Predicting the Future When the Universe Changes

The ZMan has an interesting take today on the similarity between today and the world before World War I.

This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The Commies, he writes, were the only people back then seriously trying to predict "what happens next."And they said that "the arc of history bent towards socialism."

I think that gives the Commies too much credit. Everyone understood that the industrial age was transforming the world. Everyone, back then, was eagerly proposing plans to improve the world through politics. It's just that the Commies had a full-blown religion that promised Heaven on Earth if only we followed the Prophet Marx's True Prophecy.

More likely, says the ZMan, everyone is reverting to type.

Russia, for example, has kept reverting back to being Russia, despite the changes in political economy. We see this quite clearly with China today, which is a high tech version of the Tang Dynasty. 

In our own age, we are experiencing that the technological revolution is changing everything, just as the industrial revolution changed everything in its time. "The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it." The Commies understood that the industrial order involved a huge movement of people and changed power relationships; "Similarly, technology has created new power relationships and set up a massive movement of people." 

For the ZMan, it is "the dissident subculture in which there is any serious thought about what is driving the ongoing crisis." 

The dissident knows that today is the result of the millions of decisions that have happened up to this moment on the timeline. A man is the sum of the mating choices of his ancestors and a people is the sum of all the choices that made the people.

But the future? "Nothing is inevitable other than the fact that people have always been wrong about the future."

That sets me to thinking, about what we humans are consistently wrong about. And I think that there are a couple things to seriously deal with.

1. Don't prophesy! The temptation of all religions is to try to prophesy the future. Don't do it! We humans are never going to wrap up the future in a comforting -- or a terrifying -- prophecy about what God or Gaia or the arc of history or climate change is going to do.
2. Be ready to adapt. The whole point of humans is that we are pretty good at adapting to whatever God or Nature or out boss throws at us. So let's keep those skills sharpened.
3. Help others to adapt. The problems of the last century, I feel, occur when political and religious leaders teach their followers that there is no need to adapt. The Commies teach their followers to follow them and they will smash the exploiters. Wrong! Teach the workers how to wive and thrive in the new world. The modern educated class teaches its followers to just sit there and they will take care of everything. Wrong! Everyone has to learn how to deal with the future and deal with its challenges.

When you think about it, the prophets are bound to be wrong. They might be telling us that God will provide, or that God will damn us to Hell unless we repent. But, it seems to me, both these approaches are trying to reduce fear by prophesying certainties. And there ain't no such thing.

For there is no way to know what the "unanticipated consequences" of our actions are going to be. We humans are always meddling with things without a clue about what we are meddling with. There is no way to figure out, in advance, what is going to happen when some butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil. Maybe nothing, maybe the end of the world. But we can respond to "unanticipated consequences" and try to mitigate them. I think that, on the whole, we are pretty good at that.

The other thing we can do is help other people adapt. That, I think is the great takeaway from the fraternal associations and mutual-aid societies of the 19th century. They developed a culture of helping and coping and getting on with life. I feel that the dominant movements arising out of the educated class have operated on the conceit that all we needed to do was to follow the leader, the political or intellectual leader, because He Knows!

And to reduce it to my reductive Three Peoples theory, the People of the Creative Self need to get out and set an example of creative adaption to the curve balls that the world throws at us, the People of the Responsible Self need to responsibly adapt within the framework of their culture of doing the right thing. And the People of he Subordinate Self need to up their game, because following along and looking to someone else to pull your irons out of the fire tends not to work when everything is changing. Because when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Nobody can predict the future. Not God, not prophets, not scientists, and not political leaders and bureaucrats. What we can do is adapt.