Futurist David Zach – Forward! Into the Past!

The first featured speaker at the 27th Annual G.K. Chesterton
Conference (which also marked the 100th anniversary of Chesterton’s
Orthodoxy) was David Zach, a Futurist.

Well, American Chesterton Society president Dale Ahlquist said some
things first, but graciously yielded the podium after numbers of us
began to stretch and look at our watches, while others feigned keen
interest in studying the scrap iron that adorned the walls of the
O’Shaughnessy Education Center lecture hall (I learned later that it
was a sculpture, which made me feel sad that someone has apparently blown it up. I wondered what it looked like before…?).

First of all, just the idea of hearing a professional Futurist is sort
of exciting. David Zach thinks a lot about, and gets paid to talk
about, the future. Being a solid Chestertonian, though, he thinks about
it with an eye to the past and the present. He maintains that without our most worthwhile traditions and principles, we are lost in the
future without a compass.

David Zach proposes,

"When looking at the world, you can divide much of
it into Fads, Trends or Principles. A little mantra for this is that we
should Play with Fads, Work with Trends, and Live by Principles… in modern times, we are too often Seduced by Fads, Ignorant of Trends, and Resistant to Principles.".

Like you might expect of a clever futurist, David Zach makes very
effective use of computer graphics to augment the points in his talk.
Not just slides, but little animations and such like. He is a very
engaging, energetic speaker, and great fun to watch and listen to,
though I told him in the elevator afterward that I was disappointed he
hadn’t said anything about jet packs or hover-cars.

In a little pamphlet he handed out for the talk, David Zach concludes,

"Not all principles are equally valued, just like not all change is
forward. The great struggle of our age is to define what should change
and what should stay the same."

The disease of our age is that we think that change is inherently good,
that new = better. We don’t know the value of the things we leave
behind until it’s too late.

If you’re in need of an inspiring and thought provoking speaker, you
can’t go wrong with David Zach. He was tough act to follow, which is
probably how he ended up being the only speaker that night.

Besides Dale.

David Zach, futurist – www.davidzach.com

(Visit Tim Jones’ Blog Old World Swine).

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin