One of the many annoying things about the Corona affair is that it has brought out of the woodwork an apparently unlimited number of people who pretend to know the future. “What will happen next?” they ask breathlessly, and go on to offer their unwelcome wisdom with all the confidence of Old Testament prophets. Some anticipate the apocalypse and have stimulated a lively market in old nuclear bunkers and survival gear. Others predict a kind of post-industrial economic collapse and a return to nature with a vestigial population of survivors. None of them has the slightest idea what will really happen because it hasn’t happened yet. Now, as always, it’s open season on the future. Anyone can imagine anything, and they do.
We don’t like uncertainty about the future, we much prefer magical thinking. Since the dawn of time we have been plagued by false prophets with Tarot cards, star charts, palm reading, crystal balls, dice and sacrificial entrails. In the long dark ages before Twitter almost anyone with a white beard and an impressive manner could set up as a prophet. The 16th century French astrologer Nostradamus became and still is famous, although the vast majority of his prophecies were incomprehensible or wrong.
Now even the white beard is not required. Anyone can be a prophet. So we find ourselves listening to financial advisers, think tanks, opinion polls, fundamentalist preachers, market researchers, the Federal Reserve, new age gurus, the CIA, newspaper columnists, and two billion social media users with nothing better to do than spend their time imagining futures that will never happen. They freely speculate on the basis of almost no facts and an unlimited number of unknowns, a practice technically known as guesswork.
Prophets know that the future is infinitely flexible, and so adapt their message to their present audience. From the earliest times kings, princes and other insecure rulers have employed soothsayers who, like fairground fortune-tellers, would tell them only the good news about their future victories, their future wealth and glory. Soothsayers bearing bad tidings had better look for another job. As you see, things don’t change much in government.
But to engage the attention of ordinary, skeptical citizens like you and me, a prophet must focus on the bad news. Nobody believes good news — we know from experience to expect the worst. So our popular prophets must be pessimists with catastrophic tendencies, full of dark and negative predictions. These creeps have no more real knowledge about the nonexistent future than anybody else, but they have discovered the key to making money out of people’s natural anxiety.
The only ones who feel uncertain about the future seem to be scientists, who prefer to work with facts rather than emotional fantasies. Science can offer predictions of two kinds: forecasts based on scientific laws: for example that water will boil at 100º C at sea level, or more speculative forecasts based on long-term trends like obesity or global warming. In the absence of scientific laws or long-term trends all statements about the future are mere fantasies.
All prophecy harks back to ancient religious traditions in which the future is already predestined, foretold in the sacred text or written in the stars. This makes any kind of prophecy a complete waste of time. We can sit back and enjoy fate’s roller coaster. But if you don’t believe in fate, or prophecy, and if you really want something to worry about, listen to the scientists.
Copyright: David Bouchier
