I have foreseen the future of the human race by extrapolating from current trends.
Today we all dwell within an age that must yet be classified as being within the subheading of darkness; i.e, despite advances in technology, I feel we are most likely in our darkest hour.
I believe this is because we, as virtual cavemen, are still possessed by our imaginations. Hence the proliferation of wildly expressive and divergent art forms, be they painting, poetry, writing, movies, video games, you name it.
Furthermore I am prepared to state: Due to the inherent savagery of this, our darkest hour, such fare as art has become our loftiest ideal. That is to say we exalt and hold our art on the highest pedestal. We champion our heroes and writers, be they Shakespeare or Andy Warhol, whose works we not only admire, but often speak of in hushed tones as being almost sacred.
I have hope for the human race, and believe that one day, the remaining collective will at last evolve past the dark age mire we are currently wallowing in to the point of despair. Yet I suspect this hopeful evolution will involve the death of imagination.
It will be a good thing. Our current ideologies (which exalt art, for instance) will fall by the wayside. The wildly unbalanced imaginations we so cherish today will be looked upon as barbaric by our descendants. Such things as horror tales and diverse paintings and video games will all become eventually abolished as the human mind must perforce give up spurious imaginings in favor of a hard line progressive mentality which eschews fruitless artworks in order for the real humanitarian problems facing us to be solved.
I imagine that art itself will not be entirely abolished, however. Instead, it will resemble something so refined, so minimalist in its execution and symmetry, that we today do not have the brainpower to recognise it as art (only they -- our inheritors and future solvers of most humanitarian crises facing us now -- will be able to appreciate their own art, whose delicacies will remain so refined that we ourselves are poorly equipped to detect them).
In conclusion, I offer this consolation:
You and I will be long buried, of course. Therefore, I say to you: cherish the art and writings we now indulge in. They are momentary reprieves from this stage in human evolution; this, our darkest hour.
