In one brilliant article by Robert Alexander Nisbet titled “The Year 2000 and All That“.
Historical determinism, blindly accepted for centuries (to evade Emuna!), was summarized by Leibnitz, “The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near”.
In an approach akin to the Austrian Economic Schools‘ unconcealed contempt for econometrics, Nisbet bites hard:
There have been statistician-soothsayers, I am certain, in all ages. In ancient Egypt there must have been such individuals to compute the number of pyramids there would be on the earth two thousand years later; before that someone to compute the number of pterodactyls; after that, to compute the number of knights on horseback, wayfarer chapels, not to mention witches. It is a great game for the statistically-minded (like predictions year by year in the Pentagon of that infinitesimally small chunk of time represented by our engagement in Vietnam), and, as I say, I do not for a moment disparage it. It tells us about the present.
So, what self-important secular prophets are really doing, unawares, is teaching “a great deal that is important to know about present conditions, present structures, and present rates and their apparent relation to the recent past”.
In a phrase, the “Gamblers’ Fallacy”:
“Trends” are particularly suspect. A trend, the dictionary tells us, is the general direction taken by a stream, a shoreline, etc.; it is an underlying or prevailing tendency or inclination. These are all tempting words for the historian or predicter of societal development. How easy it is, as we look back over the past—that is, of course, the “past” that has been selected for us by historians and social scientists—to see in it trends and tendencies that appear to possess the iron necessity and clear directionality of growth in a plant or organism. We think of these “trends” as cumulative movements, as genetic sequences, as actually causal. We forget that they are, one and all, a posteriori constructs, frequently metaphoric in character, always post hoc, propter hoc.
But the relation among past, present, and future is chronological, not causal. As one looks at the various sequences of events—“clusters,” as Herman Kahn calls them—there is not a sequence or linkage that would not make just as much sense in causal terms were it in fact the obverse, were it any one of the literally hundreds of “patterns” that events and changes might as easily—and, in causal or genetic terms as “rationally,” “logically”—have taken.
…
To confuse “trends,” whether Marx’s, Tocqueville’s, Stuart Chase’s, or Herman Kahn’s, with processes that have in fact genetic continuity and causal connection in time is, however, to take the metaphor of growth much too seriously in its application to human behavior in time. The hypothesis of growth is useful only in the understanding of entities that do actually grow and develop—such as plants and organisms—and for all else it is either naive or dangerous.
Unfree computers cannot predict free human action either:
What is in question, however, is whether the marvels of electronic technology, cybernetics, linear programming, systems analysis, game theory, and the like, do add anything, can add anything to our success in an enterprise that is at least two hundred years old in the West: the serious, conscious business of predicting the future by observation of real or imagined continuities of event, change, and circumstance in time.
The only kind of “prediction” possible is the “boring” type:
True, institutions, structures, established ways of behavior, will extend themselves into the future just as geographic terrain will. There will be, barring catastrophe or the appearance of the Genius, or the Prophet, or the Maniac, or the Random Event, technology, schools, kinship systems, magazines like COMMENTARY, and so on. This is safe predicting, for all we are predicting is persistence. And I do not depreciate this, for we would be a lot farther along in our understanding of the actual dynamics of change if there were real understanding, real acceptance, in the theoretical terms of social science, of the phenomena of stability and persistence of ways of social behavior. Wilbert Moore, in a wise utterance in the Daedalus issue, calls attention to our typical exaggeration of change in society and to our common confusion of change—actual, significant change—with mere motion, activity, and movement.
In summary, there is a difference between real prophets and fake:
Let us be clear on two points. (1) Events do not marry and have little events that grow into big events which in turn marry and have little events, etc.; (2) small social changes do not accumulate directionally and continuously to become big changes. We pretend in our histories and sociologies that such is the case, but it is all a posteriori, suffers badly from an affliction known as the pathetic fallacy, and does more to assuage the pain of intellectual disorder than it does to throw light on the actual processes of social change. Yes, the theory of natural selection might also be called a posteriori and poor in predictive power, but somehow the evolutionary biologist has been more successful at linking micro-changes in their additive and cumulative succession to macro-changes of speciation than we in the social sciences have (or ever will!).
And, of course, the biologist doesn’t have to deal as we have to with the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet, and the Genius. Maybe there are equivalents in the timeless, structureless, typeless world of the biologist’s “population thinking,” but I doubt it.
It is very different with studies of change in human society. Here the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet, and the Genius have to be reckoned with. We have absolutely no way of escaping them. The future-predicters don’t suggest that we can avoid or escape them—or ever be able to predict or forecast them. What the future-predicters, the change-analysts, and trend-tenders say in effect is that with the aid of institute resources, computers, linear programming, etc. they will deal with the kinds of change that are not the consequence of the Random Event, the Genius, the Maniac, and the Prophet.
To which I can only say: there really aren’t any; not any worth looking at anyhow.