Here we are again, on the brink of the new year, peering over the edge and trying to guess what will happen next. The more uncertain the future becomes, the more eager we are to predict it, and the less likely we are to succeed. From interest rates to epidemics and from Ukraine to climate change, there is never any shortage of authoritative voices telling us what is going to happen next, almost all of them wrong. History tells us that even enormously important events are rarely foreseen – the French Revolution of 1789, for example, or the First World War, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine - they all took the world by surprise, as did the Vietnam War and the collapse of the crypto-currency racket. The last one hasn’t quite happened yet, but I confidently predict that it will happen quite soon - although like all prophets I could be wrong.
Of course, we know that common sense based on facts and experience can foresee the future in a limited way: for example, the prediction that the cat will sleep on my clean shirt. This will invariably be true if I have both a cat and a clean shirt. Everybody knows that.
But the daily news is filled with unverifiable speculations about what might happen, most of them no more reliable than tips on a horse race. Who will win this or that election? Which government department will be abolished next week? When will Texas declare independence? Nobody knows because the answers are in the future, and no matter how much we obsess about it, we can’t see the future.
We hate uncertainty, of course, we do; we hate to accept that the future is unknowable. Hence the eternal appeal of prophecy. Prophets have always found an audience, and the whole of human history has been plagued by impostors who claim to read the future from Tarot cards, star charts, palms, crystal balls, dice, and sacrificial entrails.
Prophecy today hides under quasi-scientific names such as “forecasting” or “statistical prediction,” or in medicine, “prognosis.” Algorithms, artificial intelligence, and vast collections of data are deployed to reveal the mysteries of the future, but the results are not much better than the poetic guesswork of Nostradamus. Perhaps our world is just not designed to be predictable. Some physicists argue that, at the sub-atomic level, nothing can be predicted at all. In other words, our universe is chaotic all the way down, which makes a lot of sense when you contemplate Washington politics.
A group of scientists in England once studied what they called “premonitions.” A premonition is the simplest and most basic kind of prophecy - a dream or vision that predicts an actual event, often a disaster. The “Premonitions Bureau,” which was active in the 1960s, collected a large archive of examples, a few of them striking and hard to explain. But if one premonition in a lifetime happens to be true, and all the rest false, does it prove anything? And do we really want to know? A single, genuine, certified glimpse of the future would upset our entire view of the universe, with catastrophic results. Think what it would do to the gambling industry.
So, when it comes to seeing into the future, we have many questions and virtually no answers. The only single prophecy, prediction, speculation, forecast or guess that never fails is that things will get worse before they get better. But everybody knows that.
