Predicting the Future, Part II

In last week's column I discussed the overwhelming failure of expert and psychic predictions during the past 24 years. Given the problems associated with attempting to predict future events, what more can be said on the matter?

Some social thinkers, in the past, have made accurate predictions. Thinkers steeped in history, with a deep understanding of human nature, have graced history with their insights. One such thinker was Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Written in the first half of 1790, at the outset of the French Revolution, Burke's "Reflections" anticipated the politicization of criminal impulses and France's descent into military despotism. It is safe to say that Burke's "Reflections" is one of the most important political essays ever written.

Burke's ideas, useful in foretelling the outcome of the French Revolution, may be applied to our own time. For 200 years Western Civilization has slowly, gradually, adopted the most destructive ideas of the French revolutionaries. These were the ideas Burke warned against: - egalitarianism and secularism. Burke warned that an optimistic view of human nature was politically and socially dangerous. Mankind is not capable of infinite improvement. Abstract political reasoning leads to murder. The abandonment of ancient tradition leads to tyranny. Piety and reverence are essential. On all these points the West has failed to hold its ground. Catastrophe must therefore follow.

Drawing from similar intuitions as Burke's, Max Weber was one of the most penetrating social thinkers of the 20^th century. He analyzed the problem of politics, distinguishing between patriarchal, bureaucratic and charismatic types of authority. Like Burke, Weber feared that modern rationality and analytic method undermined value judgments. He worried about "the fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge." He warned that man had blundered into "disenchantment."

Weber also suspected something chaotic at the core of progress. Man would never grasp the forces that moved history. Weber's American contemporary, the historian Henry Adams, offered a similar set of thoughts. Adams was so bewildered by progress that he admitted total confusion. Notions of cause and effect in history were nonsense, he explained. No one could agree on the laws of history. The great political leaders were, in reality, as ignorant as the great historians "and, as a rule, no more honest." But Adams nonetheless sensed that things had taken a wrong turn. He wrote that "the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos...."

Progress was simply an interplay of forces, and these forces were finally concentrated in things called "machines." The steam engine was one machine, the atom bomb another. Since history could not be rationally understood in terms of cause and effect, it could nonetheless be depicted in terms of a very definite "force ladder," with stones and spears on the first step and suitcase nuclear bombs on the last step.

And how will man's machines be used, in the end?

Weber discovered - or thought he discovered - that a country's point of departure all but fixed its destiny. America's experiment in radical individualism and democracy would play itself out. Radical individualism would, in time, lead to a "culture of narcissism," self-gratification and social conformity. After visiting America in 1904 Weber offered something of a warning. Narcissism would not lead to political indifference in America. It would lead to economic cannibalism. The narcissists of the future would see that economic goodies were to be gained from political activity. Popular pressures, applied to democracy, would force the state to gratify the citizen. Consequently, the state would bloat and grow until it suffocated society and then, in the end, it would self-destruct.

It has been known, and often remarked, that history alternates between periods of war and peace, creation and destruction, the accumulation of knowledge and the forgetting of knowledge. Nations come into being and they are obliterated. This is how history works. There is no appeal to this process. There is no "end of history." There is only an alternating pendulum-like movement between opposites. Looking back on 2,500 years of history we see a legacy of death and rebirth. There is no Roman Republic today, no Athenian League, no Carthage or Sparta. The old states and empires are gone. They were obliterated, each in its turn.

It is worthwhile, in this context, to study Chart 1, which sets forth an exhaustive list of future outcomes. If you rated the future on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being the happiest and five the unhappiest, you are left with 15 generalized outcomes in three historical dimensions (economic, social and military). Everything that might happen, everything that could happen, is found on the chart. For purposes of argument, let us say that America is economically growing, socially polarized and engaged in fighting terrorism. According to the chart we live in "troubled times" as opposed to "good times." Yet we have not entered into "difficult times."

Chart 1 (USA Alternate Futures Table - 2004-2009

Now let us consider where we are headed: America has followed the line of development foreseen by Weber. Indeed, the entire West is headed toward bankruptcy because the state is democratically compelled to gratify the citizen. This course is evident in the present election cycle. No politician can resist the citizen's demands for more and better benefits (at state expense). Here we see that narcissism has reached a critical level. The very system that brought the greatest happiness to the greatest number is going to implode. "It is undeniably true," wrote Weber, "indeed a fundamental truth of all history, that the final result of political activity ... bears very little relation to the original intention: often, indeed, it is quite the opposite of what was first intended."

Ours is a time of impending cataclysm in which a de-spiritualized order has become, in the words of Henry Adams, "an accidental relation obnoxious to nature." When the breakdown comes, according to Adams, we will find nothing but "the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man." The humanitarian tone of the latest political rhetoric is disingenuous. It cannot be credited. The machinery of progress is a scaffold on which modernity hangs itself. "For politics," wrote Weber, "the essential means is violence."

As the economies of the leading Western countries exhaust themselves, the carrion birds of politics - the revolutionaries and terrorists - will gather under darkening skies. The economic storm is therefore followed by a political storm. And political storms lead directly to civil war, revolutionary war and even world war.

As long as the economic motor of the world continues to function, however, the status quo will shuffle along. When the economic motor quits, then look to the battle lines that men have already drawn. Dislike will turn to hatred, and hatred to murderous rage. Growth and progress will end. Contraction and war will begin.

The writings of modernity's greatest social thinkers suggest an approximate idea of our future. It is not a pleasant suggestion. But is it terribly surprising? Does it stray from common sense?