PUTTING THE PROPHETS IN THEIR PLACE

By Gearld Clarke

SOME societies are dominated by the past; America seems obsessed by the future. No sooner is a President elected than commentators begin to estimate his chances next time around. Hours after the discovery of a trend, someone is predicting how and when it will end and what will take its place. Why so much compulsive eagerness to read history before it happens? Perhaps it is an escape from an unsatisfactory present. Perhaps, also. Americans--and 20th century men generally--are deluded by the Faustian illusion that by predicting the future, they can control it. If all this seems occasionally oppressive, if the arrogance of the prophets begins to irritate the layman, there is one consolation: the forecasters are usually wrong, since predicting is a loser's game.

It is unlikely that any major enterprise was ever undertaken without an expert arguing conclusively that it would not succeed. At the behest of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, a panel of Spanish sages looked at Columbus' plan for a voyage to the Indies, and in 1490 came up with six good reasons why it was impossible. So many centuries after the creation, they concluded triumphantly, it was unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value. This negative reaction was similar to the learned argument that greeted Galileo when he reported that Jupiter had moons. "Jupiter's moons are invisible to the naked eye," said a group of Aristotelian professors, "and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist."

The "therefores" continued into the 19th century, when several experts asserted that a new invention known as the railroad would kill all of its passengers. Anyone traveling at 30 m.p.h., they reasoned, could not breathe and would die of suffocation. This was only a foretaste of the dire warnings that awaited the inventors of the airplane. "The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force can be united in a practical [flying] machine seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be," one scientist wrote about the turn of the century. One week before the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, the New York Times editorially advised Samuel Langley, one of the Wright brothers' chief competitors, to turn his talents to ''more useful employment."

All Time to Come

The rocket was launched with similar expert predictions of failure. In 1940 the editor of the Scientific American wrote Willy Ley, prophet of space travel, that the notion of a rocket bomb was "too farfetched to be considered." In December 1945, even though Germany's V-ls and V-2s had already terrorized London, Dr. Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, said that intercontinental missiles would not be possible for a "very long period of time." The American public, he impatiently contended, should not even think about them. Only last December, Dr. Bentley Glass, a geneticist and the retiring president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, added his name to the list of doubters. The basic laws of science are all now known, he said. "For all time to come these [laws] have been discovered, here and now, in our own lifetime."

Such naysaying led Arthur Clarke, the science and science-fiction writer, to lay down what he calls Clarke's Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Most erroneous predictions, Clarke believes, stem from one of two causes: a failure of imagination or a failure of nerve. His law holds up in science, at least, where knowledge seems almost a barrier to drawing an accurate picture of the future. Far better as prophets have been the science-fiction writers, who usually have limited scholarly credentials but who are abundantly endowed with both nerve and imagination. Almost everybody knows about Jules Verne, who foresaw both submarines and voyages to the moon. Just as prophetic, however, was the late Hugo Gernsback, the first American science-fiction writer (Ralph 124C 41Plus), who predicted, among other things, radar, television, night baseball, rocket planes and communications satellites.

With a few exceptions, the record of the social forecasters is even more dismal than that of their brethren in the physical sciences. In 1784 the Marquis de Condorcet, a leading mathematician and philosopher of the Enlightenment, saw a placid present and looked forward to an even more placid future. "The great probability," he said, "is that we will have fewer great changes and fewer large revolutions to expect from the future than from the past. The prevailing spirit of moderation and peace seems to assure us that henceforth wars will be less frequent." Reverse everything and Condorcet would have been right on target. Five years later, France was convulsed by revolution; eight years later, Condorcet himself called his country to war; ten years later, he was a victim of the Reign of Terror. At least he lived, if only briefly, to acknowledge his error.

Condorcet was not alone in trying to build the future on the present. Writing in an era of late 19th century tranquillity, French Historian Emile Faguet looked forward to an even more serene, albeit somewhat bland 20th century. "The chances are that from now on history will be less filled with vicissitudes, less colorful, and less dramatic," he wrote. "The great conqueror, the great reformer, and the great statesman will become increasingly rare." So much for Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Wilson, Gandhi, Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt--not to mention such colorful vicissitudes as two world wars.

That Overrated Bore

While Condorcet and Faguet erred in being too optimistic about the future, some modern social prophets have been proved wrong by being too pessimistic. Two widespread predictions of the early '60s, for example, have turned out to be incorrect, at least up till now. Automation, which a large number of Cassandras, from Michael Harrington to Linus Pauling, thought would put millions out of work, seems to have created more jobs than it abolished. Worldwide famine, which seemed mandated by exploding populations, has been forestalled by the "green revolution," the development of new wonder grains. Probably fewer people are hungry today than ten years ago.

Leaving aside that overrated bore Nostradamus, whose predictions were so gnomic that they could be interpreted to suit events, there have been a few prescient souls who have shrewdly guessed the future of society and relations among nations. Although wrong about some things--including the imminent decline and fall of capitalism--Lenin in 1918 foresaw "an inevitable conflict" between the U.S. and Japan over control of the Pacific. Six years later, General Billy Mitchell, one of the few military leaders to predict the potential of airpower in warfare, told how the Japanese would begin the conflict some morning with an attack on Pearl Harbor. Shortly before the Six-Day War in 1967, Charles de Gaulle announced almost exactly how long the war would last, who would win, and what kind of peace would follow. (He was only slightly less accurate in saying, before her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, that Jackie Kennedy would wind up on the yacht of an oilman.)

For sheer weight of accurate prediction, few can match another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America is still an amazingly accurate portrayal of the U.S. and its people. Writing at a time when the U.S. and Russia were hardly thought of as great powers, Tocqueville projected an inevitable American-Russian rivalry. "Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same." he wrote. "Yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe."

What separates a Tocqueville from a Condorcet? The difference is not so much in nerve as in imagination. As the French futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel points out in his book The Art of Conjecture, it is impossible for most men to visualize a reversal of an existing trend. The early 1780s, when Condorcet was writing, and the late 1890s, when Faguet made his predictions, were quiet and the world seemed civilized. Neither could conceive of a revolution or a global war that would change the foundations of society.

Lessons from the Past

In an attempt to discern just such unexpected reversals, some prophets have searched the past for clues to the future. There are, after all, lessons in history, aren't there? Not always. Looking back to the English Civil War of the 17th century and the Restoration of Charles II, French royalists, for example, expected an early return of the Bourbons after their own revolution. They got Napoleon instead. Some social prophets today have suggested that the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s will be followed by a puritanical reaction during the '70s. That, after all, is what happened in England after the licentiousness of the Restoration, and in the U.S. after the giddiness of the '20s. Perhaps it will happen again, but don't take any bets.

Quite often, predictors have been right and wrong at the same time. They have correctly discerned the beginning of a trend or movement, but they have failed to anticipate its effects, which frequently are just as important. In 1899, a writer for Scientific American accurately foresaw the triumph of the automobile over the ,horse. He then made the mistake of adding: "The improvement in city conditions can hardly be overestimated. Streets clean, dustless and odorless would eliminate a greater part of the nervousness, distraction and strain of modern metropolitan life." A few minutes' application of imagination and arithmetic, putting together the collective impact of cars, people, noise and exhausts (even if many cars were then powered by steam or electricity), would have shown that if the first part of his projection was right, the second could not possibly be.

In recent years, the art of prediction has gained from sophisticated new analytic techniques and the computer. A half-scientific school of predictors known as futurists--men like De Jouvenel and Herman Kahn--has come into vogue. Will they prove to be more accurate than their less scientific, more intuitive predecessors?

The futurists, together with other leading thinkers, seem to be in general agreement that there is little likelihood of a third World War and that the population explosion (in most of the world, at least) will continue unchecked. "In the indigent two-thirds of the human race," asserts Historian Arnold Toynbee, "family planning will be long delayed. The surplus population will live miserably, without hope, on dole from the productive minority." The futurists also believe that the prosperity of the industrial countries will reach even greater heights, that Japan will be the No. 1 power of the 21st century, and that the revolution in mores and social values--"redesigning a way of life" in the words of Harvard Psychologist B.F. Skinner--will go right on. Although the professional seers have generally not descended to such trivialities, almost everyone seems to think that marijuana will be legalized before very long. Many experts meanwhile are convinced that pollution will make all the above forecasts irrelevant. Civilization will end within a generation, says George Wald, Harvard's Nobel-prizewinning biochemist, unless drastic and immediate steps' are taken to reverse the despoliation of man's environment.

All these predictions seem so plausible that they have already taken on the color of conventional wisdom. The contemporary prophets may well turn out to be right. But there are some factors that ultimately might make the forecasts look foolish indeed. At least part of the Japanese economic miracle, for instance, is the product of Japan's desire to imitate and beat the West. If the West decided that prosperity was no longer its goal, would Japan run so fast? Or, all by itself, might affluence dull the Japanese dedication to work? In other industrial countries, changing social attitudes that put less value on work might very well slow or stop the growth of prosperity. The population explosion, at the same time, might be defused by nothing more profound than a truly cheap, effective and uncomplicated method of birth control. As for pot, its legalization might be forestalled by medical proof that long-term use leads to as yet unsuspected side effects. World War III? One can only hope --and add unhappily that few people in January 1914 predicted World War I.

The best that can be said for the futurists, and for prophets of all kinds, is that their predictions force men to examine the likely outcome of what they are doing, and then add a little to the limited choice and control men have over events. "I would willingly say," declares Bertrand de Jouvenel, "that forecasting would be an absurd enterprise were it not inevitable. We have to make wagers about the future; we have no choice in the matter."

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