Robert Heilbroner's Morality Play

Abstract

Robert Heilbroner's Human Prospect would change everything. Suddenly and radically our future is transformed. Only yesterday morning science and technology—aided by expanding industrialism—painted for us a future resonant with promise. Now we knew how to know; and in knowing all, we could control all. Thus the future was to be a realm of unlimited freedom; freedom over the forces that formerly bound us in necessity, even, said some, freedom over evolution, freedom from the limits of space and time, from want, from labor, possibly from disease, from genetic faults and from social maladjustments. Only yesterday afternoon gospels of political, social and theological liberation painted a future of self-realization, a future where the chains of oppression and exploitation are broken. Here too the future is a realm of hope, the realm where, as futurist theologians have told us, God's rule will be fully manifest.