Apocalypse Now

by Theodore Dalrymple (July 2014)

The evanescence of one’s effusions in print notwithstanding, their oneness with Nineveh and Tyre, it is good for the character to reflect upon one’s own grosser errors. I was reminded of one of these the other day by a comment posted on the internet about a book I wrote more than a quarter of a century ago, all the more troubling because it was written by someone by no means hostile.

Anyway, I did not foresee the invasion of Tutsi exiles, driven out of the country by previous ethnic violence, only two years later: an invasion that would lead before long to what was possibly the most thorough and efficient attempted genocide in history. Such, then were my powers of prediction, my insight into the workings of the future: I was completely oblivious to the approach of one of the greatest political catastrophes of my adulthood.

Lack of knowledge of a country or a situation never stopped anyone from prognosticating about it. In his famous book about the Anschluss of 1938, and the subsequent dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, called Fallen Bastions, the then-celebrated British correspondent, G. E. R. Gedye, who wrote for both the Times of London and the New York Times, tells how he wrote an article soon after his arrival in Vienna in which he praised the charming and easy-going tolerance of the people, published by ill-chance on the very day of a vicious pogrom against the city’s Jewish population. And even if Gedye were on closer acquaintance to write no more on the celebrated Gemütlichkeit of the Viennese, even if he were to become only too aware of the extreme brutality of the triumphant Nazis (he wrote the book, 500 closely-printed pages long, at high speed in the British legation in Prague, whither he had been expelled by the Gestapo), even he who had read Mein Kampf and was aware both of what he called its ‘insane incitements against the Jews’ and its clear blueprint for a general war which he took completely and correctly at face value, why even he had no inkling of the approaching Holocaust. He foresaw – as he saw – endless persecution of Jews, but he did not foresee their total annihilation.  

Even close acquaintance with a situation, then, and study of it to the exclusion of all other objects of the mind, does not guarantee insight into the future, even in rough outline, and even only a few years off. When, for example, I was in Central America during the era of civil wars there, virtually all the foreigners who had made the region the object of their researches believed that the triumph of socialist revolutions was inevitable, in the sense of being immanent in the present and the past. This was in part wishful thinking – I met no one who thought such revolutions both inevitable and bad – but I doubt that many of them have acknowledged their mistake since to the extent of abjuring further prognostications. Like me, they make excuses for their own lack of foresight. And for this I do not entirely blame them, for Man is a prognosticating animal, he peers into the future as a short-sighted man at landscape. But often he makes no clear distinction between what will happen, and what will happen unless something else happens to intervene. It is a crucial distinction, for that ‘something else’ is precisely what cannot be predicted.

Quite right, I think! I always knew the world was going to the dogs, and here is the confirmation of it. The graphs provided prove it! Debt of all kinds is increasing exponentially, the balance of trade is unfavourable, the demographics appalling. Soon half the population will be over ninety, and the other half will have to look after them. Abandon hope, all ye who read online here.

But whom can you trust? The week before the Crimean crisis broke, I was strongly advised by one of the financial newsletters to buy Russian shares. I didn’t follow the advice, for two reasons, the stronger being inertia and the better being that I trust the Russians to play the game of capitalism fairly and honestly about as much as I would trust a great white shark to eat up its greens. Within a week of the advice the Moscow index was down by twenty per cent or more: that, of course, would have been the time to buy, for I knew that the index would be up again almost immediately once the preening impotence of the Mr Obama and the European Union (here a prediction would have been almost certain) became obvious even to the fund managers.

There is a famous passage in The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, first published in 1912, in which the difficulty of induction is clearly laid out. 

The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

A thousand apocalypses that have not happened do not mean that there will be no apocalypse tomorrow. A large part of wisdom, therefore, is in knowing when things will and will not repeat themselves, and to what extent. There is no formula for it, not even in principle.

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