"One of the results of current cultural processes is a widespread anxiety magnifying worries about the future we must contemplate together; this is everywhere translated into a need for futurologies. Never, until this contemporary period, did any individual culture experience such an intense obsession with the future. The passion for astrology, the predictions and prophecies that were Assyrian or Babylonian in origin and that spread most actively, perhaps during the European Middle Ages, were far more the products of a synthesizing or magical thought than anything produced by concerns about really safeguarding the future. The same held true for the Mayans and Aztecs or in ancient China. Nor did the notion of progress, so much touted by Victor Hugo, take shape as motifs of anticipation. These days, futurology is an obsession that tends to set itself up as a science. But any possible laws of such a science would be stamped by the same principle of uncertainty that governs the métissage of cultures."