Recently on Canada’s “Space” channel, there was a showing of the 2000 movie Frequency, a movie that was unusually agreeable to the eyes. I’m thirty-four, so the science fiction movie which galvanized me during the acne stage was Back to the Future. I was a little too old to be impressed by the original 1994 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer; it was just entertaining to me, especially since I wasn’t caught up in the 90210 cult.

An introspection-based guess says that the movies which impress you most are ones seen in childhood – around the age of ten or so. If this is correct, then someone a little older than me would have been the typical Star Wars freak: I was still too much under the influence of my “cool” uncle, who dumped on it. What got me hooked was 1978’s Time After Time, a look at what H.G. Wells himself would have faced had he himself built a working time machine and wound up in San Francisco at the same time the movie was released.

The time travel movie seems to be a full genre now, with variations for target viewers instead of the monocasting approach used for types of films that don’t qualify as a genre yet. Like Buffy, “disappointing” as it is now in retrospect. The SF/fantasy-based woman action hero film is, I need hardly say, a complete genre in itself now: soon, we’ll see variations of the narrowcasting sort, if these haven’t been released already.

In the case of Frequency, what we have is a protagonist that finds an old amateur radio set which his long-dead father used to own, in the midst of an aurora borealis storm which, as a guest of an old Dick Cavett explains in a shot using the TV as background, might have a time- bender effect. The latest research in the field of superstring theory leaves open the possibility.

And that possibility does come true. The young man, whose wife just walked out on him, ends up contacting his father in 1970. A much younger Cavett is also used as background too, with a guest explaining that the latest research in subatomic physics – classifying the different particles that were appearing in observational data in the 1960s – left open the possibility of a warp in the timeline which could connect past to future.

The plot, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, involves the son saving his father from that early death and then dealing with the complications that arise from disturbing the time line. The convention that old memories of the old time line would turn into something akin to memories of dreams is followed.

But the point I’m making doesn’t concern the plot. The dad is a firefighter; the son is a cop. The dad is distressed when he learns that his kid didn’t go into firefighting, and the happy ending comes when we see the dad still alive in 1999. And the entire movie takes place in Queen’s, New York.

That’s right. The good guys are mesomorphic Archie Bunker types.

The reason why this is counterintuitive is that the natural market for futurology, including the fictional kind found in time travel movies, is liberals. The characterization of conservatives as “scared of the future” is in part displacement of the typical liberal’s own fear that the future which their trusted expert predicted won’t work out as forecasted. That the experts might be wrong in their forecasts.

This follows from one of the standard planks in liberalism: the use of long-term planning, thrashed together in a collegial way by those who have the relevant qualifications and some glimmer of insight, to push humanity forward to a more desirable future than what otherwise would have taken place had humanity been left to grow on its own.

The implication of this is that liberals do tend to be a little wooden-headed when it comes to the lessons of economics. The conclusion that the abandonment of the “space race” as the prime goal of United States technology freed up sufficient talent to put both the microcomputer industry and the biotech industry on a solid footing is one that they find profoundly counterintuitive: they have real trouble applying that lesson to how today might turn into tomorrow.

Hence their demand for forecasts with strategic plans at the end of them. The typical liberal believes that saying “I don’t know” to a question is an admission of weakness; the shame is similar to that experienced by a good student who has to leave a test answer blank. The liberal mind, still bound by his or her schooling, sees a chain of reasoning which leads to the conclusion “Answer impossible to derive” and falls almost reflexively into the assumption that there’s something wrong with his or her study habits. A better, more conscientious student should be able to find the answer which the hidden teacher knows is there.

This intellectual insecurity, in part performance-driven, means that the liberal has an unconscious fear of an “unruly” future. Us conservatives tend to lack that, sometimes at the price of preferring ignorance, admittedly.

We tend to be issue-driven when “the future” enters into the political stream of discourse. An example would be the recent controversy over federal funding stem-cell research. A more hypothetical example would be: how would fertility technology change the fabric of the typical neighborhood if the man and woman who used to be “everybody’s uncle” found it possible to focus their nurturing on a family of their own?

Or, a type of question that’s always in season: a new technology – say, an implanted foreign-language-comprehension chip – comes along and people think it’s now possible to acquire skill in foreign languages without study. How would the receipt of such a “miracle of science” spill over into other areas of endeavor? What would people, rationally expecting future spinoffs, anticipate those specific ones? What would also be thrown out the window, and what activity or activities would it be replaced by?

And how would people react if the supposed “miracle” proves to make life far less effortless than originally hoped? How would the disappointment spill over into society, or perhaps politics? Or, perhaps, geopolitics?

Despite our bias against “long-term planning,” there is a futurology that conservatives tend to affiliate to. The basic template seems to be the case study method.

There’s also a basic philosophical approach that distinguishes conservative-friendly futurology from the liberal-friendly variety: the former concentrates upon how new opportunities and new challenges impact a group of humans whose nature is assumed to be stable over time.

In otherwords: the frontiers faced by us humans in 2050 might very well be unrecognizable to us as individuals today, but those people facing life in 2050 will have a nature similar to our own. If you want this drossed up in math- speak, technological change can be represented as a function of time, but human nature is a constant. [I should note that this previous sentence is math-babble: I’d have to add set theory to clean up its syntax, for which there’s no need to bother here. Just letting you know.]

The more complex variants of futurology that’s of, or even from, the conservative mind tend to go into depth in two ways: either a discussion of human nature in detail or adding a theory of technological change to anticipate what our fellow humans would likely face. An especially sophisticated treatise might have both.

But the shape of the skeleton doesn’t change: human nature, fundamentally unchanging over time, facing new circumstances made possible by technological advance. This makes such futurology history-friendly, so a look into the past is often sandwiched in.

Since the above analysis is only an opinion, it deserves a skeptical testing. Here’s how: ask your right-wing buds what kind of futurology they consider “pap” and whose futurologists’ mistakes they tend to forgive easily. If I’m right concerning the above, then the kind of futurology considered “mind candy” will treat technological progress as a given and assumed that human nature will change as a result. The kind given a few breaks will take the approach I discussed in more detail above.

Might as well check it out. I’m as prone to mistakes as anyone.