The Sociological Problem of Predicting the Future - Bias against teleology: Interestingly, we all individually
and collectively continue our average daily lives/acts and planning for the future as if nothing major will happen.
This is likely a natural reaction since it is essentially impossible to predict what will happen and hence it is
unclear how one should prepare for a different and unknown social reality. For example, we continue to invest as
we do in our retirements that are based on our financial systems and on the assumption that the world economy
will continue to grow. My wife and I have been investing huge sums of money in a cottage and property on Lake
Michigan in Northern Michigan for our eventual retirement, assuming that the lake and area of rolling cherry
orchards will maintain the physical and cultural qualities that we so appreciate presently. We would feel foolish
indeed that we decided to do nothing or planned differently and our fearful predictions failed to come to pass.
So we more or less blindly carry on. What other options do we have? Focusing on the future is a topic that
sociology and sociologists do not seem to have much stomach for. In fact, it is typically avoided. While there
have been a few renowned sociologists that have attempted to theorize about the future. The most well-known
modern examples are likely Daniel Bell’s Coming of the Post Industrial Society. Another is Ulrich Beck’s The
Risk Society. I believe the study of climate change, especially focusing on future changes, rubs up against a bias
against teleology in our discipline. How can we as sociologists write about the potential of future realities without
being labeled as promoting teleological thinking? Or perhaps climate change is very much teleological given that
many events of the history lead to a future direction? This is a tricky problem. The bottom line is that sociologists
should be “free” to speculate our collective future. What sort of academic interventions may be required to
promote and protect that ideal?
Sociological Imagination and Responses – Individuals to a System of Nations: Personally, at the individual/
family level, in an effort to help relieve our cognitive dissonance over our environmental future, our cottage is
being built with the most affordable green practices and technologies available today. It in fact will be a LEEDS
certified structure either at the gold or platinum level. While all of this is nice and makes us sleep a little better
at night, we have no delusion that our single act will have much significance in the global picture. Even if
hundreds of others did the same it would not make much of a difference. It would take individual acts into the
millions if not billions to have a meaningful impact. How can we think about change at such a level? Might it
be even beyond our capacity to comprehend? But is this not the stuff of the sociological imagination originally
outlined by C. Wright Mills? The question here is how does one get billions of individuals to make the choices
and decisions necessary to avoid the worst of global climate change? Is it from value change at the individual
or even at cultural levels, changes in market structure/institutions, and choices, change in political processes and
leaders, or changes in science and technology? Perhaps it is all these things? But with limited time and resources,
where do we invest our intellectual, financial, and political capital? To me this remains the central question in
our sociological investigation: How does one promote effective change that affects the decisions and actions of
billions of people – essentially everywhere? Obviously some individuals and groups are guiltier than others and
inequities in both problem creation and solution should be recognized. Still, how much should we depend on
individual and voluntary decisions [read markets]? Can we succeed with such an approach? If so, what is the
best path? How do we succeed in reaching the tipping point where all the decisions reduce our current carbon
load? Or do we need to structure the institutions of societies globally so billions of citizens will make the correct
environmental choice every time? If so, how do we accomplish that? Can environmental practices be imposed
from the top down? Or must they be bubble up from the bottom? [See Barry Rabe (2004) Statehouse, Greenhouse
(Brookings Institution)]. How might one get the two processes working together at the same time? These are
critical questions that likely need to be answered.