Meditations on Divining the Future
We humans are hopelessly future-oriented — homo divinus. Our ancestors devised endlessly clever methods to try to divine the future. Scholar Peter Willem van der Horst outlines just some of the options available to the future-curious in the ancient Greek and Roman world:
One could resort to official oracles, to interpreters of dreams, to astrologers, to augurers (who practiced divination on the basis of the flight or the sound of birds), to haruspices (interpreters of the entrails of a victim offered in sacrifice), even to persons who had mastered the details of hepatoscopy (the specialized inspection of the liver of the sacrificial animal) or of teratology (the interpretation of monstra), to engastrimythoi (channelers, or persons possessed by a divine mantic spirit that resided in their body); further there was iatromancy (obtaining medical advice via incubation), necromancy (consulting the dead), lekanomancy (looking into a dish), catoptromancy (looking into a mirror), alektryonomancy (observing the behavior of sacred chicken), chiromancy (divination by palmistry), geomancy (divination by earth), hydromancy (divination by water), aeromancy (divination by air), pyromancy (divination by fire), libanomancy (observing the direction of the smoke of incense), aleuromancy (divination from flour), ooscopy (divination from eggs), omoplatoscopy (observing the shoulder blades of sacrificial animals), sphondylomancy (divination from the movements of a spindle), coscinomancy (divination by means of a sieve), rhabdomancy (divination by a wand), cledonomancy (the interpretation of auditive omens, e.g., sneezing and casual remarks), and cleromancy (prognostication, or rather problem-solving, by means of the drawing of lots [sortilegium] or the casting of dice [astragalomancy] or other randomizing practices. And one could extend the list almost ad libitum.
Our fixation on the future has not abated. Some ancient methods of divination like astrology are experiencing a resurgence. YouTube hosts a robust community of Tarot card readers who perform “interactive” readings for eager viewers. (To my dismay, YouTube yields zero results for alektryonomancy. If only someone had been more vigilant observers of the sacred chickens, perhaps 2020 could have been foreseen and avoided!)
Some of our most formidable public intellectuals are employing their prodigious intellects to divination. Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell recently debated whether or not “humanity’s best days lay ahead.” Pinker says yes; Gladwell, no. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari has sold 7.5 million copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Harari’s vision of the future is decidedly Huxleyan. Having conquered the (hitherto) perennial problems of famine, plague, and war, the next frontier will be immortality, happiness, and divinity. Powerful advances in technology will proliferate quickly enough that age, sickness, and death will be conquered — but only for the wealthy. Only the uber-rich will be able to afford the bodily and intellectual rejuvenation and cyborg upgrades made available by science. This means that society will likely be stratified into classes of ruling gods and oppressed men. Those who cannot afford upgrades will become a sort of biological underclass. Moreover, algorithms will become so powerful and knowledgeable that we will consult them in making all of our most important decisions; we will outsource our decisions about who to marry, and what career to pursue, to an omniscient Google. Humans will be hopped up on ever-more-effective mood-enhancing drugs.
Bleak predictions like Harari’s make me shiver, and so I take consolation that our predictions are so often wrong. The political polling failures of 2016 and 2020 are a case in point. If we can’t divine something so relatively simple as how voters will pull a lever or punch a button a month from now, it seems hubristic to put much stock in the much more elaborate and fantastic prognostications about what will come to pass in the year 2050 or 3000.
In early 2020, a Norweigan television program pitted professional stock market analysts against a group of cows to determine who could generate the best returns on the Norweigian stock market. From the Daily Mail:
Each group was given the equivalent of $1,222 (or 10,000 crowns), and were allowed to choose any number of stocks from the OBX index, which tracks the top 25 companies on the Oslo Stock Exchange.
The investments were held for three months and then sold off to see who had brought in the biggest return on their investment, according to a report in The Financial Times.
Since the cows couldn’t actually make selections, they were led onto a grass field with a five-by-five grid showing the 25 different companies.
When the cows defecated on a particular grid square, the team recorded the company painted in it as an official pick.
Come to think of it, the picking of stocks by observing defecating cows is not dissimilar from the ancient practice of divining the future by observing the milling patterns of pecking sacred chickens. Fun fact: scatomancy (divination by excrement) is a real method of ancient divination.
Well, how did the cows fare against the experts? At the end of three months, the picks from the cows and the expert brokers earned the same returns. It seems that despite the improvement of our modern methods of divination — our Excel spreadsheets and our regression analyses — our best prognostications are still poo poo. Our methods may not even be an improvement on ancient divination techniques.
Perhaps it’s just as well that the future refuses to yield its secrets. In college I memorized these wise lines from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man:
In his poem “To a Mouse,” Scottish Robert Burns envies the ability of the mouse to exist always in the Eternal Now: “Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!/The present only toucheth thee:/But Och! I backward cast my e’e,/ On prospects drear!/An’ forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!”
Instead of groping in the darkness and conking our heads, perhaps we’d be wise to recognize the limitations of our own deliberative and divinatory powers and make peace with the impenetrable obscurity of the future. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
