Further thoughts about the foreseeable future

Some years ago,  five or six years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I was asked to participate in a conference at Boston University’s marvelously named Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.

The details of the conference are swaddled in the mists of times gone by, but I do remember that part of my talk was devoted to some thoughts about our tendency to deploy language to emasculate surprise. In particular, I dilated on the curious phrase “the foreseeable future.” With what cheery abandon we employ it! Yet what a nugget of unfounded optimism those three words embrace!

How much of the future, really, do we foresee? A week? A day? A minute?

“In a minute,” as T. S. Eliot said in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” So much of life is a juggling with probabilities, a conjuring with uncertainties, that we often forget upon what stupendous acts of faith even the prudent conduct of life depends.

Had I been asked, on September 10, 2001, whether New York’s Twin Towers would continue standing for “the foreseeable future,” I would have answered “yes.”

And so, in one sense, they did.

Only my foresight was not penetrating enough, not far-seeing enough, to accommodate that most pedestrian of eventualities: an event.

An event is as common as dirt.

It is also as novel as tomorrow’s dawn.

“There is nothing,” the French writer Charles Péguy noted in the early years of the twentieth century, “so unforeseen as an event.” The particular event Péguy had in mind was the Dreyfus Affair. Who could have predicted that the fate of an obscure Jewish Army captain falsely accused of spying would have such momentous consequences?

And yet this unforeseen event, as Proust observed in À la recherche du temps perdu, suddenly, catastrophically, “divided France from top to bottom.” Its repercussions were felt for decades.

We plan, stockpile, second-guess, buy insurance, make allowances, assess risks, play the odds, envision contingencies, calculate interest, tabulate returns, save for a rainy day . . . and still we are constantly surprised.

In a thoughtful essay called “What Is Freedom?” the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted the extent to which habit—what she disparages somewhat with the name “automatism”—rules life. We are creatures of habit, schedules, and conventions. And thank God for that. For without habit, we could never build character.

And yet we are also creatures who continually depart from the script. Human beings do not simply behave in response to stimuli. We act—which means that our lives, though orchestrated largely by routine, are at the same time everywhere edged with the prospect of novelty.

“Every act,” Arendt wrote,

seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a ‘miracle’—that is, something which could not be expected. . . . It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an “infinite improbability,” and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real.

Every moment of every day presents us with the potential for what Arendt calls the “miracle” of human action, so familiar and yet ultimately unfathomable. That is why we find proleptic phrases like “the foreseeable future” indispensable. They declare the flag of our confidence and the reach of our competence. They domesticate the intractable mystery of everyday novelty.

But they also serve to remind us that our confidence is deeply complicit with luck—that most fickle of talismans—and that our competence is instantly revocable without notice. Which is to say that our foresight is always an adventure, practiced at the pleasure of the unpredictable.

This is something that P. G. Wodehouse, a philosopher of a somewhat merrier stamp than Hannah Arendt, put with his customary grace when his character Psmith observed that “in this life . . . we must always distinguish between the Unlikely and the Impossible.” On September 10, it was unlikely that a small band of murderous fanatics should destroy the Twin Towers and fundamentally alter the political landscape of the world. It was not, alas, impossible.

The eruption of the unlikely is an affront to our complacency, an insult to our pride. We tend to react by subsequently endowing the unlikely with a pedigree of explanation. This reassures us by neutralizing novelty, extracting the element of the unexpected from what actually happened.

I think of Winston Churchill’s sly summary of the qualities that a budding politician should possess: “The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year”—and the compensating ability “afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”

Which brings me to our situation today.

Pollsters are busy taking the pulse of voters, and pundits are doing their owlish best to parse the data and take the auspices. It pains me to say that many of them are in the position of poor Publius Claudius Pulcher, commander of the Roman fleet in 249 at the Sicilian Battle of Drepana during the First Punic War.

It was customary, before a battle, for Romans to consult the sacred chickens. Some feed was scattered in front of them. If they ate, the auspices were good and the battle could proceed. If they turned up the beaks at the food, however, the prudent commander held back.

Pulcher scattered the food. The chickens didn’t eat.  He tried again. Same result. Finally, exasperated, he had the beast tossed overboard and is said to have remarked, Bidant, quoniam ēsse nolunt: let them drink since they do not want to eat! Pulcher, you will not be surprised to hear, lost the battle.

I sometimes wonder how much more reliable our tools of prognostication are. Everyone is scrambling to second-guess what will happen on November 5, 2024. Who will win, Joe Biden or Donald Trump?

I have my opinion. So do you.

But what makes us so certain that the contest will even be between Biden and Trump? Anyone who watched Joe Biden’s performance at Normandy on D-Day must have doubts about his fate.

Yes, he plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s words in his speech (or, as Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre put it, “he didn’t plagiarize, he copied”).  But Biden conspicuously failed to copy Reagan’s vigor or his dignity.

The election is still five months away. Even a week, said British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics. Five months is an eternity.

At the moment, most observers say that it is too late to change candidates; the Democrats are stuck with Biden. Are they? Maybe. But ask yourself this: do you suppose that Joe Biden would be able to complete another term?

Since you answered, “No, he couldn’t,” ask yourself this further question: How would you feel about Kamala Harris as president? All bets are that if Joe Biden is the candidate, Harris will be his running mate.  I suspect that the people who actually run the White House are desperately trying to figure out how they can remove Kamala from the ticket, but so far as I know, no one has been able to make her an offer she can’t refuse.

Then there is Trump.  A week ago, a jury in New York convicted him on 34 felony counts for… well, no one really knows, but now that he is a “convicted felon,” some Democrats chortle about it early and often. So far, it hasn’t seemed to have hurt Trump in the polls—quite the opposite, in fact. Moreover, it has done wonders for his fundraising; in just over a week, he pulled in some $400 million.

Still, one never knows.  It is possible that Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, may sentence him to jail on July 11.  What then?

My point is simply that the play we signed up to see may be canceled in favor of another performance with different protagonists. Of course, that is always the case. Events have a way of intervening in the most unexpected ways.  We seek to insulate ourselves from the unexpected through many expedients.

Often, we are successful, or at least things turn out in ways we expect (and then we conclude we are successful). Sometimes, though, we are in the position of Claudius Pulcher after he contemptuously dispatched the sacred chickens.  There is a moral there, too.