The Future Is Not on Rails

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.”—Montaigne

“The best way to predict the future is to make it.”—Anonymous

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—2/28/11—Bearded Druids carrying placards have become stock characters among cartoonists over the last 60 years.

My best guess is that they rose phoenix-like from the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the bull market of the 1990s, their warnings included, “Hey, everyone makes mistakes.” During a bear market, “The world will end in two or three weeks—four to six at the most.” When the market was hard to read, “The end is nearish.” In a recession, “The-end-is-near sale.” Following 9/11, “I told you so.” And in a rare confessional mode, “I am a total nut job.”

The nut job’s sister is the gypsy fortune teller intent on her crystal ball. Among her predictions are: “Sometimes the future is bright; sometimes it’s dark; it’s all cyclical.” To a dog, she says, “In the future you will eat, sleep, and bark.” To Humpty Dumpty, “It was a rough summer, but I foresee a great fall.” To a cow, “After a career in dairy, I can see you in packaging.” To a pig, “I can see you playing a game with men in helmets.” And to a young man with underwear exposed, “I see London, I see France . . . .”

In 2011, Romania began fining prophets whose predictions fail. Despite the risks, everyone, it seems, wants a glimpse of the future. In the first grade, my wife used to make origami “cootie-catchers.” At recess, she’d ask a classmate several questions, which could only be answered with a number, like, “How old are you?” and, “What’s your house number?” Then she would open and close her prognosticator the sum of all the answers. If the color inside the jaws was blue, her victim was going to heaven; if it was red, she was destined for hell fire. If this odd-even method seems like a less than reliable way of predicting a soul’s destination, consider the following alternatives: discovering the future by means of nipple warts, lightning strikes, goat livers, or fish offal; walking in circles until dizzy; melting wax in water; or counting knots in an umbilicus.

Somewhere in Haiti, following the drought of 2008, the hurricanes of 2009, or the earthquakes of January 2010, I’m confident a witchdoctor said, “I told you so.” If Nostradamus rose from the dead and learned of Hitler’s devastation of Europe, he’d surely say, “I told you so.” And if Punxsutawney Phil could speak, he’d point to the 39 times out of a hundred he’s been right and say, “I told you so.”

The point is if you make enough forecasts, you’re eventually going to be hailed as a spokesman for the omniscient by those who’ve forgotten the misses. No one has ever bet on red a thousand straight times at the roulette wheel and been wrong every time! It’s called the Law, not the Theory, of Averages.

In 1900, George Bernard Shaw predicted that by 2000 the English alphabet would have lost the letters C, X, and Q. Others at the same time were confident that Mexico and Nicaragua would become American states and that Russian would be our “second language,” not Spanish. In 1839, Dr. Alfred Velpeau was certain that “the knife and pain” in surgery would always be linked, but when I had my prostate cored in 2009, I’m happy to report that I did not feel a thing though I was conscious throughout.

Moreover, in 1981, Bill Gates thought “640K ought to be enough [memory] for anybody.” Likewise the editors of Fortune, summarizing the best scientific opinion of 1938, thought splitting the atom had “no serious or practical use.” Just 17 years later, vacuum-cleaner manufacturer Alex Lewyt predicted that atomic hoovers would be in many homes by 1965.

One can be wrong in so many ways.

For all the failures of the pundits, accurate extrapolations in this age of abundant information are increasingly common. In the 17th century, Leibnitz observed that “the present is pregnant with the future,” but none today can say with any certainty whether the “baby” will be male, female or, for that matter, twins.

Nevertheless, reasoning from the bottom up, one can safely predict that sea levels will rise along with global temperatures, our CEOs’ salaries will continue to bloat, more states will permit homosexuals to wed, and a woman will occupy the Oval Office.

Likewise, Manhattan will one day be scraped clean by an advancing glacier because it has happened 19 times in the last million years.

Call me psychic, but please don’t sue the fortune cookie baker who predicts your death. One thing this naysayer has to admit is that while New Yorkers may never forgive me, some homosexuals and women reading this may have their confidence bolstered. And this modicum of support might push them in the direction that I just suggested.

A colleague in economics once asked me to predict “American social norms” for 2100 based on the novels I was reading in 2000. I e-mailed him half-seriously and asked if he were referring to the novels of Nora Roberts or Kurt Vonnegut because, when I combined the two, my crystal ball clouded over.

He replied that the novels of William Dean Howells, like the presidential elections and Supreme Court decisions of 1900, could be seen as tea leaves spelling our fate. Fate be damned. I responded by saying novelists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe may occasionally be “bellwethers” but, at no time are they “shepherds.”

Think of all the times that H.G. Wells and Jules Verne got it wrong. In 1880, Verne could not imagine our driving automobiles or flying airplanes. He thought we’d drift about suspended from balloons in velvet-lined gondolas.

I think my skepticism toward clairvoyance may have originated in the back of our family station wagon.

Mother and Dad sat in the front seat, my sisters occupied the middle, and I sat alone in the back, straddling a suitcase, looking at the land-, sea-, and cityscapes we’d just passed through. Of course, if we are honest with ourselves, that is the way we view life most of the time. If I turned my head 90 degrees left or right, I could see the “present” rushing by in a blur. But mostly what I saw sprawling behind me was the “past,” distinct in the near ground and dimming farther back as the earth revolved beneath our wheels. If I needed to use a restroom, I would turn and ask my father to stop at the gas station on the horizon, but that was about all I could see of the “future.”

Humanity’s shortsightedness is one consequence of living on an oblate spheroid, so the oxymoronic “foreseeable future,” was not at all clear from where I sat.

After the Y2K debacle, some disappointed prophet decided, on the basis of an ancient Mayan text, that 2012 would witness the end of life as humans know it. As it turns out, I’m in an interesting position to debunk that prediction because, on December 12, 2012, or 12-12-12, I will be 71. For all the kids turning twelve or any other age in 2012, this survivor of 69 12-12s is here to say that no comet or anything else is going to destroy the earth. You have my word on it. We’d do much better observing sunspot activity 93 million miles away.