.

In my mind, much of your history of the future thus holds through the demise of the United States as the sole global power and the ensuing global conflict. The only question I would have about your projections concerns the timing of these events. In my estimation, they will come much sooner than you seem to believe. Intertwined with radical climate change, the global conflict can be expected within a couple of decades rather than by the middle of this century.

But my more serious concern has to do with your expectation that the global conflict will usher an unprecedented flourishing of global democracy, which will establish itself by the end of the century. This strikes me as a non sequitur. Instead, I would expect a demographic collapse followed by several centuries of new dark ages. Here I have in mind the collapse of the Roman world and its aftermath. Your optimism concerning the future thus baffles me. As you provide no references whatsoever anywhere in your book, I wonder what information about the world ahead have I missed. I would very much appreciate your counsel in this regard.

Footnote

1. Une brève histoire de l’avenir, Paris: Fayard, 2006.