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It had been sweltering in Brussels that day. Diane and I were in the final hours of our life together. We hadn’t spoken in weeks. Our marriage, which had lasted ten years, was ending in coldness and resentment. It was June 23, 2016, the day of the Brexit referendum in the UK. That evening, a violent storm broke out over the city, bringing torrential rains. I can still see myself in the living room of the apartment on Rue de Belle-Vue, watching the deluge fall outside the bay windows. The willow branches twisted in the wind. Sometimes a bolt of lightning zigzagged across the sky, and you could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, past the Ixelles Ponds. Diane was sitting behind me in the darkened living room, leafing silently through a magazine on the sofa. She got up and I heard her move down the hall toward the bedroom. It was our last night together in that apartment—I had already arranged to move into a new place.
I heard the results of the British referendum only the next day, on the radio. I had a meeting at the European Commission first thing in the morning. Afterward, walking out of the Berlaymont, I crossed Rue de la Loi with a few colleagues to go to the Justus Lipsius building across the way. At the time, the Justus Lipsius was the only headquarters of the Council of the European Union; the new Europa building by Philippe Samyn—the famous hollowed-out glass cube that shines at night in the heart of the European Quarter—wouldn’t be put into service until early the following year. There was much more animation than usual in the lobby of the Justus Lipsius. We saw TV crews and dozens of reporters hurrying toward the press room. I can still recall the entrance of the European Council president that day. Preceded by a ferment of counselors and security agents, his resolute silhouette marched forward on the red carpet, past the row of European flags. His expression was grim, his demeanor solemn. He climbed onto the stage and began speaking with unusual emotion. I am fully aware of the grave and even tragic magnitude of the moment we’re living through, he said. It’s a historic moment, but not a time to react hysterically. The last few years have been the most difficult of our history, but I want to reassure everyone that we are prepared to confront this adverse situation, and I’m reminded of what my father used to say: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I watched the European Council president speak from the podium. At the moment he evoked his father, a veil of shyness floated across his eyes, gone in an instant. He gave a brief smile, the smile of an adult man mentioning his father in public, with all it implies of discretion, respect, and filial piety, and I couldn’t help thinking about my own father, Jean-Yves Detrez, who had himself been a European commissioner once upon a time. Since I had learned about the “Leave” victory in the British referendum, I couldn’t help thinking how he must feel. His world, the world he had always known, was faltering. Crises were accumulating in Europe, populism was on the rise, everywhere, inexorably. The humanism that my father had always zealously defended seemed in worse shape than ever. Brexit was only the latest manifestation—the most spectacular, the most drastically unexpected—of this poisonous decay.
How deeply can we forget what happens to us? I might never have asked myself that question if, months later, I hadn’t found a compromising photo on my phone. I was on a train. I had attended a futurology conference in Paris that morning and was returning to Brussels that same evening, round trip in one day. It had been a long journey and I was tired. I was letting the train rock me to sleep. Nestled in my seat, I was flipping distractedly through the images on my phone when I happened across the photo of a half-naked young woman. The poorly focused image had been taken that summer in a hotel room while I was away at a futurology retreat at Hartwell House, outside of London. I no longer remembered the exact circumstances in which the photo had been taken. I only remembered spending the end of the evening with that woman and taking the majestic staircase of Hartwell House with her very late that night, but I didn’t recall what happened next, or rather, after a certain point, my memories dissolved in the haze of an overly boozy evening. Still, no doubt that the photo had been taken in a room at Hartwell House, and clearly by me, since I had just discovered it, to my surprise and embarrassment, on my own phone—which seemed to put the lie to my hazy memory.
For several years, my friend and colleague Peter Atkins had been organizing the Hartwell House Gatherings, futurology retreats at which the participants—political officials, international analysts, experts—met for a week in the sumptuous setting of the Hartwell estate to forecast the future together. For me, who dealt with it on a daily basis as part of my job at the European Commission, the future was a purely abstract notion, which I was able to model and express through figures. But while I had undeniable mastery over the future in my professional life, I realized that, in my private life, it had been some time since I exerted any control whatsoever. My marriage to Diane was crumbling, we were having difficulties that I couldn’t see our way out of. For me, the future had become irremediably opaque. I didn’t have the tools necessary to imagine what would become of my love story with Diane. It was enough to make you think that futurology is useless in matters of the heart—or that there is no method in love.
When I began to take a professional interest in the future, in the 1990s, I quickly understood that there was an abyss between two notions that might seem related, even identical, but that are in fact quite distinct: public future and private future. The knowledge or exploration of a public future, which is at the core of my professional activities, is a full-scale discipline, much like statistics or demographics, with specific methodological techniques and tools. When it’s practiced according to the rules, futurology allows you to spot the major changes quietly fermenting in a society before they burst out into the open, and thus to anticipate the great evolutions just ahead. Whereas the desire, or the fantasy, of knowing one’s private future is more in the realm of spiritualism or clairvoyance—at which point, you might as well consult tarot cards or a crystal ball. Anyway, do we really want to know what the days or weeks ahead have in store for us? Do we want to be told what will become of us in the short or long term, considering that the most momentous things we could learn would be either that we’re going to die soon or that we’re about to have a new amorous or sexual adventure? Sex and death: nothing matters more to us, when it’s about ourselves.
In the summer of 2016, I attended Peter Atkins’s futurology retreat at Hartwell House. For those few days, the future was our main preoccupation, and we framed it with expert care. We probed it in small groups, at conference tables draped in green baize. We auscultated it with infinite precaution, to build exploratory scenarios representing possible outcomes. I’d known Peter forever; for almost twenty years, we’d been frequenting the terra incognita of strategic forecasting and exploring its last uncharted steppes. In the early 2000s, Peter had joined the staff of the Government Chief Scientific Adviser in London, who advised the prime minister on matters of technology. He had been tasked with creating the first futurology unit within that agency. And so Peter had trained himself, on the job, in the most sophisticated techniques of the discipline and had gotten to know most of the politicians, military officials, and upper functionaries working in the field in England.
After that, experts from other countries, who wanted to create their own futurology groups in their homelands, had come to London to see how it worked, and that was how Peter had become an indispensable personality in the small and very restricted world of strategic forecasting. In 2011, Peter had left his job in the British administration to go out on his own, and had founded the Hartwell House Gatherings Association. The association’s flagship event was the summer futurology retreat. Beginning with the very first session, Peter had instituted the radical idea of live challenges. The principle was to have each year a challenge to meet in real time, a general interest topic on which the participants could work over the five days of the retreat. In 2016, the Hartwell House Gathering was held in early July, barely more than a week after the Brexit referendum.
On Monday, July 4, 2016, I boarded the early-morning train in Brussels, bound for London. At the Gare du Midi, I was to meet my friend Viswanathan Ajit Pai, who works with me at the European Commission. Viswanathan was part of the Hartwell House group, and we had decided to travel together. In the Eurostar, we found an empty foursome of seats and settled in, unfolding our newspapers and placing our laptops on the shelves. Viswanathan, comfortably ensconced in his seat, had opened the Financial Times, whose salmon-colored pages he turned carefully in a muffled crinkling of newsprint. Shortly after we pulled out, we were served a nice breakfast. Viswanathan was upset, as was I, by the results of the referendum, but he didn’t look like he would let himself be defeated by it. On the contrary, enjoying his breakfast, delighting in the pastries and fruit yogurts (his and mine, which I had gladly passed to him), he instead launched into a vibrant retrospective homage to the England he’d known as a student at Cambridge in the early 1990s. You know, back then, it was a really stimulating environment, he said, an atmosphere of free thought and intellectual curiosity. People were talking about the new internationalism. Back then, Great Britain was open to other cultures. That was when you started to be able to eat well in England, with good wines, fine cheeses, excellent olive oil. English society seemed to breathe differently; there was an extraordinary openness to the outside world. According to Viswanathan, things had started to go downhill in the early 2000s, and the financial crisis of 2008 didn’t help. Grafted onto those early days of recession were an anti-immigrant rhetoric and the unleashing of populist anti-European journalism. Add to that a fair amount of cynicism and two or three sorcerer’s apprentices, Viswanathan concluded, and there was little wonder about the reasons for Brexit (and he finished off my cherry yogurt while glancing pensively through the train window).