Idea. Potential. #9
Soothsaying: a brief modern history
As I was walking between the high tenements of Copenhagen, on the way to get my kids from school, my phone pinged with a message and the way I saw the future of our world shifted. Again.
A friend had sent yet another article with predictions for life after Covid-19. This one was all about the online behaviour we could expect on the other side, and was written in an insightful but academic style. Not that it bored me. I like seeing the different takes on the future, and I even wrote a short — and already outdated — blog (#8) on the potential consequences. But it struck me that our new lives have prompted so much prediction and prescription already. We have writers and influencers queuing up to explain what could happen, what will happen or what must happen. This got me thinking: what’s going on with these predictions? What is it about a crisis that prompts so many of them? Why do we find them so captivating to read? Most interestingly: do we ever look back and work out if anyone was right?
Soothsaying is generally considered - in the social sciences at least - to be hazardous for your career. It’s much safer to describe reality , and draw conclusions contemporaneously: about what’s happening now. And that’s because bad predictions tend to survive through the ages. So the chairman of IBM predicting in 1945 that the level of demand in the world for computers was likely to be just ten, or the British Scientist who in 1899 claimed in one sentence that radios, airplanes and X-rays had no future, became epitaphs for whole careers, no matter what else was achieved during them. There are exceptions of course. Margaret Thatcher for example, predicting that no woman would become Prime Minister of the UK in her lifetime, before achieving the feat in five years later, is remarkable, but an oddity because the prediction itself is certainly not the most famous thing about her.
Nonetheless, the perils of projection have only become worse during the digital age, as amateur bloggers, celebrities, politicians and academics use content platforms to create predictions that will — fortunately or unfortunately, depending on their accuracy — survive in digital form forever (unless we delete them when we turn out to be wrong, as I will). Apparently there’s a saying in Silicon Valley that “the future ages quickly”. Predicting is certainly a tricky business.
People who know me, know I’m fascinated with where ideas about society orginate from, and how they creep into popular culture. So I now think about our predictions as an experiment in action — or a time capsule — where we can look at public announcements for life on the other side of this situation, and assess their merit later. I began to bookmark various predictions that have piqued my interest, not just to judge accuracy later, but to also understand our mindsets at this time. And I encourage you to join in! I would love to see your top prediction for how life will change after Covid-19 in the comments below.
Whilst our prognostic capabilities are being tested, I decided to go back and to try to remind myself of some seminal moments in the history of predicting the future. I wanted to look at some examples of ‘crystal-ball thinking’ from philosophers and social scientists over the last 500 years, and I decided to start with those predictions that were interesting, but not necessarily popularly understood. Maybe within them, there are some lessons for all of us. Whilst collating this shortlist, what I learned is that to have a chance of being even a little correct, you need historically novel circumstances (like a crisis, or a struggle), expert-level knowledge, and above all: bravery (in fact being courageous — or at least, stubborn — is the variable for success in your predictions getting noticed). As we’ll see, you can have all three and still be majorly wrong. But don’t panic: you can be wrong and it doesn’t matter anyway.
As always, I include some links to video, audio, and text if the thinkers here take your fancy (I checked, and the Wikipedia pages for each of these people are well kept, if you prefer an abbreviated version). Enjoy.
Giordano Bruno
The first person on this list is quite possibly unmatched in terms of courage. Bruno, who came to be known to me through my father’s admiration of him, died in 1600 in the most brutal of fashions. His spirit of rebellion was so extreme for the time, it would be criminal not to mention him. A philosopher, mathematician, and theologist, he built on the ideas of Copernicus and predicted that the stars were actually numerous planets and suns, that the universe was infinite without a centre, and that there was no religion that could objectively claim a true ‘god’. Impressive levels of disruption for an ordained frier.
The crisis he experienced was both contextual and personal. The context was warring Italian cities, a murderous theocracy, and the battle between a growing protestantism in parts of Europe, and the incumbent power of the Vatican. His own personal battle started when his controversial ideas forced him to flee Naples, and seek safe haven away from Italy as the Inquisition drew up charges of heresy against him. His two most controversial works - On The Shadow of Ideas and The Ash Wednesday Supper — would haunt him when he eventually returned to a calmer Venice, only to be arrested, imprisoned and tortured for five years, before being burned alive in the Campo De’ Fiori in Rome, where a statue now marks his heroics. He suffered unimaginably. To the end, he refused to renounce both his belief in the plurality of worlds, and his denouncement of Christian claims to the centrality of man in the universe. On receipt of his death penalty he is reputed to have said “perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” His erudition, bravery and intellect scared the church. Such was their fear of what he may say on his way to the stake, that the judges had his tongue fastened with a device to prevent him from speaking, and they hung him upside down and naked.
He is seen as a hero of tolerance and free speech in Italy even now, and was canonised in a piece of Italian cinema made in the 1970s, along with a number of books. More recently, Bruno has seen a resurgence in admiration of his unique combination of reason and spirituality. Russell Brand, among others, discussed him in two separate podcasts with the astronomers Brian Cox and Neil Degrasse Tyson (#104), and (disclaimer!) he has been the subject of my brilliant father’s paintings for more than 40 years.
Prediction: more planets besides those of our solar system will be discovered, which is not the centre of the universe; the stars are other suns; the idea of god transcends any prescribed religion.
Right?: depends on your perspective, but yes, pretty much everywhere except the deepest bible-belt.
Significance: growing, and could become even more important than his current obscurity merits, especially when weighed against the more popularly understood Copernicus and Galileo. His combination of spirituality and reason make him perfect for generations that use Headspace daily and lament the lurch to the Right.
John Maynard Keynes
If Bruno embodied the brave in our brief list of predictors, then Keynes personified the accurate. So specifically did he predict the events of the first half of the twentieth century — events with global consequences still felt now — it’s hard to think of anyone who engaged in the art of prediction with such success. Not that it mattered: no one listened to him at first.
Keynes was an economist who had witnessed the events of the First World War from his role in the British civil service. Going against the grain of prevailing thought, Keynes believed in the ability of government to regulate markets, protect workers, and invest in growth. As the Peace treaty was formulated in Versailles, Keynes began to understand that the reparations — a common form of settlement imposed upon the losers of military conflicts by the winners— were self-defeating. The rationale for the penalty was to both repay the cost of war to the victors, but also to debilitate Germany to the extent that it could not afford to go to war again.
In 1919, Keynes released a book entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and in it he predicted that the terms agreed at Versailles would create economic hardship and distrust, that would in turn spread to other parts of Europe, sowing further hostility and decay. In short, he suggested that the Peace would create another war. Instead, the rehabilitation of Europe after the most murderous conflict in history, he argued, should have been just that: investment, debt-forgiveness, and growing interdependency between European states and the US. Nations that had been defined by their conflicts for hundreds of years, should begin in earnest to see each others’ progress as beneficial (the end of the ‘zero-sum’ game). He was one of the first popularly understood ‘globalists’.
Although politicians in France, Britain and America understood Keynes’s prediction, they disagreed. France and Britain intended to punish Germany, and the US stepped backwards. And so as the Great Depression took hold in the late 1920s and European states scrambled to survive, greater isolation and antagonism took hold. Intentionally weakened by the Allies in the compromise after the Great War, the hardships became discontent, which bubbled to become hatred, ultimately creating the conditions for political instability and the eventual rise of Nazism.
In contrast, as WWII came to a close, people began to listen to Keynes. Such was his predictive accuracy, that in the aftermath of the Second World War he was given a key role in the engine room of a new global economy. Keynes’s thought became a central intellectual force in the redesigning of Europe: The Marshall Plan for investment in strengthening economies, the Bretton Woods system for international finance, and the birth of the Welfare State being three prime examples. His fingerprint was all over the new world order.
Prediction: the allies, by punishing Germany too harshly after the Great War, had created the conditions for the Second World War.
Right?: undeniably, at least about the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles and the potential for the coming of the Second World War.
Significance: Keynes’s stubbornness in the face of the establishment after WWI led him to become arguably Britain’s most important economist and certainly one of the most influential thinkers in the world. The status quo for economics and probably, world order, changed definitively after 1945 because of his ideas.
Ayn Rand
The subtle yet influential nature of the effect of Rand’s thought on our everyday lives is perhaps unsurpassed in this little list. You may or may not know it, but Ayn Rand is reputed to adorn the bookshelves of the most powerful among us, from Silicon Valley to The White House and Downing Street. Her book Atlas Shrugged has become both a totem for tech, and a call to arms against those who wish to restrain the worst excesses of our ‘captains of industry’, and the ultra-rich.
So what did Rand predict? To understand it, we need to look briefly at what Rand wanted first. Atlas Shrugged is based in a fictional world in which the ‘superior’ should be permitted to do as they wish, conforming to a kind of ultra-liberal form of free expression and to behave as selfishly as possible. The book posits — through a rebel-hero narrative — that this state of relations (between the powerful/superior and the poor/inferior) is actually for the good of mankind.
Selflessness was a folly, for Rand, and thinking socially was malignant. In this brilliant documentary series— All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, made by the master filmmaker Adam Curtis — at about 16 minutes and 25 seconds, you can see a clip from a television interview with Rand in the 50s. In it she specifically targets the idea of altruism being a value society should aspire to. She unequivocably believed that the powerful must behave sociopathically for society to advance.
Her frustrations with the limitations that the liberal democracies set themselves led Rand to predict that on its current trajectory, American society would degrade to a kind of zombie state in which perpetual injections of cash would be needed to prop-up uninspiring and inferior industries, driven by an ideology of government that’s ‘too big’ with too much regulatory power. Rand insisted that a sympathetic and ‘social’ state, built to keep the inferior safe, rather than the superior free, would perpetually lurch from one crisis to another. A hater of what she saw as ‘moochers’, welded to the breast of their government, she predicted that the ‘brave’ and ‘talented’ would flee excessive taxation and regulation, and watch from afar as society consumed itself (if this sounds suspiciously like a rationale for moving offshore, that’s because it probably was).
The ‘crisis’ native to Rand was complex, and perhaps speaks to the quality of her predictions and prescriptions (a frailty that our last crystal-ball thinker, which we come to shortly, was also vulnerable to). Born in Saint Petersburg in the early 1900s, she fled with her family to America after experiencing the Bolshevik Revolution as a child. Her writing was published during the start of what was known as ‘The Golden Age’ of liberalism in the West; a time of unprecedented economic growth, rapid upward mobility, and improvements in standards of living. But yet this was also the start of the Cold War between the West and Russia, and deep insecurities within collective imaginations about the perceived dangers of a creeping socialism into American life.
The reviews here, though amusing, paint the picture of Rand’s legacy as the marmite of all our twentieth century predictors extraordinaire. A hugely polarising figure: whilst many capitalists see her as a poster-child for the society they want to create, many social democrats see Rand as an immoral libertarian. Some go further, and describe her influence on the tech world as pernicious and dangerous. Her work has reputedly inspired the digital platforms that Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick, and Peter Thiel have built for us, and the democracy that Conservatives such as Donald Trump, amongst others, now give us no choice but to participate within. Rand effects us daily: in our political structure, in our financial systems, and in our consumption; even if it’s in a subtle way.
Prediction: that Western society would decay and be subject to more frequent crises, if it didn’t free its most talented, brave, and wealthy individuals from all regulations and governmental oversight.
Right?: sort of. Many held up Rand as a predictor of the Global Financial Crisis in 07/08. But the idea that there are contradictions embedded within the capitalist model has been around since Karl Marx. And besides, no one could say with a straight face that too much government involvement caused the financial meldown; it was too little regulation that was to blame. Crises happened, yes. But often, the very thing that Rand despised — state intervention — saved free markets. So was Ayn Rand right? You be the judge.
Significance: more relevance, especially for the powerful, than most are comfortable with. You can tell I’m not on the fence here: I think its pretty creepy. All three episodes of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace tell the story of Rand and her enduring influence much better than I will, and you can find them for free on Daily Motion or Vimeo.
Francis Fukuyama
We can’t close without a spectacular failure. A prediction so loud, bold, and wrong, that it was later renounced by the author. Not that it seemed to hurt his career too much, which is also an important lesson to take away: being incorrect doesn’t have to mean you’re finished. It just means you were brave enough to take a chance on being wrong, and you can still go on to do interesting and important things.
Fukuyama tried to put large swathes of the social sciences out of a job (figuratively, not actually). History, he said, was at an end. Western liberalism had, in winning the Cold War, won the race to be the dominant, indeed the only form of social organisation that could survive. ‘Good riddance to socialism’, he said, basically. Western culture and liberal democracy would, over the long-term, become the only game in town.
After 1991, the first test of this thesis came in the form of 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ that followed. Immediately (less than a month after September 11th, 2001), Fukuyama sensed that the scale and impact of this event on global consciousness had the potential to undermine his argument and he began to publish rebuttals. Suddenly the enemy of democracy was not a different economic and political model, but an ideological and theocratic one. Francis’s prediction was on the back-foot in the early rounds.
Then the resurgence of China and Russia began in earnest, giving us at least two huge examples of profoundly anti-democratic and illiberal systems, with potentially world-leading growth capabilities. The onset of the digital age which began in the 90s but really took flight after the millennium, allowed China to capitalise on the productive strengths of its model (they graduate around 150,000 more PhDs per year than the US does), and combined with rapid industrialisation, they are on track to have the highest GDP in the world by the early 2020s. All of a sudden we are living in a bipolar world once again, but now with a genuine economic challenger from the authoritarian — and nominally ‘communist’ you might add — point on the axis. And to boot, capitalism has twice in the last 12 years experienced the largest shocks in its history. Francis: we’re in the eighth round here and this prediction is struggling to keep its gloves up.
Finally, rather than double-down on the pluses in democratic systems, we seem to have travelled in the other direction to meet Russia and China, mainly in order to satisfy feelings of ethnic resentment and national romanticism amongst certain groups. Since 9/11, increasing anti-immigration rhetoric and arguments for ‘national interest’ began to claim more of the share of voice. The new platforms of liberal democracy — the ‘free’ social media platforms we all enjoy using so much — have actually become something of a tool to serve the ends of nationalist fervour. Brexit and Trump are symptoms of these tendencies, most would agree. Another way of saying this is to say that the Western liberal democracies that Fukuyama predicted such success for, have actually become less democratic and more authoritarian. The West doesn’t look like the West anymore. TKO (sorry Francis).
In 2018, Fukuyama announced that he had ‘revised’ the thesis in The End of History and the Last Man, but most commentators treated this as a renunciation. As late as 2019, when Fukuyama was still trying to disavow himself from much of the neo-conservative commentators for which he was a poster boy, people were refusing to let him forget how wrong he was. Not that it slowed Fukuyama down. He maintains a strong presence on the political and publishing stage (he’s a fellow at Stanford University), and is now a member of a number of Think Tanks and policy institutes.
Prediction: liberal democracy, after the fall of the Soviet Union, is the future and the only political and economic model that will endure, over time.
Right?: wrong.
Significance: when I studied International Relations from 2003 to 2006, his text was arguably still the most read and discussed in the political sciences. By the time I was doing my doctorate in 2010 Fukuyama’s argument was looked at as slightly absurd. Now, the thesis of The End of History and the Last Man and its subsequent decline has become the epitomy of the Silicon Valley maxim that the future has a short shelf-life. But that doesn’t seem to bother Francis Fukuyama one bit; he’s active, relevant and undiminished. And perhaps that’s the best lesson for the practice of predicting: don’t let being wrong spoil the fun.
